Torn limb from limb, live from the Beehive theatrette

Diary of the last 26 hours

Sunday 1.15pm

Make own small contribution to colossal all-in brawl on Twitter.

If you're not familiar with Deadwood, I can wait while you go away and have the best several days of your life watching the whole damn thing from beginning to end because honestly it's just that good.

There’s a scene for the ages in it known as Dan Dority Vs. The Captain in which proxies for two rivals take to each other in a barefisted brawl that grows into something unspeakably violent and rent with gore and a fight to the literal death and oh man, the stuff you end up seeing, you've never seen anything remotely like it in all your life.

Unless you’ve spent a little bit of time on Twitter.

Rest of a lovely sunny Sunday afternoon

Barefisted brawling on Twitter. Someone may lose an eye. No-one’s getting away or going far for a holiday right now and it’s beginning to show.

In holiday terms, Facebook is the cruise ship with 120 different restaurants and all the food is dismal buffet shit and there are 40 different theatres and they all have that comedian Michael I forget the name, you know, Brit, hugely popular, but no Stewart Lee. Not remotely. But anyway that's what Facebook is, a cruise ship.

Instagram is ten days on the Cote d'Azur. All venal and ghastly and fake-tanned and there’s no eating. You just look at your plates and take pictures and pretend to like people.

And Twitter is Burning Man, only more intense and less comfortable, with small bursts of hilarity.

Anyway, on Burning Man on this lovely sunny Sunday, the question being litigated all afternoon is OMG the questions at the 1.00 media conference about what happened when the testing criteria for West and South Auckland emerged as a headline on a social media post misrepresenting the information in the sentences directly below it.

The time it took for the Government to get that fixed was the subject of sustained questioning and now social media is upbraiding the journo for asking said questions and off we go on a debate  about what these Covid-19 media conferences are and who they're for and what you need to understand about them and what it means when Jason Wall (for it was he) asks questions like that.

One issue of some dispute is: who are they for and should we stop watching them if we feel they are wasting our time?

You could say they are purely for the gallery but I don't know. They feel more like the modern incarnation of what long-gone prime ministers Muldoon and Marshall used.

You'd be watching The Waltons or Minder or whatever and on comes the Prime Minister in a suit looking very grim to inform us that the economy is a bit completely rooted - generally from commie poms coming over here and using strikes to get wage increases - and he’s going to have to unroot the economy. So they'll be putting on a freeze from midnight and it might be on wages, it might be on prices, it might be on wages and prices and interest rates and rents. Take your pick, we got them all.

Anyhow, your government has decreed this and a solemn goodnight to you.

Then, if it was Muldoon, he’d look at you down the barrel of the camera with a look that said don't think I don't know what that is you're smoking, and then he'd be gone. No assembled journos, no questions, no nothing.

I’m not saying gallery count your blessings, but maybe it makes more sense to treat this as an all ages concert and maybe mind your language.

Or maybe we’re just living still all these years later in the afterglow of the carnival it turned into when Lange arrived in the Beehive theatrette. Now it’s late at night and here’s the public, arrived at the door, sober, and you’re blinking unsteadily at them. Awkward.

Issue two: you’re ragging on us because we're disrespecting your beloved queen, cut it out and let us do our job

Yeah, maybe. But perhaps give people a bit more credit for knowing which way the wind’s blowing.  Maybe give them credit for recognising, in the question you’re putting up today, the same exasperating angle your organ has been working for weeks now; fiasco, disaster, chaos, show us a scalp. You’re banging that drum when the public mood is more: when I compare this to the rest of the world, this feels more like the right track, do we have to toss the baby out with the bathwater?

Maybe the public mood is all for asking about things gone wrong and how and when they’re getting fixed, but not nearly so keen on the catastrophising and the scalp hunting. Maybe these are responses you can expect to get from people who number themselves among the four fifths of the population not watching the local TV news, and who are saying no thanks to newspapers full of uninformed radio hosts and sneering Svengalis.

Dishing up stuff for people who prefer the reactionary and the sensational and whatever it takes to hang on to audiences and somehow prop up the lumbering overheads of the old media model is an unhappy scenario in a time of plague.

The Newsroom style seems altogether more productive. The question tends to be less: bring me the dripping head of the minister and more: how do we get through this, what next?

If you need to see the tearing of human flesh, there’s always Deadwood.

6.45am

Siri turns on the radio and on we go with Terrible 2020.

Out of lockdown Level 3 into a world with not much infection, but more than we’d prefer, eg: none at all. That was nice for a hundred days eh?

This time ask not what your country can do to keep it out, ask yourself what you’re doing to help. Last time it was breakfast in bed, this time you’re making it yourself and sorry we’re a bit low on milk.

Wash the hands, use the app, wear the masks.

10.58am

Well that’s all very well, what if a mask offends your sense of personal freedom? We cross to venerable war correspondent Anita McNaught, currently in country.

4.17pm

While we’re here talking about the deep state, anyone got some good sabotage intel? Would be good to get this checked out.

Peace.