TV review: 50 Years of New Zealand Television

Veteran MC Jason Gunn. Photo / Supplied

What have we become? We will honestly watch anything."

So laments one of the many local television stars interviewed near the end of the opening instalment of 50 Years of New Zealand Television, the documentary series celebrating the semicentennial of the box in Godzone.

Inspired by TVNZ's recent high-rating lowbrow quasi-quiz show attempt at marking the same, let's have some fun with guessing who might have said that. Was it ...

a) Phillip Sherry.

b) Brian Edwards.

c) Hamish Keith.

d) Jason Gunn.

It was, in fact Gunn. Yes the MC of TV One's Cheers to 50 Years in a brief appearance on tomorrow night's first episode of what is shaping up to be a thorough and thoroughly engaging seven-part series.

Of course, the greater irony is that this New Zealand On Air-funded independently made series is screening on Prime - part of the Sky TV empire - and not on our state broadcaster whose archives, stars and staffers past and present appear all over it.

And their presence and that of many other talking heads recruited to dredge their memory banks, help make it really good.

The first is a 90-minute overview of the five decades. Subsequent one-hour instalments will cover the various branches of the local medium.

Still the opening manages to cram a lot in, though it does run out of steam towards the end as it gets bogged down in a tag-team discussion about the politics of modern broadcasting and funding and other really important stuff ... if you worked in television rather than surrendered your brain to it on a nightly basis and have done for more years than you care to remember.

But mostly, 50YONZTV is excellent, threading official history, personal anecdote and period footage into something both nostalgic and enlightening.

That's whether it's sculptor Greer Twiss on the puppet show he created for that first night of broadcast, Keith Aberdein seen in his reporter days interviewing Wahine survivors as they came ashore and now recalling his shame at keeping them out in the cold, or veterans Ian Johnstone, Brian Edwards and Ian Fraser reminiscing about how fledging and government-run television news struggled with Prime Ministers Holyoake and Muldoon.

This first episode it does get a little bogged down on Muldoon's bullying of television, maybe because so many broadcasters of the era have a war story to tell about our scariest beloved leader.

The mix of political and pop culture history can make for some whiplash-inducing segues - from After School's positive effect on race relations to the upheavals of the '81 Springbok Tour is amusing.

But it's no dry history lesson. It has its sad moments. We see the late Merata Mita interviewed before her recent passing and fronting Koha in the early 80s. Likewise there is the late Michael King interviewing on the ground-breaking 1970s series Tangata Whenua.

It has plenty to laugh at too, especially when it examines the quirky start of New Zealand television in the 1960s. Those early episodes of Country Calendar are even more bizarre than A Dog's Show a decade or two later. And who knew the go-go girls on C'Mon put life and limb at risk to be so groovy?

50YONZTV still knows that the most important question it can ask is of the viewers: Where-were-you-when?

My misty-eyed moment? Seeing Dick Tayler win the 10,000m at the Christchurch Commonwealth Games in 1974 again. It brought back memories of my usually reserved mum jumping up and down in the lounge as we watched it live on the black and white set.