When terrestrial television feels like a holiday
With the double-header long weekend comes a welcome chance to escape streaming slop, writes Alex Casey.
Over Easter I texted my husband Joe a sentence that perhaps nobody in human history has ever texted: 'hurry up geostorm is starting'. No punctuation, no capitalisation, not because I was trying to be ee cummings or Gen Z with it, but because I was becoming irate in our Hokitika cottage that he was going to miss the start of the Saturday night blockbuster on Three.
The heavenly combination of a Gerard Butler disaster film and a West Coast bach being lashed with rain reminded me of a compelling slideshow that writer Saraid de Silva presented during last year's Word festival. It was about the optimal situations in which to enjoy certain foods, such as a handful of almonds eaten barefoot on a hardwood floor, a toasted English muffin with baked beans in a hailstorm, or two beers on an empty stomach at after-work drinks.
I like to apply a similar framework to television movies and holiday locations. There was the misty night in the Marlborough Sounds when, after a spooky dog walk around the marina where we didn't see a single other person, we flicked on the TV just as The Bone Collector was starting on Duke. Or there was shutting out the sun to watch Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest on TVNZ2 in Whananaki, while stingrays flitted around the estuary on a hot summer's night.
What made these combinations even more magical is that I didn't engineer them – another human being did. Left to my own devices over a long weekend or holiday getaway, I would likely do what I always do. I'd frantically start three or four different zeitgeist shows or movies before getting agitated or distracted, switching them off, and going on my phone while some atrocious Ted Bundy: The Musical crime slop plays in the background.
It's not just the choice paralysis that has been gnawing away at me, but the suspicion that I am paying through the nose to enjoy almost next to nothing. In a rare moment when I knew what I wanted to watch (Bridget Jones' Diary on Valentine's Day, sue me!), I perused all the streamers and could only find it available to rent on Neon for an additional $8. What are we all paying hundreds of dollars a year for, if not guaranteed access to Bridget Jones at all times?
Which brings me back to the bliss of watching terrestrial television somewhere outside of Hokitika. On Good Friday we indulged in The Chase and later The Repair Shop, a show I genuinely find so pure, so overwhelmingly gentle and sentimental, that I actually can't watch it during my regular life. The Repair Shop deserves a viewer unencumbered by phone reception, fully present to the ache of a man hearing his dead father's oud for the first time in decades.
Then came Book Club: The Next Chapter, an ensemble film featuring Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburger and Candice Bergen as old friends who head off on a luxury trip to Italy. We both sat there captivated by the shonky script ('Rome is a great walking city, but it's an even better sit-around-and-drink-wine city!') and pondering how such brilliant actors had been reduced to kaftan caricatures. 46% on Rotten Tomatoes, five-star weird viewing experience.
What added to the surreality was what happened during the ad break. 'We've found the perfect sheets recipe' an ad for Hotelsheets.co.nz cooed, as I tried not to green out too hard at the phrase 'sheets recipe'. That was soon followed by an ad for the Soft Sitter, which seemed like a silicone baking tray for… your bum? And you can put an egg on it and then sit on the egg? And the egg doesn't crack? And it somehow costs $79.95? Over five monthly payments?
Speaking of cracking eggs, the brilliant Easter programming continued the next night with the perfect Three double feature of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and the aforementioned Geostorm. Gene Wilder and Gerard Butler, two screen icons together at last. The coastal wind howled along with Mrs Bucket as she goaded Charlie to cheer up, mercifully quietening down just in time so I could enjoy the most satisfying bite ever committed to the silver screen.
Joe got back not long after my text for a frenzied explanation about the premise of Geostorm: the entire world is constantly experiencing severe storms thanks to the climate crisis (too soon!) but Gerard Butler invented an enormous net of satellites (?) wrapped around the whole world (?) called Dutchboy (?) that can shoot (?) the storms dead (?) before they happen. Except now it is not working, so he has to go back to space for a Repair Shop moment of his own.
Despite Geostorm's appropriately apocalyptic 18% on the Tomatometer, we of course watched the whole thing and loved it – even when a poor woman in Rio froze to death in her bikini while trying to escape an ice tsunami (?). When I got back behind the desk on Tuesday, I knew I had a job to do. As journalists, we are privileged to have access to the halls of power, and I can't imagine a person more powerful than whoever programmed Geostorm to run after Willy Wonka.
That person was Jesse, who has been a part of Three's programming team for five years. Over email, I asked him what magical ingredients, a 'sheets recipe' if you will, he uses to create perfect holiday programming. While numbers factor into it – how similar titles have performed in similar time slots – there is also a heavy dose of vibes and flow. 'You don't want to give your audience whiplash going from an animated Smurfs film into Blumhouse's Insidious,' he wrote.
Long weekends provide an interesting challenge as many people are away from home and their regular routines. 'Often they're at the bach or spending time with family, so it helps to look for something that'll appeal to Mum, Dad, Great Uncle Phil, and Nan,' added Jesse. 'If I can tap into a sense of nostalgia, that's huge, because then it'll span multiple generations, and hopefully gets Mum going 'hey kids, come watch this great movie I've always loved!''
As for the specific Gene/Gerard double feature, Jesse happily explained his working. 'They both have this kind of futuristic, dystopian vibe going on where the little guy wins (Charlie and Gerard Butler's character Jake),' he wrote. 'But they're both, in a sense, comfort films. Willy Wonka for its now decades of nostalgia, and Geostorm kind of wraps you in an action-packed, Gerard Butler-starring embrace – because you just know he'll save the day.'
(Spoiler alert: Gerard Butler did save the day and then he also saved Easter Sunday, with another Three double-header of Peter Rabbit followed by Gods of Egypt.)
Now facing another long weekend where I am likely to make more shocking streaming decisions without a trained professional deciding for me, I ended by asking Jesse why it is so important that humans still programme TV. His answer was simple: because it's humans who are watching. 'It might sound a little crazy in today's fast-paced, content-rich, algorithm-driven world to sit down and watch something that's been handpicked by an actual person,' he wrote.
'But I think there's always something comforting – something nostalgic – about turning on the telly.'
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The Spinoff
6 hours ago
- The Spinoff
Understanding Sir Roger Hall, the most successful playwright in New Zealand
His name sits above the title of most of his plays. It might even sit above the phrase 'New Zealand theatre'. Sam Brooks speaks to Sir Roger Hall about paving the way for an entire artform. The country's most successful playwright cuts an unassuming figure. He is unostentatiously dressed, peers at me through spectacles, and has a freshly printed list of his plays, all 47 of them, in front of him. Within those 47 plays are ones that have gone to the West End, plays that are performed regularly throughout New Zealand and plays that have kept both venues and theatre companies open through honest-to-god grassroots popularity. The plays on those two pages represent one of the load-bearing pillars of New Zealand theatre, alongside Creative New Zealand (financially) and Bruce Mason (artistically). The most recent of these plays, End of the Summer Time, has already had two sold-out seasons in Wellington, and the Auckland premiere is on track to do the same. But who is the most successful playwright in New Zealand's theatre history? And what is his legacy? Roger Hall was born in 1939 in Essex, the only child of an insurance official father and schoolteacher mother. He attended college there and avoided the National Service due to 'not being officer material' before emigrating to New Zealand when he was 19 because it was 'more English' than Australia; and it is a fascinating tension to parse that someone who seems as core to New Zealand's storytelling voice as Hall, is a British immigrant. In a punchline that he would probably cut from any draft of one of his comedies as being too obvious, the boat he came over was called The Captain Cook. There was no clear pathway for playwriting in the 1950s but Hall had an early affinity for writing. 'I always wanted to be a writer, but I never thought of being a playwright,' he says in a gentle, low voice with that slight British lilt that has followed many of his generation across the globe. 'English was my best subject, and even when I was at school I got a story published in a national magazine. And that was the only subject I really worked at. Everything else I was bored with, and I really didn't make much effort.' The first character description Hall wrote in his first play Glide Time back in 1976 could describe himself pretty accurately: 'Works hard and efficiently at his job, though pretends not to. Quite well educated, well spoken and with a quick wit. Usually wears quite a good suit.' Shortly after arriving in New Zealand, Hall worked in insurance while performing in amateur theatre, taking on small roles in The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo & Juliet, before attending Wellington's Teacher College in the early 60s. While studying, he wrote and performed in late night sketch shows at Downstage (RIP, but the space it occupied is now called the Hannah Playhouse), continued to perform in plays with the Drama Society and would send in television reviews to The Listener. 'I was, of course, writing letters to my parents,' he says. 'At least one a week, maybe more – and also to my friends. I count the letter writing as part of my writing apprenticeship. Because writing a good letter is still skillful.' After graduating, Hall taught at Berhampore School, and wrote for his students what would technically be his first ever play, The Enormous Christmas Cracker. Meanwhile he was determined to get a sitcom picked up by the BBC back in England. He performed in the Victoria University Revue in the early 70s with the likes of John Clarke (who famously went on to create Fred Dagg, and be one of the grandfathers of New Zealand comedy), Helene Wong and Cathy Downes. He practiced his craft by writing more sketch shows, revues and television plays – all more or less lost forms today. Wong remembers Hall, and co-writer Dave Smith, bringing a strong satirical flavour to the writing, especially in regards to targeting politicians through 'brilliant impersonations'. While political comedy is commonplace now – comedians throw softball questions at politicians on 7 Days at the regular – this wasn't the done thing back then. Politicians were people to be respected, not lampooned, and this style of comedy, extremely British in origin, was only just seeping through. 'They got a rapturous response from audiences who were now used to seeing and hearing those politicians on television,' she says. 'So [they] got laughs from the recognition factor as well as for the sharpness of the writing.' 'It felt like the revue had gone to the next level.' The turning point for Hall was the mid-70s, when he received an Arts Council (the contemporary equivalent of Creative New Zealand) grant to study television writing for six months in New York. He was invited by Robert Lord, New Zealand's first professional playwright, to go to the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights' Workshop – the same year a post-Julliard, pre-Oscar Meryl Streep was there. 'That was for stage plays – the standard was such that Broadway producers were hanging around looking for plays to put on,' he recalls. 'Every play was rehearsed for two days and you could sit and watch, and at night they rehearsed the final reading.' Hall recalls the American audience praising the readings, whether they were good or not. 'I thought, actually, it's not that good… it's just okay, and then I thought, 'Oh, I can do that!' He went up to the workshop's library, began writing a few pages of dialogue set in an office – where Hall was working back in New Zealand at the time – and when he came home from the workshop he wrote Glide Time. 'It changed my life,' he says. It also changed New Zealand theatre. Theatre in 1976 didn't look like it does now. Many of our professional companies were barely a decade old, including the Downstage in Wellington (RIP), the Mercury Theatre in Auckland (RIP), the Fortune Theatre in Dunedin (RIP), and the Court Theatre in Christchurch (still alive!). Circa Theatre, now Wellington's premiere mainstage, was formed as an artist-led response to New Zealand's administration-heavy professional scene, dominated very much by overseas work. 'Apart from Bruce Mason there were virtually no New Zealand plays being presented here,' Hall points out. 'Then you had the community theatres which used to be amateur theatres called the British Drama League, so they didn't do New Zealand plays.' Industry scuttlebutt states that Glide Time was the play that opened Circa Theatre, when in actual fact, the play that opened the theatre was more reminiscent of the theatre scene at the time: Kennedy's Children, an Off-Broadway hit about five people mourning the death of John F. Kennedy. Nobody remembers Kennedy's Children. People remember Glide Time. Glide Time follows the staff of a nameless office bickering, squabbling and generally not doing very well at their jobs. Many have compared it to The Office, but I'd argue the tone sits closer to Ianucci's The Thick of It, or even Veep. Many New Zealanders are probably more familiar with the TV adaptation, Gliding On, which Hall recalls 'everybody', and emphasises 'everybody' watching. It was a sensation back when it premiered at Circa Theatre in 1976, selling out two seasons and then transferring to the Opera House. The waitlist, notoriously, was over 1,000. The cast, and Hall, became overnight celebrities. Glide Time was the first time that Alison Quigan saw a Roger Hall play, when she was working as a typist at Massey University. 'Because the play was about working in an office I was sure he had been a fly on the wall in our office,' she says. 'It was scarily accurate, and I laughed until the tears ran down my face. Seeing that play, I wanted to be an actor.' Quigan went on to be one of Hall's key collaborators, programming many of his shows during her tenure as the Artistic Director of Palmerston North's Centrepoint Theatre, and going on to work on 20 productions, including the upcoming Auckland Theatre Company season of End of the Summer Time. In the aftermath of Glide Time's success, Hall recalls friends saying that they could hear desk drawers being pulled open, dusty scripts being unearthed and typewriters firing away. 'It was a big change in the atmosphere of New Zealand theatre,' he says. 'It was a big incentive because up until then it was thought, by and large, success could only be achieved overseas. 'But here, we realised that the public quite liked us. They found that for New Zealand plays, there was an audience.' For Hall, the success was like winning Lotto. He was 37 at the time, and making a modest living from writing gigs here and there. 'A lot of money came pouring in and suddenly I went from being unknown to known.' His next play, Middle-Age Spread, had a similar level of success in 1977, and the script was picked up by a producer on the West End, where it went on the win the Laurence Olivier Award for Comedy, the only time a play written by a New Zealander has ever won that prize (essentially the British version of the Tonys, the theatre version of the Oscars). From there, the success has barely let up, and he continues to be programmed prolifically across the country, and even abroad in Australia. When asked if he was worried about following up that early success, he says. 'You know they said to Joseph Heller after Catch-22, 'You never wrote another one like that!' and he said, 'nor has anyone else!'' 'I made a lot of money and I was made after that,' he reflects, matter of factly. 'Plays that were quite major productions. The big thing was, if I wrote a play, it would get read at the theatre, which isn't always the case.' (As a fellow playwright, I can fact check that and confirm in the affirmative.) 'Success' is a nebulous word to apply to a form like playwriting. The most well-known playwrights in the country are not necessarily the most prolific, the highest-selling, or frankly, even the best. Those who are popular with the public might be side-eyed by the industry, and those who are beloved by the industry might not even be able to get programmed, let alone sell out shows. So let's put it into numbers. Playwrights make money in one of two ways: commissions and royalties. Commissions involve being paid up front by a company to write a play, and royalties are what the playwright collects after a production – traditionally 10% of the production's total box office. In New Zealand, playwrights are represented by our only playwriting agency, Playmarket, which also acts as an advocate for those same writers and the artform in general. Between 1999 and 2019, eight of the top 10 plays that Playmarket collected royalties on were written by Hall – and the other two plays are not too dissimilar from Hall plays. Without getting into the weeds, that isn't just one production selling extremely well. That is multiple productions selling extremely well. Companies want to produce plays that make money, plays that make money generally build an audience for both playwright and company, and it's a ball that keeps rolling. His most recent show, End of the Summer Time, which has its Auckland premiere later this month, sold out a return season at Wellington's Circa Theatre before it even opened. That sort of financial success has enabled Hall's philanthropy, not just for the arts – he funds an award each year for the Arts Foundation through the Roger Hall Theatre Trust – but for organisations like Forest and Bird. Or let's put it into letters. As in, the letters before and after his name. 'Sir', 'KNZM', 'QSO'. Success by a colonial metric, but success nonetheless. Or just… simple recognition. If you ask someone to name a playwright, they'll probably say 'Shakespeare'. Name another? Probably Roger Hall. That's a lot for one playwright – and one man – to carry. But what is a Roger Hall play? A modern audience would probably assume that a Roger Hall play is a broad comedy with a wink-wink title, focussed on middle-aged, middle-classed Pākeha, with a tight structure that wraps up every loose end and guarantees a pleasant time at the theatre. The fourth wall remains very much intact, and the punchlines prod at their targets rather than skewer them. For those under the age of 40, Hall's work is more of a vague concept, than a lived reality. They might have seen one of his pantomimes as a child, or gone with their elders to see one of his comedies. Despite being around the scene for about fifteen years, I've only ever seen one Roger Hall in full, A Shortcut to Happiness, about a Russian immigrant who teaches dance classes for the elderly. I enjoyed it, while acknowledging that I was not the target audience. Other shows that have premiered since I've been seeing theatre, such as Easy Money (about scammers living in a fancy Viaduct apartment) and Last Legs (set in a retirement home) seemed too familiar for me to bother. Like too many of my compatriots, I assumed there was one Roger Hall play. The reality is, however, that there isn't. There are 47, although there are sequels littered throughout. His most successful plays – Glide Time, Middle Aged Spread, Four Flat Whites in Italy, Social Climbers – fit the assumed tropes outlined above. However, there are experimental shows within his 47. He has written a play entirely from Hansard transcripts, co-written a musical-comedy lampooning Mills and Boone novels, and, in what many people I spoke to consider to be his best, most underrated work, an epic family drama spanning the 20th century called A Way of Life. That production is a fascinating outlier for Hall; a drama, a massive cast, and only having one professional outing. It is, for my money, one of the best family dramas I've ever read to come out of this country. You could point to many reasons that it hasn't become instilled as a New Zealand classic – the demise of the New Zealand Actor's Company, the fact that it hasn't had a production in a major centre, the subject matter being assertively rural and not urban – but the quality definitely isn't one of them. Although Hall works within a form that is conservative, his politics remain pretty left-leaning. His characters are generally middle-class workers, generally anti-corporation and anti-wealth hoarding. This is someone who wrote an anti-Muldoon screed, The Rose, while Muldoon was still prime minister. (It is an unintentional quirk of his success that Hall is probably more financially secure than many of the characters that populate his work.) Playwright, screenwriter and novelist Duncan Sarkies was one of Hall's students back in the 90s – industry lore also says that Hall is the only playwright who can afford to just be a playwright, but he taught at Otago for a number of years – and believes that Hall has a strong sensibility, especially in regards to his specific audience. 'He represented a middle class who might have been ambivalent to theatre and brought them into these spaces in large numbers, held a mirror to them, and made them laugh at themselves,' Sarkies says. 'Regardless of whether his oeuvre is to your taste or not, Roger Hall has had a huge impact on New Zealand theatre, an incredibly positive presence.' 'Roger's plays are mostly comedies with serious intent,' Quigan says. 'To me, comedy is tragedy – but with better timing. The truth must always be present to make people laugh and therefore to relate to the situation. All of Roger's plays are deceptively complex. Many people, when they first read them, see a simple story well told. A light comedy. But, without fail, once we start rehearsing there are many levels that are revealed.' Some of the social politics in his work remain of a time gone by. Women are described quite a bit by their physical attributes, men are notably not. People of colour are not absent, but not necessarily foregrounded. The people in his modern work are middle class in the most idealised (and now unrealistic) version of the middle class – the kind of middle class people who have mortgages, not landlords. But do we need to struggle with the politics in his work? In our conversation in that cafe, Hall points something out about modern theatre when prompted. 'It seems that this generation of plays want to use the stage as a pulpit,' he says. 'Come along and you'll be better informed and your opinion will change on whatever issue it is.' 'That's not necessarily what it's for – or entertaining!' There also hangs the umbrella that his success has not been replicated since. You can point to a few things. There is his sheer prolificity – very few people have written more plays than he has, and that's before you even consider how many of those plays have been programmed. The state of New Zealand theatre is also a very different place now than it was when he started writing; there are more playwrights, fewer theatres, and much less funding available for both. It's competitive, and not just among compatriots; theatres that programme plays are also programming musicals, comedies, dance works, and often commercial bookings just to stay alive. Crucially, Hall also writes for audiences that are often not catered to by our local playwrights: people outside urban centres, people working in amateur dramatic societies, and people who simply want to have a good time at the theatre. His work is not free of politics, not even close, but his politics are hidden beneath an accessible form and guaranteed punchlines. (It is perhaps the only cruel irony of his career that his best play, A Way of Life – which is one of his most political, and incisive, speaking to the struggles of rural life in particular – has still only been put on once.) The main factor, however, is that he also writes for an older audience that already exists. He writes for people who already go to see theatre, the people who have grown up with him, and the people who trust him to show them, gently, who they are and what they think. It's what he's been doing for 50 years, and there is an undeniable amount of trust built there. The only others who come close are, frankly, no longer with us. Helene Wong, one of his first collaborators, sums it up succinctly: 'I think the huge body of work also reflects the fact that he's lived his long life basically documenting his experience of all its stages. 'Write what you know, they say – and he has.' There is a popular myth in playwriting circles. It goes that there are three sections in the Playmarket archive – A-R, Roger Hall and S-Z. Playmarket's director Murray Lynch debunks this, and corrects it. It's a story that illustrates volume as much as it does prestige and importance. 'Each playwright has their own named file. In the A-Z, Roger is highlighted in a different colour,' he says. Every playwright has a file, Sir Roger gets an entire colour. Hall has been generous with his time with me. He's been extremely prompt with confirming interviews, setting up a time, even though after our chat he is rushing off to a meeting of the Devonport branch of the U3A, short for University of the Third Age, a group that focuses on people in the 'third stage of life' who want to keep their minds active and connect with others in their community. (It'd make a great setting for a play, really.) This generosity is something that many people I spoke to emphasised, almost as much as how important his work is to New Zealand. It is evident, financially, with his philanthropy, but his moral support is also noted. 'Roger was very kind, very attentive,' says Sarkies. 'He shared a lot of the dark arts of writing, like planting a seed that will have a payoff later, rules of threes, that kind of thing. He understood tension in writing, which may or may not surprise people. 'He was very, very supportive of me and gave me a lot of confidence. This meant a lot to me and I remain very grateful.' Towards the end of our interview, I point out that End of the Summer Time features, both in Auckland and Wellington, his name literally and metaphorically over the title. It wasn't End of the Summer Time by Roger Hall, it was Roger Hall's End of the Summer Time. He's perhaps the only playwright in the country who can do that (even though it's a marketing ploy rather than an ego play). His response? 'That's possibly true. You're saying it is true?' He appears humbled by it, but not necessarily surprised. I ask him more pointedly about how he feels about where he sits in the theatre scene – playwright, philanthropist, man with letters before and after his name. His answer is simple, structured and frankly, factual.
The Spinoff
a day ago
- The Spinoff
All the novels I studied at high school, ranked
Year 13 student Zara Dollie considers all the books she studied from years 9 to 13, and puts them in their place. From Shakespeare's tragic love to S.E. Hinton's street fights, we have all battled with 'novel studies' throughout our NCEA careers. A 'novel study' consists of closely analysing a book chosen by your teacher to write essays about. It's often a dreaded aspect of the year because it requires doing things teenagers don't typically want to do: deep reading, critical thinking, and clear writing under pressure. How often do these stories continue to impact us after the final exam is over? What life lessons did 1984 teach me? How did The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas develop my capacities for empathy? With the new English curriculum incoming, now feels like a good time to revisit the novels I was made to study throughout secondary school – and reflect on the ones that stayed with me. To help me reason with how these books impacted me (or not), I ranked them using the following criteria: How relevant the text was at the time I studied it; Its literary merit; Whether it taught me any lasting life lessons. 5. The Raging Quiet by Sherryl Jordan Studied in Year 11 Marnie's journey to Fernleigh and her catalytic relationship with Raven filled me with an unimaginable amount of disdain – and I wasn't the only one that felt this way. Marnie's relationship with Raven, while clearly intended to be poignant, didn't resonate with me the way other characters in media have. I struggled to invest myself in the progression of their bond, and instead enjoyed the individual personalities of the characters. That said, Jordan's ability to highlight the complexities of empathy was evident and admirable. At age 15 I was reading Sally Rooney, dabbling in Emily Brontë, growing amicable with Murakami. While The Raging Quiet taught independence, standing up to conformity, and breaking away from societal norms, it lacked the mind-bending, evocative depth other authors provided. I do believe that incorporating Aotearoa writers into the curriculum is important, but I would have liked to explore these themes through a more culturally familiar setting – one that reflected our own society. Jordan is a fantastic writer, but this story didn't challenge me in the ways I needed at that stage. At Year 11 we needed something complex, a story to sink our teeth into, and The Raging Quiet was not that novel. I do think, however, that this book would be an amazing novel for students between Year 7 and 8 to read as a class. 4. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne Studied in Year 9 The story of Shmuel and Bruno is heavy enough to make any adult eyes well with tears, so as an impressionable 13-year-old, I found this book profoundly sad. This story was so impactful because of its simplicity. Boyne didn't write descriptive, gruesome scenes, but instead used the innocence of childhood as a tool to convey the weight of tragedy. The contrast between a child's curiosity and the bleak reality of the holocaust struck a chord in all of us. Boyne's storytelling sparked conversations not just about history, but about empathy, injustice, and just how easily innocence can be lost. Boyne's writing contained the perfect level of mature language for our age group. We were taught valuable lessons through this book, such as the dangers of prejudice – a relevant lesson during the rise of bullying online and offline. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was the first in-depth exposure to just how gruesome the holocaust was for most students in our class. Many students later revisited the holocaust through social science and history, which made this novel a formative first step — one that shaped our emotional understanding before the facts arrived. 3. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey Studied in Year 13 The themes within One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest were eye-opening, fresh and fitting for a Year 13 class. Its structure and characters were unlike anything I'd studied in school before — a welcome shift. At its core, the novel taught the importance of human connection – an appropriate lesson at this age. In the novel, the main character McMurphy fosters connections between patients in a psychiatric hospital, despite their different struggles, and creates a web of camaraderie. His ability to unite people showed students that authentic leadership sometimes lies in rebellion against injustice, and in empathy, and in the capacity of human connection to repel oppressive systems. This made us question authority and institutions, raising conversations about how those in power can misuse their authority under the guise of order or care (for example, the ward's use of electroshock therapy and lobotomy as tools for control, rather than healing.) These weren't just literary concepts. They were life lessons. And they stayed with me. 2. 1984 by George Orwell Studied in Year 12 Studying dystopia in Year 12 was one of my favourite units throughout my school years. 1984 hooked my class from the beginning — probably because dystopian fiction is already so familiar to teens through popular novels such as The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, and Shatter Me. The novel offered countless lessons: the metaphors were rich, it's structured well and contains a diversity of sentence types, all of which made it interesting to read. Orwell's use of auditory imagery, specifically during the Two Minutes Hate (a daily ritual in which citizens are forced to express hatred for the Party's enemies), revealed to us how writing can unsettle a reader on a visceral level — and taught us how to do the same. 1984 was timely. The totalitarian environment reflected what was happening in 2024 — from surveillance control to political spin. Through Orwell we discovered how impactful propaganda can be: ringing bells of war time propaganda, the Russian revolution, and other periods we knew about because of school and other forums. This sparked questions about life itself, such as the implications of totalitarianism and what it means for the future. Orwell helped shape our perception of worldly events as well as taught us lessons about literature and what it can do. 1. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton Studied in Year 10 'Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold,' still echoes through my mind whenever I see a fiery sunset burn orange. That line — and the book it comes from — was hands down the most important novel I was taught at school. Not because it was easy. Not because it got me a good grade. But because it stuck. Hinton framed the chaos of adolescence like the films Mid90s, Eighth Grade, and Normal People would later. The ongoing relevance of the ideas in The Outsiders shows that its lessons are impactful — they move beyond the time the novel was written. I was 14 when I studied this novel – just old enough to begin questioning things like loyalty, family, class – but too young to know where to look for answers. That's why this novel landed. Considering Hinton was 16 when she wrote it, I felt like she understood exactly how I was feeling. She wrote teenagers like they were real people, rather than just mere characters waiting to be analysed. The depth of each character added to the book's literary strength and made them more relatable for our age group. Reading the novel felt like having someone articulate the inner workings of teenagehood. While the plot of the novel hit hard, the quiet moments that Hinton described resonated too. Like the way Ponyboy describes sunsets, or his deep thoughts about poetry and loss. This novel showed me that vulnerability isn't weakness, being sensitive doesn't mean you're soft, and being observant is a gift. The Outsiders showed us that real strength can come from empathy. During Year 10, I thought I was far too complicated and far too alternative for others to relate to. But Ponyboy, the 'greasers' and their utter disdain for the 'socs' made me feel like I was part of something. The main concept I took away from this book was: 'Sometimes, you have to make poor decisions for the better outcome.' Those are words I pulled straight from the essay I wrote back then in Year 10. Consider Johnny's decision to kill Bob – on the surface, this is entirely wrong, both morally and legally. But he makes this decision to protect Ponyboy. Their strong sense of companionship taught me that morality isn't always black and white. It made me realise that sometimes, the hardest choices are the ones that teach us the most. And that kind of insight? It lasts. If books we study in school are meant to shape our thinking, then let them be books that challenge us, comfort us, and — like Ponyboy's story — stay with us beyond the final bell.
1News
a day ago
- 1News
Watch: Bridgerton actor fights off phone thief
An English actor has been captured on CCTV taking on a man who attempted to steal her phone. Genevieve Chenneour, who stars in the Netflix series Bridgerton as Clara Livingston, was waiting for a coffee in a London cafe in February this year when the incident unfolded. In the video, the man could be seen grabbing Chenneour's phone from a bench where it was sitting behind her. When Chenneour realised what was occurring, she turned around and confronted the man, who was sliding the phone into his pocket. She snatched it back before the 18-year-old thief, later identified as Zacariah Boulares, was tackled by Chenneour's friend. ADVERTISEMENT The video then showed her hitting Boulares with the phone multiple times. On May 29, Boulares pleaded guilty to theft and assaulting another customer.
