1960 - 2000 TV ownership and the license fee

• Clarke, John

The NZ Post Office began licensing tv sets on the 1st of August 1960; a household needed to hold a license if they had one or more tv sets in a home. Enforcement of this requirement began a month later.

Sharp Increase In Licensing

(N.Z. Press Association) AUCKLAND, March 9 1961.
In the last two weeks a fully-equipped television detector van has been roaming the streets of Auckland, and in the same fortnight the rate of issue of television licences has more than doubled.

“Licence issues had settled down to a steady 60 or 70 a week,” said a Post Office official today. ‘‘But with the announcement that the van was going on the road they jumped to 142 the week before last, and 132 last week.

“When the effect of the van wears off we expect the number to drop off again,” he said.

Another factor might be shops which were selling television sets at sale prices, with reductions of as much as £6O or £7O. But retailers said the numbers of sets sold at the lower prices was not great. Most were either old models or demonstration sets.

By the end of last week 4285 sets had been licensed in the Auckland area.

Network bluff

Press, 13 February 1975

ANY old ladies who have been cowering behind the door in fear of the television detector van can relax. There is no such thing.

In a national propaganda effort to increase revenue from television licence fees, the N.Z.B.C. has been spreading alarm and despondency quite unnecessarily.

Its amusing network television commercial (the one in which Fred Dagg is sitting in front of his television set wearing his gummies) urges viewers to get licences without delay because “TV detector vans may be working in your area now.”

But that is not true. The Post Office confirmed yesterday that it has no television detector vans, has never had any, and has no plans to get any. It keeps track of licence-holders through a computer records system, and makes polite inquiries at the door if it suspects a defaulter.

Mr Ben Coury, the N.Z.B.C.’s public relations officer, agreed yesterday that the advertisement was “up the chute.” It was prepared by the corporation’s own production people, who had “a hazy idea” that television detector vans were used to pinpoint unlicensed sets.

“We’re having another look at it,” said Mr Coury. Although it took a lot of time and money to make the commercial, it was quite likely that it would now be withdrawn

*The license fee was abolished in 2000, with reports at the time recording that licenses held at 31 Dec 1999 numbered 854,685. Taken at face value this would have meant a drop in households with TVs to 1977 numbers which seems unrealistic; more likely the impending end to the requirement to pay the fee caused a number of TV owners to stop paying their fees, so I've used Stats NZ figures on household TV ownership for later years.

We are destroyers rather than hoarders of our past...

Recently discovered this passage in Joanne Dryton's Hudson & Halls: The Food of Love (pg9) that stopped me in my tracks as she perfectly sums up the fate of so much of New Zealand's television output, and sadly there is little evidence that even present day productions will fare any better.

Sadly, today, there is very little left of the 300 programmes Hudson and Halls made during their 11 years on New Zealand television: just a handful of complete shows, some film excerpts shot in the late 1970s, a few interviews and some Telethon footage. The duo's sparse representation in our film and television archive is an indictment on our capacity to recognise what is great and value it. We are destroyers rather than hoarders of our past: Kiwis let go of their treasures too easily. The consequence of historical amnesia is a present that lacks wisdom and self- knowledge.

Read more: We are destroyers rather than hoarders of our past...

How many New Zealand archival TV shows have been digitally preserved?

TVNZ archive titles would be a subset of the figures for 2019 onwards which record all audio visual material processed. As the TVNZ material has often been categorised as "at risk" I've always assumed that they make up a majority of titles being preserved each year, as one stated aim is to have 200,000 at risk tapes digitalised by 2025; thus it is great to see that according the 2023/24 Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision annual report over 95% of the TVNZ magnetic media collection has now been digitised. 

Read more: How many New Zealand archival TV shows have been digitally preserved?

New Zealand's "Lost" TV Shows?

A visitor to the site asked how rare the material in his collection of old beta tapes might be; sadly the answer is that any home recordings of local tv shows from back when domestic beta recorders were available - 1975 to around 2002 -  might be very rare indeed.

NZ shows were not distributed to other countries in other formats and we didn't have home VCRs until into the 1980s, so no one is sure how much local TV from back then still exists on a tape somewhere. This post from the Mutcat forum gives a good idea of the conditions that applied for TV recordings in local TV stations back in the day:

Subject: RE: BBC Treasure Hunt
From: Little Robyn
Date: 12 Nov 10 - 03:11 PM

Chris, at Channel One, NZBC, in the 60s and 70s, videotape was expensive (2inch wide) and at 15ips, a half hour programme on a metal spool was heavy and took up lots of space.
So unless a producer said "Keep that one" (in which case someone had to find storage space) after a certain period of time the videotape room was instructed to ERASE the tape and put it back in the shelves to use again. Some of the news or sports stuff that they wanted for the archives, was fed through the Telerecorder and a black and white film was made - usually very grainy and of lousy quality.
The methods of recording used today were only a dream then.
I'm sure BBC had the same problems. If a programme was done on film, there was a solid copy, but if it was a studio programme on VT, the tapes were usually wiped. (Except for Wn3366 which I kept hidden behind #1)
Robyn ex WNTV1 VT and Telecine operator, 1968 - 1973

The issue of just what happened to tapes was the subject of an interesting article in 2023: Why is there no recorded footage of NZ Hall of Fame inductees Larry's Rebels?

Most episodes of early shows like Pukemanu, Alpha Plan, Section 7, Happen Inn, seem to be missing, and even later shows like On The Mat, Close to Home etc are for the most part lost as well.

Sadly even with the exposure of some archival material during the celebration of fifty years of TV in New Zealand in 2010 and on the HeartlandTV (2010-2015) channel there hasn't been any great public interest in getting access to the older shows or any strong commercial interest in exploiting the material that does still exist, but if you do happen to have any old New Zealand TV shows on film, beta, VHS, audio cassette, script form, or any other related documents or ephemera please do get in touch so those of us who have an interest can enjoy them.

I know that here in the UK there has been a joint effort between interested  parties to try and track TV material down via the Missing Presumed Wiped initiative in a similar way to the NZ film archive's film search campaign from several years ago.

I've sent e-mails out to folk I've dealt with in the past asking if there is any coordinated approach between TVNZ, The Film Archive and other interested parties to document which New Zealand shows are missing thought lost (no copies held in archives), and how they might encourage folk to do something with their old off air recording.

Sadly TVNZ never replied.The folks from the film archive and NZ on screen did, saying there's no coordinated approach to the issue, but there was interest in pursuing the idea.

Read more: New Zealand's "Lost" TV Shows?

Televison archives and schedules for New Zealand

The folks at the UKTV focused Mausoleum Club Forum were chatting about where copies of old UK TV shows might be hiding in archives around the world and how to find out what screened in particular countries. I gave them my suggestions for where tapes and information live in New Zealand as follows:

Archives:
ngataonga.org.nz - New Zealand’s audiovisual archive. Their purpose is to collect, care for and share the audiovisual Taonga (treasure, anything prized) of Aotearoa. They have stewardship of the Television New Zealand video archives which might include a bit of UK material but probably not a lot. Check out the Status of the collection.

Schedules
The Listener was the publication of record for NZ TV broadcasts for most of 20th century. From an archival television perspective their various websites have always sucked, and the situation is even worse in the aftermath of their temporary closure and sale in 2020/21.

Thanks to the hard work and generosity of a fellow archival TV researcher the Listener's TV listing pages from the 1974 to 1998 are available as pdfs.

Plans are in play for copies of iconic magazine the New Zealand Listener to make their way to the National Library’s Papers Past digital archive website following an agreement between the National Library and magazine owner Are Media. According to the press release issues from 1939 to 1959 are expected to be available on Papers Past during 2025 with later issues hopefully to follow...

In the meantime research needs to be via hard copies in a library; I've accessed copies in Auckland Library and the University of Canterbury collections. There used to be issues available in the UK including the University of Edinburgh: discovered.ed.ac.uk.

Editions of The Christchurch Press up to 1989 have been added to the which is a big help when researching screenings as The Press ran daily listings along with some reviews and promotional articles/interviews.

I "borrow" any scans of schedules I happen across on the inter-webs and put them here: TV listings through the years