Greg Dixon's weekend

PHONE 0900 COCK-UP

It's not just the 111 service you've got to worry about. TV One's live debate on the state of the police on Thursday night suggests we should be seriously concerned about the state of the state network. It seems the debate ran an 0900 phone poll asking, "Have we lost confidence in the police?" However, after an ad break the question changed to, "Do you still have confidence in the police?" A total of 2974 said they had "lost confidence", but 4207 still had confidence. The rest had migraines from trying to work out what the hell the question was. If you voted "yes" - or "no" - to the initial question, where did your answer go when the question changed? Maybe the real question is: Have you lost confidence in TVNZ to hold live debates? Or should it be: Do you still have confidence in TVNZ to hold live debates?

WE ARE MAHAREY'S ARMY

Those with trap-like memories will recall that the Minister for Foot In Mouth, John Tamihere, recently labelled his Labour colleague Steve Maharey (right) "smarmy" in an interview with Ian Wishart's magazine Invention. Now, if we're to believe the rumours, poor Steve was, sniff, hurt by the appellation. However, the cast of thousands working in his office weren't quite so wounded. They're now calling themselves the Smarmy Army.

SIGNED WHINGING POM

Speaking of armies, Smarmy and Barmy, it appears I offended lovers of Pomgolia with last Saturday's outrageous assertion that the English can be insufferable. "Yet another pathetic, cliched and lame piece of anti-Englishness," raved one, insufferably. However, another wrote to inform me that "the English have a sense of humour". Just not when they're living here, apparently. Who was it said that England exported all its bores and got English jokes as punishment? Oh, it was me.

CATCHPHRASES OF CATASTROPHE

In television news, pictures of devastation are never enough. Nor are heart-rending stories. No, you need a tagline to help viewers understand the calamity because, well, we're a bit thick. Hence Thursday night's Close Up billed the Bay of Plenty floods as "Torrents of Terror". Obviously they'd considered but discarded "Freshet of Fright", "Deluge of Disaster" and "Intimidation by Inundation". It wasn't the only wet TV cover. One Breakfast reporter Donna-Marie Lever reported yesterday that "ironically there was a very nice sunset that came up over the water this morning".

READING, WRITING AND A GOOD THRASHING

David Benson-Pope (left) was a total amateur. At high school in the early 80s I was educated by some of the most exceptional sadists of the time. This was a school where the principal was a regional tennis champ rumoured to have both a strong backhand and forehand technique with the cane. If you talked in class, one German teacher would make you stand up front with your nose touching some town on the room's large map of Germany. The trick was that he always picked a town that was just a little higher than your nose so you stood for the remainder of the period on tiptoes. His second line of defence was the page-long essay. There were two topics: To explain the sex life of a rice bubble or describe the inside of a ping-pong ball. Then there was the maths teacher who threw things. Not tennis balls you understand - they're for wimps. He threw wooden chalk dusters. At heads. He was a cricket player so it's fair to say he was accurate. He threw punches, too, though not at the boys. I remember arriving in his room one afternoon to find he'd been so incensed by the previous class that he had punched a hole in the blackboard. Those were the days.