Rhys Darby is piloting a time machine through our nation's not-too-distant past. JOANNA HUNKIN reports
The second series of C4's Rocked The Nation doesn't quite rock. Instead, the show fronted by Rhys Darby takes a look back at 100 stories in Kiwi pop culture - but told from a post-babyboomer's perspective. While fronted by the The Flight of the Conchords co-star - whose last movie was coincidentally The Boat that Rocked - the show is the brainchild of director Mitchell Hawkes who helmed the first series. TimeOut asked him why he's turned the volume down and the nostalgia up.
So Rocked the Nation 2. It's not really about rock anymore ... Was there ever any discussion about changing the name?
There was talk about that but we thought that it had got a good reaction from the viewers and reviewers and it was the same people making it so we thought we'd stick with the brand.
And did you consider a second music series or was pop culture the obvious sequel?
We did run through a few music ideas before we settled on pop culture but we didn't want to do, you know, the 101 to 200 greatest moments.
How do you go about researching pop culture? Do you just sit down with people and come up with stuff you remembered growing up?
Well, obviously it's completely different from Rocked the Nation 1, which was lots of research and interviews with people who knew things. Pop culture did sort of come down to 'what do we remember?'. By definition it had to be well known so we weren't looking for the obscure and unknown.
A major part of pop culture is television. Did you have any problems sourcing iconic clips from rival television networks?
That's one of the positive things about all this privatisation and commercialisation. They've got their archive library that's totally commercial so if you pay them the money, they'll give you the footage. We got TV3's for free and had open access to that but we just paid for the rest.
And was there ever an issue of what you could or couldn't include, relating to the rival networks?
No, we didn't have any of that. We came across an interesting one with the underarm incident though, where the two cricket bodies - Australia and New Zealand - were saying that they didn't license that too often. We had to go through a long and protracted negotiation to get the footage of the underarm incident. That was the only time we weren't given footage. We got it in the end, it was just horrendously expensive.
Would you say that was the hardest clip to source or were there other obstacles?
I guess one of the things was, while we had access to all the archives, some footage doesn't neccessarily exist. For example, when we were doing a bit on Olly Ohlson's "keep cool till after school," as far as we can tell and TVNZ can see, there is no footage of him actually signing that. He was just being linked to pre-recorded shows so it wasn't really archived.
How much did the team's own age bracket shape the content and what you considered to be pop culture?
There was a definite objective to be within C4's demographic of 18 and 39. TVNZ have covered other stuff in the past - the babyboomers, etc - so there isn't any pop culture from the 60s. That story's been told and it's time for the next generation of stories. We made an arbitrary cut-off point of Rhys [Darby's] birth year as the beginning of the pop culture we would cover for this series. It's not a definitive list of New Zealand's pop culture throughout history, it's over the past 35 years.
Do you think there was a specific time or moment when New Zealand pop culture really came into its own?
I think it started in the late 60s with the identification that New Zealand wasn't an outpost of Great Britain. I think over the past 40 years we've become more willing to celebrate what it is to be a New Zealander. This is what the pop culture moments are - they are so specifically New Zealand because they're random. If you were from overseas, you would learn a lot about New Zealand, but you would just be confused by the whole thing because it's such random stuff. Through the randomness of what becomes pop culture - say "you're not in Guatemala now Dr Ropata" - you start to build up an overall picture of what it is to be a New Zealander. We were thinking it would be quite good actually as part of an immigrants' package. If you were immigrating to New Zealand, you could be given this series and know all these random pieces of information that people talk about. It would be perfect!
LOWDOWN
What: Rocked the Nation 2 fronted by Rhys Darby
Where and where: Premieres this Monday, July 6, at 8.30pm on C4
