With today’s announcement that Jack Tame and Hilary Barry will take over TV One’s breakfast programme, TVNZ has acknowledged its nearly century-long experiment to cryogenically freeze Rawdon Christie in the 1920s, subsequently thawing him for use on their network in the current decade, has categorically failed.

Christie, a British aristocrat who has struggled to adapt to life in the modern world and cope with the emotional struggles that come with being decades younger than his own grandchildren, will leave the network altogether when Tame and Barry take his place next month.

TVNZ Head of News John Gillespie said it was time to acknowledge that it “hasn’t worked out.”

“It was a novel idea,” he said, “and while I can’t speak to my forebears’ intentions, I’m sure they had very good reasons for thinking it was a good idea. But the truth is, Christie just hasn’t gelled, and if I have to explain to him what a computer is one more time I think I’ll just totally lose it, and nobody wants to see that.”

Sources close to the Breakfast crew say that Christie often struggled to work with his co-host, Nadine Chalmers-Ross, as he did not understand the place women hold in modern society.

“Rawdon just really didn’t grasp that she was allowed to read the news, ask questions, and even, at times, speak,” said one insider with long black hair, brown eyes and a small tattoo on her left wrist who wished to remain anonymous. “He’d just sit there, with this totally baffled look on his face, and quietly mouth ‘is this okay?’ at the camera crew.”

Christie was interviewed for this story, but nothing he said was intelligible, as he was speaking into the wrong end of the phone.