Russell Baillie: Rough around the edges

Well, if a show is going to get a fishy name like Orange Roughies, it's always going to risk being canned. Like tuna.

And if, like Sugar Shack did, you set your panel chat show in a caravan, there is always a danger of being towed.

But that's Thursday night primetime for you - abandon all hope ye local programme makers who enter here. Especially bad ones.

That's unless you're the tawdry-but-honest-about-it current affairs show 20/20, which last week gave Nicky Watson an hour and apparently gripped the nation.

A musical interlude. I missed Ms Watson. But it might explain why there weren't quite enough people at the gig that night by excellent Wellington jazz-pop combo Twinset at Tabac. They were tremendous fun, but lost a bit of momentum due to that time-honoured jazz tradition - the mid-set break.

But not before the dry-witted saxophonist Daniel Yeabsley proved he's possibly the funniest man in New Zealand jazz. Which isn't saying much. But it's as if someone spliced the genes of Nathan Haines and Radar into one amusing fellow into an opshop suit. His brother Christopher is a very dab hand on the Hammond organ and the thought occurred: what Mark Sainsbury's chat show About Now really needs - apart from a live audience in double digits and interesting people to chat to - is a house band like Twinset. All good chat shows have them. Even Mike King had one. A chatshow with Twinset would be instantly a whole lot cooler. And even better - they would tastefully drown out the sound of the bottom of the barrel being scraped for interesting guests. End of musical interlude.

Back to the end of Roughies - all taxpayer-funded $8.9 million of it. It was TVNZ's major new drama for the year but tonight's last episode is only the eighth out of the 20 that have been filmed.

So there is more than $5 million dollars of programme now sitting shelved in at its makers ScreenWorks awaiting some future graveyard slot.

Having made the enjoyable Street Legal, ScreenWorks had some form when it came to telly drama mixing crime on streets we recognised with characters we might want to follow.

But even before it came to matters of programming and timeslot, Orange Roughies, about a new special squad of border patrollers, just felt wrongheaded in its conception and execution.

Presumably no one at TVNZ or NZ On Air noticed, and hoped we wouldn't too. Looking at its ratings, it appears we did.

The episodes seemed to spend a lot of time having the characters explaining that week's story to each other rather than telling it.

As well as the influence of the Sydneyside Water Rats, Roughies featured two Aussie leads - Nicholas Coghlan as Danny Wilder and Zoe Naylor as Jane Durant. Their lack of profile here wouldn't have helped to endear the show to local audiences.

Especially as their performances as such uptight characters weren't much good and the show's writers contrived to have them fall for each other just before Jane got shot - possibly fatally - in last week's cliffhanger (and whatever did happen to that lawyer boyfriend of hers?).

Surely, there were recognisable local actors who could have been just as bad. Or was it just that likelihood which stopped them signing up?

A couple, of course, did. Some were pretty good. And if only the show had been about Danny and Zoe's relatively untroubled fellow roughies - the cool, taciturn Zack (Mark Ruka, a man who here earns "the new Cliff Curtis/Temuera Morrison" title) and the lanky gormless former traffic cop Noel (Nick Kemplen) instead. They could have been Westhaven's own Starksy and Hutch. Now that, everyone would have watched, I bet.