Pop CultureMay 31, 2017

The top 10 most popular Shortland Street episodes of all time

Staff writer

Shortland’s Street big blowout 25th anniversary might be over, but we’re still in the mood to celebrate. From births to deaths, with hostages, heists and cliffhangers aplenty in between, Tara Ward counts down the most-watched Shorty episodes EVER.

There’s one more Shortland Street birthday tribute to make before we blow out the candles and take down our celebratory Stuart Neilson bunting for good. So many episodes, so many glorious memories. In fact, we’ve watched 6200 bloody episodes of Shortland Street, and you don’t need to put your fancy maths hat on to realise that equates to a shitload of television.

But which Shortland Street episode was the most popular? Was it the one where Ellen dressed up like Sandy from Grease? Or the one when Nick photocopied his bare arse in the nurse’s station? It’s a question that keeps me awake at night, in between staring at my bedside photo of Chris Warner and hoping Lionel got the vomit off his shoes okay.

My pretties, we can once again sleep like babes, because here are the ten highest-rating Shortland Street episodes. Devour them like one of Murray’s spicy meatballs, but be careful – they involve suspect paperwork, perilous pieces of wood and, most terrifying of all, a tragic suitcase accident.

10) Sarah Potts’ funeral (25 August 2014)

It’s the circle of life, the wheel of fortune, the never ending ferris wheel of Shortland Street hope and despair. While the nation sobbed and heaved like a tidal waterfall of snotty emotion at the loss of the legendary Dr Potts, Evan helped deliver a baby. Hakuna matata, everyone.

9) Minnie reads a confidential report (25 April 2000)

Nothing to see here, other than Nick in a suit and an empty grave where Andy’s body used to be. Who’s Andy? No idea. Minnie didn’t know either, as she was too busy attending fancy management breakfasts and telling the nurses who earns the most money. For shame, Minnie. Waverley would have never have pulled that crap.

8) Caroline is MacGyver (24 July 1996)

There was drama aplenty when the hospital staff were taken captive and threatened with poisonous gas. Nothing arouses passion like a good hostage situation, and once the Armed Offenders Squad turned off the gas tap David and Ellen were at it like woozy rabbits.

But the real action was in the dangerous underworld of Taupo, when Dr Gary’s right hand was badly hurt by Caroline in “an unfortunate suitcase incident”. This forced Caroline to perform emergency surgery using only ‘a soft drink bottle, a radiator hose and a pocketknife’. Seems fine.

7) Tiffany dies (20 July 1998)

Ferndale was awash with salty tears when new mother Tiffany died after falling off a building, while a new fangled invention called ‘the internet’ caused trouble for Waverley and Luke. I’m not over this episode tbh, and haven’t trusted a computer ever since.

6) Josh’s drug bust goes wrong (15 July 2013)

Josh’s drug heist went up in flames, along with most of the hospital. Bella was taken hostage, Vinnie and Kylie were trapped in the lift, the AOS stormed the building and David and Ellen were probably still at it in the supply cupboard. Better work stories, everyone.

5) Everybody tells the truth (19 May 1999)

There were so may confessions in this episode you could tie them together and make a truth helmet to ride off into the sunset with, perferably on the back of Greg Feeney’s motorbike.

Frank confessed he slept with MacKenzie, Jordan confessed he slept with Ewen, and Caroline confessed that Mackenzie was embezzling money. I’d like to confess Greg Feeney wasn’t acknowledged enough during The Spinoff’s Shortland Street’s 25^th anniversary coverage for the saucy beast that he was, which is a crime worse than bad wallpaper and high hair.

I mean check out Lionel’s son Luke – that pre-millennium hairdo is eight different kinds of magnificent.

4) Carla takes on ACC (31 May 1995)

Forget killing Bernie with a candlestick, Carla’s greatest crime was her disrespect of all things admin. It’s well known that the mid 90s was a giddy era of peak administration, so it’s no surprise that Carla’s tomfoolery with some dodgy ACC forms and Ellen sticking her foot through Grace’s deck pushed this episode into the top four.

I’m proud of you, New Zealand, for not looking away from such reckless contempt of governmental procedure, but FFS Ellen, pull your leg out of the floor and sort this shit out.

3) Murray leaves Wendy and will never eat chickpea casserole again (18 June 2012)

The high ranking of this uneventful episode can only be explained by some national crisis i.e. we were trapped in our homes with every television stuck on TV2. It sounds terrifying, but unless you were the third party in Murray and Wendy’s marriage breakdown then you’ve no reason to be concerned.

2) TK and Roimata’s non-wedding and Princess Tilly is born (18 July 2011)

There’s never an ideal time to give birth, so having a baby while the father of your child marries another woman seems like a good a time as any. Roimata’s hair feathers were 100% wasted on TK, who ditched his bride to save lives and meet the baby Sarah had just pushed out in a paddock. Priorities, TK, priorities.

1) Keiran dies (2 August 2010)

The best bit about this episode: “a desperate Gerald rushes forward, brandishing a branch.”

While Gerald tried to save the world with some high risk stick content, Chris discovered he had a teenage son, Phoenix, and struggled to accept his super sperm had produced another portion in the ever increasing fruit bowl of his loins.

But the most dramatic event was Kieran’s cliffhanger confession that he’d killed Morgan. Moments later, Kieran plummeted to his death, and branches around the world rejoiced. “Victory is ours!” they cried. Chuck in a character named White Dragon, and it’s little wonder this is the most epic episode of Shortland Street yet.

Read all our Shortland Street 25th anniversary coverage here.

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Birthdays the Beginning_20170501150628

Pop CultureMay 31, 2017

Birthdays: The Beginning – evolution, gamified

Matthew Codd

Guest writer

Birthdays the Beginning_20170501150628

Think you can drive the very building blocks of life? Matthew Codd gives the evolution simulator Birthdays: The Beginning a hoon and he bloody learns stuff! Creationists need not apply.

Games make fascinating learning tools. I’m not talking about the “edutainment” that many of us remember, with fondness, disdain, or some strange mixture of both, from our primary school IT rooms. (Remember Math Blaster? That game was the business). No, I’m talking about about the games that teach in a more subtle, intrinsic manner: Minecraft and the lessons in maths and engineering that come through playing with LEGO-like blocks; Dynasty Warriors and its detailed depiction of Chinese history, played out through hack-and-slash action; MMORPGs and their focus on teamwork and collaboration in carefully choreographed encounters.

It’s in this tradition that we find Birthdays: The Beginning, a game best described as an evolution simulator. It’s a cute, cartoony “god game” in which you manipulate environmental factors to guide the flow of life’s evolution from single-celled organisms through to homo sapiens (that’s us humans – see, I’m already learning things!).

You oversee a little cube-shaped world, but your options for interacting directly with it are very limited – the bulk of your work is simply raising and lowering land to create mountains, valleys, and oceans. Doing so changes the world’s balance of land and water, which in turn affects things like temperature and moisture levels. With those at the right levels, the primordial ooze can birth your world’s first single-celled organisms, phytoplankton, and over the next few thousand in-game years – played out in mere seconds of real time – these life-forms multiply by the hundreds of thousands. With the phytoplankton creating oxygen and providing a food source, the conditions are ripe for other primitive lifeforms to evolve, in turn allowing others.

And so it goes on, as you birth increasingly complex lifeforms with increasingly complex needs: plants, dinosaurs, mammoths, insects, fish, humans, and plenty of others. Special items are available to help, letting you instigate various kinds of climate change, force the evolution of a species, or create rivers to bring moisture to highlands. These provide some handy shortcuts, but the majority of your involvement still comes from altering the world’s topography to manipulate conditions.

Most organisms require a proliferation of some other creature before their evolution can take hold; other species can’t find their place until the extinction of certain others. More advanced lifeforms have more stringent requirements in terms of temperature, moisture, and geological conditions. The more diverse the ecosystem, the more productive it’ll be, but the harder it becomes to manage, and “success” – whatever you define that to be – ultimately comes down to how you juggle these competing needs. You might try to mimic the evolution of Earth’s life, or go for something different, guiding the path of natural selection to create a world of your own where, for example, dinosaurs and people co-exist.

Birthdays: The Beginning is an oversimplification of the evolutionary process, without a doubt. Millions of real-life species are represented by a mere few hundred in the game, and the science of natural selection and meteorology is certainly more akin to a Wikipedia article than a university textbook. What’s important, though, is that it demonstrates the concept of evolution in a fun, interactive way, showing how all sorts of different factors come together to create the right conditions for life. Simplified though it is, this Birthdays is a great introduction to evolutionary science.

It also offers a subtle but important commentary on climate change. The game’s central challenge involves trying to spark new life while keeping extinction to a minimum, but the latter is nigh inevitable given the requirements for different species. Even altering the world’s temperature just a few degrees to create the right conditions for some particular life-form may result in the death of another, and it’s always disappointing when that happens. Even minor changes can have dramatic consequences, just as is the case in real life.

It’s not an aggressive, moralistic lesson about the dangers of anthropogenic climate change. If anything, it shows that climate change and extinction are as natural as evolution, and all part of a cycle of life and death. However, that all takes place over the course of billions of years (both in the game and in real life), and when you force your hand – say, with an item that institutes global warming – the results can be significant. Birthdays doesn’t hit you over the head and tell you that climate change is bad; it explores how climate change works, and challenges you to really think about its place in the real world.

This post, like all our gaming content, was brought to you with the help of Bigpipe Broadband