TVNZ Building

T V N Z
By James Littlewood

Television began its life in New Zealand at the hands of a group of pipe-smoking, sandal-wearing refugees from the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation (NZBC), a government agency modeled on the BBC. In 1960, they succeeded in attaching pictures to the audio signal. In many ways, it resembled Radio New Zealand today. Much of it went out live from the studio by necessity, and nearly everything was presented from the announcer’s booth: “Next up, ladies and gentlemen, we have Robin Hood.”

Six months later, the government stakeholders told them they couldn’t afford it, and to the great annoyance of more-or-less everyone, the pipe smokers introduced advertising, which has been part of New Zealand’s so-called public service television ever since.

By the time the 1980s rolled around, this commercialised concept of public service had become such a big deal that — far from being unaffordable — it became positively lucrative. In a peculiarly vindictive period of New Zealand history, the Labour government passed the State Owned Enterprises Act (SOE), which listed large organisations like energy companies and the phone network as profit-yielding public services. And — presumably because they thought TV had much in common with a hydro-electricity generator — they dismantled the NZBC, locked Radio New Zealand in a cupboard, set up TVNZ and listed it as an SOE.

Not long afterwards it was posting annual dividends to the government of anything between fifty and a hundred million dollars or more. Not bad.

Initially, the TV people worked in a sort of Babylonian tower on Shortland Street, which is worth visiting for the Gus Fisher gallery. It also still has a TV studio run by the University of Auckland for teaching. But now that TVNZ were Officially Big, they needed a large, ugly building to help them roll with the times.

The TVNZ building on the corner of Victoria Street West and Hobson is all of that. It’s big. It’s angular, in an 80s way, with lots of mirror windows. In an oblique tribute to its occupant’s history, it’s black and white. One nice aspect of it is the generously sheltered bus stop on Victoria Street West. Interestingly, this no longer has seats in it like it used to. Presumably the occupant of the building took a dislike to occupants of the street who took to the shelter in increasing numbers as New Zealand’s rock-star economy left them to enjoy the mosh-pit long after the gig was over.

It is also — according to highly reliable urban legend — designed on the same basis as most shopping malls. It’s structured around an enormous atrium, with a lovely, airy, light-filled void cascading down the entire height of the building. There was shiny polished marble, concrete and stainless steel everywhere. Classy. But a recent $60m make over has updated that look to a more contemporary vibe, based on plywood. So classy. Legend has it that the reason for the shopping mall design-concept was not (as you might think) to emulate the retail environment for the benefit of any stray advertisers found wandering the corridors, but to better support the building’s resale value after it stopped being a telly station.

From the get-go, ministers such as Richard Prebble (Broadcasting and SOEs) and Roger Douglas (Finance) held that the broadcaster could serve the public just as well whether it was owned by the New Zealand government or not. Indeed, a scoping document was commissioned in the early 90s determining the broadcaster’s value on the international market.

What mattered, they argued, was content. “Content is king” people used to say. Since the rise and rise of social media, we don’t tend to hear that phrase so much, presumably because social media companies don’t produce anything except money, although they do like to be king, so it’s not a phrase they like much. “Content is king”. It was all some people ever said.

Anyway, lots of people disagreed, including one group who prevented the sale on legal grounds, on the basis that as a language, te reo Maori is also taonga, and that TV is instrumental in the maintenance of any language, and that the Crown is obliged by the Treaty of Waitangi to provide for the Maori use and enjoyment of their taonga, and that therefore the Crown is obliged to own a TV channel by which all that was made possible. That one went all the way to the Privvy Council, who said, yep: fair enough, too. Some say Maori TV was created for precisely that purpose, thereby allowing the government to get back to selling TVNZ.

But it never happened, and things change. TVNZ is less massive than it was. After they expanded into several more buildings up Hobson Street, another government-investment known as Sky City Casinos dispossessed the broadcaster of those buildings and then knocked the buildings down to erect more casinos. Commercialism has a strange way of overtaking public services in New Zealand.

Image Credits: James Littlewood