Newsroom, home of satire. My long-running weekly satirical series The Secret Diary has moved to Newsroom and will appear every Saturday, with Victor Billot’s wildly popular satirical Odes continuing to appear every Sunday. Diaries, Odes – while serious political columnists toil at meaningful opinions and stroke their chins to an inch of their lives, Victor and myself address the same issues in literary forms, in jest, in fun, in all complete lack of seriousness.
I began the Secret Diary around about 2009 in the Sunday Star-Times. The idea has never shifted – a Monday-Friday pretend diary of someone in the news, usually in politics – and only the homes have changed. I took it to the Herald in 2014. I loved writing it for the weekend paper but after 10 years it bared its neck to the same kind of axe that has taken out so much media these past few months. Someone from the paper phoned up. Oh well. He was only doing his job and you can’t shoot the messenger when the messenger shoots first.
But it was a surprising decision and last weekend my inbox was swamped with emails from Herald readers expressing various forms of rage that the Secret Diary would no longer appear in their Saturday paper. Lorraine wrote, “I was utterly dismayed to read that your column has been axed…I won’t be renewing my subscription.” Robin wrote, “Worst news! Our Saturday ritual is to read aloud your Secret Diary. How could this happen? Possibly cancel my Herald now.” Helen wrote, “I’m so disappointed, the Secret Dairy is the only reason I buy the Weekend Herald. I’m totally gutted. Is Mike Hosking taking your spot?”
And so on, in similar vein, most flattering and kind, with the common suspicion that it was all part of some right-wing conspiracy. It’s not part of any right-wing conspiracy but such are the times, in this Age of Luxon and the Two Dwarves, Peters and Seymour, and the closing of the liberal mind. I expected another kind of email, along the lines of GO WOKE GO BROKE and HA-HA!, from right-wing readers, who sent numerous bitter and resentful messages in response to the Secret Diary these past 10 years. But none arrived. They couldn’t be bothered I suppose.
Just as every day in New Zealand life is Waitangi Day – the long reckoning of our colonial past – just about everything in New Zealand public discourse is tribal, as in it’s either gloatingly right-wing or seethingly left-wing. Satire gets caught in the middle. Victor Billot’s Odes, which assume an Olde English style of address (two most common words in the Ode: “eldritch” and “woad”), attract loathings from right and left. He then happily, merrily throws gasoline on these bonfires by wandering into Newsroom’s Facebook page and engaging with his haters. I would never do that. Too chicken. Too old. I just want peace. Victor loves a good war.
I asked him for a brief history of The Ode. He replied, “The Ode started way back in Ye Olden Times – it predates the Covid era with the original ode appearing in December 2019. It took a while for the Ode to find its feet, to find a style of its own. Editor Braunias must have glimpsed something in there – God knows what – and invited the Ode in out of the cold to Newsroom where it has happily camped since that era.
“The Ode and I have a complicated relationship – there is a sense The Ode has chosen me as its humble vessel. I serve at its pleasure. The Ode mocks, it parodies, it revels in bathos, cheap shots, puns, walk on characters, call backs. It chronicles the times through its own warped lens.
“Curiously, The Ode often evokes strong passions. Responses to the Ode have included long and obsessive debates on the Newsroom Facebook page which often have to be closed down by the moderator as it all spirals out of control. The Ode has its HATERS. They fume, and seethe, and rage against The Ode night long. I was subjected to a media offensive from the Taxpayers Union. Others have had more witty responses – such as former Coromandel mayor Sandra Goudie who wrote an ode in reply to one about her. I believe the most popular Ode was one dedicated – appropriately – to Bishop Brian Tamaki, an eminently satirical figure.
“To be featured in an Ode is a back handed compliment. If you have been Odeified, you have made it in the small pond of NZ public life. Some figures are just too dull for The Ode – it seeks out the colourful, the larger than life, the truly wretched.”
Same. I have always thought of The Secret Diary as a record of the wretch of the week. I loved writing it for five years in the Sunday Star-Times, and I loved writing it for 10 years in the Weekend Herald. The series begins properly next Saturday in Newsroom. Luxon, the Two Dwarves, hopeless Hipkins, the eminently awful Bishop Brian….Wretches, walk this way; my not very solemn duty is to lay waste to their week.
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