Peter Baldock

Much of Peter Baldock's career has involved straddling two distinct forces: television and theatre, as actor and production manager, across both England and New Zealand. His acting credentials, expansive knowledge of live theatre and 21-year tenure as production manager at Ninox Films all overlap and inform one another.

In his early teens, Baldock first became involved in theatre and his role as school pianist so as to become "something more than just a rugby jock" and gain more attention from girls. He may have been correct, meeting his future wife Fran Kelly in 1969 while working as stage manager at the Playhouse Theatre in Dunedin. Fran was among a group of Australian actors who had been brought over by the Southern Theatre Trust, and when her contract was up Baldock decided to leave too, the pair marrying in Sydney before continuing on to the United Kingdom.

"I had aspirations of being a professional actor," Baldock says, a goal he moved closer towards after being accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in the early 1970s, studying alongside Alan Rickman, Jonathan Hyde and Robert Lindsay, among others. He speaks fondly of RADA, mentioning how formal training helped him "learn the things that you can't just learn by doing it yourself". But his time there was cut short when he and Fran started a family, curtailing plans for Fran to extend her own acting career while he went through drama school. To keep afloat financially, Baldock took on evening work on technical and production jobs across London's West End.

During this time, Baldock also worked in television production, building on his experience gained the 1960s working under Roy Melford at DNTV-2 in Dunedin, where he was designated assistant floor manager while also directing and producing. "You never actually got the recognition or pay but you got the work," he recalls. In London in 1975 Baldock teamed up with Cedric Heward, a cameraman he knew from Dunedin, and used connections he'd made through infamous West End venue owner Paul Raymond to record interviews with musicians and pop groups. As well as the European outlets these interviews went to, the unprocessed film was sent to his brother, David Harry Baldock, who had followed Baldock to DNTV-2. David was in Wellington working on The Grunt Machine and incorporated the footage into the show.

Alongside television special effects and lighting design work, Baldock appeared as an actor in episodes of Doctor Who, Life at Stake, Hazell, Whodunnit? and more. Despite an American agent offering to represent him if he moved to New York, Baldock was aware he "had two kids and no guaranteed income," and even with a job in the lighting department at the Sydney Opera House and the offer of more work in Dunedin, just the act of travelling to New Zealand for his brother's wedding had left him broke.

Arriving in Wellington in 1979, with their children entering school in "such a perfect environment," Fran and Peter Baldock set down roots in Eastbourne and remain there to this day. Along with part-time work at the old Eastbourne Tavern, Peter worked as Community Arts Festival Director for the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council and as a coordinator for the Hutt Valley 'International Year of the Child' initiative.

In 1988, Baldock's brother David took redundancy from the Avalon Television Centre and began his own production company, Ninox, with Baldock joining as the Production Manager. Ninox ultimately "had over 300 hours of programmes on air, and I production managed and got out on at least 200 of those," he notes.

With budget management central to his role, Baldock got used to "very animated exchanges" with his brother. Only two or three Ninox productions ever went over budget — Our People Our Century is "a classic example," with the network wanting the focus shifted away from what they had proposed and budgeted for. At the other end of the spectrum, the long-running series Location Location Location achieved such high ratings that the first-season budgeting could be maintained for subsequent years. Location Location Location was "an important financial backbone" for Ninox, with Baldock spending three months of each year in Auckland working on it.

David Baldock was doing far less directing by the time Location Location Location screened, focusing more on editing and producing, but Peter Baldock's favourite memories of Ninox come from 1991's At the Risk of Our Lives — directed by David and garnering five New Zealand Television Award nominations. Due to local iwi and Department of Conservation restrictions, no helicopters were allowed to land on Taranaki Maunga, so the full production crew and actors undertook a long tramp with equipment strapped to their backs. Baldock recalls the ironic juxtaposition of his brother sitting on the mountaintop "calling everyone he could think of with his bloody brick cellphone," surrounded by an exhausted crew and actors in period clothing, all to capture a scene of Ernst Dieffenbach calculating the height of Mount Taranaki using a billycan of water and a thermometer.

Sensing Murder was also an enormous hit for Ninox, one that reached more than a million viewers at its peak, won three Qantas Media Awards, and played in England, Australia and America. Baldock is quick to reiterate that "there was no feeding of information or anything like that. People found that hard to believe, but we didn't cheat." As well as his production management role, Baldock played a victim in one of the dramatisations, echoing his appearance the year before in Bryan Bruce's The Investigator where he portrayed Norrie Triggs. "I hadn't done any acting on-screen for quite a while [and] the director said 'Oh, you should do that character'... and I don't know whether that was a compliment or not."

Alongside screen acting roles and demanding production work, Baldock has retained his love for theatre. With Fran and several other Eastbournites, he formed the Butterfly Creek Theatre Troupe in 1987. The troupe is "still going strong," staging two to three productions every year, winning numerous awards and contributing to the redevelopment of the local school hall. When reminiscing about his and Fran's commitment to acting and creativity, Baldock laughs — "I don't know if our kids have always thanked us for it."

Profile written by Danny Bultitude; published on 16 December 2025

Sources include
Peter Baldock