Gee, Maurice

Portrait of author Maurice Gee photographed by Reg Graham in the late 1990s — Portrait care of the Manuscripts and Pictorial Collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library.

One of New Zealand major literary figures, Maurice Gee's work writing for the small screen

is often forgotten when his literary history is discussed, as nearly all this work is tragically confined to the TVNZ archives. Some of his novels have been adapted for TV, including Under the Mountain (1981), Fire-Raiser (1986), and The Champion.

In an interview with Andrew Johnston he briefly discussed his TV writing:

Children's fiction began partly as a deliberate attempt to widen my writing base, and also because I had young children and wanted to write something for them, but certainly it was an attempt to make more money. That's why I went to TV, too—I simply wrote to the people who produced Close to Home . . . I wrote about 11 episodes of that. When I say I wrote them, I did the dialogue for them.

I could turn an episode around in about three days and get $200 or $300 for it, which was great money in those days . . . that's how I lived, writing dialogue for television. Mortimer's Patch followed—I really enjoyed Mortimer's Patch and was very disappointed when they stopped it after two series.

In his book Maurice Gee (New Zealand Writers and Their Work) (1987) Bill Manhire wrote:

Gee has also turned to more lucrative kinds of writing. He is serious and thoroughly professional about the work he does for television. Much of it has been satisfying, but not in the way that writing novels can be...Gee has reservations about working with material that is 'precut'. It means writing dialogue for characters originated by someone else. Plots have to be paced to accommodate commercial breaks; budgetary constraints determine locations and shooting schedules. There is also the audience to think of: 'Because I'm writing for prime-time viewing I've got to be only half a writer.