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.

Now there are real fears that this stuff is going to affect people in a bad way: children are going to learn to talk like American gangsters and use American slang. I mean it's bad enough with the talkies, but the radio is actually in the house. How are you going to monitor it?
– Academic Peter Hoar on the anxiety about American made radio soaps and serials in the 1930s