Country Calendar Director’s Pick

DVDPAL

For over 45 years TVNZ’s Country Calendar has brought the best of New Zealand’s farming and countryside to the screen: over two thousand programmes. In 2010 veteran presenter Frank Torley was asked to select his twelve favourites. This is the result – three hours ranging all over the country from 1974 to the present.
We know New Zealand is one of the most beautiful countries in the world, and this selection contains some wonderful filming. There are plenty of cattle, sheep, dogs and horses on view, as well as items on deer, land management, wine-growing and bee-keeping. But it is the people you will remember, outdoors men and women full of energy and enterprise from the couple producing wine with no experience to the fifteen-year-olds running 3,500 up-country acres.
The episode shown are:

Class 8 Country: restoration of over- grazed land

Deer Capture: 1970s capture of wild stock for farming

Snow Raking: livestock rescue in high- country snowstorm

Sweat, Steam and the Straw-Walloper: steam thrashing and horse-drawn binder

Orange Roughy: follows research into stocks of the fish species

Blind Bee Farmer: Bryce Hooton’s new enterprise after accidental blinding

Twins: fifteen-year-olds with big-station responsibility

Wild Cattle McGarrie: an exciting muster along the coastline and into the sea

Branches Station: an autumn muster of cattle and sheep in high country

Wild Cattle: helicopter round-up

Vines on the Hill: how to succeed in wine-producing with no experience

Dunstan Downs: an artist inspired by hard-country Merino work.

There is a catch-up on each story and, where available, there are captions for the hearing impaired.

• Running time 183 mins approx
• PAL DVD