Unreel: A Life in Review
by Diana Wichtel

American Mark Kurlansky wrote two compelling histories, Salt and Cod, in which he used these two commodities as a device to chronicle vast changes in global trade and environment. Diana Wichtel, who could well have watched more television than anyone in New Zealand, uses her life-long love of television as a device to chronicle her own life and times.

Wichtel was born in Canada in 1951. At around three years-old she got her first glimpse of television. Like most children, she was fascinated by the little people moving and speaking inside a small box. (Television sets were much smaller then than they tend to be now.) Her mother explained it was ‘make believe’, which the small Canadian heard, endearingly, as ‘maple leaf’. From that moment, she was hooked. Viewing was not regulated but childhood then was freer than it is now. Wichtel remarks, ‘We were largely free to run with scissors and play with matches in our flammable pyjamas.’

Already well known to New Zealand readers for her insightful and often acerbic television reviews, Wichtel gathered more loyal readers with her best-selling and award-winning Driving to Treblinka, in which she relates her endeavours to rediscover her Jewish ancestry. As a young man her Polish father escaped from a train enroute to the death camp. He survived. The rest of his Jewish family did not. Her father is a major figure in this book as well, both for her childhood memories of him and for her longing for him when he did not accompany his wife and children to their new lives in New Zealand.

They arrived in 1964 when Wichtel was fourteen, ‘wash(ing) up at Milford Beach on Auckland’s North Shore’, where they lived surrounded by members of her mother’s family. Young Diana felt like an alien, a cold one. Houses were not heated like they were in Canada, Aucklanders being ‘perpetually in denial’ about winter chill. Kiwis were glued to Coronation Street, which she would later write was ‘like watching a documentary about some lost tribe of cave-dwellers’ after exposure to what she perceived as the sophistication of North American television.

‘Meals were a culture shock’, our single television station often dreary and unsophisticated, but programmes watched in Canada followed her here, including her beloved I Love Lucy, Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie. Despite much of this being ‘daft as a brush’ there were moments of nascent feminism and openness on women’s issues. Back in Canada she had learned about pregnancy from I Love Lucy. Lucille Ball got pregnant in real life, so did Lucy in the show. In New Zealand the series ‘became the site of an aching nostalgia for that world in Canada where I had a father.’ Bewitched, in which nose-wiggling witch Samantha is married to boring mortal Darrin, further politicised. Darrin forbade Samantha from using her magic. She did, subversively. Wichtel links this with Jacinda Ardern:

Considering the words aimed at a former Prime Minister of New Zealand – ‘fairy dust’, ‘witch’ – this screaming metaphor for the undermining of women with power remains tragically current.

Diana and her sister were sent to Westlake Girls and her much younger brother to board at Dilworth. A stepfather entered the picture – Stew – who gets a mixed review. Years later her mother told her that when she tried to divorce the children’s father in Canada, he was ‘in no state to have papers served on him.’ He had been committed to a psychiatric institution, where he would die tragically of pneumonia.

Oblivious to this, Wichtel’s teens passed happily enough. She frequently wagged school to stay home and watch the one available channel, sitting through endless episodes of Bill and Ben, the Flower Pot Men, with whom she felt kindred due to their outsider status. Later would come Graham Kerr’s Galloping Gourmet, the brilliance of Fred Dagg, Country Calendar, The Forsyte Saga starring New Zealander Nyree Dawn Porter, The Rolf Harris Show, McHale’s Navy and many others from the period. Wichtel’s memory of these shows has been supported by recent research and reviewing, but even so her recall is extraordinary.

There was a hiatus in her compulsive viewing: at seventeen she was living with her boyfriend but no TV. As many Auckland University students did in the ‘70’s, she flatted in Grafton, smoked the requisite joints and completed an M.A. Marriage, the birth of a child, a return to ‘varsity’, as we called it then, and commencement of a never-to-be completed PhD on Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. Divorce and a new partner and, in 1984, a job at the Listener, reviewing television. It was a kind of full circle.

Throughout this biographical tale is woven a cornucopia of television, and many highly quotable pronouncements on television and life itself, for example: ‘Only in sitcoms can the problems of life be solved in a commercial half hour.’ Television ‘recorded and records still an endless human chronicle of unbearable waste.’ And also, ‘With its randomness, its commitment to nonsense, its one thing after another, television was the medium most like life.’  Her favourite show ever is The Sopranos, and she brings us right up to the recent past with mention of local hit Kid Sister.

One chapter discusses medical drama, not only early shows like Dr Kildare and M*A*S*H but our own Shortland Street. Winningly she describes actor Michael Galvin as Chris Warner AKA Dr Love, as the ‘Ken Barlow of local soap.’ She recalls the famous line, ‘Please tell me that is not your penis’, the scene recreated on US television by Jimmy Kimmel and Alec Baldwin.

Elsewhere there are short histories of the introduction and development of television. The year 1975 saw the arrival of TV2, also known for a time as South Pacific Television, which that started with first telethon. TV3 came in 1989. Shortland Street, our longest running series, began in 1992. Nostalgia rises with her discussions of lost series like Pukemanu, which only lasted two seasons, and the ground-breaking Tangata Whenua (1974), produced by John O’Shea, written by Michael King, and directed Barry Barclay. Close to Home also gets a mention, as does 1964’s Let’s Go, and the later C’Mon and Happen Inn, which starred the Chicks, Dinah Lee, Allison Durbin. ‘Not much footage survives’, Wichtel remarks. She makes no mention of the rumour that much of that early footage was used as roadfill.

In this era, where most agree that free-to-air television is in its dying days, it is nostalgic to recall the power of some very early broadcasts. This is exemplified by the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Final Solution, which was beamed out to thirty-eight countries. Eichmann was not contrite; he was in fact proud of his evil contribution. Wichtel recalls watching the trial as a child in Canada, at a time when the Final Solution was still not really talked about, even or perhaps especially, in Jewish circles. It was, she avers, ‘an early exercise in reality television,’ and reflects later that ‘History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as a programme you have to review.’ Elsewhere, Wichtel muses on the educative powers of television, how it can be ‘… a stream of teachable moments, opportunities to demonstrate to your kids that some things in our crazy world can be made considerably less scary by taking the piss out of them. Occasions to teach them to whistle in the dark.’

Wichtel reviewed for the Listener for an astonishing thirty-five years. During that time she met and interviewed many famous New Zealanders and visitors to our shores, including Spike Milligan, Peter Sinclair, Paul Holmes (with whom she had a love/hate relationship), the Topp Twins and Billy T. James. When she first interviewed John Campbell in 1997, she made fun of him but he bore no umbrage. Brian Edwards would write her furious letters despite her very real respect for him for his establishment of Gallery, our first studio interview show, and his later establishment of the recently axed Fair Go. Foreign interview subjects included famous British journalists Julie Burchill and Lynn Barber, and Wichtel ‘managed to upset them both’.

I am sure I am not the only long-time admirer of Wichtel who wondered how on earth she puts up with the commercials, the reason many viewers can’t stand watching what we now call ‘terrestrial television.’ But affection lifts at reminiscences of some of them – ‘With a hey ho pull ‘em up, one two three, Jockey Juniors are for me!’  My little brother was desperate for a pair and I can still sing the tune. There is recollection of the Kentucky Fried cartoon ad with overweight kids, which as she notes, would never be allowed today.

Hate mail, of which Wichtel received an alarming amount, is her ‘favourite’. Extracts from some of it amusingly head various chapters. When the Listener wavered and nearly fell during the pandemic, Wichtel was let go. Perhaps it was on that sad day when she emptied her desk and collected her files and papers that Unreel had its first glimmer. The hate mail went home with her, as well as many articles, interviews and stories. Unlike some journalists who reproduce their articles in book form, Wichtel merely quotes from her articles and uses them as springboards for a wider study. My only gripe, and it is a tiny one, is the absence of an index. These days an index is a doddle, put together by AI and finessed either by the writer or publisher. It would be wonderful to be able to easily locate references to much loved shows from childhood and later.

Despite its frequent light tone and infectious humour, Unreel: A Life in Review is a substantial and serious book, exploring history, literature and film. It’s my guess that many readers will note down programmes to watch later online, books to read, and past world and local events to follow up. Writers too, will take heart from such statements as ‘Writing is essentially hell, at least until you get past the reproachful blank page.’