Why Leon Must Become A God

In the mid 90s, a Kiwi girl named Petra Bagust became the hot chick of the moment with a large section of New Zealand’s disaffected but rising geek overclass. The TV show was Ice TV, pitched at 12-14-year-olds but rapidly winning a larger audience with older teens and twenty-somethings thanks to the odd and often absurd wit of Jon and Nathan, the other presenters, and particularly their willingness to openly mock BH90210 which screened as part of the show. Alongside Jon and Nathan was Petra, who was pretty, smart, and frequently able to keep up with the boys in the madness stakes. Every 90-degree-er’s ideal girlfriend, in other words.
(Petra has since fallen from the early glory, and now presents a host of lifestyle and travel programmes that completely fail to tap into the lunacy of those early Ice shows. She’s growed up, one supposes.)
Most of you reading this will have heard of Leon, fellow nomad, boy of the bread, old and trusty friend, the donkey to my moose, and the guy i set out travelling with 16 months or so ago. Well, one afternoon, in the late 90s, Leon was with friends at a museum in the south of New Zealand, and he stumbled across Petra. She was filming a segment for whatever TV show she’d landed on – this was in the waning days of Ice, when the other options were just opening up – and naturally, Leon went up and had a chat. Like most Kiwi personalities, she was perfectly happy to chat away. She even co-operated above and beyond when Leon asked for a signature for me – she wrote me something akin to a short letter, complete with sexual innuendo and a secret piece of information that “no-one else knew” (and no, I’m still not gonna pass it on). I was stoked. It made me laugh.
Leon is currently working backstage on ‘When Harry Met Sally’ in the West End, starring 90210’s Luke Perry (everything connects!) and Buffy’s Alyson Hannigan. (Luke was in the Buffy movie! Everything Connects!!!)
I’ve been a Buffy fan since the start, watching the first ep broadcast on the brand-new NZ channel 4 on the advice of Phil Wakefield in the Evening Post newspaper. I wasn’t convinced by it at first – good, sure, but missable – and it was only as the weeks rolled on that it became apparent what show creator Joss Whedon was doing.
What he was doing was making one of the best TV series in the history of the medium. Seriously. It is narrowly beaten by Freaks and Geeks in my personal list of modern greats, edging out Homicide and Twin Peaks.
Key to that success was the performance of Alyson Hannigan as Willow, nerdy sidekick and audience-identification figure. At least, she was in episode one. She changed a lot over the show’s seven seasons, to say the least.
Hannigan also found a measure of fame as Michelle, the flute girl in American Pie, a good film that became a huge success based solely on one killer line she delivers with great style.
And so I spoke to Leon. “Do with Alyson like you did with Petra and I shall make you like unto a GOD!!!”
So he did.

So now I’ve got to make him a God.