OPINION: I was in the newsroom on Monday when someone shouted out: "Eight hundred thousand dollars of taxpayer money on a new season of X Factor? What the hell?" And we all got outraged.
I was particularly pleased, because it was column week, and this sounded like the ideal topic. NZ On Air wasting scarce taxpayer dollars on trash TV? Perfect.
I could also point out that the show received $1.6m in NZ On Air funding for its first season, and that it wasn't even original programming but was instead a franchise of that slimy villain Simon Cowell and his over-rehearsed insults.
I especially hoped I'd find a worthy public arts organisation that recently had its funding cut by exactly that amount, the sort of shallow synergy a columnist dreams of.
So we all had a satisfying bitch in the newsroom about the wasteland that is television programming and society's slow decline and inevitable death, etcetera. You know how it goes.
Invigorated with rage, I sat down and composed a draft. I wrote that I hated everything about reality TV. That I could no longer watch it without yelling: "Oh come on!" and "How stupid do you think we are?" (The answer, of course, is quite stupid, actually).
That I hated the shameless commercial tie-ins; the peddling of an impossible dream; the greedy desire of ordinary people to get their 15 minutes of fame by appearing on telly rather than by doing something genuinely worthwhile with their life and gaining it the hard way; the faux-dramatic pauses; the infuriatingly timed ad breaks; the ugly banter between presenters; their manufactured arguments, etcetera. You know how it goes.
I wrote that X Factor was nothing but a handful of talented people marooned among lost causes in an embarrassing sideshow of greed; a cringing spectacle echoing the bear-baiting and carnival freaks of the nineteenth century; a sad parade of the pathetic, the weird, the outcast, and the downright pitiful, etcetera. You know how it goes.
I needed specific material, so I went trawling online for back episodes of the show, but all that was left were the interviews ("I want this so much"; "It's always been my dream") and the songs themselves. And that's when some sort of magic happened.
I watched eventual winner Jackie Thomas sing Bon Iver's Skinny Love and Black Velvet.
I watched Whenua Patuwai sing Bathe in the River with Hollie Smith, and Anna Wilson sing Landslide. They were incredible.
I am not too proud to admit that some of them brought a tear to my eye. In fact, they put me in such a good mood that I forgot my outrage and started rearranging the kitchen and doing the dishes.
They were so fantastic, in fact, that I started to get ashamed of my own sanctimoniousness and instead got annoyed that the brilliant Anna was eliminated early.
Who was I - a lone columnist, a professional troll - to condemn the tastes of the masses?
The fact is, X Factor and all those other awful TV singing shows are brilliant at their jobs.
They successfully manipulate our ancient psychological hardwiring, hitting certain brain buttons - status, pity, fear, injustice - so squarely that we get addicted.
They make us weep with the power of song. Who am I to argue with such expertise?
Sure, NZ On Air could have taken that $800k and, instead of spending it on a hyped-up karaoke show, given $20k to 40 musicians so they could spend a few months working on original music and then tour it around the country, building a fanbase the real, hard way.
Trouble is, audiences don't often get off their couches to go out and support live acts. There's too much good stuff on TV, I guess.
