Posts by Simon Bennett
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Hard News: Friday Music: The First Time, in reply to Gary Steel,
Hi Gary that would be right. It was still a thrilling 1st gig for a 14 (or maybe 15) year old!
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Concert I never saw but will always wish I had: Pink Floyd at Western Springs. 1989.
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Hard News: Friday Music: The First Time, in reply to Peter Johnston,
Yes! My memory of Don will always be him leaping around the stage in a woolly jumper, while singing and playing the euphonium - this led me to fandom of The Front Lawn, who became a huge influence on my work later on.
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My first international gig was Gary Numan at the Majestic Cinema (long gone) on Willis Street. The tickets were 14th birthday presents and I remember the concert being deafeningly loud, with a stripy fluro-tube light show and remote controlled pyramids with lights inside that lumbered around the stage. This was 1979 and I went with my best friend Lee, who died 10 years later in the United Airlines disaster. This gives my memory of the gig special poignancy.
My first proper date was going to see Split Enz play at the St James in 1981, with the Blams in support. This began a long-running love affair with the band - I must have seen them play 8 or 9 times across the years, including at Sweetwaters 1983, when I walked out of my first job - at the National Bank on Featherstone Street - to experience three days of heat, warm Fosters and appalling hygiene.
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So I'm not the only one being transported back to 1981. Not just the police culture issue, but also the schism that existed within NZ society during the Muldoon years. I'm feeling it again: when fuckwits like those Radio Live hosts can get away with their inexcusable on-air behaviour in the belief that their prejudices are typical of a big lump of the population.
And Paul Henry is about to get his own nightly show.
I'm not liking this country very much at the moment.
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Hard News: The Future of Television, in reply to Paul Campbell,
I dunno, as a Beckettian paen to ennui and the futility of the human condition in the face of universal entropy, Shortland Street does a pretty consistent job.
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If they had a mind to, I'm sure Sky could use their free-to-air channel Prime to access NZOA funding in order to commission original content.
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Hard News: Movie Disaster, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I'm not entirely sure your analogy holds up. Your 100 villas are NZ assets that foreigners are being subsidised to buy. In the film industry we are talking about the capital (the project) being imported, and NZ labour and skill adding value.
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If we say to International Producer X: "If you spend $100 million dollars in NZ making your movie, we'll give you $30 million back", that's still a net gain of $70million that we wouldn't have otherwise.
The argument that we should be developing and profiting from our own IP is noble and all, but the industry has been doing this for decades. It's not an either/or situation. Whale Rider is an example of this.
In a way, the existence of international shows such as Hercules, Xena, Power Rangers, Spartacus and Legend of the Seeker, has allowed an infrastructure and pool of highly skilled individuals to devote some of their downtime to supporting the far more modestly budgeted NZ shows such as Outrageous Fortune.
It's an ecosystem, a cottage industry with extremely high value economically and culturally. With NZ no longer being competitive as a location for international screen projects we risk losing a priceless asset in our skill base and associated infrastructure.
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It strikes me there's a simple equation here: provide incentives to make NZ competitive as a location for large scale international screen projects, with all the attendant international money and employment opportunities. Or fail to keep NZ competitive, and lose the big projects to other countries, thereby avoiding any large injection of foreign money and employment opportunities on international screen projects. I fail to see how anyone could favour the latter proposition over the former for ideological reasons.