Philip Smith
Philip Smith is a television producer whose wide-ranging roster includes successful reality shows The Lion Man, Rescue 1, and late lamented media satire Eating Media Lunch.
Born in Invercargill and raised on Southland farms in a family of entrepreneurs. In Auckland, Philip Smith started his career in print journalism as a 17 year old cadet police reporter for The New Zealand Herald, under Susan Wood. He made his way to London with a role at the foreign department at the Financial Times.
At 21 years old he was sent on his first overseas assignment to Tanzania, responsible for covering stories across East Africa. His assignment came to an end when Smith found himself arrested and expelled from the country. “Being expelled from a country in Africa sounds pretty glamorous but as I was leaving I met another guy who’d been expelled about seven times".
While still in London, Smith began working with TVNZ as a European correspondent for One News. Returning to New Zealand in the early 1990s he stayed with TVNZ, becoming a producer of current affairs show Holmes. With the a fast turnaround, Smith credits this first production experience as "an incredible training ground . . . You just learn to write so fast to deadline because there's nothing between you and seven o'clock".
Smith arranged a meeting with the TVNZ executive Mike Lattin, regarding his plan to go solo and make his own programmes. Smith claims that Lattin offered him the rights to a golfing show for one dollar.
In 1995, Smith set up the sports production company Uplink with longtime sports presenter Phil Leishman. Their first production, The Golf Show won interest from Sky Television, and became the first of many Uplink shows to sell successfully overseas. Five years later, while pitching a single show to UK-based Sportsworld Media, the buyers expressed interest not just in the programme but in the entire company — and Uplink was ultimately sold to them in a multi-million dollar deal.
In 2002, Smith and businessman David Levene set up Great Southern, now renamed Great Southern Film and Television, with Smith as the Managing Director.
The company’s original flagship show was Eating Media Lunch, a post-modern satire of news and current affairs presented by Jeremy Wells. Smith recalls first encountering the phrase "eating media lunch" in a Ben Elton novel and immediately thinking, “that would make a great title for a show about the media.” The concept took shape over a weekend at Smith’s home in Queenstown "with a whiteboard outside the woolshed." where he, Paul Casserly, and Jeremy Wells brainstormed ideas.
Smith credits his young son for sparking the idea behind Great Southern's The Lion Man, "My son came in one day and said he'd been to a backyard zoo . . . Here I am again thinking 'Oh! Backyard zoo, good show'." The resulting documentary series followed animal park owner, Craig Busch and his lions in Zion Wildlife Gardens in Whangarei. The series found international success with multiple seasons sold to more than 100 countries.
Having played a hand in creating both Eating Media Lunch and political mockumentary The Pretender, Smith considers himself part ideas man, and part salesman. His trips to international trade fairs have seen a number of overseas sales, along with format rights for other countries to create their own local versions."
In late 2006, Smith predicted both opportunities and tougher times ahead for television producers, thanks partly to media fragmentation and the growth of online viewing options. Queenstown-based Smith has cited the importance of making a diverse range of shows, to protect Great Southern against the inevitable drops in popularity of some genres.
Producer and former Great Southern contractor Rachel Gardner joined the board in 2008, signaling the company's growing interest in drama. A few months later, Great Southern's first feature film Apron Strings won invitation to the Toronto film festival. Both Apron Strings and Great Southern's Show of Hands (produced by Angela Littlejohn) began life under Littlejohn's/Gardner's old company Maxim Films.
The rapidly expanding slate of television shows made by Great Southern includes game show The Singing Bee, Back of the Y, the Jeremy Wells presented The Unauthorised History of New Zealand and Birdland, reality show Shearing Gang, and Kiwi versions of The Apprentice and Who Wants to be a Millionaire. In 2013 Great Southern show Coast Australia, based on an English format, became one of the highest-rating documentary series on subscription television in Australia, and sold to the BBC.
Four years before that, the company produced its first television drama, the twist-filled The Cult (which was later remade for Russian audiences). The same year Great Southern shows and feature films secured 20 nominations in the Qantas Film and Television Awards, including scoring two of the three finalists spots in Best Feature Film, Best Comedy and Best Light Entertainment.
Next came two seasons of Robyn Malcolm comedy drama Agent Anna, and Moa-nominated telemovie The Kick, inspired by a live or die kick during the final of the 2011 World Cup.
Smith co-created One Lane Bridge, with Pip Hall. The moody crime drama series stars Domininic One-Ariki (star of Jonah) as an ambitious Cook Island Maori detective as he begins to have strange visions while investigating a series of deaths in Queenstown. The series ran for three seasons.
Updated on 28 May 2025
Sources include
'Philip Smith: Great Southern producer...' (Video Interview), NZ On Screen Website. Director Clarke Gayford. Loaded 18 October 2010. Accessed 27 May 2025
Great Southern Film and Television website. Accessed 27 May 2025
Deborah Hill Cone, 'The New Boys on the Box' - Idealog, November 2006, Page 36. Accessed 27 May 2025.
Debbie Jamieson, 'National Portrait: Phil Smith, producer, journalist and southern story-teller' (Interview) - Stuff, 4 June 2022. Accessed 27 May 2025.
Suzanne McFadden, 'One to watch' (Interview) - Unlimited, 30 June 2008