Taranaki tales:

Taranaki Hard, a new documentary series screening on Three, follows a group of young people in Waitara. Director Justin Hawkes (below) tells Sarah Nealon about one of the programme’s stand-out characters, Leon Crean (right).

Documentary looks at hard times in Taranaki.

Leon Crean is a former reality television contestant who has a social media page called Keeping Up With The Waitarians.

He is part of a group of young people profiled in Taranaki Hard, a documentary series set in Waitara.

Others profiled in the show include a job-seeking former head boy, an aspiring rugby league player and a female electrician.

Taranaki Hard is co-directed by Justin Hawkes and Ian Hart and produced by Charlotte Hobson.

“We’re all around that 40ish age group now, but we just had amazing memories of growing up in regional New Zealand and we wanted to see what it was like now,” says Hawkes when discussing how the idea for the TV programme came about.

“Taranaki has that mountain which is just incredible as a backdrop for television.

“Then we started to go, ‘Who do we want to talk to there?’ With

Waitara, we’d all heard about it as a place with a bad reputation, but we just knew there would be positive stories there.”

Hawkes says they found Crean on social media when they began research for the documentary.

“He has 60,000 followers on Facebook and we were just like, ‘How did this guy living in Waitara have this following?’,” he says.

Some viewers may recognise Crean from last year’s reality zombie show Zombody Save Me.

“He’s got a strong sense of humour that has gone down really well with the people in town,” says Hawkes.

“We’ve gone out with him in the main street and there will be 45-year-old ladies yelling out his catchphrase. All the school kids knew him.

“It’s just fun to see how that has changed since I was growing up – that someone can become famous on the internet within this town.”