By EWAN McDONALD
Soaps have always seemed unhealthy. People watch Coronation Street every week and can't bear to miss an episode. That seems like an addiction.
If you'd watched every cough, pint, marriage, sacking, affair and death over the past 41 years, non-stop, you would have devoted something like six months of
your life to the fictional goings-on of a group of severely incestuous, low-achieving, terminally philandering Poms in a grimy suburb of the world's wettest city.
Wasn't that what many of our forebears spent six months in leaky boats to get away from?
But this opinion may have to be revised in the light of a really good, absorbing, twisting and turning soap opera that is screening three times a week from one of our pay channels at present.
Bought from across the ditch, the script may be rather too heavily biased in favour of the local lead actors for Kiwi tastes, though here at e.g. we've heard that there are plans for a New Zealand-based spin-off as soon as the original finishes its scheduled run next month.
Like all the best series, the plot is based around what's happening in the lives of the members of three families, the Blacks, the Golds and the Greens.
The Golds seem to be the most important of the three but that could be merely geographical. It hasn't been backed up by much they've done in the show so far.
All the elements of real life (well, real TV life) come into play. There's family conflict (pretty soon, one of the Golds is going to have to go home and tell Mum that he's sacking his brother from his job because the board and the shareholders have said he's not performing).
There's mysterious health problems (one of the Blacks just disappeared from an episode last week, then turned up again in the next).
And you can just tell that those unscrupulous Golds are going to pull a few strings to make sure they put something over the Blacks and the Greens in the coming weeks.
The actors have been pretty well-chosen for their roles (predictably, this year, the Blacks have one hero who looks like Harry Potter and another who blinks and stumbles along like Frodo, and a couple of the Greens could have escaped from the Mines of Moria).
Scandal and romance off-screen, too: one of the Blacks was on the cover of a women's magazine in a kiss-and-tell-all story last week.
So how's it all going to turn out? Bet there'll be a cliffhanger episode or two, then the scriptwriters will go along with the wishes of the local audience who like a happy ending.
It's going to be worth watching the rest of the drama, though, to see just how they can make sure that comes about in the last few World Series Cricket matches.
* Seen that ad for a CD where they talk about the greatest Music of the Millennium? Doesn't it make you laugh when you think that no one made any music at all in the first 1975 years of the millennium?
* Seen that ad for Robbie Williams' album of Sinatra songs where they say, "This is music from a golden age?" Doesn't it make you laugh when you think (a), yep, and it wasn't yours, Robbie; (b), would Robbie have dared put out that record if Da Chairman of Da Boid was still alive to hear it?
* Seen that ad for a sporting goods chain where Christian Cullen tries his hands and feet and six-pack at a whole bunch of different games? Doesn't it make you laugh when you read in the sports pages that Cullen is likely to miss quite a bit of the Hurricanes' Super 12 season because he injured an ankle making a TV commercial?
By EWAN McDONALD
Soaps have always seemed unhealthy. People watch Coronation Street every week and can't bear to miss an episode. That seems like an addiction.
If you'd watched every cough, pint, marriage, sacking, affair and death over the past 41 years, non-stop, you would have devoted something like six months of
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