EDWARDS AT LARGE - excruciatingly dreadful. (July 12, 2003)

Edwards at Large, Television One, Saturday 12 July 2003
reviewed by MORRISSEY BREEN, for Daisycutter Sports, Inc.

Brian Edwards was once a great television interviewer. Remember Gallery? Remember the wonderful Edwards on Saturday/Dean on Saturday? Fair Go? Remember, errrr, Whose Line is it Anyway? Well, he was ONCE.

However, on top of that, he's always been a self-involved, supercilious cold fish with a basically nasty personality. I remember Rob Muldoon's undisguised anger and contempt for him during a televised celebrity debate, after Edwards made a deeply insulting, and unfunny, crack about "trim pork". On his radio show, he veered between the most extravagant, over-the-top, affected luvvie behaviour --- I once logged him saying "mah-vellous" 24 times on one show --- and poisonous, bitchy, malicious treachery. Once, he interviewed Bill Clinton's younger brother Roger, who, like Southern boys do, repeatedly addressed Edwards respectfully as "sir". At the conclusion of the interview, which Edwards had conducted in his usual fawning style, Roger Clinton hung up. Edwards then sneered: "Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir. I don't think I've ever been called 'sir' so many times in my life!" The phones rang hot with viewers complaining about Edwards' smarmy, cowardly back-stabbing, mean-spirited remark. Edwards read some of the letters out on air and then offered a grovelling apology for his craven behaviour.

So, anyway.... he's finished making over Parekura Horomia, and after all these years, Brian Edwards is back on air. Worth the wait? Well, you be the judge....

First up: an interview with dancer and choreographer Michael
Parmenter. Bet I'm not the only one to have heard him do the same
interview at least twice during his time on Top o' the Morning.   Top question of the interview: "Do you sometimes wish you WERE NOT GAY?"

What's that you say? Edwards has no ideas? He's a lazy, smug,
self-regarding twit without any political theory?  Aw, no.  Aw no, no, no! No, sirree!!! Don't you believe it! He's got a BRILLIANT new concept... he's updating the VOX POP!!! Instead of just going out and asking people about some boring political issue, he's going to approach unsuspecting people at the Victoria Park market, push a
microphone in their face and "chat" with them about ..... THEMSELVES!!!!! 

It's called "Street Talk" and it confirms Dr Edwards as a cutting edge interviewer and leading television conceptualist. Here's how he "interviewed" his first three victims...

EDWARDS: What do you do? [thrusts mike in woman's face]
WOMAN: I'm a massage therapist here at the market.
EDWARDS: Are you married? 

.................

EDWARDS: What's your name? [pushes mike at face]
YOUNG MAN: Clayton.
EDWARDS: Clayton. That's a nice name. [AWKWARD PAUSE] Are you married?

.................

EDWARDS: Hello. [thrusts mike at young woman]
WOMAN: Hello.
EDWARDS: What are you doing here? Looking for a man?
WOMAN: [looking dubious] No I'm not.
EDWARDS: Are you married?  ....

< Back to the studio.....>

EDWARDS: Well, apart from "Street Talk" we are LIVE and
UNPREDICTABLE. After the break, everything you wanted to know about phobias but were afraid to ask....

<Advertisements>

EDWARDS: Welcome back. And now it's confession time. Since I was a little boy I've been afraid of birds. Not just big ones, but tiny
little ones like sparrows. If one of them comes in the room, I'm out of there!* I'm with Marcia Read, who is the chairwoman of the Phobic Trust. She joins me now. [smiles warly, gently] How are you feeling now?

MARCIA READ: Absolutely nervous and sick.....

[BREEN COMMENTS: That's not a phobia, surely. That's just Brian Edwards.]

MARCIA READ: Body dysmorphia - when you have a fear of looking in the mirror and seeing a part of your body deformed. Kleptomania.... that's a phobia too.                          EDWARDS: Do you ... how are you feeling now?            MARCIA READ: Oh, okay.

EDWARDS:  There's something I have to announce.  It's your birthday today, isn't it?
READ: [taken aback] Why, yes, it is.
EDWARDS: Do you have a phobia for flowers?.....
READ: No! [smiles]....
[Edwards pulls out huge bunch of flowers from arse, presents them to phobic guest.]

[BREEN COMMENTS:  A truly vomitous moment in television history]

............

<Advertisements>

After the break, once again "on the street", Edwards thrusts his
microphone in the face of two young female tourists as they step off a tourist bus....

EDWARDS: Are you looking for men?.... Where do you chat them up?....

Then he runs down another woman....

EDWARDS: Are you married?
WOMAN: [reluctantly but politely] No. I'm divorced.
EDWARDS: Can I ask you what led to the divorce?

Then, for a change, Edwards interviews  a MAN on the street, who just unloads for two minutes or so about the way Asians are over-running Auckland. It's an extended, non-stop rant familiar to anyone who has met a New Zealand First voter. The man makes several nasty comments about Chinese people, and several times he actually addresses them to Asian pedestrians as they walk past, like this:"They buy a business and they NEVER sell it to someone out of their ethnic group. DO YOU, MATE?"

Edwards, who has clearly always fancied himself as a tolerant, enlightened person, is at pains to show his viewers that he, Brian Edwards, is APPALLED by this racist. He asks the man's wife: "Are you comfortable with him talking to people like this as they go past?"

[BREEN COMMENTS:  One could, of course, be forgiven for asking exactly the same question of Judy Callingham.]

He then interviews Rabbi Jeremy Lawrence, the senior Rabbi of the Auckland Hebrew Congregation. After first establishing that he thinks Jewish customs are "all nonsense", Edwards reveals that, in fact, he has a major philosophical question for the Rabbi: Is there any difference, he asks, in high seriousness, between a Jew who observes the "irrational" customs outlined in the Talmud and.... [wait for it!]... suicide bombers? His guest looks astonished. Edwards, however, is undaunted. "I mean, they're both IRRATIONAL, aren't they!" he splutters to the stunned Rabbi.

What Edwards' imbecilic stance does is to remove any vestige of gravitas he might have had. The Rabbi immediately appears as sensible, rational, balanced. And indeed he is a personable and well spoken gentleman.

But, as anyone who has followed the news recently will know, Rabbi Lawrence is also a shameless supporter of the Israeli state, and a smooth and practised dissembler. He has recently achieved a degree of notoriety (and ridicule) for himself by his rabid letters to the editor condemning Herald cartoonist Malcom Evans for having the nerve to criticise the Israeli government. Evans equated the brutal Israeli suppression of the Palestinian people with apartheid; he's not the first person to see that similarity. But to comment on this in any way: why, this is "anti-semitism" according to the Rabbi, who is quite happy to mischievously conflate criticism
of Israel with anti-semitism.

Edwards tries half-heartedly to take the Rabbi on, but clearly his
heart is not in it. It soon becomes clear why Edwards is so soft on
this Israeli apologist: "I have to THANK you," he gushes fulsomely, "for a really LOVELY dinner we had at the synagogue the other night."

*  I personally will be carrying a sparrow on my person at all times
from now on, in case I ever see Edwards in the same room as myself.

....................................................................

One interesting thing to come from this dog of a show:  the Rabbi
Lawrence's father was the man who changed Regianald Dwight's name to Elton John.

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