TV review: How the Other Half Lives

Marc Ellis enjoys his cray in the sun. Photo / Supplied

What's happened to Marc Ellis, the larrikin? Has he gone in search of himself? Or the meaning of life?

He read a terrible poem last night on How the Other Half Lives (TV1, 9.30pm). He'll be spouting Desiderata next - another terrible poem - and discovering that there are other people in the world.

You'd think he might have already worked this out, and of course he has, but The Other Half's premise is that Ellis seeks out communities who live outside the mainstream which presumably means people who don't live in St Mary's Bay and - surprise! They're not like him. Except when they are a bit like him, because, so far at least, he hasn't come across a community of Martians.

Last night he went to a place called Riverside in Nelson where a community lives in a communal way. They object to being called hippies. So Ellis gets the H word in whenever he can.

When he thinks of hippies he thinks of "... free love, house buses ... and, of course, questionable fashion sense." Ellis was wearing what looked suspiciously like a cravat while he was visiting. So, yes, "at first glance, she's all here".

He was thinking of "sex orgies all over the place", a sentence which does not bear dissection. "Well, I brought a spare set of keys," he said in a leering, larrikinish sort of way to his long-suffering hostess. "Ooh," she said, an economical sentence which does not need dissecting.

He drove in through a field of hemp. Even a non-hippy could tell it was hemp. We were supposed to think it was the old Mary J, man. "That's the thing with this joint, pardon the pun. Things are not always what they might appear." Well, yes they did. It appeared to be hemp.

Pretending it might be a huge dope crop was treating the audience like people who had smoked too much of the stuff.

He interviewed some Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOFAS) - an alien species to him but not, I suspect, to most people. They picked flowers for salad and spoke in Martian, or some foreign language: "... showing off in, I believe, Latin". About the flowers which were, he said, "otherwise known in New Zealand as a honeysuckle". Not unless I was really stoned: they looked like that flower otherwise known in New Zealand as a nasturtium.

He went milking, a very hippy sort of pursuit, done with blokes, cows and a milking shed. This must have come as a disappointment: shouldn't the cows have been milked by sexy hippies in see-through muslin blouses taking a break from sex orgies all over the place?

That might have been a recruiting fantasy, had Riverside been a cult. "What say you're 18 ... and a really attractive WWOFA from Scandinavia ... ?"

Jen said: "Attractiveness isn't a pre-requisite at all."

And, "it's just not that exciting here."

Oh, I don't know. There was the day a Martian dropped in. There was fun to be had. Translating the Latin or the Martian or the Ellis English as some other language. "I'd have no foibles about voicing my disappointment of the inequality between some jobs and others ..."

Or, "to be fair, I don't suffer fools or people who aren't even foolish but who don't agree with me ..."

It is, to be fair, hardly Louis Theroux, whose, aah, foibles are always on display. His blunders have at least the appearance of sincerity. Ellis' are scripted jokes. His idea of faux intelligent naivety is to ask, of a member of a pacifist community, : "Why wouldn't you just apply the same sort of logic as Guy Fawkes and have a crack at parliament? ... You're going to get a lot more done by blowing that bugger up."

Boom boom indeed.