Off the agenda

Just before midday Dennis Welch, on his media slot on Radio NZ, announced that the Sunday morning current affairs interview and discussion programme Agenda would finish its run on December 7. Cancelled. Welch speculated that a similar format show will be started up by TVNZ in-house. That's how it seems to be going at the moment - I know that TVNZ 7's two media shows were taken in-house after originally being scoped out as possible independent productions. But that's TVNZ, they want the security of safe corporate style guides and accountability I suppose. Welch was a bit vague on the details of why, but he had been speaking to the boss, Richard Harman, and TVNZ were pulling the plug. This is trend is bad news for the production houses.

As for last week's show it was a total yawn. RNZ's Katherine Ryan and Metro Editor Bevan Rapson were not the problem, nor was the host - it was the choice of interview subjects. Phil Goff sent everyone back to sleep - he can't criticise National because they haven't really done anything yet and talking about Labour's old guard was tedious and irrelevant. The next guest was some little HR gimp who gave a twenty minute or so interview about the micro-end of the job market. That was excruciatingly boring. He made Goff look like a cross between Gore Vidal and Madonna, that's how pointlessly vapid it was. If that was an indication of where things are going on Agenda then maybe it's demise is timely.