Calum Henderson 
Calum Henderson watches Jeremy Kyle every day for a week, and gets up to his eyeballs in other people’s misery. Jeremy Kyle’s television show has been on the air now for over ten years. In that time there have been over 2,000 episodes filmed – something like a full two-and-a-half months worth of bickering, shouting, … Read more
Every four years rugby fans from around the world come together to experience the sport’s ultimate glory – hearing the absolute belter that is World in Union at the start of the Rugby World Cup. This year’s version of rugby’s great anthem is threaded throughout the tournament’s conceptual 20-minute Michael Jackson music video of an … Read more
It’s been a busy old week in Premier League twitter with the first round of Champions League football to play in or watch on telly, but there’s still been time for the important things – celebrity haircuts, European basketball mania, and a competition to find Stoke’s best baker. Premier League Pun of the Week A … Read more
With the BMW Championship teeing off on Friday morning NZ time, we are only two tournaments away from finding the PGA Tour Champion for 2015. That person wins the FedEx Cup. The what? Calum Henderson finds out. What is the FedEx Cup? The FedEx Cup is the PGA Tour’s Championship trophy. It will be awarded … Read more
New Zealand’s music charts are suddenly awash with charity singles. The teams are: Guy Williams and Scribe, Crowded House and every other non-dead New Zealand musician. Calum Henderson surveys the Charity Single Wars. The Pigeon Song Cause: KidsCan Stars: Guy Williams, Scribe Rival charity song composer Joseph Moore described the charity single wars as the biggest … Read more
The international break is a special time on Premier League Twitter. Lots of joyful plane and bus selfies as players disperse around the world and catch up with their countrymen, tempered by the grim spectacle of the non-internationals left behind to fend for themselves. Shopping … pic.twitter.com/2iriHt0HHi — Jermain Defoe OBE (@IAmJermainDefoe) September 8, 2015 … Read more
Calum Henderson spends the morning watching two strangers get married on The Edge TV’s thrillingly shambolic live stream. While other radio hosts have been running around binge drinking, getting divorced or floating across lakes on bouncy castles this survey period, The Edge’s finest purveyors of horseplay – Jay-Jay, Mike and Dom – have been suspiciously … Read more
Rachel Glucina’s new “Entertainment + Celebrity News” website Scout goes live on Monday. To get us foaming at the mouth and subscribed up to MediaWorks’ salacious new gossip arm, they’ve posted a teaser video to the site … So what can we expect? A weirdly specific list of possibilities is flashed before our eyes – … Read more
There are approximately three million golfers active on the PGA tour. We know the big names – the Spieths, the McIlroys, the Days – and they’re all well and good. But who are the cool, funny, and weird golfing legends hiding down the card, the ones we can really get behind? Is there a golf … Read more
Calum Henderson goes forking mad for the latest competitive sport to hit Maori TV: furious forklift driving in The World Forklift League. Proof that mad genius is alive and well in Aotearoa New Zealand: 1. Somebody came up with the idea of forklift driving as a competitive sport 2. They then packaged that idea as … Read more
Calum Henderson spends an evening with TV One’s Dog Squad and Purina Pound Pups, and explains why you should get amongst these primetime pooches. TV One’s doggone double-header begins in the familiar ‘authority figures vs lowlifes’ format of reality programming that New Zealanders love so dearly. Despite an admittedly very exciting point of difference (dogs), … Read more
The morning after the X Factor final a workmate told me he was on his way to interview Beau Monga. “Oh yeah?” I said. “What’s Boh been up to?” “Uh… winning X Factor?” Ah shit. Why had I assumed he was talking about Boh Runga, who fronted the band Stellar* 15 years ago, rather than … Read more
Some great news came through yesterday: John Campbell is going to Samoa to play rugby. In anticipation of the big match The Spinoff’s leading rugby expert has picked John Campbell’s Rugby Team XV for their first ever test match against Samoa. 1 Duncan Garner Like his front row teammates, Garner has proven he can more … Read more
Our off-peak TV connoisseur Calum Henderson watches The Tipping Point, the human versus machine game show that strikes a crucial balance between moronic and enthralling. In moments of hopelessness and despair, it can be easy to think that TV’s best game shows belong to the past. Millionaire has been clocked. Every possible permutation of Deal … Read more
With Heartland in it’s final, feeble week of life, Calum Henderson sat down and watched one day’s worth of nostalgic programming. TVNZ Heartland is dying. At midnight on the 31st of May, the national nostalgia channel will shut down, taking with it our chances of ever again opportunistically stumbling upon a classic episode of Mucking … Read more
For this Throwback Thursday, Calum Henderson watches Gary McCormick’s Heartland special on the tiger-footed town of Wainuiomata. Two big national events from the winter of 1994: in Dunedin, someone with the last name Bain shot his whole family, and in Wainuiomata, Gary McCormick shot an interview with a woman called Chloe for the TV show … Read more
Calum Henderson takes a television roadie in a car full of poshos through the bleak bartering wilderness of Antiques Roadtrip. What’s it about? After Flog It! proved far from the genuine article, I did what any antiques peddler would do after an auction failure and scrambled to recoup my losses. I MySkyed several episodes of … Read more
Appointment Viewing is a regular column which features a Spinoff writer watching one or more episodes of a current show and attempting to decode its appeal. This week: Calum Henderson watches Flog It!, a sub-par Antiques Roadshow with bizarre new wave beats. What’s it about? I first became aware of Flog It! via an ad which … Read more
Calum Henderson continues his series of really stupid yet incredibly entertaining Spinoff stories by imagining ace ensemble comedy Party Down as an indoor netball team. // The thing about a good ensemble cast is that it can transcend space and time. You could transplant the casts of Friends onto a spaceship or Seinfeld into the current … Read more
Appointment viewing… is a regular column which features a Spinoff writer watching one or more episodes of a current show and attempting to decode its appeal. This week: Calum Henderson watches Louie, the surrealist baby cartoon not unlike its adult counterpart. // Episodes Consumed: I don’t know. I can’t even begin to count the number of times … Read more
Calum Henderson watched Good Morning every day for a week, and recorded every joyful moment of the bizarre lifestyle show. // If Judy Bailey was the mother of the nation, then Mary Lambie was like an aunty you went and stayed with in the school holidays. Every Good Morning was filled with pointless, time-consuming crafts … Read more
This Throwback Thursday, Calum Henderson discusses In Bed With Chris Needham, a self-shot teenage cult classic from the BBC. It starts with a pale, spotty youth, shifting from foot to foot, hanging on the telephone. His astonishing barnet is the cumulative result of not just one but a prolonged series of bad haircuts. “I’m not … Read more
Calum Henderson looks back at the 1992 World Cup through the garish lens of Sky’s incessant memorialising and finds the coverage was as fine as the cricket. Was the 1992 Cricket World Cup really as good as everyone remembers it? Is it wrong to hold a flame for the golden summers of One World of Sport? … Read more