We are resolutely stuck in the Dog Days of January.  It’s a Never-Never world where the television content is execrable, a crap factor that’s neatly matched by inane newspaper stories on everything from crash-of-the-day to disease-of-the-week.

Other bloggers have taken to their sites to express their fury at this. And while I don’t blame them, this time round I’m not joining the fray.

Why? Because a period of enforced recuperation has allowed me the luxury of reconnecting with A Great Love, one that almost became a career – food and cooking.  These days it’s a love that has to satisfy itself with the eye candy of the Food Channel.

And while I wrote a column for “Cuisine” magazine last year lambasting the telly fashion for food-as-competition shows, in the spirit of accentuate-the-positive-delineate-the-negative that has heralded the start of 2012, here’s my choice of absolute faves that take pride of place on my MySky.

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It’s that time of year again – when, in a strange departure from traditional news values, websites are imbued with a kind of happy ho-ho-ho-ness and the real stories are often buried underneath stories such as  “How to appropriately regift”.

The lists, the bests and worsts of the year, have started to sprout like rare end-of-year funghi.  If you can’t beat ‘em, I say…..

Best News Story

Christchurch Earthquake 1, 2, 3, 4 …

In a country where annually news is thin on the ground, both channels share the honour of Best TV News cover of the quakes, even if 3 News had the by far the most extensive video on February’s killer quake (if only because ONE News’ building was virtually destroyed and its equipment largely lost or inaccessible in the wreckage).

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Even before meeting him, Anthony Flannery was described to me by a top Australian news executive as a “nice guy, short pants”, a comment that forced a smile and a nod of agreement from  another top Australian news executive.

And so it’s proven to be. He was well liked by staff and by management during his time at the Deathstar.

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We Kiwis love competitions – a fact that our telly networks reflect throughout their schedules. From cooking to its natural conclusion “Extreme Makeover: Weightloss Edition”, to being the best model on TV3’s “NZNTM” (it’s not that hard, surely?), we relish the struggle to win.

The best competition of all though, has to be “Homai Te Pakipaki” over on Maori Television. “Homai” takes karaoke singing and elevates it to an art form.

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Congratulations to Martyn “Bomber” Bradbury and his Tumeke! Blog scoop, outing Vote for Change activist Alex Fogerty for his links to an Australian white supremacist group.

Vote for Change promptly booted Mr Fogerty out of the group but not before dear old Bob Harvey quit the campaign in disgust saying, according to the Herald website, he did not want to be part of a group that had not “done their homework” on their members.

It feels a little odd to be giving kudos to Bomber Bradbury as his views and rants generally can be labelled as “loony conspiracy theory left” but a scoop is a scoop and anyone who hooks up with rabid racist groups deserves to be given the boot from a lobby group that hopes to persuade a majority of New Zealanders to again change the voting system.

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We’ve always been a country that’s been news starved.  Unless your newsroom had a bottomless budget, there are only about six decent stories a year to fight over, with too many journalists to cover them.

Tuesday’s earthquake turned that on its head. Journalists around the country were faced with covering the biggest disaster affecting the most New Zealanders since World War II.

How individuals fared forged reputations – and destroyed others – but it also gives us a clear roadmap of how punters used the media.

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