Damien Service On TVNZ's Archives

The New Zealand Television Archive, situated at the original home of New Zealand television at Avalon, is a treasure trove of history spanning some 50+ years and what might not be known about it is that individuals can request and purchase material, but only if it's been cleared.

In 1999 and 2008 I was fortunate enough to have purchased material from the archive and you may be wondering why am I using a public forum to bring this up? Well, I'll tell you.

While the material I received was what I wanted, with some material being stuff I didn't even know existed, the archive hasn't exactly been stellar with their book keeping.

For example in '99 I made an enquiry about some material on film, which had been listed on a database list that was emailed to me. When they went to check on the footage concerned it seems that the item was not able to be found, although it was, as stated above, on their records. So I was a little disappointed there.

So could the same thing happen twice? Well that's up for debate.

You see in 2008, when I went back, I purchased a number of old Television One channel promos and openers from the '75-80 period, or as I call it "the classic years". Now when I went back to get some South Pacific Television promos all they had was the short, familiar, 10 second version and an original TV2 labeled countdown leader.

Now I have since, on numerous occasions, enquired about the South Pacific Television opener and I always thought that if Television One's opener was in the archive, then so should South Pacific's.

Apparently not.

I have been told that it can't be found and if that's the case, then what else is missing? And did Television One and South Pacific Television have a similar policy that the BBC had in that to conserve tape, which would have been a little costly back then, that they needed to reuse them?

When I went back to TVNZ this past week I asked them to check any Romper Room tapes to see if they had the opener on them and I was surprised to hear back that they had no full episodes of the programme. However, they do seem to have given NZ On Screen a raw copy of the opener and it's this kind of thing that makes me wonder just what was going through the minds of the newly established TVNZ in 1980 (and upwards), if they can willy nilly destroy this valuable, priceless content and leave us with a small slither of footage.

Now I believe, and I am going to say it, that in the case of the opener a couple of things could have happened to that footage: 1. It was stolen and 2. It is still in the archive (somewhere), but hasn't been categorized and therefore isn't in the database.

There's also another piece of TV history that could have been thrown out when TVNZ came to be in 1980 and I know this because I've seen the evidence and that is the breakdown slides featuring the Goodnight Kiwi, which from the look of it were only aired on South Pacific Television.

Now this angered me and rightfully so, but what made it worse was that they had also thrown out the design speciications for the Goodnight Kiwi himself so I was glad when this ex-staff member saved them from the scrap heap.

Has this spiel been a stab at TVNZ? No. It's been waking New Zealanders up to the fact that we could be losing our broadcasting heritage and that we need to hold on to what we've got so that future Kiwi's can look back on it and appreciate what we've given to them, because if we don't then this will have all been a complete waste of time and effort.

Damien Service
Invercargill

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