Good crop but more local telly needed

By LOUISA CLEAVE

Lately it seems a local television drama or comedy is never far from sight. Three out of five weekday nights have a home-grown series in prime time.

On Tuesday nights, lawyer turned strip club owner Melissa is to be found putting the fun back into her life in TV3's light drama, The Strip.

Wednesday night is a dose of rural drama courtesy of TV One's Mercy Peak, followed by the satire Spin Doctors, which returns tomorrow night.

On Thursday a group of Kiwi flatmates can be found coming to grips with life, love and friendships in TV3's Love Bites, starting this week. And there is still more Street Legal (TV2) and a second series of Being Eve (TV3) to come this year.

Dave Gibson, producer of The Strip, has been in the TV game long enough to be impressed with the present level of local shows.

His production company, Wellington-based Gibson Group, has been making films and television shows for more than 25 years. But he cautions against "getting carried away" with the numbers.

He says there is "a bunch of reasons" for the turnaround from the New Zealand drama drought of a few years ago, among them: TV3 started investing in local production after a dry spell; the TVNZ charter and talk of quotas; an increase in the number of programme commissioners at TVNZ and TV3.

"I think if there's a willingness, then money tends to flow," Gibson says of the impact caused by putting commissioners in charge of particular genres, such as drama and comedy.

Shows such as The Strip, Street Legal and Mercy Peak are performing well despite battling American or British dramas made for millions of dollars an episode.

But Gibson says New Zealand must increase the volume of shows it makes to keep up the performance and enable television makers to hone their craft.

Local shows are made on moderate budgets and the money available from the networks and New Zealand On Air is not enough to make shows at reasonable production levels, says Gibson.

Every producer wants overseas funding but attracting investors is a production in itself, Gibson explains. "You can't sell what you haven't made and you can't sell what you can't get domestic funding for.

"Unless the networks and the funding bodies are part of the gig you can run around the world until the cows come home. One of the first things anyone will ask you when you're trying to sell things off-shore is, 'Is it supported by your local network?' If the answer is no [they think] there must be something wrong with it."

Gibson says people have to accept failure as part of making television. "There will be failures and shows will not perform to the extent people thought they would.

"It's not a chemical formula. I think the audience has an appetite for good stories, well told, that happen to strike a chord at the right time. You can't tell, you don't really know. You just have to keep making shows."