And the award goes to...

A fun night out, for young and old.

In about a month or so I will be heading out for a night out on the town, and probably doing all the crazy things I do on a night out, these days. Such feeling I’m up way past my bedtime and worrying about how I’m going to feel in the morning.  Fretting over “am I drinking enough water to stay hydrated” thoughts?  And will there be an Uber available to take us home or will we stand around on the street for ages playing that game where we summons them and then they cancel on us, just because they can?  It’s an emotional rollercoaster, a night out on the town for me.

The night on the town in question here is the New Zealand Television Awards, when all the movers and shakers from The Industry are gathered in one room to dish out prizes to all manner of shows, many of which only the people on the judging panel have ever watched.  This year I will be there to support some Ducks who briefly rocked and a mate of mine who has attained legendary status.  And, of course, to catch up with old friends and colleagues, many of whom I haven’t seen since the last awards when we promised that this coming year we would definitely catch up for that drink we promised we’d catch up for at the awards before last.

Now I’m not here to question the validity of awards shows and whether art should be a competitive thing – or even the underlying issue of whether TV can ever be art.  I quite like awards shows because it seems to me that they are the sign of an actual grown-up industry. I’ve been nominated for heaps of awards and, I believe, still hold the record for being nominated three times on one night and losing all three times. I have even won a bunch of awards, over the years, enough to know that I enjoy it more when I’m not nominated so there isn’t the remote threat of needing to make a speech hanging over my head.

No, the reason for this post is not to go into the politics and ethics of TV shows vying for a little statue and bragging rights on the night.  This little missive is to put the organisers of the 2023 New Zealand Television Awards on notice that they will have a long way to go to raise (or lower) the bar to make the night anywhere near as good as the very first awards show I ever attended: the 1987 GOFTA Awards.

I was a young Script Editor, embarking on my so-called career with the TVNZ Drama Department.  We were all quite excited to frock up in our best 1980’s fashion for a glamorous night on the town.  Even better, we scored a table right down the front, which always makes you feel more important than you actually are.

There was even food on the table, as we sat down.  A bowl of ceviche, which is what a raw fish salad was called back then before anyone thought to call it something more culturally appropriate to Aotearoa, like oka i’a.  Whatever it was called, Tanz and Jay, the two Samoans at our table, fell upon the ceviche and devoured it. 

It turned out this would be entirety of the food, for the table, for the night.

Instead of food there was sparkling wine.  Yalumba Angas Brut.  There was, it turned out, a never-ending supply of Yalumba Angas Brut.  I suspect, if the room had caught fire (which, as events transpired, would not have been out of the realm of possibility) the sprinklers would have rained Yalumba Angas Brut.

No food + endless alcohol.  It didn’t take a genius to see where this night was heading.

Then the actual awards show started, and things got truly weird.  For starters, for reasons that never became clear, the organisers had decided to wrap the presenters in tinfoil.

In future years this sort of attire would be rocked by only the craziest of 5G conspiracy theorists, but on this night it really did set the tone for what was to follow.  Insanity.  Insanity and chaos.

Much has been written, over the years, about the GOFTA Awards of 1987.  The heckling of the guest presenters; winners being stopped on their way to the stage, thus preventing them from making an acceptance speech – or even getting handed their award; and how the whole even went from bad to worse to whatever comes after worse.  A taster of the evening’s carnage can be found here, but that misses all the stuff that happened in the commercial breaks, which was where the true fun was to be found.

It was a classic irresistible force meets immovable object situation.  The irresistible force was the live show; the immovable object was the fact it was being broadcast live on TV2.  As we all know now, awards shows never ever run to time.  An overly-emotional actor wanting to thank everyone they’ve ever met; followed by someone who wants to use their acceptance speech to right the wrongs of the world; followed by some kind of techie award where the recipient feels the need to explain the whole techie-thing.  Suddenly you’re twenty minutes behind schedule and we haven’t even got to the awards where it takes ten-minutes to drag everyone who worked on the show, onto the stage.

That night, however, someone in an OB van decided that the live show needed to bend to the broadcast schedule.  If they could have lobbed the awards to the winners, at their tables, like hand-grenades, they would have, just to keep things on time.

Anarchy, inevitably, ensued.

Whenever the broadcast went to commercial-break, there were people up on their feet shouting at anyone who would listen and many who wouldn’t; shunned winners were making defiant speeches from their tables; spontaneous haka-ing broke out; the poor floor-manager stood on stage, trying to explain to a room of deaf ears why this mayhem was unfolding before our very eyes. 

And the bottles of Yalumba Angas Brut kept coming.

The now dearly-departed John McRae, the acting big cheese of TV2 at the time, was at the table behind us.  I heard him start swearing.  John was a champion at swearing.  I learnt this from my days as an even more junior Script Editor at the TVNZ Drama, where John was Head of Drama.  There you learnt to move quickly, passing John’s open office door, in case he was reading scripts and there was a loud “faaaaaaarrrrkkk!!” from within, followed by a script flying out the door, at great velocity.  (There was a series out of Wellington, called Open House, that John called Open Wound, which garnered many air miles on Air McRae.)

So, John started swearing.  Then I watched as he left the room, at the best speed he could muster.  I later learnt that he went to call MCR, back at TVNZ HQ, to tell them to let the broadcast run as over as it needed to, before a riot broke out.  Remember that 1987 was in the days before cell phones. John couldn’t get through to TVNZ because all the lines were jammed with people calling our national broadcaster to complain about the abomination on their screen – and to ask why Leeza Gibbons was wrapped in tinfoil.

I don’t really remember what happened in getting to the end of the show (see above re: Yalumba Angas Brut) but I suspect awards show fatigue led to less shouting and more drinking and before you knew it the tinfoil people were gone.  After that it was the usual mixing and mingling with an overwhelming sense of “what the fuck did we just witness?”

So, there we have it, something for the 2023 New Zealand Television Awards to aspire to.

Go on.  I dare you, organising people.  Get out the tinfoil, for old time’s sake.

I mean, there’s nothing like a little history repeating, is there?