So the latest attempt to repair the damage Mark Weldon caused by destroying Campbell Live because John Campbell had politically embarrassed his mate John Key has finally birthed. The Project replaces the awful ‘Story’ which was the original attempt to replace Campbell Live.
I’ll admit, the one thing The Project has done well is lube up the TV reviewers.
The Spinoff is in orgasmic love with the show, but that doesn’t mean much.
The Spinoff thought Mark Weldon’s changes to News were his ‘smartest move yet’ (shortly after that appeared Hillary Barry left), The Spinoff thought killing off Campbell Live was on reflection ok and the Spinoff thought ‘Story’ was great TV and The Spinoff was so impressed with MediaWorks 2014 season launch, that Duncan Grieve declared that being invited to it made him feel, “proud to be a New Zealander”.
I’m not fucking joking. A MediaWorks Season launch in 2014 made Duncan Grieve feel, “proud to be a New Zealander”.
That. Says. EVERYTHING. You. Ever. Needed. To. Know. About. The. Bloody. Spinoff.
In short, what the fuck the Spinoff thinks means about as much to me as a lobotomised chimpanzee’s thesis on bananas.
Remember, the Spinoff will be joining with other self interested millennial media to demand why they can’t get more money from NZ on Air for their pet media projects under the guise of ‘better public broadcasting’.
So. What about The Project then? The new 7pm Current Affairs show that will challenge the powerful in the 2017 election year.
Well this was the first glimpse.
Ummmm. Yeah.
So it’s lite weight diet 7 Days without the dick jokes. The live clapping hysterical audience makes it more circus than current affairs.
There’s a meth hysteria story that utterly misses the impact of the Proceeds of Crime and how it has helped spike meth production. Ross Bell, the man who has done nothing about cannabis reform in 20 years is on doing his usual useless nothingness. All the hosts nod their heads and say, ‘something must be done”, and then they are off to another story.
Jesus wept, they spent what, 90 seconds on Meth and are now off to the Cadbury plant shutting down?
Except they accidentally replayed the Meth story.
Then another nothing quick story on Cadbury that went nowhere.
The only highlight was Michelle A’Court talking about how outrageous it is that women in NZ can’t afford tampons. It is despicable that these sanitary products which are a necessity for women are as expensive as they are. They should be free at schools and any other places women congregate.
Condoms should also be free for fucks sake.
Then they went onto some other vacant story, but to be honest I’d lost any attention by this stage.
So what to make of ‘The Project’?
It is fake, meaningless and vapid, so it will rate incredibly well amongst anyone who listens to the Edge or ZM.
The 41 000 homeless, the 220 000 kids in poverty, those who can’t get a job, those locked out of home ownership, the working poor, beneficiaries, the vulnerable and the abused found no champion in the Fourth Estate here. The Project won’t hold anyone to account in an election year for them.
But it will be worth some cheap laughs and giggles.
Campbell Live this is not.
Thanks for the info. Have switched off the dinosaur TV anyway. MSM is becoming a sad joke, with scant relevance to New Zealanders. Keep up the good work.
Its the twilight zone, usually it was aired just before good night kiwi, has now become prime time viewing.
I mean honestly. How did our education system become such a disaster it spawns this devilish interruption of choice
The Project is the TV version of the Spinoff; eye candy with almost zero substance.
The billboards advertising “The Project” were enough to turn me off. It looked like grown up kids in a playground.
If that is TV3’s (or whatever the f**k they call themselves now) solution to the demands of intelligent viewing, then they really, really don’t have a clue.
If anyone from Mediaworks is reading this, my suggestion is..
…nah…
…f**k it…
Can’t be arsed.
I’m not a paid consultant offering solutions to their self-imposed problems.
Brilliant summary Frank!
Drown in their own bile!
Thanks Martyn,
I as Phil has long switched off the TV on NZ channels and I hover around Fox, RT and RNZ so that is my lot.
Only when we take over TVNZ again and restor Channel Seven will we see any sense/relevance again in NZ Media, as it is irrelevant now as Phil says.
Sunblock should be free too.
All I can say is, thank the gods for Radio NZ and Al Jazeera on Freeview. (I mention Freeview because not everyone can afford – or want to support – SkyTV.)
It is depressing, but those two free-to-air broadcasters are all that stand between us and the completion of the Idiocracy State.
The greatest tragedy of all this is that Mediaworks already had possession of “Campbell Live” – one of the most respected current affairs shows on FTA television. It was a brand and reputation that most broadcasters would sell their souls to achieve. (Oh, wait…)
This is the legacy of Weldon and Christie: making TV3 utterly irrelevent to our lives. Dross is everywhere. Quality is rarer to find.
RNZ just churns out business-as-usual bullshit, so I stopped listening years ago.
Al Jazeera has its moments and is a lot more truthful than most western media, but has serious gaps in its reporting.
You have to use the Internet to acquire worthwhile information and commentary, which is exactly how the controllers want it: a dumbed-down general populace that knows nothing and absorbs propaganda continuously.
I honestly think RT presents a much more balanced view of world affairs.
Yes, one of the websites I regularly check to find out what is actually happening.
RT and Vice and several Youtube channels, New Zealand main stream media is frankly embarrassing, inane gossip by fake D grade celebs
I saw an ad which listed what was to be on the programme and on seeing “meth” thought the serious issues were to be covered even though the build up promos lately have been “fun time in the park.”
Watched the weather, said to other person in the room, “This is their big new show replacing those they got rid of.”
It came on with the wild enthusiastic clapping that comes when you fill a studio and hold up a big sign saying “CLAP WILDLY and ENTHUSIASTICALLY.”
And a pile of people around a desk who automatically went into The Edge breakfast radio show mode.
Was this to be the new show dealing with current events? Was the crowd going to “CLAP WILDLY and ENTHUSIASTICALLY” and be full of fun and vitality after a story of a woman who can’t get the humane treatment for breast cancer, after a story about a family treated inhumanely by Work and Income or after a Minister of the Crown does some scummy thing?
Pushed the button.
No public money should be going to support this fatuous bunch of crap.
Pseudocelebrities read ‘the news’ and crack jokes?
You’d get more facts out of the Simpsons and the jokes are better.
No public money in The Project
I watched it.
God, it’s like Tellytubbies for adults!! VOMIT!
No surprises here.
None of us really believed that TV3 could actually put out anything that even remotely resembled news, did we?
No!
When I saw Rove McManus, I thought: uh-oh.
About 3 seconds into the piece on Trump – judging that the programme was starting out as it meant to go on – we switched off.
Having read the reviews, our snap judgement has been confirmed. We won’t return; it’s just Mike Hosking-style schlock. Life’s too short…..
I was in a waiting room while my partner was giving blood today, I picked up the Herald (cancelled ours 3 years ago) and had a scan of it – it was full of complete dross so I felt vindicated that I hadn’t missed anything. I then handed it over to a man sitting by me, he said “its full of rubbish and we have flagged it away”, he took it but barely glanced at it. He did say to me he had looked in on The Project with his partner last night and thought it was the most ghastly thing he had seen on TV. I didn’t even know it was on as we watch very little and only tape stuff which looks reasonable. We also use Lightbox for things as well.
Frankly I do not know how anybody can watch such drivel the breakfast shows are just as bad – its a worry really as a lot of the population think this stuff is fine to watch. They must have mush for brains.
At a certain shop in the National Park area last week, I went into a dairy seeking a newspaper to read. I was directed to the NZ Herald but I declined on the grounds that I don’t want to waste my money on such a load of rubbish. If the only daily newspaper they have around there is the Natzski Herald I hate to think how badly informed the population is.
“Frankly I do not know how anybody can watch such drivel the breakfast shows are just as bad – its a worry really as a lot of the population think this stuff is fine to watch.”
Do they actually though? If not, the only public place they can say so is anti-establishment internet fora like this one, so their complaints can be dismissed as “fringe”. Are there statistics available on the actual number of kiwis who watch these shows more than once, rather than a percentage of the people watching TV at that time? Are there statistics available on the number of kiwis who regularly visit online news and current events platforms? It would make a fascinating comparison.
Also, could it be a case of choosing the least vomit-inducing option from the available buffet of televisual bullshit? I spent a lot of time travelling recently, and I was blown away by the number of people I encountered who can’t afford to have the internet on at home. Their net access is limited to trips to the public library with their handheld computer, or small sips of data at exorbitant cell carrier rates, and the rest of the time they’re stuck with a media diet of free-to-air junk. A publicly-funded, free-to-air, wireless internet service – even if the bandwidth was limited to sub-broadband speeds, could make a huge difference to people’s ability to access more diverse writing about current events.
Then there is the issue of literacy. We usually think of this as a binary, either you can read or you can’t. But I know a lot of people who can read well enough to get by, but struggle to read complicated prose, which limits the amount of info they can absorb from blogs etc even if they want to. It could help a lot to get more news and analysis onto the radio airwaves, podcasts etc, maybe even a left-leaning talkback station to balance out the two right-leaning one. These projects are much easier and cheaper than making television, or even web video.
And to this day, WINZ does not pay clients for the costs of an internet access at home, while they try to get everyone onto their ‘My MSD’ service ONLINE via the web.
So they seem to expect people to do it at the public libraries or at their useless kiosks that few people use these days.
Indeed we need some free internet access for at least the low income people, even if it may only be by way of a subsidy or so.
After Campbell Live finished I have pretty much stopped watching TV. I get Netflicks. TV is dead and people like Weldon have pushed it there thinking they can get away with their actions and serving slop each day.
Sad for all the people in TV too. Only really see a future for quality local TV that might switch people back but more Netflicks style where you can get things more on demand.
Dinosaurs in TV don’t understand user interface or have any real interest in customer experience. TV has become too focused on advertisers and paid propaganda instead of viewers, to their peril.
As for the Spinoff – it’s Granny Herald’s younger sister, just paid advertisers in a slightly younger style and politically focused like trying to push Mike Lee out of Auckland council, so that their developer advertisers were happy.
Can’t stand it and think less of gullible lefties that “like” it.
YUCK!
Some Good points from Bomber. But I doubt even Mediaworks thinks it was ever going to be current affairs.
Thats what it is to be everything to every one and nobody at the same time. Media works isnt so much of a money spinner any more. My impression of the way they opperate is just to see what is popular or trending so they can market that to advertisers and sponsers. If media works is selling anything it must be infomation on there data they collect.
A tale of two mediums.
On RNZ, Jessie’s doing his best to be ‘old school’, whilst on +hr== he’s jss gotta be down with the kuds.
I’ll make a point of watching ( 2nd or +hr== day in), but I know it’ll be an “ew”
Short of throwing the TV out of the window and confining the Herald to “for starting winter fires only” box one can always get good INTEL from The Fake News Show broadcast on Spreaker from Monserrat. This is where we will get the best info about the return to the gold standard when the power moves from West to East. https://www.spreaker.com/user/radiomonserrat/breaking-intel-02-19-2017
If the people tuned into The Fake News know about the really really good times coming I wonder why Seven Sharp…I’ll read that again…Seven Flat haven’t managed to suss out the not so fake news.
We’re at 7.17 PM. I DID try! I really DID try, if only because I knew that Jessie had biked all the way uphill to +hre== and Bravo!
I do understand you’ve got mortgages to pay but prostitution is a far better and long standing, proven institution to indulge yourself in. It’d probably pay the mortgage a lot quicker as well
Once Was – you are a true Spartan. Kudos, my friend, for your heroic effort.
Humble apologies. +hr== should of course be +hr=E
And Jessie’s uphill bike ride from RNZ to +hr=E and Bravo didn’t show. He looked fucking gorgeous! no signs of sweat and all were perfectly manicured, pedicured, clothed and utterly rehearsed and plastic.
(I’ve got a solvent for that if you’ve ever seen polystyrene dissolve under the weight of a few cups of Z 91 Octane )
NEVER AGAIN
Bomber, thanks for the review and sparing me the pain of watching the dross. I see Jessie Mulligan’s on the show, which suggests at least three other folk turned down the job before he got it. That guy’s so dull he puts himself to sleep. Can’t stand him on Nat Radio. It was bad enough with his predecessor Snorer Mora. And Nat Radio’s becoming spineless. Campbell’s not half his old self (a la TV3), which was only half his Nat Radio predecessor – and now boss – Mary Wilson.
Well, he has so much confidence in the show he’s kept his job at RNZ just in case. A perfect description of Mulligan by the way. TV bosses seem to think he’s funny but I have never understood why. He helped kill the first version of Seven Sharp which means he’s a “show killer”. I give him six months before he leaves or gets fired.
Project? no pathetic. Thankfully John Cambell is still around for adults to listen to and watch!
Never bothered watching it.
After catching a couple of episodes of The Project whilst on holiday in Australia last year, I was impressed with the in depth knowledge offered in that program. Waleed Ali was certainly a knowledgeable host.
Which is why once I saw the Algebra channel saying they were doing their own version, I died a little more inside. I knew just like everything else out of Australia, it would be nothing more than vapid nonsense.
Especially once Mulligan was confirmed as host. Spike, he is not. His intellectual lightweight “opinions” on RNZ are devoid of anything approaching informative discourse.
So, that’s a no from me for The Project on Algebra.
We have to bear in mind, that many younger people don’t usually watch much or any television. That is why Mediaworks seems to be desperate to get some of them back to watch TV, with such ridiculous entertainment.
As for the quality and standard of the media these days, it is highly worrying that the younger generations will know little else but what is being delivered as a rather light diet for years now. They will not even know what good programs look and sound like.
When you grow up with crap, you will tend to consider the crap to be normal.
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