Lush's labour of love not all lost

TV and radio star Marcus Lush says he was devastated to hear an arson attack destroyed footage of a new television series which he wrote and starred in.

"I feel a very serious sense of loss about it," Lush told the Herald on Sunday. "It was my series - I came up with it, researched it and wrote it. I heard we had lost everything."

Fortunately for Lush, and production company Jam TV, the damage was far less extensive as last week unfolded.

It emerged that only a few hours of the series, South: A Thank You Note, was in post-production in the Auckland offices of Jam TV when it was broken into on Easter Monday.

Company director Melanie Rakena said the burglars took a $30,000 camera, a laptop, and then "set the place on fire". The Fire Service was called about 4am, then roused Rakena at 6am to tell her the Dominion Rd office had been gutted. The extent of the damage was such that the floor collapsed through into the shop below.

"They piled up all the stuff that was around in the centre of the floor and put the master tapes on top of it - then set fire to it."

Precautions with footage meant only a few hours from 45 days of filming had been kept in the office over the weekend. The master tapes are kept elsewhere.

While the tapes in the office were destroyed in the fire, a data recovery expert has been working on fire-damaged hard drives and told Rakena there was a 98 per cent chance of recovering the footage.

The industry had been generous in its support - Rakena said John Barnett from South Pacific Pictures had called twice to offer the company office space while it recovered from the arson.

Rakena said the series reflected Lush's "love of Southland". He travelled the region, speaking to people and visiting some of its most beautiful and isolated places.

Lush said he was five days into a tramp in Fiordland when one of the camera crew received a call on a satellite phone about the the arson.