Te Radar’s show Eat­ing The Dog has the hypoth­e­sis that New Zealand’s his­to­ry and nation­al char­ac­ter have been shaped by all the crazy fools out there, hav­ing ill-fat­ed adven­tures, mak­ing things that don’t quite work, and gen­er­al­ly get­ting a bit car­ried away.

Eat­ing The Dog is a slideshow at heart, but the selec­tion of sub­jects and Te Radar’s enthu­si­as­tic deliv­ery make it more than just a bunch of old pho­tos. It’s like vis­it­ing a provin­cial muse­um and get­ting a guid­ed tour from a fel­low who shows you all the weird objects out the back and tells you all the good sto­ries.

And I get the feel­ing that a show like this would­n’t be pos­si­ble with­out the excel­lent online col­lec­tions avail­able via the Nation­al Library. In fact, I’d love to see more inter­est­ing pho­tos and sto­ries from the archives pre­sent­ed in such an inter­est­ing way.

About halfway through the show, I was hit with a sud­den real­i­sa­tion — there are no women in Te Radar’s sto­ries. A few wives are men­tioned, but all the main char­ac­ters are men.

Te Radar did address this. He swears he looked for some inter­est­ing wom­en’s sto­ries to include in the show, but it turned out that all the peo­ple doing bloody stu­pid stuff in the old­en days were men. Or, at least that’s how his­to­ry records it.

But based on the wide range of bloody stu­pid con­tem­po­rary hand­crafts show­cased on com­e­dy web­site Regret­sy, I sus­pect that look­ing back at the hand­crafts of New Zealand’s pio­neer women would reveal a com­e­dy gold­mine.

Te Radar has a gen­uine affec­tion for the col­lec­tion of rogues he’s gath­ered. While we’re laugh­ing at their antics, it’s also laugh­ing at our­selves — that dumb-arse “she’ll be right” Kiwi spir­it that can get us into trou­ble as much as it leads to inno­va­tion.

And while the show fea­tures some blokes who are rea­son­ably well known in New Zealand his­to­ry, oth­ers will be new to audi­ences, but per­haps deserv­ing of a big­ger place in our col­lec­tive mem­o­ries.