OPINION

This is how the 1 p.m. Covid press conferences end: not with some sort of farewell or haere rā or recognition, we saw the last of the longest-running TV show of the Covid era , just the sight of Chris Hipkins leaving the stage and placing a pen in his inside jacket pocket. First he clicked the tip to remove the nib so the ink wouldn’t leak. Safety first; safety last.

It was a long and strange journey, those 1:00 p.m. shows. They were by appointment. Too bad they don’t allow commercials because the potential commercial fallout was huge. “What we’re fighting for are eyeballs,” media mogul Kendall Roy says in Succession. “Eyeballs that we convert to our customer base, eyeballs that we create and sell to advertisers.” The 1 p.m. show had the eyeballs of a nation everywhere.

There was something very old there. It was a listen, listen, a proclamation in the village square announcing the progress of the plague. But there was another kind of seniority in the 1 p.m. show: we watched it on TV. It wasn’t Netflix, or Neon, or any streaming service you could watch at your leisure. You had to be there. It was live, you couldn’t miss it.

It was beautifully designed and yet extremely inexpensive. The props department went as far as a few lecterns and a New Zealand flag. It would have been frivolous to add a vase of flowers or something decorative; the plague, with its life and death themes, demanded austere production values. He reduced it to basic Trump principles. Male. Women. Camera. TV.

It was shocking propaganda for the Labor Party. If you squinted, you could see the calm, reassuring face of Labor icon Michael Joseph Savage floating in the background, as well as the flowing blonde locks of laser-eyed Norman Kirk and Helen Clark. It was three years of a party political broadcast that heralded Labor – and Jacinda Ardern – as the cure for the plague.

But if the 1 p.m. show gave the idea that we were operating under a one-party state, at least it saved us from having to tune into any kind of political debate. Nobody wanted to hear about Simon Bridges at 1 p.m. Nobody wanted to hear Judith Collins at 1 p.m. and nobody wanted to hear Christopher Luxon at 1 p.m. There was a purity about it. Much of it was about politics and yet she resisted politics. It was about the most important thing: health.

He made a star out of Dr. Ashley Bloomfield. The cult of the Chief Health Officer was created at 1pm and there was nothing manipulated about it – he was just very clearly a perfectly decent guy, working crazy hours as a crisis demanded.

It also made New Zealand sign language interpreter Alan Wendt a star. He was just as decent and kind as Ashley Bloomfield, and when he lowered his arms and spoke, he had brilliant sense. “You don’t want to impersonate the person or the singer in any way,” he said of his contributions to the 1 p.m. lectures, “but you want to convey as much as possible how they speak and sort of some of the implications behind what they say.”

He presented to the nation the questions posed by the press gallery. It didn’t make a star out of any of the reporters.

It was fresh and compelling in its first season, in 2020. It was solid viewing but not terribly spectacular in season two, in 2021. It got stale and old in its third season. It had to end. The eyeballs had wandered off. Hipkins left the building and devoted the 1 p.m. conference to the exact same thing we hope and pray will plague happen: history.