Kia ora e hoa mo te koha/Thank you very much/Thank you very very very much...

Until yesterday I had no idea there was a telethon this weekend. Everyone loves a telethon, but being on Maori TV doesn't help: their audience is too small to get the same effect that TVNZ - and more recently TV3 - has, so it can't effectively promote itself. I watch Maori TV almost every day and can't recall seeing any promos for a telethon, so they aren't helping themselves. Any other station would be plugging it like it was the top of Clayton Cosgrove's head.

I heard Brooke Howard-Smith on RNZ just now extolling the cross-network talent in the venture and the technical support of TV3. This hook up is intriguing because TV3 have a close relationship with Maori TV and I suspect that Carol Hirschfeld's leaving Campbell Live to go to Maori TV has strengthened it.

Strengthened to the extent that last night's Campbell Live report on the Rotorua penny-divers was just a voice-over of the same piece from the Maori TV show, Native Affairs, the previous night. Not that TV3 were prepared to admit it - only they were forced into mentioning them when the Maori TV reporter appeared linked to a quote that they couldn't edit away and they made it appear that it was the only bit borrowed from Maori TV. It wasn't - the whole thing was from Maori TV, all of it. At least Te Ururoa Flavell on the discussion part with Campbell made sure to emphasise that it was a Maori TV story.

It was a shame that Maori TV doesn't get a wider audience and a greater shame that when they do get a wider audience their work goes unattributed.

Thinking about that title again maybe Kia ora katoa mo nga koha is probably closer, I don't know. They'll hopefully come up with some suitably Maori twists on the telethon genre to keep everyone entertained.