OMEN
01-19-2008, 07:28 PM
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GLIMPSES OF THE PAST: Whatever your view of Kiwi-made TV then and now, there can be no dispute that it has always included the good, the bad and the ugly.
We have more TV than ever, but are the golden years of New Zealand-made television behind us? Philip Matthews seeks to settle an age-old debate.
The problem with nostalgia is that there's no future in it.
Two years ago, 31 "prominent New Zealanders" - from Sir Edmund Hillary to Dame Cath Tizard, Sue Kedgley to Margaret Mahy - formed a cabal of the concerned, lining up to sign a letter addressed to then broadcasting minister Steve Maharey.
They wanted TVNZ to cut down on the ads and go back to a fully publicly funded model. See the 1970s for an example. Things were better then.
Few were willing to take them seriously, including Maharey.
It didn't help that even one of their number, former broadcaster Ian Johnstone, described the group as "old pensioners wishing there was something better to watch on television" and many s******ed at their choice of great shows from the past - Close to Home, Gallery, McPhail and Gadsby.
They were politely asked to get with the programme - as long as the programme wasn't Gliding On or Kaleidoscope.
But what if they were right? Now, TVNZ's website is making it easier than ever to assess the merits of those old shows first-hand, rather than relying on memory.
And they weren't alone in their view: a leading media specialist describes the late '70s as a golden age of local drama. In the post-deregulation environment, such a view is almost blasphemous.
So, here's an experiment. What if you went into the archives and dug out the yellowing pages of old TV guides?
What if you actually looked at the schedules for those years and the ones since, rather than falling for nostalgia on the one hand or dogma on the other?
And what kind of picture of New Zealand would emerge along the way? Did TV act as an accurate barometer of wider social change? Maybe those pages could give us an unofficial New Zealand history.
Where to begin? Let's take the first week in October at five-year intervals, starting in 1972 and ending in 2007, and see what the schedules tell us.
October 1972
In 1972, television was still regional - there were slightly different schedules for each of the four main centres.
Only those lucky enough to live in Dunedin got to see the week's best movie - the original version of The Manchurian Candidate.
Gunsmoke and Z Cars dominated primetime - although, as the one channel only ran from 2pm to 11pm, there wasn't much out of primetime. Sunday-night entertainment: The Rolf Harris Show. Local content: Playschool, Country Calendar (which debuted in 1966) and the sharp, BBC-styled current affairs show, Gallery. But the biggest local deal was the drama Pukemanu, which was into its second series.
If 1972 feels like ancient history, Pukemanu looks like the first sign of the future.
How incredible that we should be able to recognise the writers' names on all four of the episodes played that week: Roger Hall, Fiona Kidman, Ian Mune and Hamish Keith.
The show was named for a fictitious North Island timber town much like Tokoroa, and it was "innovative in its rural working-class and bicultural perspectives", says Victoria University media studies lecturer Trisha Dunleavy.
But at the time, its appeal seemed to be about prodding the reptilian brain of New Zealand identity: just as we were becoming increasingly urban, reviewer Christine Cole Catley wrote in 1973, "we cling more tenaciously to a romantic, Barry Crump-enhanced picture of open country".
You would hear versions of this argument every year over the next three decades to account for the success of slow, quiet rural shows like Mortimer's Patch, Country GP and Mercy Peak, and to explain the failure of loud, fast urban shows like City Life, Cover Story and Plainclothes.
October 1977
Now we're talking. In her book Ourselves in Primetime: A History of New Zealand Television Drama, Dunleavy describes the late '70s as a golden age of local drama production.
The second channel, SPTV, launched in 1975 and so New Zealand had two state-owned channels, one in Auckland and one in Wellington, running in complementary competition.
Each had its own drama, news, children's and documentary departments. How enlightened this sounds.
The result? Shows like The Governor, a seven-part series based on the life of Governor Grey, which went to air in October 1977.
This one has been tainted by history - according to Dunleavy's book, then prime minister Robert Muldoon orchestrated a smear campaign against the series weeks before it went to air, criticising its perceived expense as a way of getting back at "aggressive" TV One journalists.
But it was a popular success - the first episode was watched by 1.8 million New Zealanders, according to veteran TV writer Michael Noonan, who devised the series.
Noonan, who wrote for Pukemanu and Close to Home - which was two years into its eight-year run in 1977 - still believes that The Governor is the best series ever made in this country.
"It gave a wide range of people an opportunity to review their ideas about colonial history -- we were able to look at the 19th century in a new light."
The series' Maori adviser and key actor, Don Selwyn, even believed that its focus on colonial injustice influenced such contemporary events as the occupation of Bastion Point.
So, was local TV brainier in 1977 than now? Possibly.
Besides the Friday-night institution Kaleidoscope (an example wheeled out when someone wants to prove that we don't make arts shows like we used to), there was the phenomenon that was University Challenge.
This week's billing in its entirety: "Only one character survives the holocaust of Wagner's Ring of Niebelungen. Who?"
Elsewhere, though, 1977 offers the kitsch line-ups that 40-something nostalgists pine for. Saturday night on TV One: Ready to Roll, then the news, then The Donny and Marie Show, then It's in the Bag.
On SPTV: Little House on the Prairie, The Two Ronnies, Upstairs Downstairs. New Zealand in 1977 might be a fine place to daydream about, but would you want to live there?
October 1982
Still brainy. Kaleidoscope has an item on playwright John Osborne.
Hamish Keith is fronting the media show Fourth Estate that we usually associate with the brilliant, owlish Brian Priestley.
University Challenge is still on Saturday night, while opera critic Heath Lees hosts several hours of classical music programming on Sunday afternoon, but the primetime schedule also contains stuff like Magnum PI, That's Incredible, Three's Company and The Love Boat.
The Lynn of Tawa Show - was this comedy funny to anyone who didn't live in Wellington? - runs on Monday night. Radio Times - was this comedy funny to anyone? - runs on Saturday night. Brian Edwards continues to bring his formidable intelligence to Fair Go, easily funnier than both.
This was also the era of Radio With Pictures, New Zealand's ultimate rock music programme.
Here's a quick way to get depressed: go to TVNZ's ondemand website, which houses repeats and archival classics, and watch RWP's reports on live music in Auckland and Christchurch from November 1982. These 15-minute reports are thorough, balanced and edited with subtlety.
There are scores of interviews, there's no presenter, there's evidence of old-fashioned journalistic hard work - an arts show producer now wouldn't have the time or the budget to make anything like them.
And those who claim that New Zealand television was better then than now will soon get even more ammunition.
TVNZ is expected to add another 10 to 20 more old shows to the "classics" section of ondemand this year, says Jason Paris, the network's head of emerging business.
Such shows as The Governor, Pukemanu and, hopefully, Gloss, although the latter is proving to be something of a rights nightmare.
The biggest hit? So far it's been the infamous debut episode of Holmes, from 1989, in which the host prompted Dennis Connor to walk out. The day that went online, 7500 people watched.
October 1987
If there was ever a show that symbolised its times, it was Gloss.
As a cynical, bitchy mega-soap set in a world of old Remuera money and new Auckland media values -- or lack of values - it was a send-up of American soap absurdity years before Desperate Housewives did the same thing.
Auckland excess was satirised but also celebrated - and here was Auckland getting the upper hand over Wellington after years of drama production dominated by the capital.
Against this, Wellington had only Open House, less a drama than an earnest checklist of issues set in a community centre.
Gloss might have been about the money sloshing around Rogernomics-era Auckland but it was also the end of the old way of doing things.
It was conceived in 1985 within the TVNZ drama department and only ended, in 1988, because the department was closed down and productions were to be outsourced.
Gloss is where the seeds of the present were planted: Dunleavy notes that James Griffin, writer of Outrageous Fortune, began his TV career there.
Everyone seems to have fond memories of Gloss, but was it a hit? Only with teenage girls and women under 40, Dunleavy says - middle-aged men, especially, were "repelled" by it.
How do we know this? Because by the late '80s, TV ratings could be broken down into demographics - and programming changed utterly as a result.
October 1992
It was the worst of times in New Zealand and it was reflected in the schedules.
Channels One and 2 have been joined by 3 and gameshows are all over TV like a cheap plague: Sale of the Century, Jeopardy, The Price is Right, Celebrity Wheel of Fortune, Celebrity Face the Music.
A version of It's in the Bag has Nick Tansley where Selwyn Toogood used to be - sociologists might theorise about whether the atomising of communities in the years between Toogood's cosy '70s and Tansley's grim '90s is reflected in the dismal show that results.
Or whether skyrocketing unemployment had anything to do with the get-rich-overnight fantasies of gameshows.
Kaleidoscope is history; TVNZ launches Sunday, an attempt at "non-elitist" arts programming. No-one remembers it. Suddenly, sponsors' names start appearing on local shows - farewell, Radio With Pictures; hello, Coca-Cola TVFM.
In this quality vacuum, everyone makes a fuss about teen soap Melrose Place -- even the Listener puts it on the cover.
Was there any reason to be cheerful? Only that, in an era of short-lived local series - Homeward Bound, Marlin Bay - a nightly soap that debuted in May looks like it might go the distance after a shaky start.
That was Shortland Street. On good nights over the following 16 years, more than 700,000 people will watch - the kinds of figures that Close to Home also did at its peak.
But TV is an ephemeral medium and few remember what went before: Shortland Street is routinely identified as the show that got us over the cultural cringe, but Dunleavy bestows that honour on Pukemanu.
October 1997
Now we have four channels plus MTV.
And the latter, which didn't stay long, might have had the best single idea in the schedule: the one local show made by the international music channel is Havoc, essentially student radio with pictures for Mikey Havoc and Jeremy Wells.
Two weird careers are born.
Actually, there was a third: on TV3, Ian Wishart fronts Real TV, an early entry in the reality TV boom from the canny producer Julie Christie and possibly the last time that the words "Ian Wishart" and "reality" appeared in the same sentence.
On that channel, Christie also has Police Stop! - a selection of car accident footage fronted by Peter Brock.
This stuff might have been decried as cheap television then but it's the norm now.
October 2002
One, 2, 3 and 4 have been joined by Prime, which was doing a very good imitation of an Australian regional channel.
We're out of the '90s depression and into a lifestyle boom - it's the age of individual comfort and the quick buck on such home-improvement and real-estate shows as Changing Rooms, Dream Home and Location, Location, Location.
Even TV3's version of the enduring Fair Go has a home improvement focus - on Target, the chief concern seems to be whether you can find a handyman who doesn't want to fossick through your underwear drawer.
October 2007
"Academics talk about three phases of television: scarcity, availability, plenty," Dunleavy says. We're in the third now.
New Zealand niche viewing is well served by Maori Television and C4 - both recent additions - along with shows like Eating Media Lunch, Pulp Sport and bro'Town, while the mainstream conversation is held within the two light current affairs shows, Close Up and Campbell Live.
It's not all good news: we haven't cracked the sitcom again since Gliding On, if the comparison between the locally-made Welcome to Paradise and the imported Flight of the Conchords is anything to go by.
And 25 years after University Challenge played in primetime, TV2 asks: Are You Smarter Than a 10-Year-Old?
The year's talking point was probably Sensing Murder, which left TV1's The Investigator - old murders but, disappointingly, no psychics - for dead.
But the best local show has to be Outrageous Fortune, also a sure contender for the ultimate New Zealand programme.
"I think it's an incredible show," Dunleavy says. "I'm proud of us for making it."
Interestingly, it could never have been made in the '90s, she says.
Back then, funding structures dictated that shows had to have offshore appeal - meaning that obvious local edges had to be smoothed out.
Ironically, this determinedly local, even regional show - "I don't know whether people down in Winton or Dipton know what a westie is," says Michael Noonan - looks like being one of our best exports, screening in Australia, Ireland and the UK, and prompting a British adaptation, titled Honest.
And what does this show say about New Zealand? That we're not imitating foreign formats or putting on British accents - that we're comfortable in our crass, drunk, horny bogan skins.
The Press
GLIMPSES OF THE PAST: Whatever your view of Kiwi-made TV then and now, there can be no dispute that it has always included the good, the bad and the ugly.
We have more TV than ever, but are the golden years of New Zealand-made television behind us? Philip Matthews seeks to settle an age-old debate.
The problem with nostalgia is that there's no future in it.
Two years ago, 31 "prominent New Zealanders" - from Sir Edmund Hillary to Dame Cath Tizard, Sue Kedgley to Margaret Mahy - formed a cabal of the concerned, lining up to sign a letter addressed to then broadcasting minister Steve Maharey.
They wanted TVNZ to cut down on the ads and go back to a fully publicly funded model. See the 1970s for an example. Things were better then.
Few were willing to take them seriously, including Maharey.
It didn't help that even one of their number, former broadcaster Ian Johnstone, described the group as "old pensioners wishing there was something better to watch on television" and many s******ed at their choice of great shows from the past - Close to Home, Gallery, McPhail and Gadsby.
They were politely asked to get with the programme - as long as the programme wasn't Gliding On or Kaleidoscope.
But what if they were right? Now, TVNZ's website is making it easier than ever to assess the merits of those old shows first-hand, rather than relying on memory.
And they weren't alone in their view: a leading media specialist describes the late '70s as a golden age of local drama. In the post-deregulation environment, such a view is almost blasphemous.
So, here's an experiment. What if you went into the archives and dug out the yellowing pages of old TV guides?
What if you actually looked at the schedules for those years and the ones since, rather than falling for nostalgia on the one hand or dogma on the other?
And what kind of picture of New Zealand would emerge along the way? Did TV act as an accurate barometer of wider social change? Maybe those pages could give us an unofficial New Zealand history.
Where to begin? Let's take the first week in October at five-year intervals, starting in 1972 and ending in 2007, and see what the schedules tell us.
October 1972
In 1972, television was still regional - there were slightly different schedules for each of the four main centres.
Only those lucky enough to live in Dunedin got to see the week's best movie - the original version of The Manchurian Candidate.
Gunsmoke and Z Cars dominated primetime - although, as the one channel only ran from 2pm to 11pm, there wasn't much out of primetime. Sunday-night entertainment: The Rolf Harris Show. Local content: Playschool, Country Calendar (which debuted in 1966) and the sharp, BBC-styled current affairs show, Gallery. But the biggest local deal was the drama Pukemanu, which was into its second series.
If 1972 feels like ancient history, Pukemanu looks like the first sign of the future.
How incredible that we should be able to recognise the writers' names on all four of the episodes played that week: Roger Hall, Fiona Kidman, Ian Mune and Hamish Keith.
The show was named for a fictitious North Island timber town much like Tokoroa, and it was "innovative in its rural working-class and bicultural perspectives", says Victoria University media studies lecturer Trisha Dunleavy.
But at the time, its appeal seemed to be about prodding the reptilian brain of New Zealand identity: just as we were becoming increasingly urban, reviewer Christine Cole Catley wrote in 1973, "we cling more tenaciously to a romantic, Barry Crump-enhanced picture of open country".
You would hear versions of this argument every year over the next three decades to account for the success of slow, quiet rural shows like Mortimer's Patch, Country GP and Mercy Peak, and to explain the failure of loud, fast urban shows like City Life, Cover Story and Plainclothes.
October 1977
Now we're talking. In her book Ourselves in Primetime: A History of New Zealand Television Drama, Dunleavy describes the late '70s as a golden age of local drama production.
The second channel, SPTV, launched in 1975 and so New Zealand had two state-owned channels, one in Auckland and one in Wellington, running in complementary competition.
Each had its own drama, news, children's and documentary departments. How enlightened this sounds.
The result? Shows like The Governor, a seven-part series based on the life of Governor Grey, which went to air in October 1977.
This one has been tainted by history - according to Dunleavy's book, then prime minister Robert Muldoon orchestrated a smear campaign against the series weeks before it went to air, criticising its perceived expense as a way of getting back at "aggressive" TV One journalists.
But it was a popular success - the first episode was watched by 1.8 million New Zealanders, according to veteran TV writer Michael Noonan, who devised the series.
Noonan, who wrote for Pukemanu and Close to Home - which was two years into its eight-year run in 1977 - still believes that The Governor is the best series ever made in this country.
"It gave a wide range of people an opportunity to review their ideas about colonial history -- we were able to look at the 19th century in a new light."
The series' Maori adviser and key actor, Don Selwyn, even believed that its focus on colonial injustice influenced such contemporary events as the occupation of Bastion Point.
So, was local TV brainier in 1977 than now? Possibly.
Besides the Friday-night institution Kaleidoscope (an example wheeled out when someone wants to prove that we don't make arts shows like we used to), there was the phenomenon that was University Challenge.
This week's billing in its entirety: "Only one character survives the holocaust of Wagner's Ring of Niebelungen. Who?"
Elsewhere, though, 1977 offers the kitsch line-ups that 40-something nostalgists pine for. Saturday night on TV One: Ready to Roll, then the news, then The Donny and Marie Show, then It's in the Bag.
On SPTV: Little House on the Prairie, The Two Ronnies, Upstairs Downstairs. New Zealand in 1977 might be a fine place to daydream about, but would you want to live there?
October 1982
Still brainy. Kaleidoscope has an item on playwright John Osborne.
Hamish Keith is fronting the media show Fourth Estate that we usually associate with the brilliant, owlish Brian Priestley.
University Challenge is still on Saturday night, while opera critic Heath Lees hosts several hours of classical music programming on Sunday afternoon, but the primetime schedule also contains stuff like Magnum PI, That's Incredible, Three's Company and The Love Boat.
The Lynn of Tawa Show - was this comedy funny to anyone who didn't live in Wellington? - runs on Monday night. Radio Times - was this comedy funny to anyone? - runs on Saturday night. Brian Edwards continues to bring his formidable intelligence to Fair Go, easily funnier than both.
This was also the era of Radio With Pictures, New Zealand's ultimate rock music programme.
Here's a quick way to get depressed: go to TVNZ's ondemand website, which houses repeats and archival classics, and watch RWP's reports on live music in Auckland and Christchurch from November 1982. These 15-minute reports are thorough, balanced and edited with subtlety.
There are scores of interviews, there's no presenter, there's evidence of old-fashioned journalistic hard work - an arts show producer now wouldn't have the time or the budget to make anything like them.
And those who claim that New Zealand television was better then than now will soon get even more ammunition.
TVNZ is expected to add another 10 to 20 more old shows to the "classics" section of ondemand this year, says Jason Paris, the network's head of emerging business.
Such shows as The Governor, Pukemanu and, hopefully, Gloss, although the latter is proving to be something of a rights nightmare.
The biggest hit? So far it's been the infamous debut episode of Holmes, from 1989, in which the host prompted Dennis Connor to walk out. The day that went online, 7500 people watched.
October 1987
If there was ever a show that symbolised its times, it was Gloss.
As a cynical, bitchy mega-soap set in a world of old Remuera money and new Auckland media values -- or lack of values - it was a send-up of American soap absurdity years before Desperate Housewives did the same thing.
Auckland excess was satirised but also celebrated - and here was Auckland getting the upper hand over Wellington after years of drama production dominated by the capital.
Against this, Wellington had only Open House, less a drama than an earnest checklist of issues set in a community centre.
Gloss might have been about the money sloshing around Rogernomics-era Auckland but it was also the end of the old way of doing things.
It was conceived in 1985 within the TVNZ drama department and only ended, in 1988, because the department was closed down and productions were to be outsourced.
Gloss is where the seeds of the present were planted: Dunleavy notes that James Griffin, writer of Outrageous Fortune, began his TV career there.
Everyone seems to have fond memories of Gloss, but was it a hit? Only with teenage girls and women under 40, Dunleavy says - middle-aged men, especially, were "repelled" by it.
How do we know this? Because by the late '80s, TV ratings could be broken down into demographics - and programming changed utterly as a result.
October 1992
It was the worst of times in New Zealand and it was reflected in the schedules.
Channels One and 2 have been joined by 3 and gameshows are all over TV like a cheap plague: Sale of the Century, Jeopardy, The Price is Right, Celebrity Wheel of Fortune, Celebrity Face the Music.
A version of It's in the Bag has Nick Tansley where Selwyn Toogood used to be - sociologists might theorise about whether the atomising of communities in the years between Toogood's cosy '70s and Tansley's grim '90s is reflected in the dismal show that results.
Or whether skyrocketing unemployment had anything to do with the get-rich-overnight fantasies of gameshows.
Kaleidoscope is history; TVNZ launches Sunday, an attempt at "non-elitist" arts programming. No-one remembers it. Suddenly, sponsors' names start appearing on local shows - farewell, Radio With Pictures; hello, Coca-Cola TVFM.
In this quality vacuum, everyone makes a fuss about teen soap Melrose Place -- even the Listener puts it on the cover.
Was there any reason to be cheerful? Only that, in an era of short-lived local series - Homeward Bound, Marlin Bay - a nightly soap that debuted in May looks like it might go the distance after a shaky start.
That was Shortland Street. On good nights over the following 16 years, more than 700,000 people will watch - the kinds of figures that Close to Home also did at its peak.
But TV is an ephemeral medium and few remember what went before: Shortland Street is routinely identified as the show that got us over the cultural cringe, but Dunleavy bestows that honour on Pukemanu.
October 1997
Now we have four channels plus MTV.
And the latter, which didn't stay long, might have had the best single idea in the schedule: the one local show made by the international music channel is Havoc, essentially student radio with pictures for Mikey Havoc and Jeremy Wells.
Two weird careers are born.
Actually, there was a third: on TV3, Ian Wishart fronts Real TV, an early entry in the reality TV boom from the canny producer Julie Christie and possibly the last time that the words "Ian Wishart" and "reality" appeared in the same sentence.
On that channel, Christie also has Police Stop! - a selection of car accident footage fronted by Peter Brock.
This stuff might have been decried as cheap television then but it's the norm now.
October 2002
One, 2, 3 and 4 have been joined by Prime, which was doing a very good imitation of an Australian regional channel.
We're out of the '90s depression and into a lifestyle boom - it's the age of individual comfort and the quick buck on such home-improvement and real-estate shows as Changing Rooms, Dream Home and Location, Location, Location.
Even TV3's version of the enduring Fair Go has a home improvement focus - on Target, the chief concern seems to be whether you can find a handyman who doesn't want to fossick through your underwear drawer.
October 2007
"Academics talk about three phases of television: scarcity, availability, plenty," Dunleavy says. We're in the third now.
New Zealand niche viewing is well served by Maori Television and C4 - both recent additions - along with shows like Eating Media Lunch, Pulp Sport and bro'Town, while the mainstream conversation is held within the two light current affairs shows, Close Up and Campbell Live.
It's not all good news: we haven't cracked the sitcom again since Gliding On, if the comparison between the locally-made Welcome to Paradise and the imported Flight of the Conchords is anything to go by.
And 25 years after University Challenge played in primetime, TV2 asks: Are You Smarter Than a 10-Year-Old?
The year's talking point was probably Sensing Murder, which left TV1's The Investigator - old murders but, disappointingly, no psychics - for dead.
But the best local show has to be Outrageous Fortune, also a sure contender for the ultimate New Zealand programme.
"I think it's an incredible show," Dunleavy says. "I'm proud of us for making it."
Interestingly, it could never have been made in the '90s, she says.
Back then, funding structures dictated that shows had to have offshore appeal - meaning that obvious local edges had to be smoothed out.
Ironically, this determinedly local, even regional show - "I don't know whether people down in Winton or Dipton know what a westie is," says Michael Noonan - looks like being one of our best exports, screening in Australia, Ireland and the UK, and prompting a British adaptation, titled Honest.
And what does this show say about New Zealand? That we're not imitating foreign formats or putting on British accents - that we're comfortable in our crass, drunk, horny bogan skins.
The Press