The joy of vintage local screen content is often that it’s not just what screened at the time, it’s a glimpse of who we were and how we lived. In the background of current affairs shows are our towns and cities at a moment in time: dramatic characters, sport, clothes and hairstyles we’ve tried to forget.
New Zealanders make a million and a half visits to the NZ On Screen website every year to watch heritage film and TV. What is less well known is that a decent wedge of NZ On Screen-curated content is hiding away in the TVNZ+ app on your smart TV or device. It comes in two collections you can find by searching TVNZ+ for NZ On Screen: From the Vault and the more recent NZ On Screen: Iwi Whitiāhua. The former holds nearly 300 videos, most of them excerpts from full-length shows on the NZ On Screen website, and the latter is a smaller collection of longer videos.
NZ On Screen: From the Vault
The clip titles aren’t searchable, so you’ll need to browse for what you want, but as a snackable nostalgia feast it’s hard to beat. There’s Muhammad Ali radiating charisma on his 1979 visit to these shores; a long-haired, paisley-collared Bill Ralston turning up in 1973, not as a journalist but as the spokesman for anti-nuclear protesters; a heated exchange from that Kim Hill interview with John Pilger; Paul Holmes interviewing everyone from Johnny Cash to Sir David Attenborough; wartime newsreels, magic moments from decades’ worth of pop and variety shows and more. It’s the kind of rabbit hole it’s actually good to go down.
NZ On Screen: Iwi Whitiāhua
If you can remember the 1999 Big Day Out, well done. If you can’t, a look at Havoc at the Big Day Out is a reminder of the days when Mt Smart Stadium filled up annually for line-ups that seem remarkable now – as well as a reminder of what you could get away with on TV back then. In this special, Mikey Havoc and a 21-year-old Jeremy “Newsboy” Wells meet Courtney Love (yes, it’s the interview when she infamously gave Wells “the glad eye”), Fun Lovin’ Criminals, Korn, Fatboy Slim and a rather creepy Marilyn Manson. There are plenty of crowd shots, a glimpse of Shihad in their prime and significant exposure of Love’s boobs. Look out for cameos from Liz Gunn and Murray McCully.
New Streets – South Auckland, Two Cities is also hard to imagine being made today, but for different reasons. Neil Roberts (with Merata Mita on board as researcher) directed, wrote and narrated this remarkable 1982 documentary, but keeps himself out of the picture. It looks at the dual identities of Auckland’s emerging south, from Manukau City rising out of dairy paddocks to the middle-class “super suburb” of Pakuranga. The programme deals evenly with the people it meets, including the Storm Trooper gang members who provide security services at Ōtara Market, and there’s a sense of optimism about the work of the new council.
Our cities – and the changing ways we have lived in them – also get a look in in the first episode of 1983′s The City and the Suburb, which is narrated in bracingly intellectual style by Hamish Keith. It’s television of ideas, as is the 1982 profile of Witi Ihimaera from Kaleidoscope, the long-running arts show (older readers may recall arts shows being something you could watch on the telly).
Elsewhere, there’s the 1974 pilot episode of the beloved children’s show Spot On, which turns out to have been presented by poshly spoken hippies; a 1980 episode of On the Mat, in which Ernie Leonard is joined by his pal Billy T James; and a fascinating 2001 Tagata Pasifika show devoted to the comedy of the Naked Samoans, wherein lie the seeds of the characters and themes of Bro’ Town and Sione’s Wedding.
NZ On Screen: the website
This is the big vault, at nzonscreen.com. NZ On Screen has been adding programmes weekly since 2008 and now holds well over 1000 hours of screen heritage, drama and comedy included. The collection includes all six parts of the groundbreaking 1977 historical drama The Governor, for which complicated rights issues had to be resolved.
There are also the full feature-film version of Roger Hall’s Middle Age Spread, the restored episodes of Roger Donaldson and Ian Mune’s Winners and Losers, each based on a short story by the likes of Katherine Mansfield and Maurice Shadbolt, and Gaylene Preston’s West Coast thriller Perfect Strangers, along with dozens of excerpts and full episodes of Radio With Pictures and an array of themed collections.
There isn’t an NZ On Screen app as such, but Chromecast will get the website to your smart TV and you can AirPlay to an Apple TV from your iPhone or iPad.