How this show came into being, I have no idea.
People often walk up to me in the street and say, "Hey, great show the other night. Really enjoyed it, but how do you handle bad reviews?"
Often I will say, "Well, I have never really had one." A case in point is my latest hot review from Herald "TV
Eye" columnist Linda Herrick.
"I assume Leigh Hart can be quite amusing but there were so many things wrong with the first episode," she wrote.
"The mystery is how this series came into being, let alone be scheduled on TV One."
It is on TV One because TVNZ decided to put it there - that seems quite straightforward. But as to how it came into being, I have no idea.
One minute I was writing 350-word columns, like Linda, at less than $1 a word, and the next I was nut deep in the Amazon, fighting for my life, praying that a canero fish wasn't going to swim up my urethra and lodge itself up my penis.
"Hart... spent the rest of the tedious hour lurking around the backwoods of Ohio pretending to search for Bigfoot. Abetted by a ridiculous drawled voiceover, crashing background music and shots of obese Americans, Hart spouted cliched nonsense and interviewed boring people."
I couldn't agree more with Linda. "Abetted", by the way, is a clever way of saying "accompanied", and Linda has used it to great effect in six out of nine of her last reviews.
Even without having access to our detailed production notes Linda has instinctively identified how tedious and hard this project was to make.
You have to remember she only had to sit through one hour; we had to shoot about 200 hours of tedious footage, often under the influence of alcohol, just to get that one tedious hour, and that's not including the days in post-production cutting out anything remotely exciting.
Incidentally, Linda's clever handle "TV Eye" is a reference to her amazing abilities to scan TV shows and quickly appraise them - it has nothing to do with the fact that she may or may not have one eye that is significantly larger than the other, or what eye specialists call "wide screen eye".
People who suffer from wide screen eye also tend to be afflicted by a condition called "lazy eye". If this was the case - and I am not saying that it is - then Linda's larger eye would tend to drift off-centre, usually to the left, during conversations.
From her 65mm photo it is difficult to tell whether Linda is afflicted with this condition, but if she was I am sure she wouldn't mind me bringing it up; she has always been one to raise awareness, and was one of the first to call (collect) when my brother was diagnosed with a club sandwich foot.
It is also clear from Linda's picture that she shares many qualities with perhaps the greatest oil painting of them all, the Mona Lisa. Mysterious, alluring, perhaps a little more needy at first glance, but she has those magical eyes that eerily seem to follow you around the room. Then again, that could just be that lazy eye thing.
"It had no momentum whatsoever and was one of the most pointless hours of television I've ever had to sit through."
This is bang on. In fact I have heard it all pretty much before in a review of one of my sexual performances in a magazine called One Night Stand Weekly.
Many people not involved in TV or top TV journalism may take Linda's review a little too literally, but that's not how it works.
You have to remember that Linda only gets to write 350 words or so a week, so she has to make her columns multi-levelled, much like an episode of The Simpsons. When she uses words like "tedious" she could also be meaning "relaxing" or "thought provoking".
And, of course, when she says "one of the most pointless hours of television I have ever had to sit through", she may be referencing the adverts.
A standard one-hour show is only 44 minutes and the rest of the time is made up with boring adverts that I can't control.
Next week, I will be giving constructive feedback on Deborah Coddington's column.
