Before there was Shortland Street, there was Close to Home. Sam Brooks dug through the NZ on Screen archives and found the first episode of New Zealand’s first soap opera.

It’s 1975 in New Zealand. Imagine the climate. Robert Muldoon is about to become prime minister, the population has just cracked three million and television has not just one but two channels, imaginatively named Television One and Television Two.

On one of these channels, New Zealand’s first soap opera, Close to Home is born. Written by Michael Anthony Noonan, it revolves around the trials and tribulations of the Hearte Family. The Hearte Family is a vaguely middle-class, or potentially upper middle-class, or even lower middle-class family, it’s very hard to tell because everybody in the 70s seems to dress the same miserable way and look uniformly dour. The Heartes have all the problems that you’d expect a family in Wellington suburbia to have in the 70s: they’re very cold, probably low-key alcoholics, and very white.

The first and final episodes of the show are available to watch on NZ On Screen, but having only watched the first episode (I don’t want to spoil myself, you understand) I found it to be a bizarre piece of our history, and a fascinating precursor to Shortland Street.

It is more than just New Zealand’s first soap opera. It’s also a show that is influenced, and I’d say infected, by our British colonial past.

For one, this show is about as white as it gets. If you made Close to Home with this cast now, it would get raked over the coals in thinkpiece after thinkpiece and tweet thread after tweet thread, and rightly so. To make matters worse, everybody speaks in accents that hew so much closer to The Crown than our own gravel-and-beer accent. You can tell this came from a period when we were still dealing with a self-imposed cultural cringe; it was still considered so much more desirable to look, sound and be British onscreen than it was to be an actual average New Zealander. Hell, in Mr. Telly you can still read letters from people who wish we would return to British accents on the news (although most of those letters are probably coming from people who were on the boat with Captain James Cook himself).

Close to Home is trying so hard to be Coronation Street that the only hint this is set in New Zealand is the brief exterior shot clearly taken somewhere in the haunted depths of Aro Valley. This is a show where someone says the line “You’re not too old to get clipped on the earhole” with zero irony. It’s one Deidre away and tens of thousands of miles away from being a spinoff of Coro – so a Kiwi Eastenders, I guess.

And two, holy shit is this a show that was made in the 70s, in every way. Not only does it look like it was shot on a blurry cracked-camera iPhone, the morals are perfectly nestled in post-60s conservatism.

One plotline revolves around one of the Heartes (they all have interchangeable names like Liddy, Olivia, Sally, and I’m sure there’s about five women named Sarah; I will refer to this particular Hearte as Hearte #3) who is counselling a woman trying to retain custody of her three children. Specifically she’s a child psychologist trying to determine if this woman is a fit mother. For some reason, that woman is visiting her in her home, probably due to set limitations.

The woman’s ex-husband has evidence that she’s been a bit of a strumpet (my word, not theirs, but probably theirs too), and when Hearte #3’s husband comes home, he openly judges this poor woman to her face after she says that she’s ‘had a few boyfriends’. He does this while drinking cooking sherry from the cabinet above the sink. When Hearte #3, quite rightly, tells her husband he’s being an absolute dick, she comes off like the villain. Even though he does this, in the middle of the day:

This is a man who also says the sadly not iconic line:

“I’ve had a hell of a day and I can’t even get to my hot drink cabinet.” (I assume hot drink is code for alcohol.)

Another one of the plotlines follows an older Hearte, let’s call her Hearte #7, who has been promoted to the lofty title of ‘manager’ by her father-in-law, and her husband objects to this promotion. When she says she’ll think about it, he assumes that she’s joking. The 70s, you guys! What a time it was! If anything, Close to Home is accurately portraying how it was a pretty bleak time for women, or at least white women in Wellington, and also a questionable time for fashion.

The sad thing about this is that we’re not supposed to automatically side with the women here, even though in the year of our lord 2018 we do because we’re better people now, or at least pretending to be. Both of these events are set up as a ‘both sides have a point’ kind of deal, and it makes me a little happy to see how far we’ve come that this kind of crap wouldn’t happen in TV now without getting a deserved clapback. But it also makes me sad to think that you could put these plotlines in a TV show now and, even though the men would obviously be villains, it wouldn’t be outrageous. It’s believable that this is happening to women today (because people still judge women’s choices, because people are the worst).

I mean, would you listen to anything this man has to say, unless it was his sideburn recommendations?

Does Close to Home hold up? I mean no, not really. It’s a soap opera from 1975 and I don’t think anybody out there is arguing that television drama peaked in the mid-70s, for good reason. Even for a 22 minute long pilot, it moves along with all the pace of a Marvel show with 13 hour-long episodes to burn, and a scene towards the end of the episode where all thirty billion Heartes are in the same room seems to have come from a time before sound mixing was possible or even thought about.

In saying that, there are some pretty savage burns, which I have outlined below, and encourage you to use in your own life with your loved ones:

“What do they teach girls these days in school, apart from sex?” (Probably don’t use this one with your loved ones.)

“Go electrocute yourself with your guitar.” (Or this!)

“You’re employed as a child psychologist, not a feminist advice bureau for middle aged tarts.” (Maybe don’t use any of these with your loved ones, in fact. Or do! Only God can judge your immortal soul.)

But also, I don’t think we’d have something like Shortland Street without this show. Even from one episode, and even with the flaws of being a show that came out 40 years ago, you can see how a nation would find it compelling. There’s something fascinating about seeing ‘real life’ New Zealanders on screen – a certain kind of very British, very white, very suburban New Zealander, to be sure, but a New Zealander nonetheless. You don’t get to Chris Warner without Hearthe Family Member #1.

And ultimately, we should remember that there’s only 46 years between the lines, “So, we have the house to ourselves. Ought to have an orgy.” (yes this is an actual line on a show from 1975 in this country) and “Please tell me that is not your penis.”

We’ve only come so far, y’all.

You can watch a mighty two episodes of Close to Home on NZ on Screen right here.

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On Thursday night, a now iconic trio came together to play a video game and broadcast it to the world: Popular Twitch streamer Ninja, hip hop superstar Drake, and controversial New Zealand dance musician and political dilettante Kim Dotcom. Adam Goodall was watching.

Wildly popular Twitch streamer Ninja and hip hop superstar Drake had been playing Fortnite Battle Royale for an hour when a little speech bubble popped up in the lobby. It said “TheKimDotcom is Online.” Two minutes later, Ninja (real name Tyler Blevins, a 26 year old streamer who made his name playing Halo professionally) asked Drake, “Hey, uh, you cool if Kim Dotcom joins?”

“Yeah,” Drake responded. “It’s all good.

“Yeah.

“It’s cool.”

Ninja and Drake’s four-hour Fortnite stream Thursday night (you can watch it here – Drake comes on at about the 3hr 50min mark) was great, but it was also a record breaker. At one point, over 635,000 people were watching as they stormed around Snobby Shores and Retail Row, racking up a kill count that must have been in the hundreds. It was the most concurrent viewers any single Twitch stream had ever had.

They got a little help from friends like ‘Goosebumps’ rapper Travis Scott, who was pretty quiet and pretty not good at the game, and Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster, who missed the first two hours of the stream because he needed to go to Best Buy to buy a new computer. So you might think that if there were any lessons about how to be a good team player in this stream, they’d come from the professional football player, or the rap legends, or the former e-sports champion.

What if I told you, though, that all of the stream’s teachable moments came from Kim Dotcom, the cringey internet mogul, dance musician, conspiracy theorist, and bumbling bit player in our country’s political history? Would you believe me?

Bear with me here.

First, the explainer. If you already know about Fortnite, you can skip this bit. Ninja and Drake’s stream represents a kind of critical peak for Fortnite, which has been steadily gaining in popularity since the launch of its Battle Royale spinoff. It wasn’t always this way: developer Epic Games released Fortnite into early access in July 2017, six years since it was first announced.

Fortnite was, at the time, just a co-op survival game – a bit tower defence, a bit Minecraft, you and your teammates played survivors of an apocalypse who built forts and fought off waves of zombie-goblins. It also wasn’t very popular. Coverage and community engagement tanked straight after launch; in the month leading up to the Battle Royale announcement, Fortnite was struggling to pull more than 3,000 peak viewers on Twitch. Part of the problem was that it was up against PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, the new hotness, a zeitgeist-defining phenomenon that popularised the ‘battle royale’ subgenre of multiplayer shooters: one hundred people drop on an island with nothing, and fight to be the last person standing while a deadly ‘circle’ closes in on them. It was so popular that even games about competitive ice fishing are jumping on board now.

But Fortnite jumped first. A free-to-play spinoff version that Epic called Battle Royale was announced in early September, and Fortnite’s has exploded in popularity since. That explosion has many reasons: it was the first free-to-play ‘alternative’ to PUBG; it beat PUBG to consoles and supported crossplay between PC and console players; it had fewer problems with hackers; its PG13 cartoon aesthetic, with ‘Slurp Juice’ and pumpkin rocket launchers, was more accessible to kids and families.

That explosion travelled to Twitch, with Fortnite streamers like Ninja experiencing a surge to the top of the Twitch heap. As of last week, Ninja had over 140,000 paid subscribers; Forbes estimates that, assuming all his subscribers are legit, Ninja is pulling in around US$350,000 a month from playing Fortnite for 16 hours a day.

Let’s talk about Kim Dotcom though. Kim was a ringer, brought in for one game while JuJu bought his new computer and Travis tried to friend ‘TheBoyDuddus’ on PSN. He also claims to have set the whole thing up, which, cool. Nice work. Now we know Drake is friends with Kim Dotcom. I don’t know what we do with that information now.

But being a ringer didn’t stop Kim, playing as a vinyl-clad Mako Mori look-a-like, from embodying five important lessons for anyone who wants to be a true team player, whether in Fortnite Battle Royale or in real life.

1. Be ready to make sacrifices for your friends

Before Kim had even started talking he was offering to make sacrifices for the good of the team. When Ninja found out that Travis Scott wanted to join the game, he was excited, stunned – two rap superstars in one stream? In his stream? But there were already three people in the team, and JuJu wasn’t far off.

That’s when Kim made a bold decision. “Kim’s in here,” Ninja told Drake, “but I’m definitely sure Kim will leave if other people are coming in.” In that moment, ready to back out so his friends would have the best chance of getting a Victory Royale, Kim was a great teammate – whether he made the decision himself or not.

2. Be generous, but not too generous

Winning in Fortnite, like in any other battle royale game, can come down to luck just as much as skill. To come out victorious, you need the tools that guarantee victory: good weapons, bandages and shield potions, a healthy amount of wood and steel and brick. It’s that much harder to win if you don’t have those tools and Kim, to his credit, understood this rule innately. He was constantly checking on his friends’ kits (especially Drake’s), offering up his own if they were running short of anything. At one point, knowing that Ninja only had common weapons, which don’t do much damage, he called him over and dropped a legendary rocket launcher for him. “I don’t know what to drop for that!” Ninja groaned, shocked and touched by the gesture.

But you can’t just throw around your stuff with reckless abandon. A dead teammate doesn’t help anyone. Kim found that out the hard way five minutes later: alone in the woods, his teammates all far away, Kim was sniped by a player that everyone else knew was there, a player he probably could’ve taken down if he’d kept the rocket launcher. Or, for that matter, the SCAR-L that he really wanted to give to Drake.

3. Don’t be a braggart

My mother always told me that no-one likes a gloater, and that’s just as true on the battleground as it is IRL. Three minutes after dropping in Lucky Landing, Kim showed us all why. Sniping an unsuspecting player at the entrance to Lucky Landing, Ninja walked into the open to finish the job, only for a third player to get the drop on him and bring him down. Crawling behind a wall, Ninja looked on as Kim rode in to take down the third person and save the day. Reviving Ninja seconds later, Kim bellowed into the mic, “Rezzing the Ninja, baby! It’s the other way around, you in my backpack now!”

Ninja responded in good humour – “there’s nothing like a good carry” – but there’s a teachable moment here: there’s no I in squad. Don’t make your squadmates feel like they’re a burden. You’re not carrying them; you’re all carrying each other.

4. Know the vibe. Don’t try and push a different one on your teammates

Drake and Ninja had a good energy going before they switched from Duos to Squads. It was friendly and chill, the two shooting the shit without getting too intense about it. They had long, rolling chats about what they wanted Fortnite to do in the future, about where Drake was recording his new album, about Drake’s conversion to vegetarianism and whether you should put pineapple on pizza. (Drake’s a pineapple-on-pizza fan and he’s right, don’t @ me)

Kim drained them of that energy. I’ve never had cause to use the word ‘glomp’ before and I had hoped I never would, but that’s what Kim was doing to Drake here – glomping him so hard that Drake stopped responding. “I know Swizzy is watching right now!” Silence. “I never thought I’d say this, Drake, but I have a Slurp for you.” Silence. “Do you want this SCAR-L, Drake?” Silence. “Where is he. Where is he.” It got to the point that Kim was asking whether anyone could hear him. That’s never a good sign that you’ve read the room correctly; it’s also never a good sign that you’re on the same wavelength as your team, the people who you’re ultimately trusting with your digital (or real) life.

(Kim says Drake couldn’t hear him because Kim was in Discord and Drake was in the in-game voice chat, which, I don’t know, whatever helps you feel better about killing the vibe I guess.)

5. Don’t be a cringey internet mogul, dance musician, conspiracy theorist and bumbling bit player in our country’s political history; if you are that, though, definitely don’t be that online.

I mean, that’s just a hard place to work from.

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