By Helen Paske,
Originally published in the New Zealand Listener, June 1, 1985.
Dear Sir, The infantile drivel, barnyard manners and offensive innuendo in X are an insult to one’s intelligence . . .
(Letters to the Editor, the Dominion)
Dear Sir, is X an indication of the quality of NZBC productions? If so, our licence fees surely could be directed to something much more worthwhile . . .
(Letters to the Editor, Evening Post)
A landmark in the development of New Zealand television; an entertainment programme so firmly rooted in our own backyard and so zestfully expressed in our own distinctive idiom that it could not have been made anywhere else in the world.
(TV review, NZ Herald)
The year was 1975 and X marked the demolition site of Buck House, New Zealand television’s first attempt to grow its own comedy. Buck House produced the greatest public furore over TV drama since Bruce Mason’s The Evening Paper (1965): it remained unchallenged until the political fuss over The Governor (1977). It came early in a year which was a watershed for TV drama, In April, the television system was restructured into two corporations, a new optimism pervaded its workers and ambitious plans were laid to produce, in one year, more drama than had been seen in television’s 15-year history.
The significance of that history could be simply summed up: one-off plays and Pukemanu. The first locally produced drama was transmitted live in Year 1, 1960, and was a Roy Melford production of Strindberg’s She Stranger. But, the first all New Zealand play did not appear until 1963. It was All Earth to Love, written by Alfred Flett, directed by Roy Melford and described by Christine Cole Catley in a 1973 Landfall article as highly derivative . . . and clogged with artificial dialogue
. .
The fledgling television service was obviously not anxious to repeat the experience. It waited another two years before attempting the Mason play, castigated for revealing the unacceptable face of New Zealanders. 1966 had two local productions: Anniversary Day, by Jear Hill and Down by the Cool Sea, by Maurice Shadbolt.
In 1967 the NZBC held an actors’ workshop and five plays written for it were screened, including Momma's a Good Girl, by Ian Cross and Slipknot, by Ngaio Marsh. (see Cheers for tele drama from Salient. Vol. 30, No. 14. 1967)
The effort must have been exhausting, because another two years passed before the first shot at a serial - The Alpha Plan, written by Roy Hope and starring Peter Vere-Jones. No one flinched (or not to my knowledge) and we were all agreeably if mildly entertained. That makes it a milestone in local TV,
wrote Cole Catley, then reviewing for the Dominion. Three one-off plays made up 1969’s complement and four were seen in 1970, including Julian Dickon’s second TV offering, The Genuine Plastic Marriage. His first, Green Gin Sunset, had been shown in 1969 and he was to be recognised as a TV dramatist in 1971 with Pukemanu.
Those involved, particularly in the first series, recall Pukemanu with a fierce pride. Tony Isaac, who directed two of the first six episodes, says, Pukemanu was the first TV drama that really captured the public imagination in a big way. The administration let us do it, more because we were a bloody nuisance than anything else. We had been wanting to do something like this and they thought they were giving us enough rope to hang ourselves. But the series worked. For the first time we had a realistic portrayal of Maori and Pakeha on the TV screen together in a dramatic sense.
Set in a North Island timber town, Pukemanu tried to reflect the New Zealand people and their environment. Ordinary people in an ordinary town,
wrote Cole Catley in Landfall. They are inarticulate, often isolated from one another. Relationships are limited; voices muted.
Pukemanu’s script editor, Michael Anthony Noonan, says, There was a group of people who happened to be around who thought we ought to do something that had relevance to New Zealand. I can’t think of anything that’s been done since then which was a more honest programme.
Between Pukemanu and Buck House TV drama seems to have languished. Notable were local productions of overseas plays, a series on the probation service, Section 7 (1972), and several documentary-dramas, including Paul Maunder's moving Gone Up North for a While (1972) and a three-part series on the Depression, The Longest Winter (1974).
Came 1975, came restructuring and came, for better or worse, TV's Close to Home, originally planned for 26 episodes. Tony Isaac and I sat down and worked out Close to Home together,
says Noonan. I think we were trying to pick up where we left off in Pukemanu.
We did our best with it,
says Isaac. People weren’t used to what we were trying to give them; it took a while to grow. And the actors settled down after a while and got more easy-going about it.
It was meant to be a kind of pressure-cooker course for writers,
says Noonan. Between 1959 and 1974 there had been so few opportunities, then came 1975 and they wanted to launch into this big programme of drama. It was expecting a hell a lot of the writers. Every man, woman and dog was given a go on Close to Home. We must have used 17 or 20 people in the first 26 episodes. We were trying to plan for the future, in case it did continue.
Continue it did, until August 1983, having long outlasted the rival channel’s soap operas, having reached and slid from No 1 in the ratings and having provided work and training for almost every actor, writer and director in New Zealand. Isaac’s verdict: Sometimes it was dreadful; sometimes it was quite good.
But very good, even excellent, was the verdict on the years 1975 to 1977, the closest TV drama has come to a golden age. In one week in April 1976 audiences saw Murray Reece's production of The God Boy, the independent production Shining with Shiner and the first episode of Moynihan. Other stand-out productions in those years included the Winners and Losers series, The Immigrants, Thirty-Minute Theatre and The Park Terrace Murder.
The Auckland-based second channel, under its head of drama John McRae (now heading all television drama production and overseas when this article was prepared), was to go on to public success and international sales with the kidult
strand of production and shows like Hunter's Gold, Gather Your Dreams, Children of Fire Mountain and, much later, Children of the Dog Star.
And it is the Auckland style of drama, unashamedly entertaining, with high production values and an eye to overseas sales, which now dominates in New Zealand. The more socially committed style which largely came from Avalon took a knock from which it never really recovered when the National Government excoriated cost over-runs on The Governor. It was the best, publicity campaign anyone could have
, says producer Tony Isaac. Everyone watched it to see what all the fuss was about.
But the long-term effects have been more serious.
A post-Governor loss of confidence at Avalon saw the cancellation of some major projects, including Coal Flat, set to shoot on the West Coast in 1978, and, at the end of 1983, a series of-one-off plays.
Director John Anderson, who left TVNZ after this series was canned, believes that its writers, people like Sue McCauley, Tom Poata, Judith Fyfe and Paul Maunder, are the people who have something to say about this country. There is a big danger that what we are as people doesn’t get reflected on the screen. We see a nostalgic view of what we might once have been, but I really think there are big issues about race, sex and class which television has determinedly ignored. The thing drama should be doing is showing one part of the community to another - we should learn the Maori viewpoint from Maori drama, women’s and working-class viewpoints from their drama. As it is we get a strong diet of the male, middle-class, white viewpoint.
In recent years, probably only Isaac’s 1982 Loose Enz series of one-off plays provided these alternative viewpoints. And it got people upset again,
he says. I tried to pick the best, the most lucid pieces of drama as written. The idea was to put the emphasis on the writers’
A rare approach, according to Noonan In the whole period the number of times that television has said to writers ‘Got any ideas?’ is very small.
Anderson stresses the importance of the writer’s voice
. His series of Bruce Mason plays grew from this: Sometimes the medium has to adjust itself and put its toys at the service of the people who have some sense of vision about this country.
The vision of the country revealed by TV drama in recent years has had more than a touch of country, with shows like Jocko, Stock and Station and High Country prominent in the list from the late 70s and early 80s. Rachel brooded darkly in gumboot territory, Mortimer's Patch was a rural town and the flagship Country GP cruised gently through the rural backwaters of the 1940's.
It was not until last year and Inside Straight that New Zealand television drama truly brought itself up to date and into the city streets, though only the locations really coloured it Kiwi.
But why bother to make your drama unique to New Zealand, why tackle issues of concern mainly to New Zealanders? Noonan: If you’re going to borrow other people’s culture second-hand you’ve got to have some balancing diet of local production to project images of our own society. Why not have our own images on TV? Why not have our own aspirations? That’s true of everything, not just drama.
Television drama in New Zealand can no longer be called an insult to one’s intelligence
. Whether, 25 years from now, its canon will justifiably be seen as an insult to our culture is still an open question.
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