KEY POINTS:
How nice to see presenter Ruud Kleinpaste transformed into a New Zealand native parrot by a couple of Dutch body-painters in this week's episode of Here to Stay, an examination of our cultural origins.
Never mind the Dutch bit, there is something birdlike about Kleinpaste - bright and curious as a kea, almost as cheeky. Perhaps "the bug man" has a few feathery ancestors as well: there's that unnatural (for humans) hands-on enthusiasm for insects, a passion that, if you think about it, is distinctly avian.
There is, too, something frustratingly birdlike about the whole show, which hops about snatching at passing morsels and always ready to dart off. It has some wonderful material but suffers from that fear of driving away viewers that infests too many prime-time telly docos.
Mustn't linger too long on any one person or idea or the punters will get bored. Just as one interviewee gets interesting, we have to flit off to a soundbite from another. We're not allowed a decent chat with anyone.
Despite the distractions, it was apparent the Dutch did a sterling job of getting stuck into a new life in the xenophobic 1950s. Along the way they seemed to have earned the stereotype of being abrasive - a bit rich from a nation insisting on labelling the newcomers "Aliens". "From Mars," said one who had suffered the unfriendly classification and scrutiny that went with it.
With the silly season over, the current affairs teams were back in business this week. TV One's Close Up began the new year by unveiling a new set that looks like a jazzed-up staff lunchroom with Mark Sainsbury squeezed into a suit - oddly formal in contrast to the set - and standing in a corner.
There's a feature wall with a map of New Zealand made up of pulsating, slightly itinerant dots, which rather resemble those crowds of winged wildlife that mingle round your light-fittings on a warm summer's night.
The year also begins with an inexplicable enthusiasm for fuzzy, flickering footage a la old-time, badly damaged movies. Perhaps this was to show the intrepid nature of the undercover foray into rest-home care. But as it continued into the soft item on pet pigs, it was hard to understand the reason for putting us so at risk of visual impairment.
The rest-home piece also treated us to clips from a very staged-looking planning meeting for the investigation, time surely better spent showing us the actual results.
And in another alarming visual disparity, the out-of-studio talking head on the subject loomed large on the big screen behind Sainsbury and guest in-house, creating an odd impression of a giant and hobbits.
Over on TV3, there's all the excitement of Mr Campbell goes to Washington, to stand about looking pale and chilled in the darkest hours of the night, thanks to the inconvenient time zone. Campbell Live or Campbell, the Undead?
At time of writing, there hadn't yet been much for him to get the chattering teeth into, apart from a piece about the high school band set to play at the swearing-in extravaganza and a moving interview with an African-American Democrat Congresswoman from the south.
So early in the lead-up to the Celebrident's Uber-Inauguration - let's hope the poor bloke at the centre of it all has some follow-through to all the fuss - it's not yet clear whether our own leading exponent of the "marvellous" will treat us to his finest superlatives. So far, it looks like he might have decided to keep it in check.
In the home of gush and hyperbole, it will be hard to compete.
