Making New Zealand - Broadcasting

Television (Full Length Episode) – 2019

In 1921 Professor Robert Jack's voice hit the airwaves, and New Zealand's broadcasting industry was born. This Making New Zealand episode looks at the evolution of radio and television in Aotearoa, and how these mediums reflected national identity through major societal change. Historians discuss radio's glory days from 1930 to 1955 before television changed the landscape in the 1960s, Radio New Zealand's history of clipped accents and 'serious news', and the stars of commercial radio. From 1988 change kept coming; industry deregulation, the launch of TV3 and Māori Television and a thoroughly digital future.

I remember hearing the voices of Pita Awatere or Sir James Hēnare or Rangi Logan or Wi Huata, young men from the front and to hear that on radio blew me away as an adult, listening to these archives. let alone what it must have done to those of our family who were hearing their brothers and their uncles and their husbands from overseas...it must have been phenomenally powerful.
– TV producer Tainui Stephens on the importance of radio to Māori whanau in WW2