She is everywhere.

I should know because I talked to her out in a Queensland paddock the other day after she had been galloping around to a Paul Kelly song while playing a bush vet for her new telemovie Finding Hope.

All blonde, crinkly smiling eyes, she was getting ready for a visit to Glasgow where, no doubt, she is about to turn up cooking for Nick Nairn, dissecting corpses in Taggart or winning hearts in new episodes of Hamish Macbeth.

The ubiquitous Gibney is not only popular with the networks and the audience. She is appreciated by colleagues, recognised for her generosity on set and her willingness to let a co-star flirt with the camera. If you want a Logie or an AFI acting award just get yourself a guest role in Halifax fp.

Still, if someone wanted to do Gibney a favor, they would provide scripts that encourage her to hold centre stage more tenaciously. Too often she seems the reluctant star, a lead actor in dramas that don't focus unambiguously on her character. Perhaps she is just too polite, this leading lady over whom Nine and Ten now seem to be fighting.

In Ten's patchy telemovie Ihaka, a blend of action, comedy and romance that may or may not be expanded into a series, Gibney is teamed with fellow New Zealander Temuera Morrison, the memorable star of Once Were Warriors. He's Tito Ihaka, a no-nonsense, maverick Maori detective. She's Kirsty Finn, a cool, ambitious though somewhat starchy Canberra police media officer short on experience.

Ihaka's boss sends him from Auckland to a police training session in Sydney just to get him out of the way. There, of course, the rough Kiwi cop from out of town shows up the locals and begins to attract Finn's attention, despite the appearance of her drippy boyfriend.

They're assigned to review the three-year-old unsolved murder of a supermodel as part of their course. Coincidentally, the victim's former companion, a fading rock star, is in town. Add a lesbian schoolteacher and a mysterious sugar daddy to the suspects, some crusty old police chiefs, and a lot of action around Sydney and you just about have it.

Ihaka: Blunt Instrument should be a lot more fun than it is. Producer Ian Bradley (of The Flying Doctors, Prisoner, and The Great Bookie Robbery) thought New Zealand writer Paul Thomas's script might create something of an antipodean Beverly Hills Cop. Well, it doesn't quite get there.

Morrison is given the best of the Crocodile Dundee-type gags, but never really looks at ease with anything other than the action. Gibney is better with the cop-buddy bits, but looks more awkward than amusingly desperate in a lesbian seduction scene.

More convincing is Nine's 18th Halifax fp telemovie A Hate Worse Than Death. But once again, though writer Roger Simpson knows how to play masterfully with the nuances of Gibney's forensic psychiatrist, it's a dream trip for another guest star.

In this one Nicholas Eadie prances about as the prominent, eccentric and waspish magazine gossip columnist Simon Laser. Bloodied and hysterical, this deliciously devious upmarket hack leads police to the corpse of a leading QC, a conservative Melbourne lawyer and respected family man.

Laser claims the murder victim was his secret lover and had been targeted by one of his enemies. The QC's wife, played by Julieanne Newbould, returns home from Portsea horrified but with a distinctly shaky story.

It is left to Jane Halifax, of course, to help detective Harry Davenport, played by Terry Serio, work out who is telling the truth.

She is, as always, the credible analyst. Vulnerable but never afraid, never losing her cool. From the beginning we know she will come out unscathed. And we know that she is able to turn her modest sleuthing into a special entertainment.

One could ask for more . . . for Rebecca Gibney as well as the rest of us. But from Australian TV nowadays one often gets a lot less.

Brian Courtis

The Sunday Age