Derek Morton sent in this image he had been given by by former NZBC-TV film cameraman Peter Janes.
Left to right are Brian Staniland, Derek Morton, Ian Cumming, Bob Blair and (chief) John Atkinson – everybody then on the WNTV-1 staff responsible for staging productions.
Derek recalled the following
The square image shape suggests a medium format camera (often referred to as 2¼" square) which in turn suggests that it was almost certainly shot by then full-time WNTV-1 photographer John McKechnie.
The pic must have been shot sometime in 1965, because the original four had recently been joined by Bob Blair (so it can't have been before that) and Ian Cumming was soon to head off to spend several years at BBC TV in London, from 1966 (so it can't have been after that). A fairly confident guess is that it belongs in time sequence just before the production of Down by the Cool Sea stuff.
The photo is only a silly, obviously set-up joke, but perhaps incidentally interesting because it's from a time when staging was a significant factor in productions – for example, putting up a succession of several different groups during "Let's Go", swapping them in and out as the show went to air live, took some doing.
Kevan Moore, the producer of that show, had been a floor manager in Sydney, so understood staging, and others had similar experience in theatre (including most of the floor crew) so this area of expertise didn't stand in the way of developing competent NZ drama like some other elements, such as a lack of good screenplays and screen-experienced actors.
The pattern was for floor managers to often become producers/directors (knowing your way around a studio before taking control of one was rightly considered a good idea).
As the years passed, new people joined the floor crew to fill these gaps, and they in turn often moved on to become producers.
Meanwhile, another type of studio production developed in the new smaller 'studio 3', which didn't have the size or capacity for elaborate sets or big action, instead usually only a static talking head or two behind a desk, with hardly any staging required.
After this small studio began operations, floor crews began to divide into two levels (not just physically upstairs and downstairs). Studio 3 became the lair of trainees, and its productions were mostly news-related, or 'soft news'. Other stuff still took place in the main studio upstairs, and there was little cross-over of studio personnel.
Only a few people were based at the Waring Taylor Street studio building – the floor crew (staging and camera), lighting crew, a lone makeup woman (Edna 'Toni' Anthony), a still photography 'department' of two (Bert Jennings and John McKechnie), plus videotape operators and a handful of others, These permanent residents hosted daily 'guests' as they came in from distant buildings for their shows, so gossip mostly circulated via the few based in the studio building
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