Mel Williams, Visitor Services
I brought my kids to Kiwi North with me recently to participate in some arts and crafts in the Education Centre. My daughter is very artsy and immediately got stuck into the task. My son however prefers to watch TV, so I wasn’t at all surprised when he found himself a television to watch. Or so he thought. He then spent an amusing amount of time trying to figure out where the remote was and how to turn this TV on.
I remember growing up with TVs like this. They weren’t just TVs back then, they were furniture, sometimes with legs attached below, sometimes built entirely into a cabinet. They didn’t have remote controls, but chunky knobs for controlling the volume, tuning, and adjusting the picture among other things. They also had thick convex screens that would crackle and make the hairs on your arms stand up when you touched them or even came near. This charge of energy is generated by a cathode-ray tube. The CRT would fire electrons at the back of the glass, releasing coloured light visible on the front of it. This electrical charge on the inside also created static electricity on the outside. Hence the crackle.
Among the other televisions here in the Whangarei Museum is a slightly later model than the one my son found and is an example of the portable televisions that were popular in the 1980s. It is a Technica K3910 (1992/124/1). It is encased in cream plastic with a moulded handle on top and has its own built-in aerial. This TV was donated to the museum by Blair Bench Electronics in 1992.
When comparing New Zealand to the rest of the world, our little country was nowhere near the forefront of public television broadcasting. The BBC in Britain led the way when it started the world’s first public service in 1936. The NBC began broadcasting in the USA three years later and Australia in 1956. It was 24 years after the BBC hit the airwaves that New Zealand followed suit.
Experimental broadcasts began in 1951 here, but the first official television transmission was aired in Auckland on June 1st, 1960, from 7:30pm. The inaugural broadcast lasted for three hours and included an episode of “The Adventures of Robin Hood”, a live interview with a visiting British ballerina and a performance by the Howard Morrison Quartet.
TV was initially available only within Auckland. Then in 1961 television stations began transmitting independently in Christchurch and Wellington, followed by Dunedin in 1962.
By 1965, each of the four stations were broadcasting for 50 hours per week. There was still no network and overseas programmes were flown between the stations to be played on air in each city on consecutive weeks. By 1969 the hours of transmission had increased to 65 which were made up of 2pm-11pm on Sundays to Thursdays and 2pm-midnight on Fridays and Saturdays.
1969 was a big year for broadcast television in New Zealand as this is when the four stations became networked, allowing everyone to watch the same thing at the same time. This happened just in time for the Apollo 11 mission which was broadcast live nationwide in July.
It wasn’t free to watch TV. An initial annual licence fee costing £4 was imposed, which is the equivalent of almost $200 today. This was used to fund the service which was commercial free in the early days. However, after just one year, commercials were introduced, allowing for seven minutes per hour of paid content, which has increased over the years to up to 14 minutes per hour. The television licence fee was not abolished until 1999. Interestingly, the licence fee that year was $110, which was also the equivalent of almost $200 today. Most of us find ourselves paying a lot more for television now, but through subscriptions.
The evolution of televisions has been pretty geometric. Early ones had circle screens that then became four sided with rounded edges, those edges turned to points and the screen became a square. From there the televisions themselves became thinner and the screen became a rectangle, flat, some are even curved. The TV went from being furniture to sitting on furniture, and now it’s like a picture on the wall, much to the disappointment of many a house cat.
1992/124/1
