Award winning television reviewer and author Diana Wichtel returns with a brilliantly funny and nostalgic memoir.
“If, all those years ago, someone had told me that one day I could watch television for a living I would have thought it as improbable an occupation as running away from home to join the circus, especially as I never liked circuses anyway,” she says.
Diana expertly blends her personal journey, with the evolution of television, a medium that undoubtedly shaped her life and career. Born to a Polish Holocaust survivor father and Kiwi mother, her parents were too busy to police her viewing during the golden age of television. Her early years were marked by family upheaval, moving from Canada to New Zealand, without her father.
Growing up with television as both a companion and cultural teacher, she later became New Zealand’s leading TV critic for the NZ Listener. She is most well known for her sharp wit and insights that earned her both admiration and hate mail!
“Everyone’s a critic. I have boxes of bracing communications from readers and other victims over the years, particularly from pre-digital times, when letter writers could take 280 characters just to say hello. They are filed under precise classifications honed over decades as a critic: ‘Nice Mail,’ ‘Hate Mail,’ ‘Mad Anonymous Rants’... The contents of these files radiate pleasure, passion, outrage, the red mist of blind, incoherent fury - a gamut of emotion regularly run by any committed consumer of television, sometimes within the space of a single commercial half hour,” says Diana.
“Each letter I receive is a tribute to the medium’s power, the deeply personal bunch it packs.”
In Unreel, Diana reflects on love, loss, resilience and the power of TV to mirror societal change. Her narrative is laced with humour and celebrates television’s impact while offering a deeply personal story of self-discovery.
Diana Wichtel is the author of Driving to Treblinka. She was born in Vancouver, Canada. Her mother, Patricia, was a New Zealander and her father, Benjamin, a Polish Jew who escaped from the Nazi train taking his family to the Treblinka extermination camp in World War II. Read an extract of Unreel.
Reviewer: Andrea Molloy
Penguin