TV Eye: Car crash TV for dummies

Police have a difficult job in dealing with the public in reality show <i>Road Cops</i>. Photo / Supplied

When I grow up, I don't want to be a policeman.

The thing is, to be a policeman, you not only have to wear a uniform in a particularly unappealing shade of blue, a silly hat and a stab-proof vest, or work god-awful, unsociable hours. You have to deal with people. Actually not people, you have to deal with the lowest, most stupid form of life.

If I didn't know that already from occasionally running my eyes over the crime headlines in this newspaper, it was certainly confirmed to me by the first episode of Road Cops (TV3, Mondays 7.30pm).

There was a time, I seem to remember, when television, in primetime, actually featured people who, if not smart, were at the very least sentient beings. There was a time when ideas - whether in drama, documentary, comedy or news - could be found between 7 and 10pm at night on our free-to-air channels.

Now, I think the pathetic state of television affairs is best summed up by the first words uttered in the voiceover on Road Cops: "Up ahead on Road Cops - young, dumb and dumber".

Is this an enticement to keep watching? Does this suggest to you that what is about to come will be worth a half hour of heartbeats? Of course not. Yet a half hour of heartbeats I gave to the police and the halfwits who inhabit Te Rapa straight, a stretch of road I understand is something of a moron's mile in a place called Hamilton.

Still, I can't argue that Road Cops didn't pack a lot of losers into the first half hour. There was Chris, a smug, lanky doofus in a hoodie who, when he spotted the police officer on his tail, switched off his lights, accelerated to over 150km/h and passed a large truck in order to evade capture.

In the end he was caught, admitted he'd already been banned from driving twice, and then he declared "I actually had a bit of a giggle". I didn't. I just prayed that at some point his large intestine would shoot up his spine and throttle his brain.

Then there was the guy who avoided arrest because he had six toes. There was the car-full of stoners who, for reasons that weren't fully clear, weren't arrested despite the icecream container of dope. There was the mother who was caught driving after consuming a whole bottle of bourbon. There was the dropkick who fled a drink-driving checkpoint and crashed his or her car before fleeing on foot to God-knows-where before, eventually, being found at home.

It was enough to make you weep. Instead it made me angry. So many idiots. And this show, while it appears to take a stern line on all the idiocy, isn't as true-police-blue as it would like you to think. Sure, ageing reactionaries like me will be outraged. But what do people like Chris and the other idiots on the Te Rapa Straight - the only people who, surely, would enjoy watching this crap - think when they see this sort of television? They'll get a cheap laugh and, most probably, encouragement. For them, this show will be filled with antiheroes to be emulated, not appalled by.

Is it possible for the brain dead to cause brain death? God, I hope not, because I also watched an episode of New Zealand's Next Top Model (TV3, Fridays, 8.30pm) last week.

I'm not sure how I've avoided seeing this rubbish until now; the other half certainly watches both it and its American progenitor. But I'm glad I have now watched it once, all the way through, because it means I won't have to ever again.

If you haven't, like me before last Friday, seen it, I will sum it up - much like judge Sara Tetro did when describing the efforts of one of the wannabe models - in just four words: advertorial, bitchiness, screaming and (functional) illiteracy.

Indeed if Top Model has one attraction, it is the unintentionally hilarious rubbish the various people on this show - the models, but most commonly Colin Mathura-Jeffree and Tetro - talk. But cheap laughs at their expensive will not be enough to draw me back to it, or to Road Cops.

What a week of television. As Estelle, the first model to get the push, said after getting the bad news: "It was a bit guttering". I know how she feels.

-TimeOut