Before you yell, "the answer's screemingly obvious" - it's like choosing between reading Proust and a Mickey Mouse comic and Mr Mouse wins hands down - then take a look at Campaign.

Oh sorry you can't - unless you whip down to the film festival in Christchurch to catch it before its shut up in its box never to see cinematic light again because it's had its two screenings in Wellington and that's all it'll get thanks to television programming stupidity.

One can imagine the reasoning that went into turning down Campaign, a highly entertaining documentary which has more belly laughs in it than any rotton episode of the recent series of Market Forces.

Of course only campaign trail camp followers would want to see a documentary about New Zealand's most political electorate in the first year of MMP.

Only pol sci students would be interested in watching former National candidate Mark Thomas handle indirect suggestions that he was gay, then get stabbed in the back by his party leader hours before he went to the polls.

Only pinko politicos would be the faintest bit interested in seeing Alliance candidate Danna Glendinning putting on a slap happy make-up face before sobbing her guts out on camera.

Nah, Joe Public wouldn't be interested in that lot, sounds too Shakespearian, not nearly real TV enough.

The truth of the matter is that Kiwis love documentaries, can't get enough of them. But programmers have decreed that we must have them served up to us in high chairs, bibs around our necks and be spoon fed the information by a mummy presenter or voice-over to recap what Johnny has just seen or is about to see before each ad bweakie.

That's why we can't have Campaign on our screens but we can have burnt out babe-on-the-make Geri Haliwell cavorting among her nouveau riche-bad antique furniture in her all-that-money-can-buy mansion for 800 hours because the subject matter is as simple as suet and we are, apparently, fascinated by post-Spice angst.

While bikini-clad Halliwell whiled away her exiled hours on a French hotel balcony contemplating her days in the sun and writing plaintive letters to Prince Charles on what to do next, unbeknown to this most bumtious of budgerigars she was being head-hunted (if you can hunt a head the size of a pin) by the United Nations.

Girl-power was what was needed to seek United Nations initiatives and Geri was the right girl at the right time. And why not? Fellow dwarf, United States secretary of state Madeleine Albright did recently on a fashion television programme revealing that she wore slip-on lapels during her appearance in the Kosovo conflict.

They do bear a resemblence. Madeleine and Geri both look like they've sprung from the same House of Budgerigar nest and both are gifted at doing bad Marilyn Monroe impersonations of Happy Birthday Mr President.

But that's television isn't it? If you watch enough of the stuff everybody starts looking the same after a while, as if they're related. For instance, had it ever occurred to you that Coronation Street publican, Alec Gilroy, and Paul Holmes might be brothers?