ScreenTalk

Comedy legend David McPhail began making New Zealanders laugh in pioneering 1970s sketch show A Week of It, and then moved on to McPhail & Gadsby with his comedic mate Jon Gadsby. The two comedians also produced and starred in the sitcom Letter to Blanchy. In later years, McPhail starred in the mock documentary The Waimate Conspiracy, and played the appallingly politically incorrect teacher Gormsby in Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby. In 2007 McPhail donned a spandex super hero costume to fight crime in Amazing Extraordinary Friends, directed by his son Matt McPhail. As well as acting, McPhail has written many of the shows he has been involved in. His other writing credits include A Haunting We Will Go, and he has also worked as a comedy director on such shows as The Life and Times of Te Tutu.

In this ScreenTalk interview, McPhail discusses:

• The excitement of filming A Week of It an hour before it aired each week
• Using satire to prick the ego of former Prime Minister Rob Muldoon
• Why the concept behind the first season of McPhail & Gadsby was a mistake
• The real life stories behind Letter to Blanchy
• How Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby shocked the TV network but delighted fans
• Getting caught in public in a very revealing spandex costume while shooting The Amazing Extraordinary Friends

This video is available on YouTube to embed via a Creative Commons licence.

Credits:  Interview, Camera & Editing – Andrew Whiteside

Scriptwriter, playwright and columnist James Griffin has been writing for most of his life. Since becoming a scriptwriter in the 1980s Griffin has written many of New Zealand’s most well known and best loved TV shows as well as the feature film Sione’s Wedding.

In this interview, he discusses

• His love of writing from an early age but his desire to be a TV director
• Getting “side-tracked” in to script editing and learning the mechanics of how a script works
• The popularity of Gloss and blending comedy and drama
• His surprise that the TV drama City Life flopped
• The rollercoaster ride that is Outrageous Fortune and when its run should end
• Criticism of NZ comedy
• What it takes to make a “hit” TV show

This video is also available on YouTube to embed and distribute via a Creative Commons licence.

Credits:  Interview, Camera & Editing – Andrew Whiteside

Chris Knox is a musician, film critic and cartoonist. His music career began with legendary Dunedin punk band The Enemy, followed by post-punk heroes Toy Love, then the Tall Dwarfs and his own solo work.

Knox has appeared as a film reviewer on arts TV shows The Edge and Backch@t, and hosted the series The New Artland. He is also the man behind the long-running Max Media cartoon strip in the NZ Herald. Knox has also hosted an Intrepid Journey to India.

As a singer-songwriter and music video director, Knox is known as a pioneer of lo-tech, DIY classics.

For this special two-part ScreenTalk interview, Flying Nun founder Roger Shepherd chats with Knox about his life and career. (See the first part here.) In part two of the interview, they discuss:

• Knox moving from appearing in music videos to directing his own with the Tall Dwarfs‘ Nothing’s Gonna Happen
• Making the video for the Tall Dwarfs‘ Turning Brown and Torn in Two
• Making the video for his solo classic Not Given Lightly
• Becoming a film reviewer on TV arts shows The Edge and Backch@t
• Moving into television presenting, with an episode of Intrepid Journeys, and the series The New Artland
• Knox’s long-running cartoon strip Max Media

This video is available on YouTube for distribution via a Creative Commons licence.

Credits: Interview by Roger Shepherd, directed by Clare O’Leary. Camera and editing by Leo Guerchmann.

Veteran television script-writer Michael Noonan’s screenography reads a little like a list of New Zealand’s significant early TV dramas, including the historical epic The Governor.

Noonan talks to NZ On Screen about working as the first script editor in TVNZ’s fledgling drama department in the 1970s.

He tells the story of the letter-writing campaign that boosted 1973 drama series Pukemanu.

Noonan talks about the importance of having good producer/director partnerships. He discusses his strong working relationship with Murray Reece and the late Tony Isaac, and their work on early 70s dramas Richard John Seddon, The Longest Winter and The Games Affair.

Noonan was also the interviewer for the classic 1975 Janet Frame interview in the Three New Zealanders documentary series, again directed by his close colleague Tony Isaac. He says Frame was quite different from the image of her in popular myth.

Although Noonan was involved in the production of the other Three New Zealanders documentaries, he chose not to interview Sylvia Ashton-Warner, and he explains why this was.

Noonan also speaks about his and Tony Isaac’s work on the landmark series The Governor in 1977.  The series was controversial in its day, and Noonan suggests that some of this controversy was fanned by film industry people who were annoyed about so much money going to a TV project.

Referring to the 70s as the “developmental decade,” and a great time for NZ TV drama, Noonan says the 1980s were a tougher time, but he enjoyed his work on the Legacy series, and the drama Homeward Bound, which was started as a rival to Shortland Street.  It got the good reviews at the time, but Shortland Street got the viewers.

Noonan also talks about setting up the NZ Writers’ Guild.

This video is available on YouTube to embed and distribute.

Credits: Interview conducted by Clare O’Leary with camera and editing by Leo Guerchmann.