Documentaries
The BBC’s Natural History Unit is behind the beautiful three-part miniseries Wild New Zealand (TVNZ 1, Sunday, 7.00pm).
Tuatara hatch and go on the hunt. Kiwi prod about in the dark. Giant kauri logs are floated out of the Pelorus River and carted off for carving. The Central North Island steams, spurts and slops – footage that can only have been filmed by drone makes for fascinating new perspectives.
We take an odd detour into Country Calendar territory with a day of high-country sheep mustering. Wild? Well, some
fairly rugged-looking Canterbury shorts feature heavily.
Some of the most spectacular footage from this first episode follows a pod of dusky dolphins as they flip and somersault off the Kaikoura coast. Shot well before the quake, the doco foreshadows that event rather eerily, tracing the fault lines between tectonic plates.
Despite the series ostensibly being about our wild side, the BBC manages to shoehorn
in all our Hollywood touchstones. Tourism New Zealand must be delighted. Sam Neill narrates. There’s a Hobbit quote – “remember, you are over the Edge of the Wild now …” Flight of the Conchords were even brought in to shoot a promo (tinyurl. com/NZLConchords). Bret McKenzie, watching Snares penguins waddle through a lush green forest: “I think this is Antarctica now, this is what it looks like.”