Doug Coutts’ TV Preview: Decades in Colour

DECADES IN COLOUR

Prime, 8.30 Sunday

A PERSONAL VIEW
By Doug Coutts

On the surface it’s a great idea – plunder (in a polite way) home movie collections around the country, tweak the brightness and contrast and then string them together in rough date order with some sort of linking narrative.

In practice, it works. Episode 1 looks at the fifties, starting with the biggest event of that decade, the end of World War II. We’ll let them get away with that though, because much of what follows is linked to the war – the rationing, the returned servicemen (no women apparently) and the rebuilding.

A lot of the soldiers who came back from shooting everything that moved swapped their rifles for movie cameras and carried on with the shooting, and we should be very grateful – the depth, breadth and quality of the footage uncovered by the researchers is remarkable. 

Everyday New Zealand in the fifties – where you made your own fun, or your own farm, and built your own house (although the work had to be signed off by a builder, how things have changed) – had a lot going for it. Who knew, for example, you could pod peas in a washing machine ringer? (Hint: set the gap a bit wider than for shirts and undies.)

There were lots of parades as well – blossom parades, Christmas parades, Royal visit parades – and you didn’t have to lock your doors. On the down side there was racism, polio and the Cold War – and ladies dressing in hats and gloves to go down to the shops. And there are some moving moments, as the people in the home movies talk about what was going on for them at them time.  

Decades in Colour is not quite “the story of New Zealand from the inside out” that Judy Bailey promises in the opening – instead it’s a nice little trip down Memory Lane. Sometimes that’s all you need in a nostalgia hit.