Now you’re talking my language

New Zealanders have a distinct accent. Our trans-Tasman cuzzies like to remind us of this by insisting we say “fush und chups” and “sex” instead of “six”.

That’s OK. We can take it. Just please (and I’m going to swear here, so brace yourself) for fuck’s sake stop trying to imitate it.

The worst case lately has been on Aussie TV series Underbelly, which in its second series examines the activities of the Mr Asia drug ring in the 1970s and 1980s. The key figure in the story was a Kiwi named Terry Clark, who set up a Melbourne-based import/export business – importing heroin to Australia and New Zealand, and exporting addicts into holes in the ground.

Actress Anna Hutchison plays an important role as Alison Dine, a New Zealand kindergarten teacher who ended up running Clark’s network for a bit while he was in prison. Hutchison can pull off a Kiwi accent; primarily because she’s a Kiwi.

But Katie Wall, who plays Kiwi lawyer Karen Soich, cannot do a Kiwi accent to save herself. She sounds like an Aussie trying to do a Kiwi accent. Which she is. But what’s worse is that she sounds like an Aussie trying to do what an Aussie thinks a Kiwi accent sounds like. The result is this bastardised combination of Aussie “eeee” and Kiwi “uuuh” that is just revolting to listen to.

The thing is, if she’d just done an Aussie accent, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

An embarrassing confession here: I went to Canada in 1996 and spent two weeks in Montreal. I then spent a week in LA to do touristy things. While in LA I was in the hotel elevator and heard this small group of people talking. I had been away from South Pacific accents for a while, but this was familiar. I said: “Hey, are you guys Aussies?” and they looked at me funny and said: “Nah, mate, we’re Kiwis”.

I couldn’t tell them apart.

Ever since then I’ve maintained the difference between our accents is three weeks.

But this special message goes out to Katie Wall: If you can’t do it, don’t try. You’re right up there with Dick Van Dyke’s cockney on Mary Poppins and Meryl Streep’s “Deengo ate moi baaeybe”. Which, if Katie was doing it Kiwi, would no doubt have been: “a dungo aite muh boibbie”.

Based on a True Story

The second series of Underbelly has hit New Zealand TV screens. The ads for the show say it's a true story, but now a journalist involved in breaking the Terry Clark story has come forward and said Underbelly's version of events is a heap of shit.

It's an interesting issue this whole education versus entertainment question. The series' creators will say they have bent the truth a bit to enable them to tell the story better. Maybe just so they can give Anna Hutchison's breasts more airtime. And anyway, they never said it was going to be a documentary.

This is true. But then, are they entitled to advertise it as a "true story"? It seems to me that filmmakers get around this by saying: "Based on a true story". But the idea that it's "based on a true story" is so tenuous that it would be more accurate to say "not complete fiction". Or "we got one of the name's right ... but it's spelt differently".

The best of these was admittedly the Cohen brothers' Fargo. The start of the film says the events are based on a true story. In fact, it wasn't. But who was to know?