From Beavis and Butt-head to Drew and Shannon, TeleTrader to the Champagne Lady, Calum Henderson looks back on the first 20 years of New Zealand’s fourth TV channel.

In 1997, I spent a week of intermediate school metalwork classes carefully etching the TV4 logo onto a sheet of copper. That is how excited I was that New Zealand was getting a fourth television channel.

After school I would go home and watch the new channel’s test pattern, which played a loop of clips from shows like Beavis and Butt-Head and Harry Enfield & Chums in a tiny box in the middle of the screen. Every night I would sit through several cycles of the loop before going to bed and dreaming of the day when I could watch the full episodes.

I was 12 years old and absolutely chomping at the bit for youth-oriented programming. And then finally, one chilly day in June, TV4 officially launched. Here’s what happened next.

1997-2003: TV4

On the 29th of June in the year of our lord 1997, New Zealand officially got its fourth television channel. A youthful companion to TV3, the early TV4 schedule featured a comedy-centric line-up of shows mostly from the US and UK.

Probably the most exciting ones came straight off MTV: Beavis and Butt-Head was obviously a huge drawcard, as was the debauched dating show Singled Out. The Real World, meanwhile, was quickly overshadowed by one of TV4’s first New Zealand-made shows, Flatmates.

TV4 also offered one of the greatest after-school / early evening runs New Zealand has ever seen with its suite of Peter Engel-produced high school sitcoms. Saved By the Bell was the original and best, and it screened alongside a combination of Saved By the Bell: The New Class, California Dreams, Hang Time and USA High to make for a solid gold hour-and-a-half of programming each night.

As the years wore on and the lustre of TV4 wore off, the channel was forced to seek out new audiences. One innovation brought to New Zealand television around the turn of the millennium was TeleTrader live classifieds, an early sort of precursor to TradeMe. “It like a giant garage sale at the end of your phone,” Invercargill mayor Tim Shadbolt explained in a beguiling ad for the service.

Shadbolt had seemingly agreed to front the ad campaign under the condition that the channel also screened a three-minute ad promoting the city of Invercargill. It remains one of the strangest things ever screened on New Zealand television.

https://youtu.be/u9QjrEJXdEE

2003-2011: C4

Our fourth channel entered its second age on the 3rd of October 2003, rebranding as C4 and going all-in on music videos. By this stage I was nearing the end of high school and had become deeply insufferable. The changeover barely registered; it is likely that I considered C4’s music selection ‘too commercial’.

In hindsight the channel seems quite cool. It was surely no coincidence that the mid-2000s was such a boom time for New Zealand music when C4 (along with rival music video channel Juice) was operating at full steam.

I got more into C4 when I was at university and contrarily started listening to the Top 40 again. One of the channel’s best features during this period was UChoose40 – a weekly themed countdown voted by C4 viewers. At the height of emo, the countdown was almost guaranteed to feature ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ by My Chemical Romance somewhere in the top three places, regardless of the week’s theme.

C4’s peak, however, was the Drew Neemia and Shannon Ryan era of Select Live. To pinpoint the afternoon show’s absolute zenith is easy: the 28th of April 2010, the day a tiny child called Justin Bieber was the studio guest. His interview with Neemia –  in many ways New Zealand’s own Bieber – is best remembered for the singer failing to comprehend the New Zealand-accented pronunciation of of the word “German”. The pair’s off-air patter is 12 minutes of the greatest comedy this country has ever produced.

2011-2016: FOUR

The third age of New Zealand’s fourth channel began on February 6, 2011, with the rebrand to FOUR and a move back to regular comedy and drama programming. This wasn’t strictly the end of C4 – it relocated to another channel which had since been established as C4 2, where it survived until 2014.

On paper FOUR’s line-up was a lot stronger than TV4’s had ever been. FOUR had The Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park; New Girl, Glee and How I Met Your Mother. But by 2010 broadcast television was already starting to lose its foothold, and FOUR’s programming was a lot more risk-averse than either of its predecessors.

FOUR’s lasting legacy will probably be its local children’s programming. It premiered the extremely popular Moe Show in 2014 and broadcast several hundred hours of Sticky TV, including the popular  ‘Kanoa, Mon and Walter’ era.

The channel’s final moments are described with surprising poignancy on Wikipedia: “At 10:50pm on Saturday 2 July 2016, [FOUR] closed with Feist singing ‘1,2,3,4’ (the same Sesame Street song that was used to relaunch the channel in 2011); the channel then faded to black. The final show to play on FOUR was The Biggest Loser.”

2016-????: Bravo

For many New Zealanders the real channel four ended on that dark July evening in 2016. Technically, though, it continues to live on in a fourth age – the age of Bravo.

The wall-to-wall American reality channel debuted on the 3rd of July 2016. It offered a schedule rife with property shows and a variety of Real Housewives franchises, which before long came to include the channel’s only New Zealand production Real Housewives of Auckland. This show is responsible for Bravo’s only positive contribution to New Zealand society to date: the emergence of the Champagne Lady, Anne Batley-Burton.

A world without the Champagne Lady simply doesn’t bear thinking about. Just knowing she is out there somewhere quaffing champagne and feeding stray cats is enough to turn a grey sky blue. The outtake in which she talks about her pet gull and communicates with her dead cats through a pet psychic is one of the great pieces of New Zealand television, and it wouldn’t exist without Bravo.

It would be easy to scoff at a channel like this and say things were better in my day, but who knows – maybe somewhere out there is a 12-year-old with a penchant for high-end real estate and an unquenchable thirst for conflict between middle-aged women. Bravo is the channel for them. I hope they feel the same way about it as I felt about TV4, 20 years ago.

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In the first in this new celebrity-endorsed-and-branded mobile game series, Sam Brooks plays the upsettingly addictive Demi Lovato: Path to Fame.

Some disclaimers before we start:

I haven’t played a mobile game since the ubiquitous Snake. The entire phenomenon has skipped me, mostly because I’d rather spend my valuable battery power on making nonsense tweets, and a little bit because I am relentlessly old-fashioned and think that videogames should be played while you’re sitting on the couch looking at the TV.

I am a lukewarm fan of Demi Lovato. She’s that one Disney star who can really, genuinely sing and she seems like a pretty cool person. I think ‘Cool for the Summer’ is one of the most underrated pop songs of the past few years, and I think ‘Give Your Heart a Break’ and ‘Heart Attack’ are similarly underrated. She gave the world Fifth Harmony. One of my favourite comedians Justin Sayre has a joke where he says ‘Demi Lovato’ sounds like something a doctor would cry out for in an episode of E.R: “Get me a Demi Lovato stat!”

I also have an addictive personality. I’m the boy who went to the school fair at age 16 and had a gambling spiral when playing the wheel of fortune and spent maybe a hundred and fifty dollars without winning anything. I have a distinct, chilling, memory of asking friends if I could borrow money to play on the wheel of the fortune. Dark times, friends. Dark times.

So when I was given the assignment to play Demi Lovato: Path to Fame, I was a bit sceptical, for all these reasons. But I took it on, because I’m a serious journalist who can put aside his biases and hang-ups in the pursuit of truth.

Demi Lovato: Path to Fame is one in a long line of mobile games in which a celebrity brand is a thin veil over the actual gameplay. See also: that Kim Kardashian game, the Spice World game from like 20 years ago, any licensed movie game. It’s the kind of game that’s designed to hook superfans in and get them to spend their hard-earned cash on easy in-app purchases.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I was shocked and stunned to find that Demi Lovato: Path to Fame has an actual plot! In it, you create a character, and kudos to this mobile game for having an incredibly diverse range of options to create your character, even if the skin colours are labelled: Cocoa, Mocha, Toffee, Olive, Peach, Cream, which is… diplomatic, let’s say. This character is a superfan of Demi Lovato, and is also a wannabe singer who wants to be famous.

The first few episodes are distractingly well-written and engaging for this kind of game. You can choose who your romantic love interest is (and even the gender, which is cool and chill) and who your best friend is (I chose to name mine Kate Bush, which turned the game into some kind of strange fanfiction). The dialogue is zippy and is vaguely similar to what people sound like. For a moment I was like, “God, this is better than Mass Effect: Andromeda! My choices actually matter!”

I blitzed through about ten episodes in an afternoon without even noticing. The plot moves at a fairly glacial pace, but it’s equal parts engrossing and banal: You go from wanting to get tickets to a Demi Lovato concert to winning a contest to be taken onstage to winning a contest to be her backup singer to going on tour with Demi Lovato. There’s also an episode that revolves around your character filming a promo video. An entire (15 minute long, albeit) episode. Towards the start of the season, each episode starts and closes with Demi Lovato praising and condemning your choices, like some kind of omniscient guardian angel, considering she is also a character in this low-heat soap opera.

Then, dear reader, the gaps begin to show. The game has all the trappings of a branching plot, allowing you to prioritise your fans, your friends or your love life. I prioritised my fans, because it’s called Demi Lovato: Path to Fame, not Demi Lovato: Path to People Thinking You’re a Good Person. But eventually I realised that no matter how much I prioritised my fans, and however much I ignored my annoying sister, my hanger-on best friend and both my douchey ex-boyfriend and current semi-famous squeeze, the game would continue to plod along to the same resolution. But eventually I got tired of hearing the same tinny backing track to ‘Cool for the Summer’ or ‘Skyscraper’, I got tired of the repetitive animations and tired of being judged by a fake Demi Lovato.

But goddamn, that same teenager who spent all his money on a school fair version of wheel of fortune was present here. I was never tempted to pay for any of the microtransactions (because oh this game has microtransactions!) but I had to finish the season. I had to get enough fans to unlock some of the nicer clothes! I had to know if my character would end up with thinly veiled circa-2011 Justin Bieber! I had to know if my single ‘Katy Perry is Problematic’ would win me a Glammy! (Spoiler: It does! No matter what you do, I assume.)

There are three seasons of Demi Lovato: Path to Fame. I can’t imagine what drama my character, the imaginatively named ‘Sam Brooks’, gets into in season two, but it will have to happen without me.

Amount of game played: 26 episodes, which took me about six hours. I’m not proud of this. There are three seasons of this game, and I am not going to play any more. You know what the game is by now, you’ve got your pound of flesh.

Amount of [insert name of celebrity] in [insert name of celebrity game]: Demi Lovato is a prominent character in the plot of her own video game, often serving as a deus ex machina to an episode or providing generic encouragement. Almost every scene is scored to a tinny backing track of one of her songs, and everybody in the game is obsessed with Demi Lovato. You can tell the exact point when Demi Lovato the real person stopped caring about the game because her voiceovers drop off pretty damn quickly.

Amount of $$$ spent on microtransactions: $7.50, but only to get more passes to play through the season. You can spend a huge amount on gems, which allow you to buy outfits, which allow you to win the game. Evidently, the path to fame is spending a lot of money, which is a depressingly real and honest way to look at how to get famous! Thanks, Demi Lovato.

Amount of shameless promo for [name of celebrity]: Very little! I imagine it would make you want to buy some of the songs if you didn’t already have them/have a Spotify subscription. There are sponsor ads in between each episode, but you can take out your headphones and do something else during this.

Should you play this: No? Probably not? It’s really hard to justify it to your friends, and even harder to justify it to yourself. There’s a limited amount of time on this planet, and there are definitely more wholesome ways to get your satisfaction that aren’t playing a Demi Lovato mobile game.

Next game in this celebrity-branded series: The incredibly current Tom Daley Dive 2012.

Made with the help of the benevolent superhumans at Bigpipe Broadband, the best ISP in all possible universes.