This award-winning Attitude episode follows an ‘early onset’ sufferer of Parkinson’s disease — 48-year-old Auckland marketing consultant Andy McDowell. McDowell narrates as he struggles with the effects of the degenerative neurological condition on his relationship with his wife, family, and career. The episode includes a visual poem made to communicate his condition to his two young daughters, and an Outward Bound stint. McDowell hopes to qualify for Deep Brain Stimulation — a risky ‘bionic’ surgery that may help his co-ordination and uncontrolled movements.

Each episode of Going Going Gone introduces sellers as they head to auction, and then sees if buyers agree with their valuations when the items go under the hammer. This opening episode heads to Turners for a classic car auction, and follows a woman selling off her antique family furniture, as her heirlooms are assessed then presented for sale by auctioneer James Parkinson. The show ends with a teaser: the arrival of a bejewelled solid gold bull at Webb’s auction house. The long-running popular factual show was made by Greenstone Productions for TVNZ. 

One of the last films made by Jeremy Sykes before his death in the Antarctic in a helicopter accident, this NFU short commemorates the 1969 Cook bicentennial. It traces Cook’s first voyage to New Zealand and his charting of the coastline. Contemporary illustrations and dramatic camerawork are used to follow his six-month journey around Aotearoa. It also highlights Cook's navigational skills as he sailed the Endeavour, home to 94 men, two greyhounds and a goat, through uncharted waters, helping earn him his reputation as "explorer extraordinary and servant of the King".

Pirate radio hit Kiwi airwaves on 4 December 1966 when Radio Hauraki broadcast from the Colville Channel aboard the vessel Tiri. Made by Sally Aitken, this film reunited the original pirates for the first time in 30 years to recall their battle to bring rock’n’roll to the youth of NZ. Featuring rare archive footage, the tale of radio rebels, conservative stooges, stoners, ship-wrecks and lost-at-sea DJs was originally made as a student film. It was bought by TVNZ and screened in primetime to praise: “Top of the dial, top of the class” (Greg Dixon, NZ Herald).

Colin Broadley was part of the Kiwi soundtrack during a decade of dramatic change. A DJ on NZ's first pirate radio station, he was also hunky star of Runaway, the first local movie in 12 years. In 1986 'whatever happened to' style series Then Again found him in the Coromandel, where he was tending bees and living back to the basics. Broadley talks exciting times on the Radio Hauraki boat, and inside a cell; the perils of kissing Bond girl Nadja Regin in the Opononi mud; a near-fatal crash; visits to China, and his belief that modern day economics and land use are unsustainable.

Starting in the questioning times of the late 60s, many New Zealanders began leaving town to set up their own communities, in search of alternative ways to live. This then and now documentary travels to communes long gone and still active, and tracks down many of those involved. Tim Shadbolt describes a time when people questioned "everything fearlessly ... without reserve and without restraint". The back to the land approach brought both satisfaction and fatigue. Dirty Bloody Hippies played to full houses at NZ's Documentary Edge Festival.

The launchpad for Billy T’s rise to television superstar, Radio Times recreates an era when home entertainment involved another type of box entirely. Inspired by 30s and 40s era radio extravaganzas, producer Tom Parkinson creates a show complete with swinging dancehall band, adventure serials and coconut shell sound effects. Parkinson’s masterstroke was casting Billy T as the oh-so-British compere glueing everything together (and occasionally sliding effortlessly into a different accent). The Yandall Sisters, singer Craig Scott and writer Derek Payne also feature.

Children's adventure series Gather Your Dreams follows Kitty, a teenage girl who dreams of stardom while travelling with her family's vaudeville troupe in Depression-era 1930s New Zealand. The troupe's impresario (and Kitty’s father) was played by Terence Cooper (Mortimer’s Patch). Mostly shot in the Coromandel, the 1/2 hour 13-part series was one of a run of kidult dramas made in the late 70s by SPTV, and like its predecessor — colonial scamp saga Hunter's Gold — it found international sales success. Dreams was helmed by Hunter's Gold director Tom Parkinson.