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.