HEART OF GOLD: Rachel Hunter showed her goodness in Sumatra on Intrepid Journeys.
There have been so many lurid television moments lately: Target's sleazy carpet cleaner, Shortland Street's anniversary chopper crash, complete with a fugitive body part, Campbell Live's dubious jackpot on Monday, which unmasked the ACT donor racist as a creep into the bargain.
"Have you ever had sex against a tree?" the rheumy-eyed anti-Maori crusader asked the female interviewer, apropos of nothing in particular.
So it was unexpectedly relaxing – or at least a break from toe-curling embarrassment – last night to join Rachel Hunter in Sumatra, on TV One's new series of Intrepid Journeys. Lots of trees, no sex – to the point where the former cover girl was chased from the jungle by a group of orangutans who plainly wanted their privacy. "They want to do some shagging," she narrated, adding that this was fair enough. "It's their territory, not ours."
The programme initially threatened to be more annoying than stimulating, as Hunter's flat and strangely bleaty mid-Pacific accent grates even more than the incessant tooting of urban Sumatran traffic. When she waffled on and on about being at a crossroads in her life, and longing to move "in new directions", the experience threatened to be unbearable.
But all was forgiven when we saw Rachel tenderly communing with a beautiful, sad-eyed ox resting unconsidered in a village she was passing through. By the time she had paid NZ$50 to liberate an eagle, battering itself in torment against the bars of a cage, it was time to concede that, while trite of phrase, she is gold of heart.
The eagle presented an interesting dilemma which she debated with her Sumatran guides. "Westerners do not like to see this," they told her of the captive eagle. But the caged eagle was part of a trade based slyly on this Western sensibility. Westerners could be relied on to pay to set the eagle free. If they stopped paying, the eagle would stay captive till it pined to death – but maybe the cruel trade would cease.
But who could pass by and do nothing? Hunter acknowledged that she had no idea whether setting the bird free would pose it more hazards, and sure enough, the bird was immediately involved in a battle with wild eagles. But, as she said, better to be free to fight your battles than die in captivity, and the sight of the magnificent creature on the wing made it hard to argue.
As with many intrepid journeys, the trip involved hideously long and comfortless road travel. One of Hunter's rides lasted 10 hours on bad roads, punctuated by nerve-jangling tooting. But while she longed to be free of the juddering transport, the flip-side was no more welcome: a four-hour trek up a live volcano. Out of condition owing to a lengthy lay-up after back surgery, Hunter found the steep slopes the least of her worries. She was a smash hit with the local leech population.
"That's my blood – I need it!" she exclaimed with indignation as her guide detached the first sucker. As the hours of slog passed, there were small but intense tantrums about the incessant slimey hitchhikers. "Not something I had on my bucket list," she narrated grimly.
Reaching the summit for the apparently stupendous view was hardly less of a challenge to Hunter's temper. "Very peaceful – except for my moaning," she said, gazing down upon thick, view-occluding mist. "Four hours [to see] my mother's soup."
However, she rallied at the chance to see the sort of live volcanic activity that in a New Zealand tourist spot would be strenuously cordoned off.
There was a heart-warming banquet in a traditional extended-family long-house, and when it came time to camp overnight in the jungle, where the leeches brought their mates – spiders, snake and scorpions – Hunter was remarkably game. The leeches might come while she slept, "but at least they get full and they fall off at some point".
A further adventure was being welcomed in at a big wedding she happened to be passing by. "I'm not sure how I would have felt if a van-load of strangers had gate-crashed my wedding," she mused – perhaps forgetting how many paparazzi had tried on the occasion of her becoming Mrs Rod Stewart.
Swamped and trussed in a near-body-bag of white, rather like a bio-hazard officer, for her induction into a Banda Aceh mosque, she embraced the non-glamour of the situation."I'm just very happy that Sports Illustrated isn't hanging around anywhere."
Meanwhile, in the leech-free Hamptons, TV2's Revenge, Monday, was an agreeably florid double episode.
Our heroine, Amanda, who is pretending to be Emily, is secretly the daughter of a wrongly convicted terrorist merchant banker, bent on punishing the Hamptons grandees who framed her dad to cover up a massive embezzlement.
The plans were always going to unravel, but the fun of this programme is to see how twisty and turny the unravelling can get.
Best gotcha was that, from the flash-forward that featured in the pilot episode, viewers have assumed that sweet, blameless rich boy Daniel ends up getting murdered as a result of Amanda's covert web of come-uppances.
This "knowledge" has imbued her seemingly sincere love-hearty relationship with Daniel with a special vein of nastiness.
It was both a relief and rather disconcerting to learn this week that the dead bloke was actually misidentified in the flash-forward, and when the corpse is turned over, it proves to be the evil, bisexual, bipolar, fugitive but highly intelligent blackmailer Tyler.
Good job all round, you might think – but Daniel is now the prime suspect for the murder. And if he gets off, it'll be the turn of Amanda's childhood sweetheart, the equally nice and blameless Jack, who was skulking about the scene of the crime in an effort to get his flaky girlfriend (Emily, who is pretending to be Amanda) out of the frame.
But Revenge is wonderfully reliable in that the seemingly inevitable outcome of any situation always gets subverted – sometimes twice between ad breaks. Plus the frocks are fabulous.
- © Fairfax NZ News
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