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Myf Warhurst’s Nice explores the delights of her youth – music, food, fashion, photography, art and design.

MYF Warhurst is nice. This is not news. Everyone in Australia knows how nice Myf is. If there were awards for being nice, Myf would turn them down because she’s too nice to compete against others. Her full name is actually ”That Nice Myf Warhurst”, she just shortened it for TV. And she’s been this nice for years – she rose to fame on the incredibly nice show, Spicks and Specks, sharing the stage with Adam Hills, whose blood has been extracted for use in calming down feeding sharks, and Alan Brough, whom genealogists estimate is everybody’s uncle. And even next to those two long tall glasses of affable, Myf was the nicest thing on the show.

And now she has her own show, and it’s called Nice, and it IS nice. But not ”nice” in that dismissive faint-praise way that we’re accustomed to receiving the term. It’s not the show that you describe with, ”Yeah, a nice little show, but nothing memorable.” It’s nice like memories of childhood, like those little pieces of life that are often overlooked in the great scheme of things, but which seep into us and make us what we are. Nice like a family photo album, or a Kenny Rogers record, or going to a Chinese restaurant when you were a little kid. Nice because it’s not just a show starring the very nice Myf Warhurst, it’s a show about the things she thinks are nice, and what they mean to her.

What makes Nice so nice is our hostess’ sincere and passionate desire that we should share in the loves and obsessions of her life, and her sheer life-affirming enthusiasm for the subjects she visits. There have been few shows in television history that make it harder for a viewer to maintain a world-weary air of cynicism: because Myf is telling us that life, if you look at it the right way, is quite nice, and she’s eager for us to feel the same way.

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To be honest, niceness is a little underrated in TV, or perhaps it would be better to say it is mischaracterised. A few years back the media tossed confetti about the place in celebration of the explosion of ”niceness” that had supposedly won over audiences, beating back the forces of nastiness. But it’s so easy to get niceness confused with cloying sentimentality, with bland ”family-friendly” pap where people love their parents and learn lessons, and with reality shows where nobody’s honest about their dismal failures. It’s so easy to think that if a show is ”nice” it must be a dull affair, of value mainly as background noise while you play Scrabble. So thank goodness for Warhurst and the blow she has struck for those among us who like a bit of nice in our nightly viewing, who get joy out of spending half an hour in the presence of a preternaturally pleasant person looking to share the world’s niceness with everyone.

I think that’s what’s so nice about Myf Warhurst’s Nice – it’s an exercise in sharing. Not all of us listened to Kenny Rogers or idolised the Chiko Roll girl, but we all know the feeling of seeing the world as new, and delightful. And if Warhurst can help us recapture that feeling, I say that’s as nice as nice can be.