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I am really enjoying the irony of a gutter and spouting specialist who can’t look up.
I am really enjoying the irony of a gutter and spouting specialist who can’t look up.

Pop CultureJuly 1, 2018

Survivor NZ, week 11: A chocolate feast you can’t turn your back on

I am really enjoying the irony of a gutter and spouting specialist who can’t look up.
I am really enjoying the irony of a gutter and spouting specialist who can’t look up.

We’re into the 11th week of Survivor NZ, and this game is only getting crazier. Luke Harries recaps all the action, including a new immunity idol, a chocolate feast, and non-blindside strategies.

Things got tense at last week’s tribal council, and after putting up a good fight, we said goodbye to Renee. The drama didn’t stop there though – Arun had a score to settle with Renee back at the Jury Villa, and back in the game we saw Dave doing some damage control of his own. But, the game must go on, so let’s see how things unfolded this week.

Idols do grow on trees

The biggest twist this week was the discovery of a new hidden immunity idol. After some quality strat chat by the well, Dave, Lisa and Matt stopped to have one last tête-à-tête, when Lisa and Matt both noticed an arrow on the ground. In some of the worst lying I have seen this season, Lisa tells the others that she wants to just “stay and meditate” for a bit.

The grimace really didn’t help with this already unconvincing lie.

Matt, knowing exactly what Lisa is up to, stays behind too, and Dave heads off, having no clue what is going on. Lisa and Matt find the idol at the same time, but the idol is up a tree, and Matt is the one to climb and get it, so technically, the idol is his. Matt tries to tell Lisa that she wouldn’t have been able to get the idol on her own, because she can’t climb trees. Ohhhh right, because only a BIG STRONG MAN can find idols right? Pfft.

The worst part is that Matt couldn’t even get the idol down until Lisa untied the rope it was attached to. Lisa is understandably quite upset about Matt taking possession of the idol – but she might have a cunning plan up her sleeve. Later on, Lisa tries to convince Matt to give her possession of the idol, even if it remains technically his. It’s a weird game of idol chicken, where they both say they trust each other “one hundred and ten percent”, and yet neither trusts the other enough to hold onto the idol.

I’m pretty sure Dave could prescribe you something for that.

Chocolate Extravaganza

This week’s reward challenge is a chocolate feast, and before the challenge begins, Chissy gives everyone a little piece of chocolate brownie, to whet their appetites. This sweet sampler is supposed to help motivate the castaways, but it seems that Tara was more than satisfied with her tiny morsel.

Tara wants you to know she just doesn’t really crave chocolate.

Survivor just seems like a really weird arena to be bragging about how you don’t really crave chocolate? Anyway. Eve is the eventual winner of the challenge, and she chooses runner up Dave, and chocolate obsessed Adam to join her.

This season of Survivor NZ has a running theme of redemption – not for the competitors, but for the show itself. The chocolate feast was a vast improvement over last season’s ziploc bag of chocolate poo.

What a difference a year can make.

Adam is bloody stoked to be part of this chocolate extravaganza, especially since he had no chance of winning the challenge. Apparently, after 31 days in the jungle, Adam’s botox is still immobilising his face enough that he can’t look up.

The botox did not however prevent Adam from giving yet another spectacular impression of Dave and his post-binge moaning. Dave has been to pretty much every reward since the merge, and every feast he goes to, he eats like crazy then has immense regret.

We get it Dave, you ate too much. Again.

Strat Chat

The alliances are becoming less and less clear as the game proceeds. What we know for sure is that Tess and Adam remain a solid power couple, to the point where I’m still confused that no one has tried to target them yet. Matt and Dave have a controversial real-life friendship, which has been great for Dave, and a chore for Matt so far. And finally we have Tara and Lisa, who have been together most of the game.

When your power couple alliance is so strong that you don’t even need to get up.

Here’s where things get tricky: Lisa and Matt are very close, but Lisa knows she needs to boot out Matt if she wants any chance of winning votes at the end of the game. Unfortunately for Lisa, Matt wins immunity this week, as well as finding an idol right in front of her, so her chances of getting him out aren’t looking great.

All things considered, Eve seems like the easiest vote. Eve has been extremely strong in challenges, but her social game is not so great. Eve struggled to make connections with any of the original Khang Khaw members, so as her Chani tribemates were picked off, she didn’t have many options left.

However, it seems that not everyone feels great about targeting Eve, and her weaker social game could be in her favour, as some of the other survivors feel she might be an easier opponent in the final three. At the last minute, Tara throws out Dave’s name, in an effort to keep Eve around. Adam humours the idea, but Lisa thinks it’s too late to be making new plans.

Tfw u want Dave.

Tribal Council

This was an emotional tribal, and pretty hard to watch. Eve felt that her alliances had abandoned her, and she knew she wasn’t safe since no one wanted to talk to her, or even look her in the eye.

Adam laid it out for Eve, saying she hadn’t ever spoken strategy with him. Eve responded by telling Adam that he underestimated his power in the game. Eve is totally spot on about Adam, and I think if the other players aren’t careful, Adam could be on his way to winning the $250k.

Blindside Rating: 1/10

As sad as it was to see Eve go, it was clear it wasn’t going to go any other way. Tara’s plan to switch the vote to Dave proved too little, too late.

The flower was a nice touch though.

Chisholm-ism of the week

“Just to show you I’m good for it.” This was a weird thing to say, right? Has Matt got a track record for not delivering on reward promises? You’ve got me feeling suspicious, Chissy.

Survivor NZ Quick Stats

6 – Survivors left in the game
0 – the amount of cravings for chocolate Tara has
0.1 – centimeters from Tess’s head it looked like the bowl was when it fell in the reward challenge. Can Tess make it out of the game without another concussion? I hope so.


This content, like all television coverage we do at The Spinoff, is brought to you thanks to the excellent folk at Lightbox. Do us and yourself a favour by clicking here to start a FREE 30 day trial of this truly wonderful service.

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Hosts of The Male Gayz Chris Parker (left) and Eli Matthewson (right).
Hosts of The Male Gayz Chris Parker (left) and Eli Matthewson (right).

Pop CultureJuly 1, 2018

‘We have a gay agenda we’ll never drop’: Chris Parker and Eli Matthewson on The Male Gayz

Hosts of The Male Gayz Chris Parker (left) and Eli Matthewson (right).
Hosts of The Male Gayz Chris Parker (left) and Eli Matthewson (right).

Chris Parker and Eli Matthewson’s hit podcast The Male Gayz is now a thing you can look at with your eyeballs, thanks to TVNZ on Demand.

Chris Parker and Eli Matthewson are two of the country’s most prolific and well-known young comedians. They’re both writers for Jono and Ben and Funny Girls, as well as occasional performers on both shows, while collecting plaudits and awards aplenty – Matthewson was nominated for the prestigious Fred Award in last year’s Comedy Festival for his show The Year of Magical F*cking  and Parker won that same award this year for his hit show Camp Binch.

Alongside all of this, they’ve got a hit podcastEarlier this year, The Male Gayz received funding for a TVNZ web series which loosely follows the structure of the podcast. I sat down with the pair to talk about the show, what makes it different from the podcast and how they’re engaging their audience without pandering to them.

Sam Brooks: So what is the difference between the show and the podcast?

Chris Parker: One is for your eyes and one is for your eyes and ears! Basically it’s a visual version of the podcast. We’re both animated story tellers so there’s something to be said about being able to see our faces when we talk.

Eli Matthewson: I’d say at least half of each episode is us chatting in the studio.

So how did you plan out each episode?

Eli: Every one of the six episodes has a different theme and an arc which is maybe progressing – we end the season with an episode about the future. We made a list of themes, people we wanted to talk to, things we wanted to do and then collated those together.

Chris: I think a big challenge for us trying to work out what we wanted to do. Everyone wants to make a web series and apply for funding, and then when they give you the money you’re ike, “Now we actually seriously need to think about what we want to make. It’s a lot of our storytelling – our podcast – and our relationship, but filmed.

Eli: And even then the themes could very easily have gotten preachy or teachy, but we wanted to avoid that. The themes of each episode are just loosely the conversations we have, among other things, and we’ve got important and awesome people in like Louisa Wall, Mika Haka, Aych McArdle, who are all activists, but we didn’t necessarily delve into that super deep.

I think the show is more about positive role modelling by us having fun and talking about whatever. And we’ve had a really strong response to that – when we get messages from people, they’re not necessarily like, “Wow, you showed me how to live my life!” They just like hearing stories from people who are like them.

Chris: There’s no explaining what Grindr is – we ask our allies who wanna watch the show or listen to the podcast to google that because we don’t have time for that. And we know there’s straight people who listen to the podcast all the time, they come up to me saying they’re huge fans of the podcast–

Eli: This guy’s like a builder from Christchurch and he’s like, “Keep it up guys.”

Chris: We’re like, “You’re that interested in Tom Daley’s disaster of a wedding?”

Eli: Every three months he’s like, “Yeah, where are the episodes?”

Chris: That stuff feels awesome. We just get to make what we wanted to make, and it felt really liberating to put your foot right down on the accelerator, cause often we drive our gay agenda cautiously through the fields of Jono and Ben and Funny Girls.

We got one sketch in on Funny Girls and we were so stoked. It was still fitting in with the kaupapa of Funny Girls which is channeling and showcasing women, but we also have a gay agenda which we’ll never drop.

The hosts of The Male Gayz Chris Parker (left) and Eli Matthewson (right).

So you guys both represents the same backgrounds as gay men. You’re both from Christchurch, you’re both white and performers and you both came out around the same time in life. So how do you acknowledge that specific kinda thing in the show? Is that important to acknowledge?

Chris: Totally that is something we were hyper aware of and that’s the whole point of having guests. We kinda can’t–

Eli: –can’t just have white gay men in their 20s.

Chris: Our experiences are not everyone’s experience and in fact it’s often only part of the experience, so that’s the power of having guests in.

(to Eli) How else do you think we navigated that?

Eli: We just made sure we had lots of people with different identities. I think the fact that we had such similar upbringings is a benefit to our show because it means we are so reactionary to each other’s stories and we identify with each other so strongly.

Which is a really fun part of the show and the podcast, it’s really nice. In so many of these shows it’s two people from different backgrounds coming together. That you guys come from the same background, there’s an implicit and unspoken understanding there.  It’s quite a special relationship.

Chris: And so often you are the voice of difference in the room, right? Like when I did a line up show with myself, James Malcolm and Rhys Nicholson, and Rhys walked out and went, “Fuuuck, all the gay jokes have been mined”.

I’m like that’s so true, it’s so sad that we’re at the point where we’re just so used to being the only one on the bill.

Eli: With the show, we can go deeper into our experiences rather than just the surface level. But there’s this other dynamic where every time we have a guest we’re learning, we’re learning about their experience, learning about people who have had much different experiences to us.

The first two episodes of The Male Gayz are out now on TVNZ on Demand.


This content, like all television coverage we do at The Spinoff, is brought to you thanks to the excellent folk at Lightbox. Do us and yourself a favour by clicking here to start a FREE 30 day trial of this truly wonderful service.

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