Live At Six

Having enjoyed One80° Restaurant’s ostrich burger during Burger Wellington, I was pleased when a voucher for dinner for two popped up on GrabOne, so we went there for a pre-theatre dinner looking out over the harbour, with a spectacular sunset going on in the background. We kicked off with cocktails at the bar (the usual Martini & cosmopolitan), then dined on scallops, ostrich steak and chicken curry, accompanied by a Gisborne Chardonnay.

Afterwards we headed across the road to Downstage Theatre, there to see Live At Six. This follows the behind-the-scenes machinations of rival newsrooms (One News and 3News) following an incident when the newsreader of one of the stations got drunk and fell over after an awards ceremony the night before: the incident being captured on smartphones, security cameras etc., and broadcast over Youtube, Twitter and the blogosphere. The incident took place in the theatre’s bar before the play opened, and members of the audience were encouraged to film it, post it on Facebook, and tweet about it. As a result of this, the colours of Nicola’s Pembroke College scarf are now unconsciously lodged in the audience’s psyches forever.

It was resolved with two different takes by the rival stations when they both broke the story at six. The behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing, personality conflicts and such were well played, and allowed such lines as “this isn’t the news, this is the TRUTH!” and allowing them to work current news stories into the script (in a Drop The Dead Donkey style) The nerds who compiled and edited the footage, recorded telephone conversations and the like were particularly good – playing MMORP games in spare minutes, looking at cute videos of kittens and wearing t-shirts with geeky slogans…just like real life.