There is a magic in objects and their stories. The expert calls on value might provide the sizzle in, say, the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow, but the real heart of the show – the thing that has kept it rolling for 47 seasons – is the provenance of its objects and the personal, family and social histories that attach to them.
That’s what National Treasures – now back for a second season – taps into, with a particular emphasis on the social history. It’s essentially a show about us, told through the things we have kept.
“From the priceless to the seemingly ordinary,” says host Stacey Morrison in her introduction. “These are living taonga, with all the richness, inspiration, grief, humour and passion that they have woven into their fabric.”
Morrison, her husband Scotty, Oscar Kightley and their six experts return from 2021′s first season, but, as the intro reveals, the main location for the show has shifted from the Auckland War Memorial Museum to an unnamed venue in downtown Auckland. The first season’s promise that the objects will be displayed at Te Papa has also gone.
If the museums are out of the picture, their people are still around. First up is the museum’s manuscript curator, Nina Finigan, who speaks to former New Zealand servicemen Tere Tahi and Lindsay Roberts. As teenagers, they were sent to observe Operation Grapple, a series of hydrogen bomb tests near Christmas Island in 1957 and 1958.
“We’ve now come to realise that the British government wanted to know what would happen to [a ship] and its contents – and we were the contents – when put into close proximity to a nuclear detonation,” says Roberts. “So, while we were watching the bomb, the scientists were watching us.”
Studies since have not delivered clear conclusions about the extent of harm suffered by the sailors, and the New Zealand government still does not officially acknowledge that the men were put at risk. But, Roberts explains, his wife had 13 miscarriages “and no live births”. Tahi’s grandson suffered multiple cancers. “I blame myself,” he says, fighting back tears before Finigan hugs him. The objects themselves – medals and news clippings – seem almost incidental to the grief on display.
Finigan closes with a plea for recognition of these men – and the show itself is not shy of taking a position on either history or the present. A visit from drag legend Buckwheat moves from the story behind a spectacular costume necklace to an observation from the museum’s social history curator, Jane Groufsky, that “we continue to see opposition to LGBTQI+ progress” and includes a snatch of anti-trans activist Posie Parker’s controversial rally in Albert Park last year. The political ascent of anti-wokeness since season one has clearly not daunted the producers.
There’s also a fascinating encounter with two brothers who bring in an 8mm film shot by their uncle at the infamous Waikato match of the 1981 Springbok tour – one had been in the stands, the other on the field, preventing the game from going ahead.
But it’s not all political. Former Human Rights Foundation chair Tim McBride turns up to show off an old school photo with his classmate John Clarke and a copy of Fred Dagg’s Greatest Hits.
Veteran journalist Richard Griffin reflects on an object familiar only to New Zealanders of a certain age – an iron lung. He spent months in one as a polio-stricken child. The appearance of New Zealand television’s most famous puppet, Thingee, in a forthcoming episode is enthusiastically trailered.
It all washes up as a nicely crafted and accessible series of history lessons about, as Morrison puts it, “who we are and how we got there”. It is, perhaps, a lesson itself that history is not only to be read in books.
National Treasures: TVNZ 1, Tuesdays, 7.30pm, from September 17; TVNZ+
