TV review: Gnome place like home for Amazing Race

Host Phil Keoghan introduced the viewers to his home country. Photo / Supplied

For those of us who go to the airport three hours early - and that's just for domestic flights - all that global rushing around on The Amazing Race leaves the nerves as tight as those knots confronting the competing teams in Gulf Harbour in last night's episode (TV2, Sunday, 7.30pm).

There's also the excuse of it not being environmentally kosher to watch a show that, with its wanton use of air and land miles, surely is the telly-viewing equivalent of driving a Hummer.

However, with New Zealand awarded the honour of being a pit-stop this time, patriotic duty demanded tuning in to see what kind of a backdrop our backyard would make for all those accelerated, feuding couples.

Other key questions: would Kiwi host Phil Keoghan, who always seems to find steering the American accent a strain, lose control of his vowels back on home territory? Would Kelly and Christy finally get over the sports bra thing and admire the scenery? Would Toni, a sterling reinforcement to the cliche of American geographic ignorance, be able to find us on a map?

A couple of the contestants had questions of their own: "I wonder if they like blondes in New Zealand?" mused one of the "Southern Belles". Yes, the local population's receptiveness to one's hair colour should always top one's foreign destination research list.

The show's whiz through Aotearoa, well from Auckland to Keoghan's home town Te Puke, might have been speedy but taught us things about our country locals might have been unaware of. Who knew Gordian knots were endemic to Gulf Harbour, as well as ancient Greece? Or that, despite all those Department of Conservation eradication efforts, we are again suffering a severe infestation of garden gnomes.

Unfortunately, a chunk of the action was in the dark, which probably won't leave Gulf Harbour enthusiasts impressed. However, a keen-eyed tourism entrepreneur could spot an opportunity in that fast-forward challenge, in which the "separated" couple bonded over their nerve-racking climb up the spike of the Sky Tower: Kiwi Extreme Couples Therapy.

Maori warriors atop Mt Eden made a fearsome variation on the tourism-trail concert party and showcased their people's superhuman resistance to goose-bumps in the Auckland chill. Then it was off for another well-known Kiwi adventure sport: forget the Fijian fire-walk, in Te Puke it's the famous barefoot crushing of the kiwifruit.

The other option was blow-karting. Let it be known that in a land blessed with thousands of kilometres of fantastic coastline, some of us prefer to go sailing around a small track of asphalt. Let it not be said that Kiwis stand in fear of the rest of the world thinking we need our heads read.

The finish line was on a pastoral hill, where the contestants got to meet a major Bay of Plenty celebrity, Phil Keoghan's dad, and air their winning joys or losing sorrows, their aches and pains accompanied by a strangely apt soundtrack for this show, the bleating of sheep.

Dare we ask, not what our country can do for the The Amazing Race but what The Amazing Race can do for our country? Yes we dare. And the answer is that when it comes to being a good place to pointlessly dash about, TAR has put us on the map.