Patrick Day: Voice and Vision

Voice and Vision

A History of New Zealand Broadcasting (volume 2)

Auckland University Press $59

Review Paul Smith*

Less voice and more vision might have helped this history of broadcasting in New Zealand.

Radio and television are uneasy textual bedmates at the best of times, but represent the voice and vision in Day's second volume on broadcasting.

Because the industries are so very different, lumping them together distracts and hinders the flow of the text.

For comprehensiveness, though, it is difficult to fault Day in most areas. His notes, bibliography and index run to 24 pages. They are diverse and detailed and clearly show he has done the hard work of burrowing into everything from reports and newspapers to corporation minutes and letters.

For this he has to be commended. His book, dealing with the period from 1950 to the present, will serve as a solid reference for students and others interested in broadcasting.

What detracts from his work is its plodding progress through the various stages of broadcasting development.

In his preface, Day says the book is not so much a record of what has been broadcast in New Zealand as a study of the continuing conflict over who may broadcast and what broadcasting should be. Curiously, then, he omits to interview seminal figures such as former TVNZ director-general Allan Martin, but in the preface thanks some well-known performers and academics whose involvement with structural change was minimal.

Day covers the numerous battlegrounds which have characterised our broadcasting history, and documents our losses and gains as well as the cyclical nature of arguments about broadcasting.

Some things never change. In 1959, the newspaper industry made it clear that it wanted to run at least part of any television operation but Labour disliked the idea. Thirty-two years later newspapers had their way when National removed any ownership and therefore any cross-media ownership provisions.

In the mid 1970s the proportion of New Zealand-made programmes was 22 per cent. Last year New Zealand On Air estimated it was 24 per cent.

There were calls then for quota. There are plans afoot now to achieve them.

Regionalism rose and fell, a victim of costs. Now regional news is back on the television agenda.

The gains have come in the form of increased channels, the losses in programmes which once informed, entertained and educated.

In 1964, Ian Cross' raised eyebrow on Column Comment could dispatch poor news coverage to the graveyard of ignominy. Later, Brian Priestley's animated assessments did much the same on Fourth Estate. There are no present-day successors to this proud tradition, and others.

Once, Compass and Gallery led the way in studio current affairs, a genre now neglected in pursuit of profit, infotainment or both.

The glittering strand of entertainment under pioneering producer Kevan Moore and others shines only occasionally in the threadbare fabric of modern television.

Satire is non-existent - A Week of It is a sad, long week away.

However, as Day points out, the hostility and neglect of politicians and Treasury, underfunding and increasing commercialism have remained worrisome constants.

One statistic illustrates the commercial trend: under the NZBC an hour-long documentary meant 58 minutes for a Sunday transmission and 52 for a commercial weekday. Now it means less than 45 minutes.

Day reveals that the NZBC wanted a second channel in 1964 - 11 years before it arrived. He also makes some odd observations. During the Springbok tour he singles out sports commentator Keith Quinn for particular mention, forgetting TVNZ's news grunt Graeme Booth, who trudged through that bitter winter of conflict, sometimes with a bodyguard, to bring viewers their news.

Day's book almost runs out of steam as it and the century end. The 1990s - probably the most eventful decade in terms of impact on broadcasting - run to just nine pages compared with the 40-50- page chapters on other eras. His section on TV3 is similarly anorexic, at one-and-a-half pages.

On the sale of Radio New Zealand's commercial stations to the private sector, he claims, dubiously, that that was where they now really belonged.

Two pages later he confounds his own logic by saying that public radio faced continuing difficulties over its news service, which have become more pronounced since the sale of the RNZ commercial stations.

He makes no attempt to link the sale of stations to Irish media magnate Tony O'Reilly with National's unprecedented and wholesale removal of media ownership restrictions in 1991.

This fin-de-siecle skim compromises the thoroughness of the book and pays insufficient attention to the beginning of another cycle - the resurrection of public broadcasting ideals.

* Paul Smith is an Auckland writer and TVNZ board member.