Elizabeth Smither
Unreel: A life in review by Diana Wichtel (Penguin Random House, 2024), 292pp, $40
Diana Wichtel and I shared a bump-box of congratulations at the 2018 Ockham Book Awards, bumping together the planter boxes we’d each received—hers for her memoir Driving to Treblinka, and mine for poetry. The boxes, with wooden sides, held a trailing plant. Before the ceremony, Diana, with professional makeup in place, killed time in my hotel room where we talked with so much energy I hardly had time to powder my nose. The same engaging talk spills from the pages of her cultural commentary Unreel: A life in review. The learning as you go, the bluffing, the flattery, and the killer punch of the TV reviewer, the chutzpah and the doggedness. She became television columnist for the New Zealand Listener in 1984 and held the job until the magazine folded under its German owners, the Bauer Corporation, during the Covid-19 pandemic. But her love of television began when she was a pre-schooler in Canada and never wavered.
When Diana lists the television programmes that have influenced our lives, I find myself thinking of a stateroom in Buckingham Palace with the diminutive Queen extending her hand or reaching for her sword, performing her professional duties with both grandeur and aplomb. Awaiting the Queen’s leisure are her TV favourites: Doctor Who, Coronation Street, Midsomer Murders and, especially, The Kumars at No. 42. She was also rumoured to watch The Crown. Similar viewers of a conservative persuasion may prefer David Attenborough, or Brideshead Revisited, or The Mary Tyler Moore Show. They are unlikely to be fans of reality TV, excoriating interviews, desert islands or love bombing. Some savour television’s ability to unreel at the ticker-tape speed of a bear run on the New York Stock Exchange, the broker with his head in his hands and phone clamped to his ear—and bringing to mind what Philip Larkin said on hearing an ambulance flying past with its siren screaming: ‘Someone’s done for.’ Everybody has their favourites, but Diana makes you believe she has watched it all—and remembered it too, or the highlights at least.
Game shows, cascading counters, talking animals, robots and aliens, cop shows, king hits and minimal dialogue, the Eichmann trial, the death of Princess Diana, the FA Cup, Liam Lawson, the Eurovision Song Contest, Dr Ropata from Guatemala will see you now. A truck load of M&Ms or a container of unsorted laundry has nothing on this. Diana sees potential in a floundering uneven show, some crudely drawn children’s cartoon, where others see a failure of nerve, sloppy sentimentality. Over the course of time, as she shows us, the short-lived may turn out to be a classic in its early stages.
Unreel: A life in review is delightfully replete with fizzy headings: ‘Heil, honey I’m home’; ‘Goofy and the goose’ … Then there are the assorted exhortations, sometimes philosophical, sometimes abusive, sometimes both: ‘I see nothing. I hear nothing and above all, I know nothing!’ (Sergeant Schultz in Hogan’s Heroes); ‘Izzy Wizzy, let’s get busy’ (Sooty welcomes the counter-culture revolution). And the hate mail she receives: ‘As usual your latest column is pure mind-numbing drivel. If I was the editor I would tell you to shape up or ship out. PRONTO!’—so declares Mrs F. of Wellington. ‘YAH-YAH-YAH-YAAH to Diana Wichtel. Are her opinions really necessary?’—so sneers Mrs F. of Tauranga. These Madam Fs have no idea of Diana’s resilience. ‘To be a critic you have to take it as well as handing it out.’ She meets disapproval from operatic prima donnas and operatic primo uomos. She applauds the off-the-charts brilliance of Wolf Hall and The Sopranos; and reels from some cartoonish horror that warps by at explosive speed. She tells us of animal characters that hide morals under their pelts; and then there are those costume dramas that have achieved cult status (The Pallisers, Brideshead Revisited). There are television interviews that raise questions in parliament; sometimes there’s television that offers a too-close focus on someone grieving or else the bludgeoning use of silence. Over television’s land of plenty, Diana levitates and descends to alight with her graceful umbrella like Mary Poppins: is it a spoonful of sugar, or is it medicine? Surely, it’s difficult for anyone to stay calm and unperturbed over vast vistas of TV watching, but she mostly manages it. Is it her personal history, interspersed in this book amongst the television schedules—the childhood years in Canada, the culture shock of moving to Auckland when she was 14, her Mum, her Nana, the search for her father—that gives her an awareness of life’s happenstance and frailty? Certainly in Unreel: A life in review she shows a gluttonous capacity for the way television mingles serendipity with boredom, a greediness for the way television at any moment might suddenly become supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
Diana the connoisseur acknowledges the nuclear-fusion brilliance of dialogue when combined with just-the-right situational images; together they are what makes television dazzling: ‘It’s just gone eight o’clock and time for the penguin on top of your television to explode’ (Monty Python’s Flying Circus). And in an episode of Blackadder, titled ‘Going Over the Top’, Baldrick says: ‘Shall I do my war poem, sir?’ to which Blackadder ripostes: ‘How hurt will you be if I give the honest answer which is, No—I’d rather French-kiss a skunk.’ And then, when the fatal moment in the episode arrives, those famous last words: ‘Made a note in my diary on the way here. Simply said, Bugger.’
Diana, schooled in Virginia Woolf’s writings and the waspish ways of the Bloomsbury Group through her years as a graduate student in the English Department at Auckland University in the early 1970s, is well-equipped with her own outrageous comments throughout this book. She’s always ready to both offend and defend. She can take down an over-preening presenter with a line, and puncture pretentiousness with a damning quote, but her responses are always grounded in common-sense and an openness to experience. She lifts the lid on life at the Listener in the pre-Bauer days, the camaraderie, the galaxy of editors. And she extols our own TV triumphs, praising the Māori Television channel, which seemed to grasp what television could do from its inception, with programmes like After the Party that celebrate our unique culture. Where else can you imagine Robyn Malcom dining on a block of cheese and a glass of wine? To be a television critic, Diana writes, ‘is to spend your life immobile amid a pile of snack wrappers, watching the electronic cavalcade of the human condition in all its inherent absurdity parading by until you pass out. To ask television not to intrude is to misunderstand a medium that all but sits in a viewer’s lap along with her TV dinner.’
The charm of Unreel: A life in review is given an added dimension through its autobiographical elements. Coronation Street, when she first watched it as teenager, was like watching grey porridge congeal, and as Diana tells it, the antics of her own family members, Mum, Stew, Luke, Sy and the aunties, were to her more vivid than those of anyone on Coronation Street: the life in them left Ken Barlow for dead. Her absent father, who didn’t immigrate to New Zealand from Canada with them and who was a Holocaust survivor leaping from a train to escape a Nazi death camp, remains an absence who is ever-present. Personal memories interweave with television programmes. There is the terrible image of a father at a camp watching helplessly as his young daughter is swept away from him and his last sighting is a small dot, the colour of the new red coat he has bought her.
In reviewing, Diana can be as sharp and concise as Oscar Wilde; like him it is accuracy she aims for, and as a critic she is fearless. Once the shock is over, her victims often admit she has hit the target. And television offers both immediacy and immersion. Personalities introducing personalities sometimes turn Trumpian when an interviewee hogs the spotlight. It’s a hardscrabble, ratings-ruled world, where you can sympathise with the Kardashians or peer closely at the screen to see whether Anna Wintour’s Met Gala outfit really was ruined by a small stain.
Is it resentment of television’s non-stop barrage of images that turns us all into media critics? Or are we just made perpetually anxious by its discombobulating variety? Allen Curnow thought our truncated history as New Zealanders predisposed us to living ‘in a perpetually irritating present tense’, which describes what television does exactly. But is there more to television than a sense of vertigo induced by moving wallpaper? A recent current affairs programme showed a bulldozer excavating long-buried waste and restoring a river bed in a mood-enhancing way; and an recent episode of Endangered Species Aotearoa showed a rediscovered wood rose (known to Māori as te pua o te rēinga) that has a honey-like pollen. Fascinatingly, it is a plant fertilised by bats. Judicious selecting, like the Queen choosing just to watch The Kumars at No. 42 as her sole radical choice, may be the solution. Programmes like David Attenborough’s Ocean or The Secret Lives of Orangutans, though not facile viewing, can feel like a comfort blanket in their predictability. Perhaps we should regard criticism, apart from the hostile all-caps variety, the way Jane Austen regarded gossip; to paraphrase her: ‘For what do we watch TV but to make sport of its programmes and laugh at them in our turn?’
Just recently I rewatched the docking of the spaceship to the accompaniment of the Blue Danube waltz in 2001: A space odyssey and found it less exciting than I remembered it being first time around. Technology has moved on and perhaps films and television programmes need to be remade regularly to remain vital and engaging. When I think of a particular character—Lucy Ricardo in the classic black-and-white sit-com I Love Lucy—I see the vivacity and stratagems of a woman who could not get a bank loan. Whereas, I still have hope for Mary Tyler Moore. Criticism, analysis, the parallel text, are essential to the development in any art. The critic is the viewer with stamina, able to remain alert and discerning. The great critic is a great discoverer: she looks on our behalf, incorporates all the vagaries and aspirations, finds what triumphs and what’s a good attempt, the promising series: a good night’s viewing. And on certain nights loves the dross.
Last words from Diana:
Television is off its rocker, random and manipulative. It’s wild, inquisitive, occasionally profound and always hopelessly human, just like the people who make it, watch it, yell at it, and write about it. The technology will change but people will always want stories. Has any medium really matched the reach and range of television? You wouldn’t want to be a TV reviewer if you didn’t think the golden age is right now and the best is yet to come.
Diana Wichtel has done us proud.
ELIZABETH SMITHER has written five novels, five collections of short stories and seventeen poetry collections. A collection of four novellas, titled Angel Train, is forthcoming from Quentin Wilson Publishing. She lives in New Plymouth.
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