Occasional Heartland host Maggie Barry visits the Southland town of Gore, where she checks out horse-shoeing with the New Zealand Farriers Association, visits the local freezing works, and attends the legendary Gold Guitar country music awards (with performers including Suzanne Prentice). Not such a controversial visit to Gore by a TV crew as the one some years later by Havoc and Newsboy's Sell-Out Tour. 

These New Zealanders was a series presented by Selwyn Toogood (one of his first television roles) that looked at six Kiwi locations. Here Toogood visits the prosperous farming county of Gore. At that time Gore had a very high rateable value (75 million pounds) and was the only county in NZ to be debt free. A freak early summer storm has left seven inches of snow on the ground at a ‘rehab’ farm; a romney sheep breeder also dabbles in grain, rearing bulls and race horses; and Toogood chats with Maurice Cronin, who has been farming in the area for 45 years.

Although The Tumbleweeds toured beyond Otago only occasionally, they provided many New Zealanders with their first exposure to country music. Almost 40 years into the band's career, Stephen Latty (Opera in the Outback) got some of their songs and memories down for this half-hour film. The band describe influences, costumes, and their own mid-tour double wedding. Country music expert Garth Gibson praises the "quite famous harmony sound" of sisters Myra and Nola Hewitt. Then The Tumbleweeds hit the road for Gore's Gold Guitar Awards, to perform 'Maple on the Hill'.

Irreverent 90s youth show hosts Mikey Havoc and Jeremy ‘Newsboy’ Wells went on the road in this hit series. Down south they infamously outed Gore as the “gay capital of New Zealand”. While many viewers had a laugh at the Auckland duo’s lampooning of small town conservatism, some took the bait and were not amused by Newsboy's “gay man’s Gore” moniker, preferring to tout the town’s trout fishing, line-dancing and country music. The mischievous pair also visit Dunedin, Fox Glacier and Queenstown, where they 'promote' attractions and meet base jumper Chuck Berry.

Havoc and Newsboy's Sell-out Tour saw the intrepid pair ramble up and down the country offering their irreverent take on all things Aotearoa. This episode from the second series (subtitled 'Ratings Drive') is a deadpan homage to Discovery Channel as they go on the hunt for dangerous animals. They head to Nelson to cage-swim with sharks; then down to Waimairi Beach sand dunes to check out NZ's deadliest spider, the rare katipō. Finally they don disguises on return to Gore, the town they'd infamously outed as "the gayest in New Zealand" in series one.

This 21 December 1999 Xmas episode of Havoc 2000 recaps the show’s memorable moments of the year. The malarky includes various Kiwi TV celebrities, a notorious visit to Gore, cracking up at puns in Bulls, Angela D'Audney entoning Doors lyrics, 'Fun with Meat' classics, a nude horse, a honeytrap for presenter Nick Eynon, and Mikey bungy jumping from the Harbour Bridge. On the music front there’s truck bed tunes from The Hasselhoff Experiment, and an interview with dub pioneer Lee 'Scratch' Perry. The finale features a Ferrari and a "peace out" from newsreader Tom Bradley. 

This documentary looks at the attempts by New Zealand's small towns to attract attention: ranging from giant statues of fish, fruit, and soft-drink bottles to festivals devoted to local vegetables or wild food. Actress Miranda Harcourt travels from Paeroa to Alexandra to explore the colourful expressions of small-town identity and pride. Shot by Leon Narbey, this was one of a series of documentaries directed by Shirley Horrocks about kiwi popular culture. A book by Claudia Bell and John Lyall (with the same title) was the film's starting-point.

"So the Queen comes to New Zealand. 12,000 miles from the motherland she is not among strangers. She has come to her New Zealand home." When the Queen and Prince Philip began the first tour of NZ by a reigning monarch (soon after her coronation), a National Film Unit crew followed the journey, before condensing 40 days and 46 stops into a mere 25 minutes. Along the way the newly crowned Queen wears her coronation gown to open Parliament, and witnesses geysers, long-jumpers, Māori canoes, plus masses of enthused Dunedinites refusing to keep behind the barrier.

This documentary showcases some of the tricks of the trade used by Peter Jackson in the making of his first feature — the aliens-amok-in-Makara splatter classic, Bad Taste. Compiled following the film's 1988 Cannes market screening, it's framed around an extensive interview with a 25-year-old Jackson at his parents’ Pukerua Bay home. These excerpts offer fascinating insight into his ingenuity: from building a DIY Steadicam, to the making of the infamous sheep-obliterating rocket launcher scene, to PJ musing on the impetus that being an only child provided him. 

After concocting all manner of outlandish images on 8mm film, Bad Taste was Peter Jackson’s breakthrough; years in the making, it was the first feature to make it from his Pukerua Bay backyard to cinema screens, where it quickly began to rack up sales. An all-male cast of public service Alien Investigation and Detection Service operatives run amok with guns, food, vomit, rockets and misguided enthusiasm, to rid the earth of alien Lord Crumb and his fast-food gang — who want to turn earthlings into hamburgers. Jackson took two acting roles in this ‘splatstick’ sensation.