New Zealand’s whim-whamly poet laureate composes an ode for the dearly departed broadcaster
The Exile of Duncan
Lo, he has departed from our screens.
He who garnered high praise and approbation both.
He has evaporated like sand in the wind,
and Mark and Amanda weepeth at his career move.
A sturdy yeoman of common sense reckons,
who manufactur’d consent amongst the serfs.
A clever blade, whose takes were controversial,
but never too controversial, as is the way of things.
Like the Bard’s King, this Duncan hath borne his faculties
so meek, hath been so clear in his great office.
While other mewling scribes, resentful
of their pitiful wages, gnaw at the Queendom
with treasonous envy and woke cancel culture,
the centrist and somewhat rudderless morality
of the middling type was accounted well by Dunc.
What in honour of this fellow can we speaketh?
Supreme on David Hartnell MNZM’s Best Dressed List,
he cast a eerie spell of Veganism on himself
to deny the Kind Queen ascension to the Throne.
His lineage traced from the first Prophets:
when Holmes first led our lost tribe
to the Promised Land of Capitalist Media Dominance;
Duncan stood on the shoulders of giants,
like The Hosk and Paul Whatsisname,
yet actually once did do some real journalism,
embarrassing the Red Lords with their baubles
of office, and the mealy mouthed Blue Barons.
Will we ever see his like again?
Quite possibly, says Young Ryan Manbun,
stepping out from stage right.
Victor Billot has previously been moved to write odes for such New Zealand luminaries as Billy Te Kahika, Simeon Brown, Jacinda Ardern, Todd Muller, Mike Hosking, and Garrick Tremain.
