Shoe repairmen of the world unite

On Friday evening I sat down in front of 3 News to find a story to pick apart. The promo at the end of Home and Away suggested a prime candidate, a story about a kangaroo rescue in the ocean. To me that sounded equal parts freakish and unnecessary within in a news hour. So even before being greeted to by Mike McRoberts' dulcet "Kia Ora, good evening" I had found my target.

But this was all to change. Something came along so ridiculous, so un-newsworthy and so gosh darn flimsy, I just had to write about it.

It was a story about shoe repairmen. It clocked in at number four in 3 News' top stories, about six minutes into proceedings, so we're talking headline stuff here. It was a report from the particularly annoying reporter Tony Field, the master of the ‘news voice'. You know, the absurd style of speech solely used by news reporters whereby the MIDDLE word of a sentence is stressed and so is the END. Field is the best in the business at ‘news voice'. He's also a master nodder. Whenever he delivers a piece to camera he will sharply nod his head downward on every second word, alternating from side to side. Sometimes if you're lucky he'll get carried away and nod to every syllable, so you can get three nods to a single utterance of "recession".

And that's exactly what this particular story started off as, a story about the credit crunch, the global financial crisis, the R word. At first this made me zone out a little bit, but then the mention of "a 3 News informal survey" slapped me across the face.

An "informal survey" in Tony Field's case was to ask one person (Richard Gardner - Consumer) what their shopping habits are, then anointing him as a representative of all New Zealand consumers. Turns out, shock horror, that we're buying less things in the recession. Wow. News breakthrough. Great reporting, Tony.

But the best, or more bizarrely useless, was yet to come. Shoe sales are up, apparently 5%, although that figure could well have come from another ‘informal survey'.

After this nugget of useless information, Field went on to report the contradictory 'fact' that shoe repairmen were the real winners in this recession. He backed this up with the accurate-sounding statistic that some shoe repairmen had "almost twice as many customers" this year so far. Such a hard-hitting statistic may well have come from an 'informal survey'. Then we were shown a collection of shoe repairmen saying that they were pretty busy. Interestingly each one was given a graphic that named the shop they worked at. Was I now watching a Tony Field facilitated advert for the shoe repairmen industry? For a lead news story, this was just plain weird.

But the strangest thing was yet to come. After Tony Field's nodfest of a conclusion, back in the studio Hilary Barry took us through a list of Tony's shoe care tips. For real. The list included such gems as ‘make sure wet shoes are dry before putting them on' and ‘polish them'.

For such a useless headline report, it did manage to teach me a couple of things; informal surveys are hilarious, and Tony Field probably has stock in the shoe repairmen industry.