Michael Noonan

Veteran scriptwriter Keith Aberdein once said that Michael Noonan was the best television writer New Zealand had — a man who wouldn't be brought off, who insisted on "getting things right". Certainly Noonan's resume is not lacking in Kiwi television firsts: including bicultural drama Pukemanu, historical epic The Governor, and the country's first soap, Close to Home. Noonan was outspoken about the importance of stories that reflected New Zealand, and "help us understand a little more about ourselves".

Growing up in Dunedin, with spells in Ōamaru, Michael Noonan hated school, arguing that he never learnt to spell. His Catholic childhood gave him "a healthy cynicism" which may have helped him be a better writer.

After leaving school he began writing: poetry (partly to impress women), satire, and theatre. Landfall editor Charles Brasch compared his play The Rattle to King Lear. Then came a series of part-time gigs: newsreading for the Dunedin regional station DNTV-2, radio drama, and acting at the Globe Theatre.

In 1967 he was one of 170 actors chosen for a series of workshops aimed at training actors for television. As a result, he acted in murder mystery Slipknot and got a lead role in A Joker in the Park, a controversial tale of gay bashing which won both praise and criticism.

By now Noonan had spent four years in Auckland. There he experienced the cultural shock of discovering there are other colours than Pākehā, and managed the university bookshop. Newly married, Noonan saw television as the only way to make a decent income from writing, in the absence of a local film industry.

When the NZ Broadcasting Corporation decided to split television drama off from radio in late 1969, Noonan became the first script editor of the new television drama department.

New Zealand's first ongoing drama series, Pukemanu (1971) was inspired by working class life in a North Island forestry town. As script editor, Noonan recruited Listener reviewer Hamish Keith, and together they coached a team of fellow novices whose talent would quickly grow: among them author Fiona Kidman, Roger Hall, Keith Aberdein, and Ian Mune.

Echoing the thoughts of series creator, ex-forestry worker Julian Dickon, Noonan argued for Māori characters, fighting disbelief from on high over whether there were enough Māori actors to play them. Frustrated by how a series about outdoor people living in the middle of a forest was increasingly spending so much time indoors, Noonan  later quit the NZBC in protest at Pukemanu's axing.

Going freelance did little harm to his career. Noonan adapted August Strindberg play Miss Julie with his colleague Murray Reece, did interviews for TV show On Camera, and wrote for independently-made kids' thriller The Games Affair. He and Hamish Keith led the writing team on ambitious probation officer series Section 7 — "a terrible flop" — and in 1973 Noonan scripted a one-off drama about Prime Minister Richard John Seddon. Listener reviewer Roger Hall praised it as New Zealand's "best historical documentary" to date. It won a Feltex Award.

The following year — 1975  — Noonan won his own Feltex: for writing The Longest Winter, a three-part dramatisation of the impact of the Great Depression. The programmes followed the decline of a jewellery business and a boot-making factory, including the 1932 Queen Street riot. During this period Noonan also researched and conducted interviews with Janet Frame and Ngaio Marsh for Three New Zealanders, a series profiling women writers.

Close to Home, New Zealand's first soap opera, launched in May 1975. The show's aim, in Noonan's words, was "to hold a mirror up to society". Noonan and his longtime directing/producing partner Tony Isaac were at the start line. They had agreed to devise a concept and create the first 26 episodes, on one condition: Noonan's long cherished dream to make a historical series about Governor George Grey got the go-ahead. Nobody expected the soap to last 818 episodes.

Hopes of broadcasting five episodes a week were abandoned as too ambitious before launch; it was hard enough making two per week. Noonan had written a Māori family into the show's original ‘bible', but a lack of funding for Māori writers meant such bicultural hopes wouldn't even start to be realized until later episodes.

Noonan and Isaac's "friendly blackmail" resulted in arguably the most ambitious drama series in the history of New Zealand television: The Governor. Covering the colonial period from 1840 to 1890, the show was based on exhaustive primary research, including tribal oral histories. Noonan, producer Isaac and scriptwriter Keith Aberdein (who writes about The Governor here) were well aware of the show's subversive potential. The six episodes were partly designed to challenge myths about Grey, and the country's supposedly perfect race relations record.

Noonan cameoed in three episodes as Grey's colleague, colonial secretary Alfred Dommet. Audience figures for The Governor were impressive, while reviews ranged across the spectrum. Already caught up in spats with TV One journalists, Prime Minister Robert Muldoon began attacking The Governor over its costs, which TV executives were evasive about.

Noonan gave his account of the controversy in this 2009 video interview. He argued that Muldoon likely found the show "just too subversive for words", but that he was also "partly stimulated by the private sector of the film industry, who were jealous that the project was going ahead . . .  some of the big names in the film industry were working on The Governor, and trying desperately to stymie it."

In 1979 Noonan became the first scriptwriter to be named a Burns Fellow at Otago University. During his year in Dunedin, he continued to research and write a nine-part adaptation of Bill Pearson's West Coast mining novel Coal Flat. There were hopes Sam Neill would play one of the leads. But in the cost-cutting that followed The Governor controversy, Coal Flat was narrowly cancelled at a late stage. The project was turned down again in 2002. Noonan's World War l era drama Home Fires also never went into production.

In 1984 Noonan left TVNZ's drama department. That year, in screen industry magazine Onfilm, he critiqued a lack of commitment to local TV drama. He argued that the controversy over The Governor's costs had led to "a sharp cutback in serious local dramas" — by which he meant "quality productions with integrity which aim to broaden our horizons, to help us understand a little more about ourselves, while also being entertaining". He argued that TVNZ was only interested in upbeat dramas, "made with an eye to overseas markets".

Noonan adapted Roger Hall's smash play Glide Time into a one-hour teleplay, and wrote two episodes of 1982 anthology series Loose Enz. The success of Glide Time led to Gliding On, the long-running comedy show about public servants who do very little.

In the 1990s Noonan was one of the writing team on TV3's first drama show Homeward Bound, which won rave reviews but uninspired ratings. It followed the lives of a sprawling farming family living near Auckland.

He also acted many times on screen, in everything from Pukemanu to a 1990 episode of The Ray Bradbury Theatre. One of his biggest TV roles was in playwright Bruce Mason's 1983 teleplay The Garlick Thrust. Noonan played weary grandfather to a rugby-mad boy.

Amongst the shows Noonan was proudest of was Legacy (1987), a documentary series about immigration to New Zealand. Other treasured projects did not come to pass: among them another historical piece featuring George Grey, and a script on pioneer aviator Richard Pearse.

Noonan was also active in trying to improve conditions for writers; as mentioned late in this interview, he spent time as national secretary of PEN (the NZ Society of Authors). 

Michael Noonan died on 11 June 2023 in Auckland. He was 82. 

Noonan was often credited as Michael Anthony Noonan or as Anthony Noonan — in order to avoid confusion with Christchurch-born writer Michael (John) Noonan, who worked mainly in Australia and England.

Profile written by Ian Pryor; updated on 15 June 2023

Sources include
Michael Noonan
'Michael Noonan: Pioneering scriptwriter...' (Video Interview), NZ On Screen website. Director Clare O'Leary. Loaded 14 April 2009. Accessed 14 June 2023
Michael Noonan, 'Closed to Home Production' - Onfilm, June 1984, page 27
Robert Boyd-Bell, New Zealand Television - The First 25 Years (Auckland: Reed Methuen Publishers, 1985)
Trisha Dunleavy, Ourselves in Primetime - A History of New Zealand Television Drama (Auckland University Press, 2005)
Pamela Stirling, 'The Drama of it all' (Interview) - The Listener, 16 April 1983, page 14
'Michael Noonan - 1979' Otago University website. Accessed 14 June 2023
'Michael Anthony NOONAN' (Death Notice) - The NZ Herald, 13 June 2023