A Christmas beer with a beard
Credit: BBC
Had a beer with a beard the other day to celebrate the relentless commercial onset of Christmas. The beard was my old friend’s familiar trademark and I told him once more how much it suited him.
Category archive: Viewpoint
In the secure ward
We sat on a wide verandah and looked out on a backyard. Backyard? This one was huge, park-like and its green flowed past crimson flowered jacarandas on both sides for more than an acre. Finally it gave way to a to a lily-covered billabong under the shade of towering ghost gums.
‘The next time you see it will be when you die…’
He boarded the outbound 737 from Auckland looking out of place and time.
He was a Buddhist monk, replete with flowing brown robes, practical sandals and on his left wrist, corded bangles. Not a sober sort, he joked with other passengers as he settled into his seat. One asked him what religion he belonged to. A pause.
Bye Blossoms, G’day Geckos…
In South Auckland’s Ihumatao, a peaceful group of Maori activists continues the campaign it began in 2015. Their aim? To stop Fletchers building 480 homes on what they believe is sacred land.
And a few miles away in the leafy suburb of Mt Albert early last month, middle-class Pakeha began their protest.
A nation of landlords…
We do not have a housing crisis. The housing market works perfectly for those it was designed to serve. Landlords are now protesting because the precarious position of renters has (finally) been acknowledged.
But who knows how long it will it take before the talk ends and the watered down action begins? And even then if the result resembles the government’s affordable housing fiasco where do we go from there? But we are not alone.
Kiwi TV as we once knew it… Part two
Credit: ‘New Zealand Television – the first 25 years’, by Robert Boyd-Bell
The early television days were staffed by competent, experienced staff with mainly radio experience coping with second hand BBC equipment in small make shift studios with tape, lighting and telecine (film) operators in cramped uncomfortable cupboards/offices. Staff like Barry Warner, Colin Harrison, Geoff Eady, Robyn Petrie, Ian Hill, Stuart Murray and Russ Lambert and Bob Smith. We owe them so much.
All I want for Christmas is…
First I must declare that I’m involved with Better Public Media, so it is very apparent what I want from television in New Zealand.
But I also want more for other sectors of the media, for I have drifted away from mainstream (linear, scheduled) television and have joined the Netflix generation. When I drift back to Television New Zealand or TV3, these channels seem like foreign places, where narratives are jarringly interrupted by extended breaks of increasingly banal adverts.
Christchurch today – wreckage, and renewal
Standing on the fourth-floor balcony of Tūranga, Christchurch’s recently opened library sited on Cathedral Square, I gazed down onto the sagging ruin that is the post-earthquake Christchurch Cathedral. From this angle the decision to restore makes even less sense than it did three years ago when I viewed the wreckage from behind a ground level wire-mesh safety fence.
The end of the long con…
The Lost Generation
‘There’s a generation of Kiwis who have grown up not knowing what public service television is’, says the Better Public Media Trust on its website. And it goes on to list the programming casualties lost in the shifting battlefields of broadcasting over the past 50 years: