by Frank Stark
Originally published in the New Zealand Listener, June 1, 1985
Looking back, the 1960s can seem like one long Peter Sinclair show - the cardboard psychedelia, the go-go dancers, the breathless enthusiasm. Let's Go, C'mon and Happen Inn may not have captured the way that decade really was, but they certainly reflected the way it wanted to be. No New Zealand television programme since has been so right for its time, not even the turn-of-the-7Os gloom of Close to Home.
These days Sinclair himself has no doubts about the pre-eminence of those shows. Let's Go was started by Kevan Moore and me in 1964 out of Wellington. It became immensely popular and really put the other local shows like In The Groove out of business. . . A couple of years later we both moved to Auckland and started C'mon and that was acknowledged to be the light entertainment show.
And the hits just kept on coming. After the stylised frenzy of C'mon and the big stars it made out of mid-60s performers like Mr Lee Grant, Alison Durbin, the Chicks and Larry's Rebels, came the more temperate but no less successful Happen Inn. The appeal there was less specifically teenage, with the likes of Craig Scott, Rob Guest and Angela Ayers crossing over into mums and dads territory.
Happen Inn rated even better than its predecessors and, as it entered the 70's, showed every sign of going on for ever. But something had to give and it was Sinclair who, after the best part of a decade of doing 40 shows a year and spending the breaks on the road with spinoff tours, packed it in at the end of the 1972 season. Moore pressed on with the same sort of show, under the title Sing, replacing Sinclair with a roster of performers doing their own fronting. Maybe because Sinclair was essential, or perhaps just because the zeitgeist had turned against the Moore formula, Sing failed to match up and was quietly laid to rest.
I quit,
says Sinclair, from sheer battle fatigue. Once a job becomes a burden, that's the time to get out. If I hadn't we'd probably have been doing Happen Inn until about 1980. It had excellent ratings. And the whole structure was all set in place. Kevan had a production line going, turning out stars where there had never been any before.
So bright was the glare from the Sinclair/Moore blockbusters that only the most tenacious of memories can still recall most of the other entertainment programmes from their era. Somewhere in the shadows were period pieces like Just a Song at Twilight and The Cheeseman Singers series from AKTV2 and Music Hall from Dunedin, speciality music programmes like Just Folk and The Country Touch made in Auckland by Bryan Easte and late night "sophisticated" chat and jazz shows including After Dark and The Late Show.
The real competition came from Auckland's In The Groove, a pop show fronted by Clyde Scott and directed by Peter Webb, among others, and Studio One and New Faces which originated from Chris Bourne in Wellington. In The Groove was onscreen-for two years before Let's Go and featured a peculiar practice, long-since abandoned, of having local entertainers lip-synch along with the latest imported hits. It failed to outdo the live excitement of Let's Go and folded in 1964. The "New Faces" segment of Studio One (later a series on its own) was an attempt to get a new talent programme off the ground after the relative failure of the radio transplant Have a Shot. First winner was Brendan Dugan. Studio One lived on into the 70s, often watched as much for the put-downs by judges like Phil Warren and Nick Karavais as for the talent on show.
It wasn't all song and dance in the 60s. Television satire made a tentative beginning in 1969 with In View of Circumstances, written by Joe Musaphia and Roger Hall. Cookery was an early favourite thanks to Graham Kerr and Alison Holst. The biggest effort other than for the musical shows went into panel games and quizzes. Some, like Note for Note and Play It By Ear were musical, others like Top of the Farm and Top Mark provided stiff mental competition for minimal prizes. It wasn't until Selwyn Toogood made a triumphant and belated crossover from radio with It's in the Bag that the old standby the greed quiz reared its head here. Dishing out impressive prizes in return for answering simple questions or negotiating embarrassing parlour games has always been a surefire formula for popular success, but it took the best part of 10 years to catch on in New Zealand television.
The division into TV1 (out of Avalon) and South Pacific Television (Auckland/Christchurch) in 1975 didn't bring a golden age of light entertainment. While SPTV did come up with some new faces which have lasted, it was very much business as usual at Avalon with plenty of talent shows and lightweight song-and dance predominating. SPTV Auckland introduced Hudson and Halls, whose tipsy mix of slap-up cordon bleu and guest acts still goes down well. SPTV Christchurch specialised in humour, with Something to Look Forward to and A Week of It ultimately giving birth to McPhail & Gadsby. Then it was back to ONE and TWO, with TWO scoring well with "specialised" musical shows like That's Country and Radio Times. That's Country brought host Ray Columbus back to Christchurch where he had begun with his own pop show, Club Columbus, in 1962. Even though he began as a supporting player, Billy T James came to dominate Radio Times and was duly rewarded with his own Tom Parkinson produced show.
It's in the Bag rolled on regardless, joined by other game-shows like Stumpers, Supersale and Blankety Blank and the heavyweight quizzes Mastermind and University Challenge. The latter two completed a neat cycle in local television as they involved Max Cryer and Peter Sinclair who had begun in the very early days often in much less serious surroundings.
The march of the rock video has also been apparent since the mid-70s. While the early pop shows such as In the Groove, Let's Go and C'mon all had overseas material in them, it wasn't until the advent of shows like Grunt Machine and A Dropa Kulcha in the 70s that this became the staple diet for nominally local programmes. These days Ready to Roll, Radio With Pictures and Sha'zam provide the bulk of each week's music content - catering for the rock and roll audience almost entirely and doing it by medium of free promotional videos for records. They spend virtually no money on producing videos themselves. Of those local artists who do make it onto the programmes, many have paid for their film clip themselves and then donated it to Television New Zealand.
Of the old-style musical shows hardly a trace remains. With the demise of That's Country the flag is now carried by specials, new talent shows and occasional short series of programmes like Hui Pacific. The days of big names in local entertainment Tina Cross, Prince Tui Teka for instance being regularly on the television screen seem to have passed. Sinclair regards that as a tragedy. I maintain that there's a crying need for that sort of show once a week on New Zealand television a showcase. In our day we set the tone for the entire entertainment industry in the country and now television says it can't afford it . . . that attitude just has to change.