TV looks at itself 

On Easter Sunday on Two Television New Zealand will screen an important documentary about itself. The 100-minute film, made by an independent Auckland producer, lan Mackersey, takes a look behind the broadcasting scenes, at both the programme makers and the transmission engineers who distribute two channels of television to more than 97 per cent of the population.

“Network New Zealand” follows, throughout one day’s operations, the world of the television production staff and the engineers who work in the remote places of the transmission network. It begins in the dark before dawn on a winter morning at a lonely microwave station in the mountains between Napier and Taupo; it ends with the close-down of Television One in a control room at Avalon at midnight.

In the 18 hours between, the film moves about the system to reveal some of the complex strands of production and transmission activity that add up to a typical day in the life of New Zealand’s television service.

It watches the news operation, both in the Auckland newsroom, on assignments with reporters, and in the studios as the national bulletin goes on air. It goes on location with a drama director shooting an episode of “Country GP”; into the Christchurch studios to watch David McPhail and Jon Gadsby putting their satire show together; up into the Alps with the Natural History Unit crew making a film about the kea; out to a Canterbury pine forest with an outside broadcast team covering a motor rally, and into one of the biggest television studios in the Southern Hemisphere where a music producer is rehearsing Louise Malloy with the Symphony Orchestra.

It looks at children’s programmes and current affairs, at the Maori language news, at the censors, the audience researchers, the television commercial sales staff, and follows Oily Ohlson to a school for deaf children.

The film also goes out into New Zealand’s lesser known places to observe the broadcasting engineers, the seldom publicised teams who, round the clock, maintain the central microwave system which carries the television programmes from hill-top to hill-top from the far north to Southland.

It follows them in four-wheel-drive vehicles up zigzagging mountain tracks, by helicopter and ski-lift to snow-bound transmitter sites in the Otago mountains, and on horseback to one of the hundreds of translators that take television to tiny population pockets in some of which less than a dozen people live.

It is a hybrid day compiled from two months’ filming during May and June of 1984 and thus reflects New Zealand and world events in the early winter immediately before the snap election led to a change of government.

The Prime Minister’s press conference is held by Sir Robert Muldoon and the Soviet Union has just withdrawn from the Olympics.

The programme’s producer, lan Mackersey, who wrote and directed the film, was commissioned by the Broadcasting Corporation to make the programme in an effort to create a wider public understanding of the whole television operation.

Working on the project with him as assistant producer and researcher was his wife, Caroline, who for 17 years was in production with BBC. Television. The choice of an independent production team was a deliberate decision to seek a detached view of the subject from film-makers emotionally uninvolved with the corporation.

lan Mackersey, who has never worked on the staff of Television New Zealand, returned to New Zealand in 1983 after more than 20 years as a documentary producer overseas during which his films gained 23 international awards.

“There was no television here when I left. I returned to find two very sophisticated channels,” he said. “Soon I discovered they were a regular target for political and public attack. This puzzled me. Having seen the output of a large number of world television services I believe that, for a small country, New Zealand has developed a remarkably professional operation. Frankly, it gives its audiences a considerably higher standard and variety of programmes than the services of many bigger countries — and among them I have to include America.”

Researching and organising the film’s shooting schedule was a big task for Caroline Mackersey, who has worked throughout the world on more than 40 BBC television documentaries.

To get a reaction to “Network New Zealand” in its final stages of editing, the Mackerseys invited a small group, a cross section of viewers from different walks of New Zealand life, to view it.

Caroline Mackersey said, “We wanted to avoid the specialist and emotionally involved responses of the broadcasting people themselves. We wanted some average Kiwi viewers, as far as they exist. They were wholly absorbed by the film.

One man said: ‘I was amazed. Television people are just ordinary blokes like us.’ Another said: ‘You should put it out on both channels at the same time so people have to watch it.’ And again: ‘We do get a lot for our licence fee. I wonder they don’t all get ulcers’.”

 

Comments powered by CComment