DAILY DIARY – 800 words

I don’t watch much television. I can’t really see the point. The same narrow points of view called “editorial comments”. The mindless propaganda reflecting what a friend terms the Zeitgeist - the “time spirit” of the age (Do we thank Thomas Carlyle for the term or not?) – that endless agenda without moral compass or objective truths we once held dear… the incessant bashing of all things American or at least their beleaguered leader… well actually it’s just depressing. Entertainment means violence. News means mindless repetition of - I mean seriously, have you actually listened to Patrick Gower’s analysis of anything and everything?
And then there’s 800 Words. It’s a great story of an Australian widower with two children who moves to these wobbly islands to a fictitious coastal dorpie (a little village) called “Weld”. I’m not sure what genre it’s supposed to reflect. But the cumulative effect of the nutty but lovable characters and their small-town kiwi antics is the craziest of comedies. They say it’s comedy-drama. It certainly is comic.
We did the sensible thing that you can do these days. We recorded the series. The main protagonist – George – is a journalist who writes a column of 800 words. You’ve guessed it – I’m having a go at that now. (Oh bother, this is only about 204). And the machinations, okay that’s a bit strong, the antics of the locals are a brilliant tonic in the face of my challenges at this particular time of life. And of course - record the series, and you can fast forward the adverts AND not wait a week to see what happens next. As I write of course, at 6.00am on a Saturday, my thoughts are drowned out again by a RNZAF plane flying over my roof to the local military airfield. Good grief, with so few planes that fly, do they have to shake the house so early in the morning?
So back to Weld. We all need a Woody and a Constable Tom in our lives. And we need a lot more comedy. The intriguing thing is whether anyone in America or Finland actually laughed when the series was broadcast there. Comedy, like sermon humour, is lost entirely when your listeners have no idea what normal is in your culture – thus making the funny seem uneventful. Which reminds me of a John Cleese interview I watched. He and his side-kick tell the story of how they left the UK on a visit to New Zealand in 1968, and arrived in 1868. The account of an audience full of ladies with clinking cups in a Dunedin hall (which clinking he erroneously ascribes to Parkinsons) – is quite hysterical (in the humorist sense of the word). Naturally no one laughed at all during those early Monty-python sketches. And of course, the ladies with their clinking cups were probably just manifesting what is known as essential tremor. You can’t blame Dunedin for that, or can you? On the other hand, it may have been cold and with all those Presbyterians saving on heating expenses on the mainland, well it could have been the winter shakes.
I don’t blame John Cleese for miss-blaming Parkinsons. Now Billy Connelly would have understood. Like the script writer of that other comic cleric, the Vicar of Dibley, who like Connelly is doing battle with Parkinsons, you have to find something funny about it every day. Paul Mayhew-Archer tells the story of his neurologist who explains that with PD you get about five good years. ‘Great” he replies (in words to that effect) – I haven’t had one good year yet!” (Don’t confuse him with New Zealand born co-writer Richard Curtis). Mayhew-Archer muses that you can get arrested for Parkinsons (on the assumption you are drunk) which Billy Connelly would enjoy. The challenges of a movement disorder indeed. Connelly makes a joke of the drugs that have risky side effects – like becoming more addictive to your addictions (like sex). He refused those on the grounds that he had enough trouble with that already!
Well John Cleese couldn’t get a laugh from his Dunedin tea-drinking ladies at the matinee. And I suppose some of his humour isn’t very funny when it is off the page. But you can’t criticize the genius of Fawlty Towers. And Fawlty Towers neatly sums up my week. Assuming things about the health system and how it works. Trying to explain things to people who have made more assumptions and don’t actually understand anything you are trying to say to them at all.
800 Words is a tonic. We have yet to finish the series. But there are moments when the painful yet redemptive realities of this family in Weld are far too close to the bone. Friends save the day, and save me too.