Look out! He's got a knife!

I'm totally with you on that one Pearce! And I totally regret my inability to understand or speak Maori. Having been wavering about ordering a teach yourself Maori tape and book from the internet, but kinda think that learning it from a native speaker would be so much better, for so many reasons. Make learning Maori compulsory in primary schools!

I also have a hillarious story that's not really related but we can pretend it is. When I first got to Scotland I got a job working in a corner store. One of my workmates was a weedy high school drop-out. One day he siddled up to me and said " you know how the All Blacks do that dance thing that's like 'come and get some', well if you're in a pub in NZ and you want to fight someone, do you start it by doing that dance thing?' I love being a kiwi.

I'm really digging Maori tv. It is completely surreal. I bet it would be great if I was stoned. The children's show features giant brownish orange plush toy taniwha (or things like on tiki's) wearing red, green or blue singlets. There is like jazzercise or something. There is a dodgy CGI SF cartoon dubbed into Maori. There is Watership Down, dubbed into Maori, with what seems appalling voice acting, but it's hard to tell.

Overall, it is remarkably charming to see TV made by people with very little money who obviously don't make TV. It is just... different. Taking it back to TV is what you stick in front of the camera, and getting away from the totally manufactured unreal bubble to which we have become habituated. Plus all the random new zealandness of it, especially the small town stuff, seeing people talking shit.

I just wish I had the faintest fucking idea what they were saying, but it is possible that would ruin the experience. A little like how Asian TV is really cool because it makes no sense. But Maori TV is cooler because there is more dissonance for something to be clearly local and totally unintelligible.

But yeah, what time is the show to teach you Maori on?

Um, re-reading this, I'm not dissing it at all. But my enjoyment may be slightly off-kilter.

Billy -learn yourself some Maori man. You can probably get some books and tapes from the library if you can't find yourself a native speaker to teach you.

billy - the program is on at 8pm weeknights with a recap on Sundays at some time. Watch it. I reckon it is a good format for informally learning a little maori language.

here's a speech:

I assure you have all heard the "Tony's Tyre Service" ad or the good old "bugger" ad. If you survey everyone from New Zealand, I bet the majority of Kiwis have. This proves the amount of communication, TV, can provide. This means Māori television could spread the culture and language for Māori easier than it could before. But it's not all there and there are some things that they need to get up to scratch.

Māori food and culture can be shown by Māori television. I have watched Māori television and one of their cook programmes had some good Māori recipes. Māori television shows traditional Māori music and dances like kapahaka. And also considering that over one million people are watching, people can access this information with the press of a remote button. People can now watch a kapahaka in their living room. Before you had to go to the kapahaka, but with Maori television up and running, you can access it at every television set.

But there is a point where some major improvements are needed, in the English spoken programs there are Māori captions underneath the main picture, but in the Māori spoken programs there are no English captions. Māori television would benefit from this, as non-Māori speakers could learn from the TV programme, it will also help non-Māori speakers to learn the Māori language as it will provide a Māori, to English, so-called, "dictionary." You have to remember that some Māori can't even speak their own language, and also remember that those people want to watch their own television.