Cracker by Damian Christie

...Usually down at the dairy, although sometimes I nick one from work. Actually often I don't read it, I just get it. Then I leave it on the table, unopened, and throw it away a couple of days later. Into the recycling bin, natch.

The lads at Pulp Sport obviously find the new TV3 news promos (sorry can't find a link to those) a bit naff too, and have put together these parodies, which I like.

I'm not being partisan here, I find most news promos a bit naff. Usually because they're created by marketing and advertising people, and require reporters, presenters and journalists to do things they don't normally do. Running alongside a tank in Pukekohe, pretending it's the Gaza strip; a high-profile presenter going to cover certain stories because an upcoming promo is scheduled and the footage is needed. Or, in one of the more ridiculous tales I've heard, an ad agency using a production crew of about twenty people (focus puller, DOP, director, clapper loader and so forth) to show presenters doing natural-looking vox pops, which are done all day, every day in the real world, by a reporter and a single camera op.

It's just not real.

But we kinda know that about advertising don't we? Even if the thing that's being advertised is the news?

As a result I've been a bit surprised by the amount of chatter not just on the blogs (including a big discussion over at Spareroom) , but stories on telly and everything, about Telecom's new McCallum & Partners ad.

Maybe I lost all my principles somewhere between being a lawyer and a journalist, but I can't quite get worked up about an advert creating a fictional company (or in this case, a partnership).

Adverts are, by definition, fake, aren't they? Otherwise they'd be short documentaries and no-one would buy anything. Beer just isn't that much fun, nor are cars, shampoo, cereal or chocolate bars. Imagine if ads certainly used real people telling the truth:

Scene: Local dairy.

Woman: I'd like a Mars Bar please.

Dairy owner: That will be $1.80 thank you.

Woman: (eating bar) Mmm. That was quite tasty, although now I feel a little sick.

I don't think this 'fake ads' scandal is entirely new, either.

Thinking back as far as my little memory will allow, there was a guy allegedly called Brucie, who probably wasn't. Vince Martin has never really worked at Beaurepaires, not in any sense that he needs to turn up in that uniform. That Fernleaf Butter family that had everyone entranced in the early 90s? Fake. Those two Mainland Cheese old guys don't make cheese. In fact, I'm pretty sure even Ches and Dale didn't use their real names.

Even just a month ago, the brain-damaged woman in the LTSA ads simply turns out to be Australian…

So why is McCallum & Partners coming in for such criticism? Because it's Telecom? Because its AmCam feel means some people were fooled into thinking it was real, then were annoyed to find out it wasn't? Does it matter?

If there's any reason to be disappointed, it should be because Saatchi & Saatchi simply ripped off a good internet viral video of real people doing this for real, and charged Telecom a shitload to remake it for them. But that's hardly unique in advertising either, those NZI ads ironically entitled "someone's always stealing your stuff" always seemed to me to be ripped from the 42 Below virals.

Anyway, fake or not, it's still done in one take, with a whole lot of locals (I recognise at least three people in that ad, and they're not actors, dancers or otherwise gifted with abilities that would make them more able to perform such a feat than an ordinary worker at say, McCallum & Partners), it's got a catchy tune courtesy of Elemeno P, and it's a bit of fun, isn't it?

Or maybe I don't actually get it.

I've always said that if oil is going to run out, the best thing we can do is to chew through it as quickly as possible so we can move onto something cleaner. Like those water-fuelled engines my P-smoking friends insist the petrol companies have been covering up for decades. That's how I justify driving a 1965 HD Holden Special. And if we are living in the last days of oil, I'll be buggered if I'm going down driving a SmartCar. Make it big, and make it hungry.

Of course, I also have to balance the burning desire to drive a muscle car until the gas runs out, with my urge to do the right thing by the planet. Until now I've been chucking my bicycle in the back seat and calling it "carbon neutral", but I don't know if that's fooling anyone. And increasingly, the thirsty old HD is hurting a little in the wallet department too. I'm happy to fork out for a good old carbon-emitting cruise down the motorway on a Sunday afternoon, but paying $50 every day or two so I can run a few errands in town doesn't make a lot of sense.

So I've joined the scooter revolution. A brand new 200cc Vespa (yes, you need a motorbike license; no I don't have one but I'm working on it; let's see what comes first, a fine or an L plate). It's great, it's white, and apart from today when I learnt that driving rain is even more aptly named when you're driving into it with your face exposed, it's a whole lot of fun. Easy to park too, or at least I'm told it is, but I'm still not quite sure where I'm supposed to leave it(?)

I'm the third of my friends to make the move to two wheels this year, and there's probably a dozen or so of my pals I know who've decided to ride. At $15 to fill it up (my early-adopting friends sigh as they recall the days when it was "only $12"), I can see a whole lot more of us heading that way in coming years. Having spent a bit of time in countries where scooters are the rule rather than the exception, the downside is inner-city air thick with two-stroke engines. Mind you, having sat behind a few cars at the lights recently, those vehicle emission rules still have a way to go too.

So what's my point?

If you see a dick on a white scooter bunnyhopping away from the lights with a cop behind him, spare a thought. But more importantly, if you don't see a dick on a white scooter, check your blindspot again before you pull out, thanks.

I do think it’s a bit ridiculous our politicians are supposed to be so hamstrung, so toe-the-line, so blinkered from what everyone else in the world can see, that Phil Goff is not allowed to say “yes, we’re up against it, and maybe one day Helen might decide it’s time to stand down” without everyone checking their backs for knives.

Having said that, they are (hamstrung, blinkered and line-towing) so Phil Goff should’ve known full well how his comments would be interpreted by the ravenous pack of the Press Gallery.

I suspect he might not have made the comments in an interview on Morning Report, and it’s significant they came out instead on an interview on Alt TV. When I used to work at 95bFM, we would often get politicians making admissions they wouldn’t make anywhere else. There was a perception that no-one was listening, it was all below the radar, but as Don Brash proved when he made his Exclusive Brethren admissions on that station, and as Phil Goff has now found out, someone’s always listening. Even if they’re not, you can bet the interviewer is keen to make sure people find out…

One thing (and perhaps the only thing) I found quite charming about Don Brash was his inability to talk a good game. When asked if he thought his colleagues were plotting to overthrow him, he said words to the effect: “yes, I rather believe they would be”. He never unrealistically talked up his chances, or those of National, and of course, he was rolled as a result. As long as they weren’t pushing the sort of policies Brash was at the time (remember Orewa?), I’d vote for a leader for who showed even a modicum of that sort of honesty.

By comparison, the Prime Minister is a lot more guarded. She’s astute, she knows the rules. And you don’t lead a party –and a country– for nine years without putting up a few walls along the way. But I’m always impressed by her accessibility. There might have been a DPS guard watching from a distance, but at the airport the other day, Helen still took the time to inform me that she’d had no luck with the coffee machine I was about to try. You wouldn’t get that from Mugabe.

And guarded though she might be, I’m sure over the years even the Prime Minister has made a few comments on her weekly bFM appearance that she wouldn’t want quoted verbatim on TV that night. All politics aside, one thing I really admire about Helen Clark is the unprecedented access she’s given to media of all shapes and sizes. It’s hard to imagine any previous leader making time to speak to student radio each week – and not just one station, but a host of them, let alone all her other commitments. Nor can I imagine this happening in too many other countries around the world.

In order to keep up with the game, John Key has made the same commitments, appearing on most of the same stations. I hope he keeps this up when/if he becomes Prime Minister, and I trust he will. Again, all politics aside, I randomly bump into Key on a semi-regular basis when I’m out and about. He’s easy to talk to, friendly, and quite accommodating.

Of course I’m not so simple to vote on personality alone – I’ll leave that to Winston’s mob. And it’s around about this time I start to get frustrated with National not releasing enough policy. Okay, we’re going to get more of this, more of that, and more money back in our pockets, apparently. So excuse me for wanting a little detail. I understand it makes sense strategically to hold off as long as you can, to provide the detail and swing the voters at the last possible minute, making it harder for them to become un-swung.

But it just pisses me off.

And in the case of National, who have been proudly policy-free for a long time now (I remember interview after interview when English was leader, unable/unwilling to provide any detail), it worries me it might be because they don’t have any real policy yet, rather than just keeping it all a secret until the election.

So come on guys, throw us a (highly detailed, policy-etched) bone here. Keith Ng is getting restless, he’s got his FX82b scientific calculator at the ready, and his index finger is itching to start doin’ some sums. Policy sums. Let’s have it, please.

I have left this post link-free, because that's the way I wrote it, and it seems a bit artificial going through and putting them in afterwards. I mean, you guys know how to use Google, right? "Don Brash', "Orewa" etc?

But by all means, feel free to point to other people's interesting stuff in the discussion forum...

Unlike some people, I might not get invited to the awards ceremonies these days, but it's still nice to hear (via Russell's blog) that we've won the Netguide Awards. So 'thanks' to everyone who voted for us.

Last week I floated the idea of shutting down Comalco's Tiwai Pt smelter as a way to solve our energy crisis, and as often happens around here, I was impressed by the responses I got, pointing out the various holes in my argument. Most notably, it would seem, even if Comalco stop using the power (which they get at a cut-rate price, thanks to some smart negotiating way back when), there's not really any way to get it to Auckland. Which clearly, is all I'm worried about.

In a case of 'be careful what you wish for', now Comalco's people are talking about just that – shutting down if the Government goes ahead with its Emissions trading programme. One the one hand the company is talking about the loss of thousand of jobs to the region, on the other, they're threatening to take all the skilled workers overseas with them. So which is it? And if they're skilled in running an aluminium smelter, and we close down our only one, are they really a loss to the labour market anyway?

I'm not denying it's going to cost the country jobs, or money. But you know what I say to a company that receives cheap power, doesn't pay tax here, takes the profits overseas, and now says it doesn't want to pick up the tab for its pollution?

Fuck 'em.

If we're going to try and do something to save the planet –and I'm one of those freaky people who reckon it probably does need saving– we can't kowtow to threats from big business. Of course they're going to say they'll close. Of course they're not going to accept extra costs to their business without making some noise. And if they end up going to China, well so be it. We should no more be trying to undercut China in environmental terms than we should offer cheaper labour.

I follow with some interest, but mostly just amusement, the development of Alt TV's current affairs since Oliver Driver's been at the creative helm.

Typically, when Driver starts doing something, he blusters off a few press releases saying how he's going to show the mainstream media what-for, all other news is shit, get ready to see how real current affairs is done, and so forth. He said it when he teamed up with fellow conspiracy-nut Mikey Havoc for the ill-fated and inaptly-named Quality Time (once described by a mutual friend as "The Abu Ghraib of Television"). He said it when he joined Alt TV, and he said it once more for good luck when announcing his own interview show, Let's Be Frank.

The message ahead of last night's premiere of the Naked News Flash was altered somewhat (it's hard to pretend a topless stripper from Hamilton reading the news is 'how it should be'), but the tone was still there:

'We want to take the piss out of the news because the news is crap. Have you seen the news lately? Especially television news. It's Jin the missing otter, it's Nicky Watson's lost dog.' But Driver insists it's not going to be a joke. The news content will be 'robust'..."

Which is why the lead story last night was "Great tits do well in warm weather". It was about a breed of bird surviving climate change, but still.

Oliver Driver needs to get real, and be honest with himself. He's putting a woman with a bad boob-job on TV and getting her to stumble through poorly written scripts with about as little animation as her breasts. Driver might be a smart guy, but we're not stupid either, and it's pretty clear what the point of the show is. He's not making some brilliantly ironic point about how crap other news is, he's putting tits on TV, as Cate Brett put it in the SST last week:

It's just a shame Driver feels obliged to offer some deeper justification for his naked news stunt, suggesting it is some sort of ironic comment on the woeful and debased nature of the modern commercial news bulletin.

What he also needs to realise, is TV news isn't all "Jin the otter and Nicky's lost dog." For a start, Jin the otter was 2 years ago now. A quick look at some 6pm news stories from the last couple of days: A great story last night (watch it here if you haven't already) on a couple of small-town dairies happily selling vital ingredients for making P – and in at least one case, doing so knowingly; Vast amounts of coverage of the tragedy in Myanmar (including hidden camera work across the border from TV3's Mike McRoberts); the election run-offs in Zimababwe; the Government's buy-back of the railways; the Greens new list candidates; Comalco's potential closure; the closure of PPCS; Bob Clarkson not standing again in Tauranga...

...you get the point. There might not be the number of stories about vapour trails, pharmaceutical cover-ups and a one world order led by reptilian shapeshifters to please some people, but it works for me. And not an otter in sight.

What's disappointing is that Driver is a smart guy, and you can see this in his interviews on "Let's Be Frank". But what he doesn't seem to realise, is talking to Peter Dunne for half an hour, (a FULL half hour, sans commercial breaks), is not ground-breaking current affairs. Especially when the lighting is bad, the audio appalling and the picture quality equally shoddy. Yes, these things do matter. (Mind you, I wouldn't want to watch Peter Dunne for half an hour non-stop even if it was in HD with dolby surround sound.)

Perhaps if Driver just kept his head down and honed his craft, one day someone (other than him) might turn around and say "Hey, that's some great current affairs he's got going there."

So it doesn't matter if we own our own power network, electricity is so Twentieth Century anyway… nothing says "progress" like locomotives.

And why is it Michael Cullen keeps saying we have no money for this, no money for that (and by that I mean 'tax cuts'), we've got to tighten our belts and so on, then he forks out 2/3 of a billion dollars for some trains? I guess it's no fun having the tracks if you can't play with the engines.

(And it's not surprising so many in the media have used the 'train set' analogy. Can't you just picture Dr C sitting on the ground in one of those train driver caps? Awww)

It was interesting to hear one member of the public on the telly, being asked what she thought, and saying "I think it's a good idea, because I don't think the tracks have been looked after well at all". Yes, well unfortunately the tracks are owned by the Government, have been since 2004.

Much has been made of the fact that John Key has now said he won't sell any state owned assets in the first term, and that Cullen has now somehow tricked him into including the railways (which English had previously said he'd re-sell). I guess it's fair enough that Key might not have thought that in these tough times the Government would actually be acquiring new assets. But it'll teach Key not to make open ended promises in future.

I know rail is generally regarded as one of the more environmentally-friendly methods of transportation, but I wish that if the Government was going to ease the pressure on households, it wouldn't do it by backing out on its commitments to the environment. Yes people are hurting, but if we’re going to chuck away anything, can it not be the Planet please? We kinda need that one. Fast forward to this blog in 2050:

Cheese on Toast | May 06, 2008 13:25
Damian Christie – Cracker with Attitude
So, I notice that due to the Positive Feedback effect of greenhouse gases, much of our planet has now been reduced to molten lava. Not surprisingly, the rapid increase in temperature has played havoc with the train tracks, which fortunately, we still own, and seem increasingly relevant in this day and age of instant teleportation. Oh well, at least a block of Tasty Cheddar is still within reach of the ordinary family.

I’ve been wondering about this for a while, but can someone please tell me, aside from 900 jobs (which is no small fry, but still), what exactly do we get out of Comalco? Overseas owned, I'd be interested to know how much tax they pay here, but whatever, they use 15% of the country’s power! That's more than everyone else put together, or something. Well maybe not, but they're definitely the single biggest consumer of power.

So do we really need them? Unemployment’s low at the moment, life in Bluff can’t be that great anyway, are you sure these 900 people can’t take one for the (hot-water-using, long-shower-loving) team?

Finally, after about 9 months of planning, travelling the world and writing, my piece for North & South on sustainable energy and going "off the grid" (set in Timaru, Afghanistan and Pakistan) is out late this week. Please check it out if you can, I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. (And thanks again to the Asia NZ Foundation for getting me there.)