TV review: Are those big boobs really news?

BY JANE CLIFTON

Big, as the guy from Mitre 10 is always telling us, is good. The question is, is it news, let alone current affairs, when the "big" we are talking about is a set of bosoms?

Close Up thought it was on Tuesday night, devoting a segment to following up and down Queen St a visiting American woman whose augmented bust weighed as much as a child.

To be fair to the programme, this was an extraordinary sight. It was like looking at a sort of reverse-puberty, as though the woman had grown on to the boobs as an afterthought. Neither had any contextual relationship to the other, except that they happened to share the same body.

They, not she, appeared to be in charge.

This viewer cluelessly spent the first half of the item boggling that nature could do such a cruel thing, and thinking, "Poor woman, surely her local health authority could help her if she couldn't afford reductive surgery."

Silly me. Eventually we were told the bosoms were the result of breast augmentation. The thought that someone would do this to herself was scarcely more comprehensible than that nature could do it to someone.

This was voluntary self-deformation, and a guarantee of later-in-life issues like back injury and arthritis. (And only think of what she will look like as a little old lady with those bazoongers out front. Perhaps a modified walking frame with a clip-on tray, or, depending on how far they've drooped, a trolley?)

But where many of us will have felt distinctly ill-used in being shown this item was the bit right at the end when Close Up disclosed that the woman was here to participate in porn king Steve Crow's annual Boobs on Bikes event.

So just as with Readers and Writers Week, the Ellerslie Flower Show and a conference on mental health, during which the media quite rightly features visiting foreign luminaries, now it is perfectly normal for visiting porn stars to get on the media circuit.

Because it wasn't just Close Up giving the porn business oxygen. Over on TV3's Campbell Live, they were featuring Lisa Lewis, a young woman who got a teeny bit famous for agreeing to read the news topless on an obscure TV channel, and who now calls herself a porn star.

This was news, apparently, because she is having a financial dispute with Crow, his having refused to pay what she asked for appearing nude in his porn trade fair, and she having retaliated by writing to a newspaper to complain about it.

Call me a prude, but when did we stop treating commercial pornographers with suspicion, and regarding strippers and porn stars with regretful - if fascinated - pity? Suddenly they're newsmakers as of right.

News and current affairs reporters do have to cover other events that run close to the bone for some people, like the Hero Parade, or an artwork or movie that has offended some religious faith or other.

But that's not about money or exploitation, but, in the case of Hero, a community celebration, and in the art world, a genuine controversy. Take it or leave it.

There's no denying porn folk - the very fact they exist in little old NZ - give us a frisson. Even if it's a frisson of horror, that'll lift telly news ratings every time.

The most shocking thing about the featured porn people is, sadly, how unappealing they all were.

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