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We all know how tedious, dejecting and exhausting flat hunting is. In my first year we applied for over twenty houses before we found a landlord who was willing to let four chain-smoking nineteen-year-olds rent their house.

The first flat I lived in was in a council estate in the deep, dark depths of the Glaswegian ghetto. We were new to flat hunting of course, but still should have realised that something was suspect when we had to battle our way through a group of young skinheads on our initial tour of the house. “It’s a family area,” Kate mentioned as we watched them throw bottles at each other. Putting their violence down to youthful exuberance, we took the flat.

Wadestown is a family area. Karori is a family area. Yoker, Glasgow was not.

The local pub was nicknamed ‘McStabs’, a result of the drug related knife-crime that the area was famous for. Within days of moving in we had the words “Fuck off and cut your hair, New Zealand dafties” scrawled across our door, a brick through our window, and our naïve attempt at a vegetable garden destroyed. The perpetrators? A knife-wielding street gang whose members called themselves ‘Neds’.

The eight months we lived there were punctuated with violence and crime. Towards the end of our stay we came home to find that our door had been kicked in. Kate’s Ned connections informed her that a man had thrown his crack onto our balcony as he ran away from the police, and had later broken in to retrieve his booty.

We shouldn’t have been surprised when Kate failed to give us our £1000 bond back, given her allegiance with the Neds. We were too stupid to deserve it really; we were so trusting that if she’d told us the crack was icing sugar we would have believed her.

I’ve got a great flat now, but finding it was hard work. The landlord is a little odd; he spent a good ten minutes reiterating that we were “not to EVER throw a television off the roof.” We giggled at his eccentric emphasis of this as we signed the tenancy agreement, and wanted to ask more about his last tenants. “Of course we’d never throw a television off the roof! What an absurd thing to do!”

This weekend we threw the television out of the window. Why? New Zealand’s Next Top Model.

I’ve always enjoyed seeing how New Zealand television programs compare to their international counterparts. I watched Stars in Their Eyes with particular glee, and savored the embarrassment I felt when Simon Barnett felt it necessary to mention that he “didn’t agree with the lifestyle” of a lesbian singer. The success of such programs surely relies on their audiences being simultaneously embarrassed and entertained by their heavy-handed production, and their failure to reach the mark. They emphasise that indoctrinated Kiwi attitude that, if we are not always successful, at least ‘we gave it a go’.

New Zealand’s Next Top Model takes this to the extreme. The whole idea of the show doesn’t really make sense—when did a supermodel last emerge out of New Zealand? We still cling to the memory of our darling Rachel Hunter, who now designs a range of dated womanswear for The Warehouse.

The promo promised a cringe-worthy version of the American franchise. It was difficult to not let out a nervous giggle when one of the judges deemed it appropriate to tell a model that she “walks like a cripple.”

I laughed harder when the models were taken, not to Tokyo or Paris like the American contestants, but to the conservative chain store Max. Max obviously sponsor the show, but did they have to be so obvious as to have the challenge winner exclaim “Oh my God, I’m so glad I’ve won, because all my life I’ve wanted to be in a Max shoot!” Bit of a specific life ambition, isn’t it?

A flatmate of mine is friends with one of the girls from Christchurch, and tells me that while she is portrayed as an absolute airhead on the show, in reality she is modest, quiet, and intelligent. It’s fair to assume that the producers thought that it would be entertaining to portray the girls as stereotypically idiotic models, but did they really have to include lines like “I like modeling because, like, it’s good to look good and stuff eh”? The producers clearly didn’t count on the fact that this, in addition to its clumsy production and maniacal judges, makes the program unbearable, and not in a funny way.

I hope our landlord never finds out about the tele-vision incident. If he does though, I can honestly say that it was not an act of vandalism; it was an act of national pride.

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