The cut and thrust of surgery
By JANE BOWRON

Early days yet on New Zealand Idol (Sunday, 7.30pm, TV2) with the first auditionees turning up for wheat-from-chaff sortings, but our truly madly deeply bad discards are the funniest of all the idols seen yet.
The first siting of the judges in the bizarre turf location of Trentham showed them pressed far too closely together in what looked like a shoddily knocked-up election booth.
As I said, early days yet but where's the difference on the bench? Judges Frankie Stevens, Fiona McDonald and Paul Ellis all seem to boringly agree with each other and so far we are deprived of a decent Simon or Dicko baddy judge failing to deliver one really witty, funny or clever comment in the whole first hour.
Idol host Dominic Bowden's hairstyle looked like he'd been down in the horse float and given a quick lick by an errant equus, but it's mandatory for the host's hairstyle on an Idol show to be something to talk about. Bowden did a good job, far better than those clowns on Aussie Idol.
And as for the talent? Don Brash must be cursing himself that he didn't delay his inflammatory speech till after this show which so far has revealed how parlous the Pakeha is in the warbling stakes. At this rate they'll have to instigate an affirmative action policy for anyone who can prove they don't have Polynesian blood.
For weeks we've been hearing beat-up stories about the knives of the judges cutting into the national yugo (youth ego) but no evidence of savage slashings yet.
If you're looking for stab wounds and knife cuts, try TV2's Nip/Tuck (Monday, 9.30pm). It really is a hoot.
This absurdly graphic show that has determinedly set out to gross out viewers as it addresses America's obsession with plastic surgery – the very second scene is a butt implant gone wrong – picks up years later where those gyno twin (played by Jeremy Irons) surgeons from the thriller film Dead Ringers left off.
At least the twins in those innocent operating days had the modesty to draw a discrete veil – an operating sheet – over the blood and guts. Not so in Nip/Tuck where the almighty plastic-coated hand is repeatedly shown sloshing bloodily around in the face and body of those wanting vanity surgery as doctors Sean and Christian help the well-heeled externalise the deep hatred they feel about themselves.
Beauty butchers, Sean and Christian are partners in a plastic surgery practice and their friendship goes back to when Christian first dated Sean's wife Julia (Joely Richardson).
Richardson, obviously chosen for her classic noble good looks (her mum is Vanessa Redgrave) and implied virgin surgeon skin, is first spotted underneath the emotionally dead Sean as he performs bored marital sex that comes care of the anaesthetist.
At the same time we keep "cutting" to Christian who managed to pick up a beautiful Marilyn Monroe (Kimberly) look-alike in a bar by delivering America's best pick up line, "I'm a plastic surgeon".
Their sex, shot from above is of the wild bucking bronco kind and the comparison that Sean is sexually and emotionally dead while Christian is deeply manipulative and morally bankrupt is quickly established.
Christian plays on Kimberly's fears by lowering her self-score of 10 to an eight and marks her body with her lipstick to show where he'd make the necessary incisions. After all, she did say she wanted to be perfect and Christian is the ideal handyman to have round the body-is-my-temple home.
Later, bandaged and abandoned, she hysterically begs to see Christian who hasn't showed up to do a house call. The anaesthetist gives her the verbal slap that she's Christian's "sixth fix . . . this month".
For anyone chilled by the film The Ice Storm, Nip/Tuck gives off the same heat – temperature 30 below.
There's nobody to like in this show except for Sean's daughter who's so perfectly cutie-pie you keep looking for the knife incisions at the kid's hairline. Sean's son is weirdly good looking and bears more than a passing resemblance to that patron saint of plastic surgery, Michael Jackson, but hates his dad, preferring to confide in Christian his desperate need for circumcision – the other boys are laughing at him in the shower room.
There's a Colombian wanting total facial reconstruction for what Christian presumes is escape from a drug crime, but the guy's actually a paedophile and the show peaks with a brilliant liposuction-interruptus splatter scene that gives nods to our Peter Jackson's Brain Dead.
Don't take any of this too seriously. Series creator Ryan Murphy obviously had a good laugh making it and deliberately went out to raise the hackles of American moralists, half of whom probably see plastic surgery as acceptable grooming. But they need not worry for all nasty deeds and dudes get their comeuppance in this surgical soap opera.
Like so many plastic surgery horror docos we've seen lately, Murphy is only lifting the skin on those having work done but it is a mite graphic. This sure is one director's cut I wouldn't want to see.