Frank Greenall: Straight flush hard to beat

Olympic Winter Games bronze medal winners Zoi Sadowski-Synnott and Nico Porteous, arrive at Auckland Airport.

The implementation of the new coalition Government's 100 Day plan has been very cathartic, with nine years' dross and dead-bat policy accumulated by the previous cataleptic incumbents finally being addressed — Pike River, Teina Pora compensation, housing et al.

I heard an apt comment that the Nats were a kick-the-can Government, while the new lot feels like a can-do one. Naturally, the real hard yards are still to come, so we'll see. But nothing like a good spring clean to kick things off: the Augean Stables spring to mind.

Cleaning the Augean stables, you may recall, was the fifth Labour of Hercules. The stables belonged to King Augeas of ancient Greece. Housing 3000 cattle and, not having been cleaned in 30 years, they were decidedly whiffy. Hercules wagered Augeas he could clean them out in a single day, then did so by the simple trick of diverting a couple of rivers through them for a good flush-out.

According to the mythology, Hercules went on to found the Olympic Games, so it's him you have to thank — or not — for popularising beach volleyball.

Speaking of which, one of Labour's other election campaign planks was to kick off a real-deal, commercial-free public service TV channel. I was reminded of this with the appalling coverage of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics by the main free-to-air — but ad-addled — channels, TV1 and TV3.

Introducing an ad-free State TV channel shouldn't be all that much of a biggie. Denmark, with a comparable population to us, has half a dozen of them, plus a network of eight radio stations, albeit part-funded by a media licence fee.

The cry always goes out that this type of broadcasting is elitist, but stations like Radio New Zealand's National programme prove that it's possible to deliver more in-depth programming and still be popular, without the clamour of intrusive ads. If Jacinda can tear herself away from the international media interviews, bring it on.

But back to Pyeongchang coverage. For those by choice or necessity not accessing Sky Sports, the main channel TV coverage was pathetically threadbare and cringe-making.

Their skimpy references to this only-once-every-four years epic sporting event were eclipsed by reports of contractual disputes with this-or-that Warrior, or talking heads spouting on about upcoming T20 cricket.

The only exceptions were for anything that involved Kiwis, with the two bronze medal winners feted to a degree Hercules himself would have envied. To all intents and purposes, hardly anyone else existed.

Prime TV's more extended coverage was also obsessively slanted to anything remotely involving Kiwis. All in all, a shameless display of childish extreme parochialism that's unfortunately replicated in summer Olympics coverage as well.

All credit to our two young medallists, but a reality check on our "glorious" result was needed. The two bronzes brought our Winter Olympics' tally up to a grand total of three minor medals in our entire history. Norway, a nation with a similar population and sports funding to ourselves, took home 39 medals, including swags of gold and silver, from this Olympics alone — a grand total, all up, of 368 medals at Winter Olympics. That's ahhh… a mere 365 medals more than us, a country with its own winter sports climate and culture.

Frank Greenall

Lest anyone think that it's just because Norway has more snow, their overall medal total at Summer Olympics also outdoes us by 148 to 120. But more than medal counts, it'd just be good to see more of the world's best athletes in action on the iconic Olympic stage.

A case in point, Norway's Marit Bjørgen became the most decorated Winter Olympics athlete ever, winning her seventh and eighth gold medals in cross-country skiing. I didn't hear her even mentioned.

With its current lowest-common-denominator click-bait programming, New Zealand television has got its own Augean stables to clean out. Let's have at least one public service channel to deliver a more balanced and inclusive view of the world around us. Pronto.