WIMP-WALLOPING

18 October 2013 at 10:22 pm

WIMP WALLOPING
Wimp: Jeremy Elwood. Walloper: Nevil Gibson
The Panel, Radio New Zealand National, Friday 18 October 2013
Jim Mora, Jeremy Elwood, Nevil Breivik Gibson

JIM MORA: It’s Susan Baldacci, with what the WOOOOOOORLD’s talking about!
SUSAN BALDACCI: Well the first story today is a rather sad one. It seems that slavery is still rife around the world.
MORA: Slavery?
SUSAN BALDACCI: Y-y-yes. And the country with the most slaves is India.
MORA: Is it India that has the most slaves?
SUSAN BALDACCI: [betraying slight irritation] Mmmmm. …. [Pause]….The country with the highest proportion of slaves is Mauritania. It has five to twenty per cent of the population as slaves.
MORA: Five to twenty per cent of the population of Mauritania are slaves?

…..[Pause]…..

SUSAN BALDACCI: Mmmm.

…..Some minutes later….

MORA: Mmmmmmm, mmmmmm!
SUSAN BALDACCI: Mmmm, mmmm!
JEREMY ELWOOD: Mmmmm!
MORA: Mmmmmmm! This is delicious cake! Who brought it in?
NEVIL BREIVIK GIBSON: I did!
MORA: What, is it your birthday?
NEVIL BREIVIK GIBSON: It is.
MORA: Happy fiftieth birthday! Ha ha ha ha ha!
NEVIL BREIVIK GIBSON: Ha ha.
MORA: I mean, happy FORTIETH birthday! Ha ha ha ha!
NEVIL BREIVIK GIBSON: Ha ha.

A couple of minutes later, as the music gradually rises to usher in the 4 o’clock news, the Panelists are discussing the stunning revelation that we’ve been lied to for the last hundred years about a crucial historical event….

MORA: So if the band on the Titanic didn’t play “Nearer My God to Thee”, what DID they play?
JEREMY ELWOOD: “Sailing”.
NEVIL BREIVIK GIBSON: Heeeeeeeeeeeee!
MORA: That was the resident comedian on the program, Jeremy Elwood. Back after the news!

……4 o’clock News…..

After the four o’clock news, Mora always drags his hapless guests through a mandatory ritual of introductory or (more commonly) catch-up chit-chat. This would be pretty dull at the best of times, but seeing that he has a small roster of Panelists, this is also (almost always) a wasted seven or eight minutes.

However, these informal chats occasionally reveal some highly interesting aspects of character, or lack of character. Yesterday (Thursday October 17th), for instance, right wingStuff business editor Ellen Read and that grouchy old hippie-hater and scourge of progressive thinkers, Rosemary McLeod, took the opportunity to boast about all the books they had not read. First of all they dealt to The Bone People, defiantly announcing that they found it boring, over-rated and unreadable. If they had stopped there, their little excursion into book criticism would have been reasonable and unexceptionable. But this pair of Mother Grundys were incapable of stopping there; they couldn’t help themselves. Warming to the task, McLeod announced she would never ever look at anything by Pope or Dryden. Ellen Read warmly endorsed this strident declaration of philistinism.

That, however, was as bad as it got yesterday. For the rest of the program, Read and McLeod were considered and reasonable in their comments. Long-time listeners would have been not only surprised at this, but also a trifle disappointed. Ellen Read has a particularly nasty, acerbic personality and has in the past unloaded both barrels on opponents, or amiable victims like Tim Watkin. So her failure to deliver on yesterday’s program left many listenerssans our fix of righteous right wing raving. Listening to a young lout playing nice and agreeing with everything an old lout says is nobody’s idea of entertainment, surely. If we wanted that, we’d just listen in on Cameron Brewer sucking up to Don Brash.

Many of us sufferers were no doubt hoping that today’s extreme right wing guest would come through with the good stuff, i.e., the crazy stuff. After all, with Nevil Breivik Gibson on board, the probability of a demented comment is extremely high.

Today’s post-four o’clock chat revealed (1) that Jeremy Elwood recently met Dan Marino and Dan Ackroyd, and, more interestingly, (2) that Nevil Gibson has visited Ireland recently. That trip provided the springboard for Gibson to make one of his trademark cock-eyed observations, a paean to the “excellence” of Ireland’s Sunday newspapers. That would have come as a surprise to anyone who has actually read an Irish Sunday newspaper, which to any literate Irish person is a synonym for “crap”.

Still, as Breivik Gibson comments go, raving about the quality of crap Irish papers was pretty mild. More extreme stuff was to come just before the end of the show. Before that, though, there was a bit of excruciating banter with the host….

JIM MORA: Nevil Gibson, happy birthday. That’s a nice cake you’ve brought in for us. Did you bake it yourself?
NEVIL BREIVIK GIBSON: No, no, I got it from Hollywood.
MORA: You got it imported?!?!???!?
NEVIL BREIVIK GIBSON: Heeeeeeeeeeee! Actually it’s the bakery chain!
MORA: Oh!

The bulk of the program was pretty run of the mill. There was something about Len Brown, and both Gibson and Elwood made bland contributions for the “Soabbox” segment. It seemed that, apart from Gibson’s endorsement of substandard Irish rags, this was going to pass away into the space-time continuum without leaving a trace.

But then THIS happened……

In the last five minutes, Mora brings up the subject of the Republican extreme right and its determined assault on civic and public life in the United States, AKA “the government shutdown.” Just as I suspected he would, Nevil Gibson takes up the opportunity to deliver one of his crazed homilies—this time on behalf of the Tea Party loons. He embarks on an utterly untrue and fantastical speech, asserting that Ted Cruz and his cronies, far from being thugs and vandals, represent a significant section of the U.S. population. “Don’t they have a right to be heard?” he pleads, his voice croaking with emotion.

Gibson would never have gotten away with such nonsense if the other Panelist were, say,Gordon McLauchlan or Gordon Campbell or Mai Chen. But his interlocutor today is that nice Jeremy Elwood, a man who goes out of his way during his comedy appearances to make it clear he is a concerned and thoughtful liberal thinker. Unfortunately, Elwood has a dismal track record of going out of his way to “find common ground” with people who are philosophically and morally opposite to him. A few years ago Elwood brought down ignominy and contempt on himself after he cravenly voiced agreement with every single thing uttered by the bullying ex-cop Graham Bell during one of Bell’s infamous swingeing rants against liberals, conservationists and young people.

It was always a forlorn hope that Elwood would show a bit of courage and actually argue with Gibson. And so, just as we knew he would, he caved in. Instead of challenging him, Elwood joked lamely that there are huge numbers of Americans that take no notice of the government, and don’t need it in their lives. “They got on just fine during the shut-down,” he snickered. Nevil Breivik Gibson guffawed his approval.

Mercifully, the insistent sound of Carmina Burana wells up. Time to sign off…

JIM MORA: Nevil Gibson, happy birthday. Thank you for bringing in the cake!

31 March 2011 at 1:35 pm

WIMP-WALLOPING: Bassett on Watkin, 29.3.11 (Part 1 of 2)
The Panel, National Radio, Tuesday 29 March 2011, 4.10 p.m.

Today’s Panel is: Jim Mora, Doctor Michael Bassett, Tim Watkin.

Putting Watkin up against Bassett doomed this program from the start. Bassett is a bitter and extreme right wing academic, who will stop at nothing to score a political point. A couple of years ago on The Panel, Bassett, in the middle of a swingeing rant, called Nicky Hager a holocaust-denier. Jim Mora did not dare to even demur, leave alone challenge, that lie. Bassett speaks with a slow, basso profundo delivery, and projects an air of gravitas even while spewing vile and rancid nonsense. He will not stand to be contradicted.

So the choice of Tim Watkin is perfect for Bassett’s purposes. Watkin is mild, desperately eager to please, and will bend over backwards to agree with an adversary. Although Watkin is an intelligent liberal thinker, as shown by the articles he writes on his website The Pundit, he is also personally timid, and allows himself to be bullied by the right wing adversaries he is inevitably paired up with for “balance”. He is a regular commentator on NewstalkZB, where he plays the Alan Colmes role to a succession of crude Sean Hannitys. Paul Holmes and Larry Williams both treat him with a mixture of amused condescension and outright contempt. As well as all that, Watkin’s value as a commentator is fatally compromised by the fact he works as a producer for Holmes’s piss-poor Q+A television programme. A year or so ago, during one of his interminable introductions, Mora asked Watkin how Q+A was going. Watkin said, “It’s going great!” Cruelly, Mora asked that question just after the news had revealed that the show’s audience had halved, from an already low base.

Anyway, let’s see how the first half of Tuesday’s show went…

MORA: Ahhhhhh. Topic number one: Is there a disproportionate emphasis on the nuclear meltdown in Japan? Our first guest is SOPHIE WRIGHT, an Englishwoman who has been living in, and tweeting from, Tokyo, in Japan! Welcome to the Panel, Sophie! Ahhhhh, you, ahhhhh, say on your tweets that the overseas media, because of their unwarranted concentration on the nuclear meltdown, have neglected the real human tragedies caused by the earthquake and the tsunami.

SOPHIE WRIGHT: Yes. The tsunami and the earthquake have been overlooked and neglected. The foreign media seem to have been misled into thinking that the nuclear meltdown is far more serious than it actually is. I think a lot of the reason for that is because of the Japanese mode of address. You know, the imprecision and vagueness of the Japanese.

BASSETT: Yes. Why is that?

SOPHIE WRIGHT: It’s the characteristic mode of discourse of the Japanese. You know, imprecision and vagueness.

BASSETT: Yes, yes, that’s it.

MORA: I see that four people froze to death in Miyagi prefecture. Uhhhhh. Do you think that the media have neglected stories like this?

WATKIN: Absolutely! A lot of film crews and journalists were sitting round Fukushima, waiting for news about the nuclear leak, and they just didn’t bother with these other stories.

MORA: Uhhhhhh. We don’t know what to believe. The Japanese government says that Greenpeace readings can’t be believed, and from this distance, uhhhhh, you don’t know who to believe.

SOPHIE WRIGHT: The authorities are being transparent.

BASSETT: People accuse the Japanese government of playing politics when in fact it is GREENPEACE that is playing politics! Greenpeace is jumping ALL OVER this. You have to weave your way between competing agendas.

WATKIN: Mmmmmm, mmmmmm.

MORA: Yes. Ahhhhh, Ten microcivets per hour. There are nearly seven THOUSAND microcivets from a chest X-ray.

BASSETT: Precisely.

MORA: Sophie Wright. She’s in Tokyo. Thank you very much for coming on The Panel! It’s 28 minutes past four. Let’s talk briefly about LIBYA! The humanitarian intervention by the United Nations—uhhhh, don’t we also have to intervene in Syria, the Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe?

WATKIN: And Rwanda. They did nothing there.

BASSETT: Zimbabwe. The international community hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory, has it?

WATKIN: There’s blood on our hands!

BASSETT: We need to remember, though, that Rwanda and Burundi were TRIBAL wars. But when there is mass slaughter, like in Libya, it’s hard to stomach from the other side of the world.

WATKIN: Mmmmmm, mmmmmm.

Note: Watkin did not have the nerve to bring it up, but during another mass slaughter of civilians, in Gaza in 2008-9, Bassett found it exceedingly EASY to stomach. In fact, he applauded and vociferously justified the slaughter. Mora, like Watkin, forbears from mentioning that.

News at 4.30. After the news, we are treated to the strains of a catchy New Zealand pop song to introduce the next topic…

MORA: There aren’t many songs about Daylight Saving Time. That’s San—

WATKIN: And yet YOU found it, Jim Mora! You and your team!

MORA: That’s Sandy Edmonds from 1968. The song is called “Daylight Saving Time”.

BASSETT: Ha ha ha ha ha!

WATKIN: Ha ha ha ha ha!

MORA: Ha ha ha ha ha! Russian president Medvedev says that Russia will not be bringing in Daylight Saving Time, to save electricity. He also says it is harmful to health, and upsets biological rhythms.

WATKIN: Ha ha ha ha ha!

MORA: Ha ha ha ha ha!

BASSETT: Medvedev is no fool. He’s a lawyer. Does he really believe that or is he just playing along with the ignorance he knows is widespread in the Russian community?

MORA: Indeed. Anyway, no Daylight Saving Time for Russia!

WATKIN: Ha ha ha ha ha!

………End of Part 1 (of 2)………..

10 August 2012 at 5:05 pm

Wimp Walloping
The Wimp: DUNCAN WEBB; The Walloper: NEIL MILLER
“The Panel”, National Radio, Friday 10 August 2012

I’m listening to another horror show unfold. Once again, the ostensible “liberal” (Webb) is bending over backwards to find common ground with, and to please, a right winger (Miller). So whatever Miller says, no matter how bizarre and doctrinaire, Webb has obviously decided to agree with it.

Today, Miller announced that the New Zealand security services are “open” and that he feels “relaxed” about their conduct, or misconduct. Duncan Webb did not even so much as demur at this nonsense. And neither did the stand-in host Finlay McDonald. Instead, both of these “liberals” laughed insipidly at Miller’s wry and cynical comments.

Question: Why is Gordon Campbell never on this programme any more? He had the courage to confront Graham Bell, getting the tough old copper to admit he knew nothing about climate science, and on another occasion got Richard Griffin to backtrack and apologize for making some ignorant comments about Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. On another occasion, Bomber Bradbury angered Michelle Boag, when he demanded that she back up one of her wild statements with at least one piece of evidence. I would not be surprised if she had something to do with the eventual banning of Bradbury from the programme.

But Campbell and Bradbury are not on the programme any more. Instead, we get the likes of Duncan Webb playing the patsy. Neil Miller is a shallow and complacent commentator, but he gets an easy ride on this programme. As do other right wingers like Michael Bassett, Karl Du Fresne, Barry Corbett, Stephen Franks, John Bishop, and Deborah Hill Cone.

The pity of it is that “The Panel” is so much less interesting and stimulating than it could be. Is it too much to hope that Jim Mora gets a thoughtful and serious producer one day?

8 May 2013 at 4:36 pm

WIMP WALLOPING
Wimp: BRIAN EDWARDS
Walloper: MICHELLE BOAG
Radio New Zealand National, Wednesday 8 May 2013

Over the last few years, we Standardistas have delighted in handing out a good old tonyveitching to Jim Mora’s radio chat show The Panel. In most cases, I believe, Jim and his guests have deserved this Rankin/McCoskrie treatment. Over the years, anyone mildly interesting—Bomber Bradbury, Gordon Campbell—has been drummed off the programme, until it has been whittled down to (mostly) an uninspiring roster of retired columnists who call themselves “curmudgeons”, third-rate journalists and some exceptionally horrible, disgusting ex-politicians.

Recently, however, the programme seemed to have improved. I must admit that I missed most of last week because I was overseas, so I possibly missed someone dull and/or unpleasant and/or outrageous, like Karl du Fresne, or Stephen Franks, or Nevil Breivik Gibson. In fact it’s been quite a long time since I heard anyone really dreadful on the Panel, such as those three gentleman, or Dr. Michael Bassett, or John Bishop, or John Barnett, or Garth “Gaga” George, or Jordan Williams.

So I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that the programme had been getting better; it had been a long time since I had heard the cringe-inducing Jeremy Elwood bending over backwards to agree with every word uttered by the bullying old ex-cop Graham Bell, and the godawful Christchurch knife-enthusiast Barry Corbett had been thankfully absent—and silent—for a good few weeks.

With these recent developments in mind, therefore, I was feeling mildly hopeful about what might be coming up on the Panel today. Sadly, however, at 3:45 p.m., I heard this….

JIM MORA: Coming up after this song, we have The Panel, with Michelle and Brian.

MORRISSEY BREEN, i.e. MOI: Arrrrrrrrggghhhhh! NO-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O!!!!

….A pleasant song plays for three minutes, during which Breen calms down somewhat….

JIM MORA: Michelle Boag, how ARE you?

MICHELLE BOAG: [chirpy and bright] Very WELL, thank you!

JIM MORA: Michelle joins us on the programme today, along with Susan Baldacci and what the WOOORLD’s talking about….

SUSAN BALDACCI: Now the story that everyone’s talking about around the whole world: these three women that were kidnapped in Ohio… ….[Extended insincere blathering follows]….These women just need to be allowed to heal.

MICHELLE BOAG: Do you remember that Austrian case like this?

BRIAN EDWARDS: Oh yes, yes, that Austrian case was a terrible one!

MORRISSEY BREEN: [shouting insanely] Say something about the hundreds of kidnappings that are perpetrated by the U.S. government every year, Dr. Edwards!

MORA: And Madeleine McCann’s parents must be interested in this too!

BRIAN EDWARDS: Oh yes, yes.

MICHELLE BOAG: No doubt these people developed a relationship with their captors. The Stockholm syndrome…

BRIAN EDWARDS: Oh yes, yes, the Stockholm syndrome. It’s very real.

MORRISSEY BREEN: Shut the F*CK up, Edwards! You f&cking waste of publicly funded air time!!! [extended muttering and shouting at radio]

MORA: Abba were never really cool, were they, but they certainly are now!

EDWARDS: I think they’re GREAT!

MORRISSEY BREEN: What’s on the Concert Programme?