Cold breakfast

Today marked the end to the holidays for many people as they headed back to work. Among them were the new hosts of TVNZ’s Breakfast. I watched most of it and while I certainly didn’t hate it, the programme left me somewhat cold.

New hosts Corin Dann and Petra Bagust replaced Paul Henry, who was forced to resign last year after making racist remarks, and Pippa Wetzell. Dann was formerly the reader of business news and Bagust is a veteran TV presenter, mostly of lifestyle programmes on TVNZ’s competitor, TV3.

The new hosts couldn’t be any more different from the former hosts if they tried: There was no real spark, no real energy; the whole thing was very low-key and, for lack of a better word, mellow. I don’t know (yet) if that’s good or bad, but it was certainly different.

What was troubling was that TVNZ used its own people as guests when those roles were formerly taken by outsiders. Gordon Harcourt of TVNZ’s Fair Go talked about a telecommunications company whose marketing efforts may have run afoul of the law. Or something (I was busy at the time). In the past, the interview subject for such a segment would be an outsider, like someone from Consumer NZ.

A new segment, “My Media”, will bring in “a well-known Kiwi to give us their take on news story that has caught their eye.” My first thought was, “okay… uh, why?” But that was partly because of their first guest: Kiel McNaughton, an actor who plays Scotty on TVNZ’s soap opera, Shortland Street; I didn’t know who he was because I don’t watch the show. Purely coincidentally, of course, Shortland Street resumes broadcasting tonight after its hiatus for the holidays. PURE coincidence.

My sarcasm is because last year TVNZ increasingly used news programmes—chiefly Close Up and the evening news, One News, to promote other TVNZ programmes. Close Up is sometimes little more than an extended commercial for TVNZ itself—infotainment. That’s bad enough for a programme that purports to be a current affairs show, but when the news programme does it, too, it cheapens the entire broadcast, making the whole thing inconsequential.

So it looks like Breakfast—which is mainly infotainment for 2½ hours each weekday—is just part of what TVNZ programmes now do regularly: Use TVNZ staff for cross promotion of other TVNZ programmes.

I don’t really care about who they have present Breakfast or any other show, but I’d prefer that whatever information or news they deliver wasn’t served with a large helping of cold self-promotion.