You think we’ve got it tough?

Pictured: “How fit were you after five weeks of ‘Tuesday Trimming’? Lindsay McCaughan, who leads the exercises must be very fit indeed. Each week he went through the vigorous routine time after time under hot studio lights for rehearsals. Then he had to appear fresh and smiling for the programme itself. If you were puffing (as I was) after going through the exercises only once, admire this man who did it all without turning a hair.”

The “two most important events” in television in New Zealand in 1972 were the announcements that the country would soon have both “a Second Channel” and “Colour” — as soon as October 1973, it was predicted. Those who reacted with dismay may have been cheered by the 1972 New Zealand Television Annual: “Fortunately we are able to receive colour transmissions in black and white just as we are at present receiving black and white transmissions from colour films.” This would have been a relief to the colour refuseniks.

But the annual’s writers complained bitterly about the building of the satellite receiving station in Warkworth: “The cost of operating this service has been so limiting that we have had very little of direct on-the-spot television.”

Considering the dearth of outside broadcasts, the commentators were generous about the ubiquitous repeats; as a half-page devoted to the studio potboiler The Forsyte Saga testifies: “Some of us have now been privileged to see this outstanding series three times in three years.” Bad luck for anyone who didn’t consider watching regurgitated period costume dramas a privilege.

Reading this soft-cover magazine is like opening a time capsule. With a colour cover of the recently married Elsie and Steve Tanner posing with Ena Sharples from Coronation Street, the annual grandly boasted a PICTORIAL SOUVENIR OF THE YEAR’S VIEWING, but the interior is all in black and white on cheap newsprint. Olde English favourites, such as Geoffrey Bayldon as Catweazle (“the wizard who jumps through time from the Norman era more than a thousand years ago to the 20th Century”), grace its pages alongside local shows like Break 21, an “electronic word game” featuring a studio set that appears to have been stolen from Thames TV’s Magpie.

Some of the NZBC’s programming, though, was clearly unmissable (just imagine what a wasted device a remote control would have been, assuming such things even existed): “Prime Minister Jack Marshall has emerged from a great deal of Gallery exposure as the most completely composed person appearing on the programme.” Clearly, a tryout would have been wasted on Willie Jackson or Peter Dunne.

Filming for the 1972 series of Pukemanu 2 began “on location” — at the Tauherenikau racecourse near Masterton. “Despite more sophisticated techniques, better writing, more cohesion between episodes,” the annual writers complain, “there is no attempt to make this series anything other than a tale of typical everyday life in New Zealand.” A backhanded compliment if ever there was one, when you consider that such local shows were competing — at other times on the same channel, of course — with big budget US dramas like Alias Smith and Jones and Ironside, not to mention something called The Good Life. No, not the BBC’s Richard Briars/Felicity Kendall self-sufficiency comedy. This was the American take on downsizing: “Larry Hagman (star of I Dream of Jeannie) and Donna Mills, a couple who are sick of the irritations and responsibilities of middle class life, sell their house and car and take jobs as ‘experienced’ butler and cook on a wealthy estate…” Did it sink without a trace, or does any NZBC reader remember the show?

That the big US networks were cashed-up is brusquely underscored by this aside regarding the sophisticated special effects that were commonplace in bigger productions:

“Television viewers don’t always appreciate realism when they see it. For example, did you realise that Mission Impossible is the only television show with its own ‘working’ lift?

“A lift scene is one of the easiest to fake. You close the doors, show a fake indicator moving and the audience accepts the idea that somebody is going up or down.”

Fancy that. How fortunate for viewers that they had the investigative talents of New Zealand Television Annual experts to disclose such trade secrets for them, and how disappointed Kiwis must have been that those riveting lift scenes on all their other favourite shows were, in fact, shot in the linen cupboard.

Back in more sedate territory, Derek Nimmo is pictured sharing some distinctly non al dente spaghetti with his son Piers in “an Auckland hotel”; Marty Feldman rehearses the old goggle-eyed-flame-throwing-lighter-and-fag routine at the Feltex television awards presentation in the long-gone Mandalay; and the great Warren Mitchell as Alf Garnett grimaces over a glass of apparently corked Kiwi wine during a month-long stint of nightclub gigs. There was no Spy Valley Pinot Gris in them days.

As far as TV shows from the other side of the Atlantic went, a multi-page Coronation Street special catered to low-brow viewers. The soap, we’re told, was originally scheduled for only a 13-week run, but popular demand “miraculously” extended it:

“I say ‘miraculously’ because it’s always seemed to me that the people in charge of TV aren’t really very interested in what people like. And Coronation Street, though it very handsomely pays for itself now, has never been a cheap programme.”

I wonder what that writer would have said if he or she had been told that the show would still be handsomely paying for itself 6000 episodes and 34 years later, and that the 21st Century would bring Hollywood-style car stunts and movie-budget pyrotechnics to Weatherfield. Remember that for New Zealand fans, this was before Ray Langton joined the show the first time around (and if any Coro fans have been wondering what Neville Buswell has been up to for the last 28 years, read all about it here). In 1972, Albert Tatlock, Annie Walker and Hilda Ogden still ruled Kiwi screens, and a double-page spread, with a Dickensian pen-and-ink map of The Street by Anthony Cobb, showing who lived where, brings back long-forgotten Coro characters such as Effie Spencer, bus inspector Harry Hewitt and his wife Concepta.

The New Zealand Television Annual’s editorial style was neither hard-hitting nor illuminating. This, about the impending visit by Peter Adamson, Coronation Street’s Len Fairclough, is indicative of its laboured style: “The mountain of mail coming into the Television Studios reaches its peak when the characters are involved in controversy,” we’re coyly informed. Just a few lines later, the tone shifts to apologetic: “The real person is seldom completely separate from the character he is playing.” A nice way of warning Kiwi fans that he was a bastard in real life, too?

And this on “expatriate New Zealander” Ewen Solon (a familiar face on British screens at the time), who starred in Section 7 and was obviously quite the wag: “Solon was born in Mount Eden ‘although not the jail’ he quips.”

David Frost visited New Zealand in 1972 as well, but appears not to have been enamoured with Kiwi hospitality. He “breezed through” Auckland on September 4, having given a press conference at the Auckland Town Hall and “left for the United States during the night barely 16 hours after he arrived”.

And if, like Frost, you couldn’t bear 1972 New Zealand, or stomach another episode of The Mod Squad, NYPD or Hogan’s Heroes, as little as $420 could get you away from it all. The inside back cover of the 1972 New Zealand Television Annual offered “a luxury voyage and a month’s marvellous holiday as a bonus!” The ad copy went on to promise “NO CRAMP — NO SWOLLEN FEET — NO STOMACH ‘TIME CLOCK’ UPSET, Comfort all the way via Tahiti and Panama to Southampton in the 20,000-ton one-class super luxury cruise liner SHOTA RUSTAVELI”. The ‘Shot of Rust’ had five bars, and so its “FREE medical attention” was probably a much-needed part of the service. When you finally arrived in Southampton in 1973, you could head up to Weatherfied for a Coro catch-up at the Rover’s Return with Ray Langton.

It had to be better than watching Doctor At Large or The Partridge Family on the single channel of your black and white TV set. But try telling that to the young people of today and they won’t believe you.