The veteran reviewer takes us through her life in television, including the allure of property shows, the crushing end of Campbell Live, and the review that got the most hate mail.
Having reviewed television for The Listener for over three decades, award-winning critic Diana Wichtel has chronicled the medium through a period of fascinating evolution in Aotearoa. Her writing has covered such spectacles as the enormous shoulder pads of Gloss, to the shiny leopard singlets of Cheryl West, to certain fluro-clad politicians “twerking in the manner of one in the throes of gastric distress” on Dancing With the Stars NZ.
But how do you cope with reviewing local television in a country where you’re likely to bump into some scorned producer on your coffee run? While Wichtel admits she has had backs turned to her and side eyes at industry events, she developed a foolproof coping strategy. “To this very day, if I write anything, I’m kind of in denial that anyone’s going to actually read it,” she says. “Because if I allowed myself to think about that, I’d be totally paralysed.”
That strategy has allowed her to publish an astounding body of work that has not only preserved our popular culture, but has served as a chronicle of her own life. “Whenever I’m writing about TV, there’s always a bit of memoir in it,” she says. “I would always relate it to something I was thinking about, or something happening in my life, because I think you bring your whole life to watching television.” It’s a thesis that informs her new memoir Unreel: A Life in Review.
Like a phoenix from the ashes, the idea was born from her hate mail. “I remember walking away from The Listener with all those boxes of hate mail that I had kept. I just thought maybe I’d write an essay… but these things sort of creep up on you.” The hate mail is peppered throughout the book, which spans staring at “the blue tinged glow of a cathode-ray tube” in 1950s Canada, to watching Mike McRoberts announce “the end of the news as we know it” just this year.
“For me, just about everything is about television,” Wichtel says. “I appreciate television as a cultural form in all its absurdity and all its surreality, because it’s a very surreal thing.” She’s still watching as much as ever, but admits it can get overwhelming. “I’ve seriously been considering a spreadsheet,” she says. “We have this moment every night when we sit down and say to each other, ‘So what is there? Did we watch the finale of that yet?’ It’s very hard to keep up.”
Thankfully, Wichtel didn’t need a spreadsheet to recall her own telly-watching past, graciously taking us through her life in television from the allure of property shows, to the emotional end of Campbell Live, to the one franchise she’s surprisingly never seen a minute of.
My earliest television memory is… The first time I can remember noticing TV was one of those early Sunday Playhouse television plays. Because it was kind of theatrical, with people walking on and delivering their lines and walking off, I remember thinking “how did they get in there?” It just did not make any sense to me. I asked my mother and she tried to explain that there were people in a studio somewhere else that were doing this play, and it went through the air and came to our television. It never made any sense to me, and it always seemed quite magical. I think from that early experience, there was an element of of not being able to understand TV and it appearing magical. That memory stayed with me – and I still don’t know how it works, really.
The TV moment that haunts me is… As a child, it was most definitely Dumbo, which was a movie, but they played it on TV all the time. The scene where his mother has been locked up in a train carriage with bars for being angry because of something they did to Dumbo. And he comes up and his little trunk reaches out and they join trunks and she sings him a lullaby. That still gets me to this day. In recent years, I would say the first season of The Handmaid’s Tale gave me nightmares, and that doesn’t happen very often. You get to be a hardened TV watcher, and it takes a lot to actually get into my subconscious to the degree that did. I had real nightmares watching that, because it was such a shock. I read the book back in the 80s, but it hadn’t affected me that way back then. The series arrived in a time where you felt like you were slowly seeing the potential for something like that to happen in a way that I certainly didn’t feel in the 80s. I can’t think of anything that haunted me more than that.
My earliest television crush is… I would normally say Dr Kildare and I’ve got a whole chapter about him in the book, it he wasn’t really my first crush. When I was probably seven or eight, there was a show called Meet McGraw, and it was about a private detective. I can’t actually remember a huge amount about it, but he was one of those guys who, underneath the cross exterior, had a heart of gold and was trying to help people. I don’t know why, but I just really fell for him. I think it is because he was a loner who was misunderstood and trying to do good. It also set off great lifelong love of beleaguered guys in shows like Cracker, Luther, Slow Horses – I’m not a great one for gore and torture and violence, but I will put up with it for those shows about outsiders trying to do good in their own way.
The ad I can’t stop thinking about is… I always like the ones that were weird and scarred your psyche in some way. One of those, which I don’t think was ever on TV, was the Geddes Dental Renovations ad that was mostly on the radio. It had this terrible jingle to the tune of ‘My Darling Clementine’ – “broke my dentures, broke my dentures, woe is me, what shall I do? Take them into Mr. Geddes and he’ll fix them just like new”. It just so ludicrous, but it either began or ended with the statement, “over 20,000 teeth to choose from” which sounded like a nightmare.
My television guilty pleasure is… Definitely my go-to is Love It or List It, or Location Location Location, or House Hunters International – any of those. Even those terrible ones where awful British couples go to Spain to buy a holiday home and are impossible to satisfy and want the house to be like the one back home. I’ll watch Married at First Australia and I had a period of time with 90 Day Fiance, but I must say, I have never watched a single episode of anything to do with the Kardashians in my life, which is kind of weird.
The most positive response I’ve had to a TV review is… Probably the final of Campbell Live. I was personally really upset by that show going because they’d done such great work through the Christchurch earthquakes, and I just thought it was a really good-hearted show full of really great journalists. I was really sad about that, and so that review obviously rang a bell in our part of the world.
The most negative response I’ve had to a TV review is… Anything I wrote about the royal family. People just were outraged, because it was a bit of a sacred cow in a way that I don’t think it is anymore. But I remember people used to be so invested in it. I wrote one about Princess Diana and, although I was always quite sympathetic to Princess Diana being brought into that family and treated the way she was treated, I didn’t write in an excessively serious kind of way. I soon got a phone call from this woman threatening to cancel her subscription and I had to talk to her for about 20 minutes in the middle of the office. I eventually hung up, having talked her down and saved her from canceling her subscription, and I got a round of applause.
The most challenging TV review I’ve ever written is… I remember having to write about things like Holmes going down to Aramoana, or writing after the Twin Towers came down in 9/11, and trying to figure out what to say. You couldn’t ignore the wall-to-wall TV coverage, and it was very, very difficult to find something to say. That’s where you just watch and watch until you find people saying things or coverage that you think is good, or coverage that you think is awful, and you get to work. I think that’s another reason why I like reviewing television, because if you just keep watching, you will eventually find things that help you formulate what you want to say.
Those things were the hardest, definitely, because you feel a certain amount of responsibility to not completely stuff it up, but that’s also where I really respect television. For instance, during the mosque shootings and the Christchurch earthquakes, there was some extraordinary reporting by people who are working incredibly hard, and showing great empathy and great sensitivity. When people say that TV news has all gone to hell in a hand cart, I just don’t agree. I think there’s some extraordinary reporting that still goes on, and that’s where it’s quite a privilege to be able to notice those people and give them their dues.
My favourite television show of all time is… It’s so boring, but I cannot get past The Sopranos. I like shows that change how you think, or make you experience the world in a different way, and that one did. It forced me to have some sympathy and even an attachment to this guy who was, by any objective standards, a monster. That’s what good art does – it makes you feel things you just don’t think you would feel. I thought it was like the Great American Novel. It covered off so many conversations about people coming into the country not being able to find a place, not being valued, and deciding they’re going to make their own little world that they operate in. Plus, it was also funny. It was often one of the funniest shows on television.
The funniest show on television is… For me, it’s the excruciating comedies I love the most: Fawlty Towers and The Office, and even Extras. But if you want to talk about laughing out loud, it’s probably the time I spend these days with my grandchildren watching Modern Family. My daughter always had Friends on high rotation, and now my grandchildren are watching Modern Family. I have watched probably the entire back catalog of Modern Family so many times, and it’s just just so funny. It has other things in it that I could complain about, but I just think jokes-per-minute it is the funniest. My 10-year-old grandson often communicates with me in lines from Modern Family.
My most controversial television opinion is… People say we’re experiencing the death of television, but I don’t buy into that. I think television will survive, and maybe even a version of linear television will survive. It’s like how everyone said newspapers wouldn’t survive and radio wouldn’t survive and movies wouldn’t survive when VHS came out. You just have to reinvent it, and you have to do it differently. For instance, I wouldn’t have thought I’d enjoy a half hour news bulletin on Three, but then you watch it and it is just fine. It’s all been so silly and ritualised – we don’t need holograms and people standing in the action in front of giant screens. You don’t need all that – let’s see it reinvented in some other way.
The last thing I watched on television is… I watched the final of Disclaimer last night and it was much more engrossing and troubling and interesting than I thought it was going to be. It’s one of these stories about something that’s happened in the past that comes back and wrecks your life, and it’s always about the mother, isn’t it? On television, it’s always about the bad mother. It has a nice twist in its tale, one that I didn’t 100% believe, but that was an example of a show we just drifted into without much enthusiasm and got completely hooked. I’m still thinking about it today, so that’s always something.
Diana Wichtel’s memoir Unreel: A Life in Review is released November 26
Unreel: A Life in Review by Diana Wichtel is released November 26 ($40, Penguin)