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Hazel and Pluto the dog, plus some recent local kids shows (Photo: Supplied, additional design by Archi Banal)
Hazel and Pluto the dog, plus some recent local kids shows (Photo: Supplied, additional design by Archi Banal)

Pop CultureMarch 17, 2022

A seven year old (and her parent) review four new local shows for kids and tweens

Hazel and Pluto the dog, plus some recent local kids shows (Photo: Supplied, additional design by Archi Banal)
Hazel and Pluto the dog, plus some recent local kids shows (Photo: Supplied, additional design by Archi Banal)

There’s a whole heap of new locally made shows on Heihei, the ad-free kids TV channel hosted by TVNZ on Demand. With help from her daughter Hazel, Thalia Kehoe Rowden reviews four of them.

I try to emphasise, to our far-flung family and friends, all the wholesome and varied pursuits of my darling children.

Seven-year-old Hazel sings, hums, or whistles all the live-long day, throws herself into futsal and gymnastics, devours books with that uninterruptable focus of the true reader, and is an undisputed jigsaw puzzle queen.

But if you ask her about her favourite things in life? “I love watching.” She’s a binger who can watch a show for hours on end, and frequently forgets to eat when watching TV. She’s utterly absorbed, pausing only to exclaim aloud, to anyone nearby, about surprising or exciting developments. While wearing headphones.

So here she is, with her first TV reviewing gig, asked to check out four new local shows from Heihei on TVNZ, live and on demand. Her now-anonymous older brother helped me give Heiihei a thorough critique when it first launched in 2018 – we even had a spreadsheet! But for this week’s list he decided to stay in the background, and just lob a few opinions across the room.

Extreme Cake Sports

Alice Soper and Jack Tai Poa, hosts of Extreme Cake Sports (Photo: TVNZ)

“But can we still watch it? Because we LOVE IT!”

Of the four new shows on this week’s list, we’d already binged the entire first season of Extreme Cake Sports. Hazel was momentarily worried we’d be skipping it this time round – both kids (seven and 10) are committed fans.

This fabulous, wacky competition sees young master bakers depend on their sporty friends to score them the necessary ingredients for a cake challenge.

Rugby player and human firework Alice Soper and comedian Uncle Jack Tai Poa commentate the action with enormous energy and good humour.

Two teams of intrepid athletes take on challenges – sometimes having to learn skills for the first time – and encourage each other on with an impressive level of fair play and kindness.

Back in the kitchen, two bakers watch and wait nervously, unable to even begin their time-sensitive baking project until prowess on the field yields the eggs, vanilla, or bananas necessary to get cracking.

Real-life professional bakers come in as guest judges, asking the young chefs to recreate a signature product from their own businesses – and they’re fancier than anything I’ve ever made. But even more impressive than the courage and skill of these kids in the kitchen is the character they show when things go wrong.

It’s heart-warming, intense, funny, and you should all go and watch it right now.

My kids can’t wait for the next season. In the meantime, Hazel is busy making friends with Alice on Twitter:

Bird’s Eye View

Birds Eye View (Photo: TVNZ)

Hazel: “The funniest part was when I discovered they were birds talking!”

In the venerable tradition of witty shows that work for both kids and adults, Bird’s Eye View lets us see ourselves from the point of view of lushly animated manu in suburban Aotearoa. How do the neighbourhood birds make sense of pizza deliveries, TV remotes, and soft plastic rectangles with other birds’ faces on them?

Five-minute episodes bring a deadpan tūī, a maternal kererū, a high-energy pīwakawaka, and a slightly defensive pūkeko together to try and figure out the weird human behaviour they observe.

Both the children in our house were drawn in, and wanted to see more – who wouldn’t love talking birds? I got more of the jokes than either of them, though – the humour is pitched pretty high.

Ableism warning: the second episode hinges on a caged, fearful budgie who talks to his nemesis in the mirror, and who our bird stars see as ‘pōrangi’, and ‘totes nutbar.’

Riddle Me This

An image from animated programme Riddle Me This
Riddle Me This (Photo: Screengrab/TVNZ)

Part interactive game, part dreamscape, this series of shorts uses distinctive, dynamic animation to illustrate the musings of school kids when faced with a riddle to solve. Here’s an example:

While out exploring on a camping trip, Shu and Wiremu sit down under twinkling lights and share some hot chocolate to warm up. Wiremu hears flapping wings and feels something tickle the back of his neck. He shouts, “Monster!” and starts running back to the campsite. Shu sprints to catch up to him when his torch flickers and goes flat. Shu looks behind them and says, “Wiremu, stop running, there’s no monster chasing us.”

How could he see?

Kids from Auckland schools, with a variety of ages and accents, chat through the possibilities, and their guesses are animated as we listen in. They get a few extra clues and answers from the narrator, until they eventually figure it out.

Great soundscapes, absorbing animation, and satisfying journeys towards the answer: well worth a watch! Just be ready to hit pause when your seven-year-old leaps up every 30 seconds saying, “I know!” and yelling her theories over the dialogue.

The Feed

Ronnie Taulafo and Monique Clementson, hosts of The Feed (Photo: TVNZ)

I grew up with Olly Ohlson and After School, then 3.45 Live!, so I shouldn’t begrudge this latest incarnation of an after-school magazine show, The Feed. But it wasn’t our favourite.

An afternoon TV show line-up is interspersed with studio bits from a vivacious team of presenters, over a constant dance track. They give us a steady stream of TikToks and app reviews, and a few interviews and set pieces. The pace and noise, and the repeated calls to download the programme app, earn “byte coins” and win prizes got a bit much for all of us, though in my case it’s definitely just that I am Too Old For This.

On the day we watched – for 90 minutes – the shows that played were a bit of an odd mix, from UK cartoon Dennis and Gnasher, to teen showjumping doco The Young Riders, a Canadian drama serial, and local quiz show Brainbusters. Each of us had a different favourite, and we each zoned in and out accordingly – except for Hazel, of course, because she loves watching.

Top highlight for me was an interview and pre-recorded package with “Soph and Indy” – as they are known on social media – a young woman who uses a wheelchair because of tetraplegia, and her carer, who is also her cousin. This week they showed us, with candour and friendly humour, what they get up to when Soph goes driving in her adapted car.

Have you heard? Hazel loves watching (Photo: Supplied)
Keep going!
Left: Laser Kiwi, an act from 60 Seconds. Below: Laura Daniel, Tegan Yorwarth and Pax Assadi, judges. (Photos: TVNZ, Image Design: Tina Tiller)
Left: Laser Kiwi, an act from 60 Seconds. Below: Laura Daniel, Tegan Yorwarth and Pax Assadi, judges. (Photos: TVNZ, Image Design: Tina Tiller)

Pop CultureMarch 14, 2022

Review: 60 Seconds is a bizarre, confusing delight

Left: Laser Kiwi, an act from 60 Seconds. Below: Laura Daniel, Tegan Yorwarth and Pax Assadi, judges. (Photos: TVNZ, Image Design: Tina Tiller)
Left: Laser Kiwi, an act from 60 Seconds. Below: Laura Daniel, Tegan Yorwarth and Pax Assadi, judges. (Photos: TVNZ, Image Design: Tina Tiller)

New Zealand’s Got Talent? We do, but TVNZ’s new show 60 Seconds is an even more high-concept version of the old talent-show standby, writes Sam Brooks.

Any adequate description of 60 Seconds makes it sound like one of those fake shows from 30 Rock. It’s essentially New Zealand’s Got Talent, with an extra wrinkle: each act has only 60 seconds to perform, then the judges bid their money (real money!) on whether they want to take the act through to the next round, as part of their team. But wait: Clint Roberts, the host, also gets to save one act to take into the next round. Oh also, the acts include a Hogwarts-themed dog show, a Jenga-based circus stunt, the obligatory big-voiced singer, and a man who tells stories with sand. 

Sound confusing? Yes, because it is! But it’s also a lot of fun.

Tiffany and Vixen, the Hogwarts cosplaying duo. (Photo: TVNZ)

Luckily, understanding the intricacies of 60 Seconds isn’t really necessary. If you’ve watched a talent show before, you know enough. The judges – comedians Laura Daniel and Pax Assadi, and Mai FM presenter Tegan Yorwarth –  have plenty of banter from the off, and are engaging enough to breeze past the labyrinthine rules of the game. We watch talented people do their thing. Some people make it through, others don’t. At the end of the competition – eight episodes in this instance – we have a winner.

60 Seconds wisely adapts the standard talent show format for our distracted 21st century minds. Each act is introduced with a teaser TikTok, after which the judges (and by proxy the audience) have to guess what the act’s specific talent is. Each judge gets one question each, which is played up for comedic effect if a judge senses the energy is lagging, and then we see the act in question. It’s short, it’s quick, and the show manages to squeeze five very different talents into an hour without it seeming overstuffed or rushed.

The first episode wisely spreads the talents across several acts, and although no talent show is complete without one a singer, I wish they hadn’t started the show with one. No shade to Verity Howells, who can obviously sing – and her original track was moving – but singing isn’t the real selling point of these sorts of variety shows. There are already a lot of singing-based talent shows! There aren’t, however, a lot of talent shows where three talented weirdos do Jenga stunts or a dog cosplays as Harry Potter (and the world is worse for it, frankly).

The main tension within 60 Seconds right now is that it is, truly, bizarrely complex. The bidding system isn’t inherently confusing – even though it seems to be weighted towards acts who perform near the start of the episode, when the judges have more money to bid – but the way that it is implemented is. It’s unclear, at this stage, what it means to be on a judge’s team as they move into the semi-finals, there’s a “stealing” element that has yet to come into play, and it frankly seems an exercise in piling on enough logistical debris so that (legally) it’s not just a copy of the Got Talent franchise.

The acts from the first episode of 60 Seconds. (Photo: TVNZ)

Leaving aside the rules, though, 60 Seconds is a charming watch. As judges, Daniel, Yorwarth and Assadi perform like seasoned pros, shuttling us between acts while giving generous praise and measured critiques in turn. Roberts is an entertaining host who quite visibly puts the acts at ease – after all, performing for an audience of thousands down a camera is not quite the same as performing for an audience of hundreds at SkyCity Theatre. But what we’re here for are the acts.

My personal gripe with the preponderance of singers on variety shows aside, the acts on 60 Seconds are a goddamn delight. The Disciples are goofy but seriously talented dancers. Marcus Winter tells the myth of Papatūānuku and Ranginui as he draws it with sand, which is (subjectively) cool and objectively quite difficult. Tiffany (human) and Vixen (dog) do a routine that retells Harry Potter being chosen by the Sorting Hat which, yes, is deeply bizarre. But it’s a cute dog on stage doing tricks – there’s very little not to love.

However the highlight of episode one has to be LaserKiwi, a trio who remind me of what Aunty Donna would be like if they were significantly more acrobatically inclined. They start off with a bit featuring an olive (funnier than it sounds), and then proceed to deliver a very well-rehearsed, visually impressive stunt featuring some seriously impressive Jenga skills. LaserKiwi is the act that reveals what 60 Seconds can do best: provide short, sharp showcases for incredibly talented people that you wouldn’t see on any other TV show.

So, yeah, 60 Seconds is a bit too complex for its own good – I’ve watched the first episode twice and I’m still not sure if I’ve got a completely solid grasp on what the rules are, and I expect they’ll change over the eight episode run – but when you’re watching each act do their 60 second, the rules fade away. You’re watching talented people do the thing they do best. And that’s just bloody delightful, isn’t it?

60 Seconds begins tonight 7:30pm on TVNZ2

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