This edition of the mid 1990s TV One arts series sees host Alison Parr interviewing literary rising star Emily Perkins, then 26, while the expat author is visiting from London. Perkins talks about her time at drama school, her debut short story collection Not Her Real Name (whose Generation X life stories won international notice), and nerves about her upcoming first novel. The episode opens with poet Bill Manhire talking about book Mutes and Earthquakes, which anthologised the work and processes of his Victoria University creative writing programme. Perkins was a graduate.

This edition of the early 90s magazine arts show begins with a visit to Auckland's Herald Theatre to preview a production of Romeo and Juliet, directed by Michael Hurst and starring 16-year-old actor Sophia Hawthorne. Raybon Kan explores fatal books; author Ian Cross is interviewed and Bill Ralston reviews Cross’s latest novel (with Ralston wanting to know why all New Zealand art is "so bleak, so barren"). Film Festival director Bill Gosden previews the event's programme, and comedy group Facial DBX is interviewed ahead of the Watershed Comedy Festival.

Many of Aotearoa’s most successful films have been adapted from novels. This 2006 Artsville documentary looks at the process of turning books into movies. Authors Alan Duff (Once Were Warriors), Tessa Duder (Alex) and Jenny Pattrick (The Denniston Rose) reflect on the opportunity and angst of having their words turned into scripts — and maybe films. Duff reflects on DIY adaptation (What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?). Scriptwriters Ian Mune (Sleeping Dogs), Ken Catran (Alex), Riwia Brown (Warriors) and Geoff Husson (Denniston Rose) provide the adapters' perspective.

Central North Island art is spotlighted in this episode of the road trip arts show. Douglas Lloyd Jenkins and Nick Ward discuss Len Lye's 'Wind Wand' and visit Michael Smither works in a Catholic church. Novelist Shonagh Koea reads in her favourite antique shop while photographer Sarah Sampson serves tea and discusses her fabric work and "chick art". Rangi and Julie Kipa reconcile traditional Maori process with modern art, performance artists Matt and Stark deconstruct the family sedan; and, in Wanganui, Ross Mitchell-Anyon is proud to call himself a potter.

The writing and drawing of comic books has remained a little-known and under-rated area of New Zealand culture. Director Shirley Horrocks reveals it as a highly creative subculture with a rich local history. Eric Resetar, the grand old man of local comics, discusses the moral panic brought on by comics in the 1940s and 1950s; and other artists of the genre, such as Barry Linton, Dick Frizzell, Coco and Dylan (Hicksville) Horrocks, explore the wide variety of stories that have been drawn, framed and speech-ballooned since then.

In the 1930s Jean Batten broke solo distance flying records and achieved international fame. Directed by her biographer, Ian Mackersey, Garbo of the Skies chronicles Batten's life through archive footage, interviews, narration from her unpublished memoirs and reconstructions of her epic flights. The documentary also reveals a lonely private world: a domineering mother, romantic tragedy, a fall into obscurity, and death in a Majorcan hotel (a mystery finally solved during the film's making). Garbo of the Skies screened on TVNZ, the Discovery Channel and the BBC.

Based on a classic novel by Margaret Mahy, The Haunting of Barney Palmer is a fantasy about a young boy who is haunted by his great uncle. Young Barney fears that he has inherited the Scholar family curse; a suite of 80s-era effects ramp up the supernatural suspense. The TV movie was a co-production between PBS (United States) and Wellington's Gibson Group. American actor Ned Beatty (Deliverance, Network) was part of the cast. Mahy based it on her Carnegie Award-winning novel The Haunting; it marked an early fruitful collaboration between her and director Yvonne Mackay.

On this episode of the book show hosted by novelist Emily Perkins, the panel discusses Rachael King’s gothic toned second novel Magpie Hall. There’s a visit to Governors Bay on Banks Peninsular to meet a book club with a multi-national feel; and TVNZ journalist Tim Wilson talks about his favourite book – the ultimate in weighty tomes, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. In his ‘Under the Covers’ piece, Finlay Macdonald explores ‘A Good Keen Man’, Barry Crump’s breakthrough novel from 1960 – the work of a “man of the land with the soul of a poet”.

Gaylene Preston's documentary on writer Keri Hulme — filmed two years after Hulme shot to global fame on the back of her Booker Prize-winning novel The Bone People — is both a poetic travelogue of Okarito (the township where she resided for 40 years), and a sampler-box of affable musings on her writing process, whitebait fishing, the supernatural, and the 1200 pages of notes for her next novel, the elusive Bait. Leon Narbey's camera is aptly alert to the magical qualities of the coast, from the resident kotuku to the surf and birdsong peppering Hulme’s crib.

JRR Tolkien's beloved novel The Hobbit follows Bilbo Baggins on a quest to help reclaim the lost dwarf homeland of Erebor from the dragon Smaug. Shoulder-tapped by Gandalf for the mission against some opposition, Bilbo joins a company of dwarves in an epic adventure: vying against goblins, orcs and Gollum's riddles. After the box office blitzing and Oscar-slaying Lord of the Rings trilogy, adapting the precursor novel was an expected journey. Martin Freeman (The Office, Sherlock) plays Bilbo, with Peter Jackson again at the helm in this first of a three-part adaptation.