The Ars Tits

"The Artists" was a really nice 5-minute segment screened just before the evening news, featuring the work of a prominent New Zealand artist. As the days of TVNZ 7 drew to a close, these were repeated more and more often - we probably saw the profile of organist Gillian Weir, presented by Peter Averi, a dozen times (familiarity didn't make it any less enjoyable). The title sequence for The Artists featured the letters drifting around the screen, temporarily forming the quote of our catchphrase.

So what on earth is going on?

The climax of a promo for TVNZ 7 news. The trailer celebrated "the news with more ... in-depth interviews and extended analysis."This was immediately illustrated by a clip of Greg Boyed subjecting an (unseen) interviewee to the probing interrogation that has become one of our favourite catchphrases.

Hindsight - it's a wonderful thing

Hindsight was one of our favourites (partly nostalgia for Kiwi childhoods). Each episode followed a theme of social change over the past 50 years, illustrating it with archive clips from NZ television, and followed up with an in-depth interview with a modern commentator or policy maker.

The show with more volts than Dr Frankenstein's laboratory

Not really a favourite (there are few opportunities to repeat this in day-to-day life), but another one that stuck in our brains. This was final sentence of the trailer for How Do They Do It.

The escalator was in fact invented as a novelty fairground ride

One of several engineering-themed shows on TVNZ 7, a genre that is seldom seen back on the BBC :-(

Although the most memorable catchphrase from this category, the show itself wasn't one of our favourites. Presented by Robert Llewellyn, who was far better suited to his ringmaster role on Scrapheap Challenge, How Do They Do It seemed to have borrowed a presentational style style that was a low-budget mashup of Mythbusters and Brainiac: Science Abuse (neither shown on TVNZ 7).

Yeh, but so do the old boys though, Eh?

Response to the interviewer (Wallace Chapman) saying "Some of the old boys say you like the short skirts". From the trailer for The New Old, a local show that investigates young people taking up traditional pursuits. The trailed episode featured a young man playing lawn bowls (no footage of the skirts was included in the trailer, and we didn't see the episode ... were there also young women playing, or do the traditional players wear short skirts too?)

I like you both tremendously, but I think you're totally wrong

Trailer for The Good Word, a literary magazine show presented by perky New Zealand novelist Emily Perkins. Segments typically included a profile of a local writer in the place they work, a group discussion of a recent publication (the source of the trailer clip), and a guest author/celebrity discussing a book of their choice. The theme tune was weirdly spooky - not sure what that was supposed to imply!