When did TV get so f***ing rude?
Penis pumps and prime time poos - all bets are off after 8.30pm...
Bad language, sex scenes and a Minotaur-themed strip club. I’ve noticed a trend happening across our TV screens lately. If you’ve been flicking around channels, you might have seen it too. Standards seem to have gone out the window, and I have thoughts about this. Basically, it’s great! Here’s why. Let’s go … (This story contains spoilers - if you haven’t already, go finish New Zealand Today and Creamerie)
In 2019, a woman called Barbara opened up her emails and started typing. She’d seen too much. She’d had enough.
She snapped.
What pushed her over the edge?
“We are being assailed by more and more of Hilary (Barry) in low-cut tops exposing her cleavage,” Barbara punched into her keyboard.
She’d been watching an episode of TVNZ’s evening line-up fluffer, Seven Sharp, and she was pissed.
“Unfortunately, it's become a worldwide trend which is mind-boggling considering we have the #MeToo movement trying to stop women being treated as sex objects.”
Barbara - or was it Brahbrah? - wasn’t done there.
“It is a fact of nature that women’s breasts are sex objects and should be kept private except at the beach or at an evening do.
“Hilary should be seen as professional, intelligent and have taste and her breasts being accentuated does not give this image.”
Wowsers. That email was read out on live TV by Barry’s pithy Seven Sharp co-host Jeremy Wells, and you can imagine how the co-hosts reacted.
“They're just boobs,” Barry clapped back. “They're just boobs and half the population have them. Barbara has them.”
Two years ago, that incident sparked nationwide headlines. In May of 2019, Barbara and her hot takes on Barry’s cleavage seemed like the biggest issue in the world. To be fair, we had far fewer cares back then. You could travel. You could go shirtless at music festivals. You could sneeze in your office without HR calling you in for a stern chat about personal hygiene.
What would Barbara make of what’s been appearing on our TV screens lately?
Because, in comparison with Hilary Barry’s cleavage, it is an absolute avalanche of fucking filth.
On Monday night, on TVNZ 2, viewers were treated to the finale of Creamerie, Roseanne Liang and Perlina Lau’s excellently chaotic blast of dystopian feminism that’s been playing out over the last six weeks.
The finale (spoiler warning!) included the show’s big reveal: a shed full of naked men writhing around on chairs with suction cups attached to their genitals. They were being milked for their semen.
Yes, penis pumps. On a Monday night. On TVNZ.
That’s the same channel that once blanked 17 minutes of expletives from the pretty average Kevin Smith film Zack And Miri Make A Porno, sparking a viewer to complain: “Don't play movies you haven't got the balls to show as intended.”
Balls. Heh.
So it seems TVNZ’s censors have relaxed a little lately. My hat goes off to Perlina Lau and co. A few years ago, getting penis pumps onto prime time TV would have been unthinkable.
But that network isn’t the only only one pushing late-night TV boundaries.
Over on Three, comedian Guy Williams has been covering every kind of ridiculous R-rated randomness he can get his sticky fingers on.
Across the wonderful second season of his “fake” journalism show New Zealand Today, Williams has opened a Minotaur-themed strip club in Wellington, gifted a giant blue dildo to a Huntly woman who had her sex toys stolen, and persuaded infamous All Blacks streaker Lisa Lewis to utter a line so grim it’s destined to haunt my nightmares for the foreseeable future.
During a segment bathed in pink in which Lewis plugged her OnlyFans page next to a grinning Williams, she declared: “Come for a wank.”
Take a moment to recover from that, because there’s a lot more coming. In last week’s episode, Williams pushed the boundaries further than he, and possibly Three, thought possible.
In Wainuiomata, he arrived casually at a non-descript neighbourhood house, knocked on the door and threw a microphone under the nose of suburban mum Kirsty and her children.
Why was Kirsty being interviewed?
“I’m an awesome hairdresser,” she said. “And I also shat in a lunchbox.”
What?
“I was driving along and I looked over in the passenger seat and there was my son’s lunch box. I emptied it out, because it had yoghurt and whatever in it, slid it under my ass, and just went for it.”
Yes, these are actual words spoken on actual TV at a time when my 11-year-old son was almost certainly still awake and listening intently from his bedroom.
However bad I thought Auckland’s traffic was, it is clearly not yet up to Wainuiomata’s terrible standards. I have sat in my fair share of 4pm gridlock on the Northwest motorway, but I have never, not once, sized up my son’s lunchbox as a toilet.
To show her gratitude for the interview, Kirsty gifted Williams the box in question, wrapped in birthday paper and all. He should get many good years of use out of it.
Maybe throw one in your car’s glove box, you know, just in case.
I am not complaining about any of this. I love seeing rule books torn up. There’s nothing better than old notions of censorship and respectability getting cast aside and replaced by new ones. It’s 2021, and network television is dying anyway. TVNZ boss Keven Kenrick basically admitted this himself recently when he told The Spinoff its future is almost all online.
Besides, any TV network that allows Guy Williams to gyrate alongside masked Minotaur strippers in a dimly-lit Johnsonville lazer tag warehouse gets my blessing.
Remember when Melanie Bracewell made a two-word gag on 7 Days that was so rude I wasn’t even allowed to write about it? I think things may have changed. I think TV standards have become looser and freer. I bet I could even get that 7 Days story over the line now. Maybe it’s a changing of the guard. Perhaps it’s a generational switch-out. Or, more likely, no one gives a flying fuck about a bit of dodgy telly content screening well after dark, considering what we’ve all been through over the past year.
Yet I can’t help but think about Barbara, channel-surfing one evening after a sherry or two, when she stumbles across Creamerie’s penis pumps, or New Zealand Today’s Minotaur strippers, or any of the other excellently lewd locally-made content on our screens.
It must be giving her absolute conniptions.
Everything you need to worry about this week…
Tonight’s the night, the big one, the moment we finally find out who really ‘dunnit.’ Yep, it’s the final episode of the riveting Kate Winslet drama Mare of Easttown. I’ve had a sneaky early watch and I can’t say much, just prepare yourself for an episode with more endings than Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. (On Neon and SoHo from 8.30pm)
Sweet Tooth, the comic book series adapted into a Netflix show that was shot in New Zealand over the second half of last year, lands on Friday. Early reviews are promising…
On Friday, Crowded House release their much-anticipated new album Dreamers are Waiting. You can read my interview with the band, dad jokes and all, here.
The Cave is my happy place. Across two brilliant seasons, producer Kenny Beats invites his favourite rappers into the studio to capture top-of-the-dome freestyles then puts the results on YouTube. Here’s the first episode of season three with Isaiah Rashad, and it’s as brilliant as ever…
Editor’s note…
Thanks to everyone who read my Thursday newsletter on a Facebook scam that was impacting a local tourism business. Many of you took the time to submit a complaint to Zuckerburg’s minions and it worked: 48 hours later, the page offering insane concert experiences like ‘Mt Smart live at Spark Arena live at Mt Smart’ was de-platformed. We did it! Well, sort of. I’ve been sent a whole bunch more dodgy stuff that needs investigating … there’s definitely more to come, so watch this space!
If you like Boiler Room, help me keep making it by subscribing here.