Good old Country Calendar. If it were a joker or a sheila, you wouldn’t hesitate to buy it a beer down the pub. You’d know, as sure as a ewe’s a ewe, that you’d be rewarded with good company and a decent yarn for your trouble.
Over three
generations, and for more than 1600 episodes, the TVNZ series about life on the land has become irrefutably that for many hundreds of thousands of viewers: a best mate. One who’s as reliable a companion as an old labrador, never has a bad word to say about anyone and who always has a good story they’ve just got to tell you.
This week, that mate turns 60. Good old Country Calendar first aired just after the US sitcom My Favourite Martian at 7.15pm on Sunday, March 6, 1966. It has never looked like leaving our screens since.
Turning 60, it should barely need pointing out, is a feat unique in New Zealand television history and one that seems, as traditional linear television staggers towards the boneyard, unlikely to be matched.
It is a milestone not just remarkable here, but everywhere. Outside of news, current affairs, “beauty” contests and sports coverage, there is but a handful of shows around the world that have screened continuously for 60 years or more, including The Tonight Show in the US and Britain’s Coronation Street.
“It is a very rare thing,” says Country Calendar’s current producer and narrator, Dan Henry. “I’ve been a freelance television director for 30 years this year, and I know for a programme to get a second season is a huge win. So to be on screen for 60 years and still be relevant and still be rating is massive.”
Country Calendar is almost as popular in raw viewer numbers now as it was before the internet began wrecking traditional media, a fact that explains why New Zealand on Air still funds it – to the tune of $745,122 this year – and TVNZ has never sent the show to the works.
Top left, producer Tony Trotter, below, presenter Fred Barnes, and producer/narrator Frank Torley. Photos / Supplied
In 1989, for example, it drew 600,000-750,000 viewers on a Sunday night. By 2024, it attracted an average of 572,000 on Sundays and about 416,000 more watched via streaming on TVNZ+ during the year. The show’s output has grown exponentially, too – from just 14 shows a year in the early 2000s to 40 today, encouraged, in part, by sponsor Hyundai.
In an age of atomised attention and of endless, numbing choice, the indisputably old – and old-fashioned – Country Calendar finds itself in rude health still. It’s a weird anomaly. So, regular viewer or not, the fact of its continuing existence is worth celebrating.
To mark its three-score years the show will not, as it did for its 40th and 50th, commemorate the anniversary with a one-off special offering a fleeting parade of its highlights. Instead, it will take the whole year to honour its history. Each of the 40 episodes of the 2026 season, which began screening last month, concludes with a short snippet from the programme’s archives, with the full episodes from each of the 40 teasers available to stream on TVNZ+.
“We’re celebrating all year,” says Henry, sounding a very happy man. “We’re going to keep the party going all year long.”
Simpler times
New Zealand television was still in short pants when good old Country Calendar debuted 60 years ago. Local broadcasting had begun not quite six years before, and much like the country itself, the new medium was simple, unsophisticated and a bit prudish, the broadcaster and screenwriter Judy Callingham has said. The local programming from the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, the state-owned company set up in 1962, was straight-backed, sincere and firmly, if not quite completely, for the edification of the viewer.
Lots of people look like they’ve just come out of central casting. Actually, they’re real people.
Kerryanne Evans
This was certainly true of Country Calendar. No drone shots of high country vistas or eccentric backblock philosophers, then. It was just 15 minutes of a bloke called Fred Barnes sitting in a modest studio serving up news for farmers along with, in the first episode, a short film on river control in Southland and an interview with a former chairman of the New Zealand Meat Producers Board.
Total snoozer? Not quite, reckons long-time Country Calendar director and former producer Julian O’Brien. “I find this extraordinary, but Fred Barnes used to smoke a pipe in the studio on air to create a kind of sense of ‘this is a relaxed Sunday evening, folks; I’ll just light up’.”
Away from the fug in the studio, the programme began stretching its legs in the paddock more as it went on. But it was not until a former farmer who’d flown for the Royal New Zealand Air Force in World War II got his hands on Country Calendar that it became the show it is today. Tony Trotter, a country doctor’s son from North Otago, knew the programme well. He had been a director and scriptwriter for the programme since its launch in 1966. But when he took over as producer in 1974, he took three pivotal decisions. The first: to refocus the show’s content for general viewers. The second: to feature just one story per episode. But most influentially, he also decided to let the subjects – the farmers – spin their yarns.
“Tony, when he took over, did something quite revolutionary,” O’Brien says. “He said, ‘Let’s not have our directors or reporters telling the stories. Let’s get the farmers to tell their own.’ The NZBC liked to do things with people with appropriate, somewhat British accents, so the the idea of an ordinary bloke or woman on screen was unusual.”
Authentic: Rebecca and Quintin Hazlett of Hukarere Station, a 7740ha organic sheep and cattle farm in west Otago, opened the programme’s 2025 season. Photo / Richard Langston
The revolution caught on. For the wider public, here were real people talking about their real lives while standing in real places. Under Trotter, Country Calendar became more than just a news programme about farming for farmers, but a reflection, at least notionally, of authentic lives in rural New Zealand.
The late, celebrated Frank Torley, who produced the show for 20 years and was a much-loved narrator, continued the formula, as did O’Brien, producer for a total of 17 years, and now Henry. “[Trotter’s] model of show-making was the massive change,” O’Brien says. “Technology has changed, the duration of the show has changed, lots of things have changed. But [every producer since Trotter] has kept the formula, and Dan is showing absolutely no signs of deviating from it. It’s clearly very successful.”
Feel-good factor
New Zealand is filled with tall poppies, but in Country Calendar’s New Zealand they are to be celebrated, cheered and championed, never cut down to size.
After Trotter took over as producer, the series did occasionally take a more playful view of rural life. There is the famous Fred Dagg mockumentary, written and performed by the late satirist John Clarke (see “Savour the date”, below), and spoof items such as the radio-controlled sheep dog conceived by humorist Burton Silver. But for the main part, rural New Zealand is there to be admired not ribbed, and definitely not judged.
Henry says Country Calendar is about Ps: people, places, pictures and passion. “The fifth P is positivity. We don’t go looking for conflict. We lean into the positivity of what [our subjects are] doing because on a Sunday night going into your working week, people need something to feel good about. I think people respond well to a story that leaves you feeling good.”
Realism is also key. Long-time Country Calendar director Kerryanne Evans, a former current affairs journalist, believes “authenticity” is the secret to the show’s longevity. “Lots of people [on Country Calendar] look like they just come out of central casting, don’t they? Actually, they’re real people. I think [the show’s longevity] really does come down to the realistic nature of the people we feature.”
From left: Narrator Dan Henry, producer/director Julian O’Brien, and director Kerryanne Evans. Photos / Supplied
Of course, there is reality, then there is verisimilitude. In a 2020 paper, “Telling Stories About Farming: Mediated Authenticity and New Zealand’s Country Calendar”, Massey University academics Susan Fountaine and Sandy Bulmer found that although audiences, including farmers, view the programme as both real and honest, they also understand it is a “constructed, idyllic version of the rural good life in New Zealand”. The programme achieved this through predictable narrative arcs, consistent narration, invisible reporting and directing and naturalised sound and vision. These gave it a predictability and ordinariness that created an authentic but also aspirational view of farming.
Yet trimming off the rough edges of farming life is potentially problematic. Country Calendar taps directly into our national identity, into nostalgia and into the mythos that New Zealanders are still hardy, adaptable rural types when actually we have one of the most urbanised populations in the world. For urban viewers, who make up the vast majority of its audience, Country Calendar helps shape their perceptions of modern farming practices – a complicated and contested subject, not least with the current government rolling back environmental and climate change measures.
However, Fountaine, a long-time viewer, says it would be unrealistic for the programme to change. “They’ve become a victim of their own success,” she tells the Listener. “Why would you start messing with it too much? The bigger challenge we have is there isn’t much other than Country Calendar. There’s not a lot of conversation that seems to go on in these kinds of media about agriculture, the role of farming, sustainability, climate change, animal welfare. There are big, complicated things in this space.”
For the main part, rural NZ is there to be admired, not ribbed, and definitely not judged.
Greg Dixon
Fountaine says a concern is that Country Calendar is all the urban audience sees about rural New Zealand, and it is an idealistic, non-critical view. “But I don’t blame Country Calendar for that. I think our broader television landscape, or our media landscape, doesn’t give us many places where we could have more complicated discussions.”
Welcome exposure
If good old Country Calendar trades a little on nostalgia – its deathless, plinky-plonk theme tune encourages that – and feeds urban viewers’ incipient dreams of a simpler life, for its subjects it is both a recognition and a showcase. It is also an all-consuming experience.
For Patrizia Vieno, an Italian who, with her late husband Rod, a Brit, bought the 1000ha Rewa Rewa Station in rural Wairarapa in 2011, the 41/2 days they spent with a Country Calendar film crew in 2020 was quite the adventure. “It was great fun, but so tiring,” she says. “It was like five in the morning until five in the evening. It was quite an intense experience.”
Although the station’s spun wool business, which is Vieno’s baby, was not yet fully up and running when the programme was broadcast, the couple were grateful for exposure. “I was quite pleased with how they portrayed us. They don’t show the nitty gritty, but I don’t think people want to see that. A lot of people said to me that it was a very good episode.”
Producer Dan Henry says if country people are cautious about appearing on the programme because they’re worried about what neighbours might say or how they’ll be perceived, he asks whether they have ever seen someone made a fool of on the programme. “The answer is no,” he says. “There’s a great duty of care to make sure people are portrayed fairly and accurately.”
Therein lies the fundamental key to the programme’s longevity: the continuing affection rural people have for Country Calendar. After all, without their buy-in, there’d be no show. Henry says although the programme needs to make sense to urban viewers, it must still be relevant to the rural audience, too. “That’s where the authenticity comes from. Farmers feel, quite rightly, that the programme still belongs to them and it needs to be relevant.”
For both rural folk and urban viewers, then, it is the formula for storytelling that Tony Trotter came up with 50 years ago that is the show’s secret sauce: For rural people, good old Country Calendar celebrates them. For the rest of us, it makes us feel good – like an old mate should.
John Clark as Fred Dagg. Photo / Supplied
Country Calendar episodes that entered folklore.
By Russell Baillie
Fred Dagg, 1974
John Clarke’s Fred Dagg character had already appeared in skits on news shows before, in 1974, he got a whole show to himself – and six sons named Trevor – in the last show of the year. “It was one of the happiest experiences, and certainly one of the better expressions of the Fred Dagg ethos, because you got to tell the whole story,” said Clarke of the episode, which finished with Dagg in front of the television consulting a Listener wondering why the show went by so fast.
The Spoofs, 1977
What became an occasional Country Calendar tradition started in 1977 with an episode co-created by Burton Silver, whose Bogor cartoon ran in the Listener in the 1970s and 80s, about a farmer who could get a tune out of his fences, his stockyard gates, and some of his more talented livestock. More spoof shows, including the public outrage-inducing one featuring a sheepdog wired to a remote control, followed.
Vigil, 1983
In 1983, the programme visited the set of Vincent Ward film Vigil in Uruti, north Taranaki. There, it was noted the valley Ward found had “three essential ingredients: rugged terrain, isolation, and reliable rainfall”, while the owner of the horseshoe shaped valley that was the film’s bleak backdrop described the location as “drought and eczema free”.
Left, a farmer plucking a tune, and right, the set of Vigil. Photos / Supplied
Tim Wallis, 1987, and Dave Saxton, 1993
The programme long had a thing for the pioneers of helicopter deer recovery in the South Island. Footage of aviation entrepreneur Tim Wallis as he scoots through the crevasses of Fiordland remains thrilling, as does the inside-the-cabin footage of the Calendar crew who walked away from a high-country helicopter crash-landing in the 1993 episode about Dave Saxton.
Carbon Zero, 2022
The most headline-grabbing episode in the modern show’s history was about liquor magnate Geoff Ross and wife Justine, and the regenerative farming methods they brought to sheep and beef farming at Lake Hāwea Station in Central Otago. Some parts of the rural community, especially those aligned with the Groundswell movement opposed to regulations over freshwater and climate change, thought they were being lectured to by a woke townie – and said so.
Helicopter excitement, and the face behind decidedly woke farming. Photos / Supplied
Most of these episodes are available on nzonscreen.com and TVNZ+ is adding archive shows for the 60th anniversary.
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