Bringing you the highlights of this week’s TV Guide, New Zealand’s top selling magazine and this website’s papery spiritual grandmother. //
Growing Up Winston: A Talk With Bree Peters
This week’s issue features a cracking interview with Bree Peters, daughter of Winston Peters and Dr. Pania Stevens on Shortland Street. Bree talks about her career highlights, including filming a sex scene with Blair Strang on Nothing Trivial, despite him being her distant cousin.
Disappointingly, the interview is steered away from answering any questions about her father. No doubt his performances on camera has influenced her thespian talents in one way or another. We’ll find out someday.
Insight into Peters’ home life comes later, when she reveals that her Mum used to switch channels when Shortland Street came on TV because it was too racy. Maybe if you had shown her a sex scene or two she wouldn’t have signed up to do one with her cousin, Mama Peters.
Ladies Love Cool James (and Chris O’Donnell)
There’s a great little read with two NCIS: LA superstars LL Cool J and Chris O’Donnell. They talk about their differences (“it’s not just a black-and-white thing”), as well as their camaraderie on set. Chris O’Donnell reveals his special connection to New Zealand: one of his children was born here and the other…conceived here. Vertical Limit? More like Horizontal Limit. Sick mate.
The Best of Mr Telly:
This is the ‘have your say’ part of the TV Guide where New Zealand’s most impassioned television watchers send in their praise/complaints/poems to an amorphous white blob wearing a tie called Mr Telly. This week we shall readily compare Mr Telly to a summer’s day – because it’s really heating up. Here is the winner this week, yet another furious ode to the Prime logo:
Another Rhyme for Prime:
I’ve noticed it too, up in the blue,
That big white blot does not do a lot.
Thank you Lyn for noticing that,
I too have found it does distract.
Cows and painters have tried to remove
This logo that makes us disapprove.
So a third wave of protest is rising now,
To join the painters and the cow.
What will it take, to a watermark make?
Transparency clear, not opaque.
And reduced in size to maybe a third,
Something smaller and less absurd.
We’re not saying to Prime to take it down,
It’s just so big that viewers do frown.
So Prime stays big in the shows you air,
Not in your logo’s ego flair.
– Dave Morris (Wellington)
Peeve of the week:
The peeve of the issue comes from a Dunedin writer called Language Please. He or she has an issue with the diction of our current journalists, and laments the introduction of Americanisms. Language Please was steamed to hear that TV3 reported Sophie Lowry used the word “bin” instead of “been.” Lowry, if you are reading this, “learn to speak the language of your country before you attempt to to speak someone else’s and pronounce words correctly.”
As always, let us end on an inspirational note from the wise Mr Telly contributors. This comes from a reader called Coralie in Greenhalgh, who wrote to complain about female contestants doing too much on The Amazing Race:
Thanks TV Guide, catch you next week.