This drives me absolutely nuts. What is it with these TV3 executives who spend all that money on buying the rights to broadcast the V8 Supercar’s from Australia, only to manage to screw it up?

Did you know that motorsport is the most watched sport in the world? TV3 has paid more money for the rights to broadcast the Australian V8’s  for the next five years than has been paid for the rights to any sport in NZ other than rugby.  If you have never been able to bring yourself to watch it, you really are missing out on a fantastic experience. It is hard not to admire the skill and energy that goes into driving and running a Supercar team.  Not to mention the fact that there are 5 kiwi’s driving, four kiwi owned teams and the many thousands of kiwis who trek across to the Tasman to watch the racing every year.  There is a huge audience here.

Notwithstanding the fact that motorsport has, in this country, and continues to, produce world class athletes we can all be proud of.

All that aside, the coverage in New Zealand has been great up until this year when TV3 took over. They have put together a panel of hosts consisting of two radio announcers (who incidentally know nothing about motorsport) and Aaron Slight who, to be honest, is the only one worth listening too.  Then we cross over to their resident bimbo at the track for silly interview question time, which frankly makes TV3 look like a bunch of hillbillys from across the ditch.  Oh and did I mention we lose a substantial amount of racing due to the long ad breaks. They don’t show adverts during the rugby, they wait until half time.

Come on TV3, is this really as good as it gets?

Surely someone has told them how this works.  Surely they haven’t spent all that money and not consulted someone who knows what we want to see.   Their audience are intelligent, passionate and most definitely informed fans, they don’t like to be treated like idiots, like we are being with this coverage.   We certainly don’t want a couple of guys like Simon Doull telling us what he thinks, because we know he doesn’t know much about motor racing and then there is the other guy who said right up front "I know nothing about all this".  Great, in that case go back to radio.

Send Aaron to interview the drivers, at least he can ask intelligent questions that will make for better viewing, get a panel who knows something about motorsport and for goodness sake get rid of the female interviewer, she’s just plain annoying.

Sort it out TV3, it’s not that hard to get this right.

   A ‘hot topic’ right now is sunscreen,  what’s good and what’s not and the other day I was at an appointment telling someone about how much trouble I had with this new sunscreen I had trialed,  when this lady sitting nearby overheard and piped up saying I had the same thing happen to me with exactly the same sunblock.

New to the market last year was the Neutrogena Helioplex range which they have trademarked, it is a major scientific breakthrough in sunscreen technology and given the recent stats on skin cancer in this country, we can all do with using the latest and greatest.   They claim that it ensures long-lasting protection against both UVA and UVB rays after it was discovered that other sunscreens can break down when exposed to light and lets face it anything new and innovative is normally the way to go.

So I used it through my holidays and as an avid sunscreen user I applied it everyday and always twice a day.  It felt very thick when I applied it to my face, within minutes it tingled and felt uncomfortable. It was ok on the rest of my body but not on my face, over the course of a couple of weeks I realised that it was really aggravating my skin, it had become really red and sore.  I kept thinking I was just taking time to get use to it but, no.  My skin also became really blocked and I had lots of breakouts due to the sunscreen as well.  I tried both of the products I had which was the Ultra Sheer 55 and the 70.  After weeks of trying I finally stopped using them on my face and the problem went away, eventually.

An interesting note is: did you know that sunscreens can be split into two types chemical and physical, chemical barriers absorb UV’s converting them into energy and safely filtering them through the body’s cooling system.  Physical sunscreens bounce the UV’s back.

I love this though, the Cancer Society recommend applying sunblock in two layers in case you miss a bit on the first go and applying at least 30ml (six teaspoons) a time which makes a total of 60ml (12 teaspoons) or the size of a small orange.  As they say on the Tui billboards   Yeah right!  You would be hard pushed to find anyone who applies that much sunscreen, but I will say the main thing to remember is to reapply again half way through the day as it doesn’t last.  Also, don’t be fooled by the ‘Daylong’ sunscreens on the market, they don’t work either.

So my slant on it is this, the Neutrogena sunscreen may claim to block the sun out but, in the process, it blocked the pores on my face and caused it to become very red and sore.  The fact that it tingles within 5 minutes of applying it, is never a good thing.   So by all means buy it for the rest of your body, (although this is quite and expensive way to buy your sunblock) but don’t put it anywhere near your face.