Background to TV's Here-the Hits
From the New Zealand TV Weekly. October 28, 1968
The songs and spectacle of years past swept a wave of nostalgia over the country’s TV audience and brought calls for a repeat performance of the home-produced musical Here—The Hits. Success did not come easily, though—there were months of work and countless hours of planning involved in the show’s preliminaries,
It all started some months back when five people in Wellington spent - many hours in a darkened theatrette looking at films made between the years 1925 and 1960 — the years covered by the popular TV series. The five — Valerie Bayley (choreographer), Garth Young (technical producer), Ross MacIntyre (technical producer), Murray Hutchinson (designer) and John Barningham (producer) found that for help in the recreation of the hit music of those 35 years the films made in that time were invaluable.
From them, all sorts of facts were gleaned and checked—the dance steps, the orchestration styles, the way scenes were lit, the way women’s evening frocks were cut — and the many other details which typified the various periods.
Because Here—The Hits presented songs from a five-year period in the style of that period, this preliminary research was necessary and very valuable. The outcome of the hours spent is now TV history. The show’s six resident vocalists— Judi Beaumont, Jennifer Martin, Yolande Gibson, Ronnie Davern, Robert Gennari and Eddie McCarthy aided by guests such as Sandy Edmonds, Eliza Keil, Ray Columbus and Ray Woolf sang and danced their way through 180 songs written between 1925 and 1960.
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