TV Pick of the week: Rage

Ryan O'Kane plays an anti-tour protester who falls for a police officer (Maria Walker) in Rage. Photo / Supplied

Just as the Rugby World Cup attempts to put the nation into a celebratory mood, here comes a reminder of how our national game ripped the country apart during the 1981 Springbok Tour.

The final in the Sunday Theatre series of big-budget $2.8 million local telefeatures, Rage is co written by Tom Scott and his brother-in-law, police superintendent Grant O'Fee. It was inspired by the debates they had in the wake of the clashes between protesters and police.

Their story is about Carol Keriama (Maria Walker), a young Maori police-woman who goes undercover and falls in love with Des (Ryan O'Kane, last seen playing cricketer Bob Blair in Tangiwai), a charismatic student protester in the anti-tour movement.

"I was a detective-sergeant in Wellington during the tour," says O'Fee who now heads policing for the Rugby World Cup." I was an undercover agent about 10 years before then. With Tom, I would tell stories from my viewpoint, and he would tell his. Then, one day, he suggested that we could put a story together."

He says what attracted him to Rage was that he wanted to give a police perspective to it. "I think that's what we've both achieved: both the perspective of protesters and the perspectives of police are shown.

"Ultimately, the villain of the story is apartheid. It's not the protest movement, it's not the police and it's not the rugby union."

Scott, a protester during the tour and also a co-producer on Rage, had dealt with recent New Zealand history before, screenwriting for Fallout, the two-part miniseries he co-wrote with Greg McGee about the political demise of Sir Robert Muldoon and the subsequent Lange Government's anti-nuclear stand.

He says it always struck him that the story of the Springbok tour had never been dramatised.

"In 1981, you couldn't go anywhere without it (the tour) coming up, any dinner party, smoko room or conference hall," he says. "Anywhere you went, people talked about it."

However, Scott adds, as soon as the tour ended, the conversation stopped and nobody wanted to talk about it.

"It was one thing we all walked away from: the great debate became the sound of silence."

Rage is directed by Danny Mulheron, who directed last year's widely-panned telemovie, Eruption, about a volcano exploding in Auckland.

LOWDOWN

When: Sunday, 8.30pm
Where: One
What: A romance across the battlelines of the 1981 tour

- TimeOut