NZ On Screen’s Dunedin Collection offers up the sights and sounds of a city edged by ocean, and famed for its music. Dunedin is a bracing mixture of old and new: of Victorian buildings and waves of fresh-faced students, many of them carrying guitars. As Dave Cull reflects in his introduction, it is a city where distance is no barrier to creativity and innovation.

The South Tonight was a Dunedin-filmed regional news show. In these excerpts, Martin Phillipps and The Chills return home from London, and find album Submarine Bells is number one; legendary local band Sneaky Feelings play a last gig; Velvet Underground muse Nico plays Orientation Week; a ball is filmed at Larnach Castle for TV series Hanlon; rhododendron nuts ramble at the Dunedin Botanic Gardens, and Jim Mora visits the Danseys Pass Hotel. Finally there’s a survey of dingy student digs circa 1985 (when rents went as low as $14 a week). 

TV3 celebrated its launch with a two-hour special featuring music, montages, and a Māori welcome. Aotearoa's first new television channel in more than two decades went to air on 26 November 1989, after years of meetings, hard graft and competing bidders. This clip of TV3's first ten minutes creates a party atmosphere of smiling happy faces. Dave Dobbyn and dancers get energetic in promotional song 'Get the Feeling', then Governor-General Sir Paul Reeves pulls the launch lever. Also featured are appearances by a wide array of Kiwis, from children to soldiers to Sam Hunt.

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.

Made by the NZ Broadcasting Corporation in the mid 1960s, this half hour TV documentary sets out to summarise New Zealand. More than a promotional video, it takes a wider view, examining both the country’s points of pride and some of its troubles. In a brief appearance Barry Crump kills a pig, although the narration is quick to point out that the ‘good keen man’ image he epitomises is also a root of the country’s problem alcohol consumption. The result is patriotic, but certainly not uncritical. Writer Tony Isaac went on to make landmark bicultural dramas Pukemanu and The Governor. 

The early 80s were the apex of the local beauty pageant — Lorraine Downes won Miss Universe in 1983, and more Kiwis watched the 1981 Miss New Zealand contest on TV than Charles and Di’s wedding. This 1984 Miss World New Zealand live telecast was legendary for host Peter Sinclair announcing the wrong winner (clip six). Miss Auckland Barbara McDowell’s runner up sash is swiftly swapped for a crown and she is (eventually) made the first part-Samoan Miss NZ. A retro delight is the beauties dancing to Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ in an Oamaru quarry.

Over ten episodes, Ghost Hunt crisscrossed Aotearoa on a mission to find ghosts — or at least signs they might have been in the building. Presenters Carolyn Taylor (What Now?), actor Michael Hallows and actor/director Brad Hills visited locations with a reputation for hauntings, usually arriving after dark. The locales included Dunedin's Larnach Castle, Waitomo Caves Hotel, and the Fortune and St James Theatre — plus cemeteries and abandoned psychiatric hospitals. The 2006 Screentime show is not to be confused with the anime series which premiered in Japan the same year.