Duncan Greive: It's time to pay Julie Christie some respect

Julie Christie made Kiwi television that everyone watched. Photo/Nick Reed

Julie Christie made Kiwis watch themselves on TV. Why isn't she celebrated?

"I pretty much decided that I was going to become a major commercial success so I didn't have to be a critical success," Julie Christie told Diana Wichtel in a deft 2006 Listener profile. It's a more elegant summation of Christie's career than anything I could come up with, and precisely the reason I think it's entirely justified her being named Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

That distinction - how to weigh the commercially and critically successful - is one New Zealand has struggled with for years. This is, perhaps, because its non-commercial broadcasting sector came very late to this country. In the US and Australia it was commercial from day one, while even the UK had independent competition for the BBC from the mid-50s. Here though, with our statist central control and fetishisation of a very specific era of Britain, we waited until the waning months of the 80s before allowing competition for TVNZ. (Incidentally, titles like Dame are another odd colonial relic we should never have revived, but that's neither here nor there).

As a result of this television monopoly we didn't really know what audiences wanted until relatively recently - only what commissioners thought would be good for them. When we found out what it was, the cultured class winced: instead of quality drama and long-form current affairs, we watched goonish reality TV and stunt-riddled game shows.

Julie Christie would have struggled mightily in the NZBC era; in that which came later, she thrived. By comparison to other production companies, that one she built, Touchdown, had almost no relationship with NZ on Air. Say what you want about Ready Steady Cook, Marc and Matthew, The Chair and all that - New Zealanders loved them, and, better yet, never had to shell out a cent to pay for them.

Christie was a masterful judge of what regular people would find entertaining. Not necessarily nourishing - but then, that was always a pejorative idea. Instead her vision of television was bright colours and big personalities who could be moved from one wild idea to the next as soon as interest started to fade. To her TV was a medium which existed to allow the mind to relax at the end of day's work, not a realm for the intellectual or political.

That this conception of television has somewhat swung around in the decade since, during the "golden age" and streaming eras, doesn't mean that her model was flawed, just that it worked particularly well for a specific period. Some of the more furious criticism of her Queen's Birthday honour had this elitist vision of culture as its subtext; more critiques came from what has happened at MediaWorks since her arrival on its board.

That era is rightly less celebrated. Along with some good, occasionally great reality TV, we also saw the dismantling of one of the great private newsrooms in the country. Yet its stars have found new and arguably better homes. The Project is finding its feet and Newshub just won best news site at the Canons, indicating that the green shoots coming through underneath that scorched earth are in good health.

Besides, Christie was placed on the board precisely to advocate for a specific style. It was the executive's role to hear that advocacy and appropriately weigh it. If you feel they went too far, save your fury for Mark Weldon.

Christie in her prime seems like a force of nature. She had her first child induced, then returned to work the following day. During a period when I was reporting on MediaWorks' lurch from crisis to crisis I had a number of people call with stories of her ruthlessness.

All of which might be bad, but none of which invalidates what she did accomplish, as a woman and almost entirely off her own steam. She sold formats around the world, created a generation of dorky stars and dominated ratings - if not critical respect - for a clear decade. Broadcasting has never seen anything like her.

If this reads less like a defence than an obituary, it is perhaps understandable. Her influence isn't what it once was. But as someone who runs a site which appreciates both the high and the low of television, I wish we had more programming like The Player, her bizarre dating show, or our corny, heartfelt This is Your Life. Our channels are now much more likely to be filled with well-made overseas shows, and feel less like a reflection of who we are as a result.

For better or worse, when Christie was in her prime, there were a lot more New Zealanders on screen, and more again watching them.