Paul Thomas: End-of-year report: could do better if they tried

It's that time of year again when columnists turn schoolteacher to deliver a report on another mixed year in the turbulent life of Homo sapiens: doesn't learn from his mistakes, must try harder.

Arts sections tend to review the year with the best and worst lists of various luminaries. For the writer, participating in these exercises provides a golden opportunity to plug their friends' books and settle long-standing scores.

Apart from Corsicans and Sicilians - for whom revenge is a way of life - no one nurses a grudge like a writer who has suffered a wounding review.

Once you've looked after your mates and done the dirty on your enemies, it is customary when nominating books of the year to flaunt the breadth, depth and adventurousness of your reading.

Obviously, you steer clear of bestsellers because that would be like a restaurant critic praising McDonald's. Ditto the heavyweights, because sucking up to the establishment is not cool. The trick is to come up with a writer no one has ever heard of, or, failing that, never read.

Back in the days of the Iron Curtain, Eastern European dissidents had a certain cachet. And for a while, Latin American magic realists were an absolute goldmine.

The ultimate oneupmanship is to recommend a book by an obscure figure who writes in a foreign language, with the rider that the forthcoming English translation is unlikely to do justice to the intense lyricism and exuberant wordplay of the original Serbo-Croat.

No review of the year would be complete without acknowledging the contribution of our most visible celebrities - our television personalities.

I watch a lot of televised rugby and cricket but I don't watch much television in the sense of custom-made programmes: infotainment flagships, contrived reality shows, celebrity vehicles, hyped-up talent quests, soaps that just keep on keeping on, candyfloss sitcoms, fraught dramas, and clench-jawed crime series with added pseudo-science.

This isn't a boast or an assertion of high-mindedness, merely a statement of priorities. But the obsession by the public - and therefore the media (or is it the other way around?) - obsession with John and Carol and Paul and Judy and Co - suggests that television is the dominant external influence on many New Zealanders' lives.

Paul Holmes' switch to Prime was stage-managed and trumpeted like a high-level Cold War defection. If that event was comparable to the director of the CIA appearing on the Kremlin balcony during the May Day parade, then Richard Long's disappearance had the terminal abruptness of a Stalinist purge.

Holmes' move seems an odd one, but then I've never watched Prime, at least knowingly. I say that with some confidence because I don't know which channel it's on.

It also seems like a terrific punt on Prime's part, but perhaps the bean-counters have been dazzled by wishful thinking dressed up as strategic vision. There's a distinct whiff of a minor publisher trying to buy itself instant credibility by signing - amid great fanfare and for an astronomical advance - a big-name author to a multi-book deal.

Kerry Packer, the owner of Prime's partner, Channel 9, has the dual reputation for being one of the hardest-headed businessmen and one of the most heroic gamblers. Time will tell whether Holmes was poached by Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde.

After Packer made a killing by selling Channel 9 to Alan Bond for a fortune - then buying it back for a comparative song - he remarked that you only get one Alan Bond in your life. Perhaps Holmes will end up saying something similar about Prime. While we wait for Holmes to change the landscape or disappear without trace, we should doff our caps to Judy Bailey for having simultaneously slipped a 100 per cent pay rise past the TVNZ board and detonated a large political bomb under her generous paymasters.

One can only marvel both at television's capacity to generate political heat and Helen Clark's Road to Damascus discovery that a culture of extravagance exists at TVNZ. Has she already forgotten Ross Armstrong's expenses?

While Aunty Jude deserves an honourable mention, my vote for New Zealander of the Year goes to All Black coach Graham Henry for being that rarest of creatures, a high-profile public figure who admitted he got it wrong: wrong pre-conceived ideas, wrong training regime, wrong personnel.

As former Wallaby Mark Ella said of his time coaching in Italy: "I've heard every explanation for failure you can think of except 'It was my fault'."