The EYES of the world

By Frances Grant

Dame Kiri Te Kanawa was on a stage on a Gisborne beach in the pre-dawn darkness, singing in the sunrise of the new millennium to the world.

Maybe not the whole world, more like half - singing to a potential audience of around two-and-a-half billion people, those with television sets in countries receiving the global broadcast making telly history.

An eerie thought as you watched New Zealand's famous songbird, trying to get your head around the numbers, to imagine the billions of homes the diva's image was beaming into at that moment.

On the telly she appeared as a voice in the wilderness. Dame Kiri and the NZSO playing before the cameras at the very ends of the earth. The soundstage a small, lit hemisphere in the surrounding dark.

The applause reminded you there was a live audience there witnessing the event. But at home in front of the box, you couldn't help but think: the millennium was made for television.

The thought kept recurring as we were served strange, and often beautiful, spectacles from the most remote corners of the globe. Would these events be happening if there were no cameras there to see them?

On the first piece of land to see the year 2000, Millennium Island, a tiny, uninhabited chain of coral islets in the dateline-hopping Kiribati group, the BBC's world affairs editor John Simpson mused on the strangeness of the event.

He writes in a report for the British newspaper the Sunday Telegraph of the impact of the television crew and 60 dancers and singers brought in by the Kiribati Government to celebrate. The fragile ecosystem of the islets, home to an amazing range of wild-life, will take years to recover.

Simpson writes, too, of the pathos of recording the first dawn of 2000 on an island which is about to die: "Millennium Island itself probably does not have that long to live. The islets are mostly two or three feet above sea level, and like almost every coral island on the globe, they face extinction within decades as sea levels rise.

"So there was an intense irony about coming to celebrate the birth of a new century on an island which is unlikely to see the century out."

Closer to home, the Herald reporter covering ceremonies on the Chatham Islands noted some of the effects created by the televised nature of the occasion.

The locals received their instructions: turn on the cheering now, put out your cigarettes, the world is watching. The dawn greeting was performed not so much for the locals but the camera crews, who walked away mid-performance, obviously having got their required footage.

Television went to town and so did city after city around the globe, grabbing the moment to stun the world with their own brand of razzle-dazzle. Sydney, Paris, London - ours have more "flare" than yours, each fireworks display seemed to say.

Never have we seen so many ancient crooners and rockers hauled out in one 24-hour period. Wow, every nation has a Howard Morrison figure. Was that the Norwegian Max Cryer we saw singing with the kids in Oslo?

The more arty nations seemed to be striving to outdo each other in producing something visually striking. Central European nations emphasised their culture, the Irish their spirit, the Icelanders their wackiness, the Italians their faith, the South Africans their new-found one nation. All art-directed to the hilt. Who for? Their citizens and the eyes of the world.

Television was breaking records. TV3's globe-trotting 2000 Today was part of the most ambitious broadcast in the history of the medium. TVNZ's One New Zealand Challenge went the parochial route and was the biggest thing ever produced by local telly.

What would the millennium have been without television? "Well, that's right," says Andrew Stefanou, project director of 2000 Today. "During this project, people asked me, 'Are people going to be watching television?' They certainly did around the world, there's no question about that. And it united everybody and everyone got a taste of how other people celebrate."

Cross to the heartland. Ross Jennings, executive producer of the One New Zealand Challenge: "I tell you, the little communities would still have done their thing. So individually people have done their thing and derived great satisfaction from it.

"The big difference with television is we were able to take those little insular moments and let the rest of the country share them as well. When we started [the project] that was the thing that came through loud and clear ... you'd often hear someone saying we applied for funding, we didn't get it and initially we'd think, 'Bugger it, that's the plans gone down the drain.' And then we'd think, 'Why don't we do it anyway?' If I've heard that once, I've heard it several hundred times around the country.

"And they've gone ahead and done them ... their shoulders are back, their chests are out a little bit, in that they've done something for themselves. And by golly, television came and portrayed it to the rest of the country."

Stirring stuff. As stirring as the slogans beaming into our living rooms on the night. The bravest came from Hong Kong, a place which had the advantage of not being first to the millennium and the likelihood of Y2K disasters: "The cyber era starts now."

It was a night made for futurist fantasies, communicated by a 20th-century technology, born of the century's defining war. And ripe and ready to rise to the occasion: the telly.