Sorry, Campbell who?

May I interrupt the almost wall-to-wall social media handwringing about the demise of the John Campbell show to say that I don’t give a flying fuck?

Thank you.

I am one of the 96% who don’t watch him (the four percent of NZers who do not being sufficient, it’s reliably suggested, to justify shareholders subsidising his show). Truth be told, I don’t watch the other mob at 7 either – or any mob at all for that matter. Too much insulting viewers’ intelligence on all channels for my money, and that’s all channels both here and overseas bother to do. So my TV stays hooked up to my computer, and my interest in who’s dumbing down what and who gets sacked where is confined mainly to the small viewing portions of news-on-demand that I’m either sent or recommended – which generally only confirms my view that the longer the TV stays disconnected from the aerial the better (leaving me to enjoy Netflix, my monthly internet subscription to live AFL, and bludging off friends’ Sky subscriptions when cricketers and Counties are playing well).

Now, fair’s fair, for all I know NZ’s half-hour of Jon-Stewart-Without-the-Jokes may well have become the last bastion of intelligent journalism on the telly, just as its noisy advocates say it is. But I doubt it. So Socialism at Seven will have to die without my signing a petition to save it.

There it is.

PS: To be perfectly, absolutely, one-hundred percent fair, I have said good things about the Campbell show on occasions. Some of those occasions are in my archives here.