By GREG DIXON
It was like stumbling into a Palmerston North nightclub about 1988.
The crowd was mixed (there were farts old and new) and the band played on and on and on with one hoary song after another, letting the good times roll with a bland competence.
Desperately trying to convince themselves and everybody else that they were having a swell time, each and everyone of the gathering smiled and smiled like a bunch of demented Cheshires. Welcome to their nightmare.
But this was no ancient Palmy knees-up — this was TV2 celebrating its 25th birthday last Sunday night. It was like most of the last 15 years never happened.
With ageing Rob Guest hosting, ageing Mark Williams doing the bulk of the warbling, and a confusion of mostly ageing guest warblers, Happy Birthday 2 You seemed to be celebrating the wrong thing.
"Paying tribute to the pop music industry," was what Guest said the thing was partly about. But as this hour and half of self-indulgence dragged on and on it seemed almost exclusively that, and mostly dug from a deep hole called the 70s.
There'd obviously been a whip-round at the channel's archives — where Fred Dagg remains popular — with a paltry result. This was history as a bunch of short, tired clips.
As this birthday bash wound on, it highlighted something more deeply entrenched and more deeply disturbing in the mind of local television: obsessive self-aggrandisement.
It is perhaps the fault of television people everywhere that they believe they are doing God's own work. How would the world amuse itself, they must all ask themselves, without us and our stupendously wonderful medium? By buying a book, probably.
But our mass entertainers have taken one step beyond. Self-promotion of its programming, of its insular little world, has now become some sort of low artform at TVNZ.
What Happy Birthday 2 You didn't tell us was, that in the past five years or so, blowing hard about its product has moved from its natural home in the ad-breaks to include voiceovers (often inappropriately) at the end of programmes and finally into the programmes themselves, forever blurring what we watch into something I'll call info-promo-entertainment (IPE).
In a twinkling of television's unblinking eye it seems to be everywhere: One News now routinely promotes other programmes, either by crossing to another studio to verbally gladhand Linda Clark, or by generating stories to build an audience for Backch@t or to promote a "documentary" on Prince William turning 18.
Susan Wood's Today Live is perhaps the worst example of IPE. It has fast developed into some sort of corporate magazine, as a succession of in-house "stars" trot through to talk about their not terribly fascinating jobs or to hand-wring about being recognised in supermarkets.
Happy Birthday 2 You — much like last month's One Turns 40 — was pure IPE. It was memory lane as a street with no exit, but worse yet it must have been the longest advert ever made.
Pumping current TV2 shows like Shortland Street, Strassman, Treasure Island, The Mole and even Popstars (with no reference to the stars' unhappiness) was this IPE's reason for being. That's not entertainment.
TVNZ's theory must be that the more you advertise something, the more people will buy it.
But from a comfortable couch in a universe far, far away from its little world, it looks like something much sadder.
Somebody call a shrink.
<i>Powerpoint:</i> TV's info-promo-entertainment
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