The past was a particularly nostalgic time.
The past is mostly memories.
It's all memories really.
Actually, there's nothing else but memories.
But never mind, because Prime TV has brought the past back to the present, with its new series Decades in Colour.
The three-parter that started on Sunday at 8.30pm is presented by the historic Judy Bailey, and covers the past in three neat decades: the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
The show evolved from a national search for home-shot colour footage, which is presented along with the recollections of people who were there, capturing what the makers say are ‘‘personal versions of history and what life was really like during those crucial years of change''.
And as the series kicked off on Sunday evening the snippets of interviews with those who were there told a story we like to hear.
‘‘There was no such thing as unemployment,'' one fellow says about the '50s.
‘‘We just had babies,'' another remembers about the swinging '60s.
‘‘It was a time of phenomenal hope and excitement,'' said a third about some period in which things sounded pretty darned good.
We saw plenty of home movies of children, and New Zealanders heading out in boats and doing things with cars.
Next Sunday, of course, the show made in association with NZ On Air's Platinum Fund will dip its nervous toe into the wild decade of the 1960s, so expect plenty of free love and early television, psychedelic drugs and rebellion among the awful youth.
Thank God that's all over.
Those with an interest in things military, and gee there were a lot of them at Warbirds Over Wanaka recently, will be excited by a new documentary on the Discovery Channel, Churchill's Toyshop.
The show, at 7.30pm on Sunday, April 17, goes deep within the secretive arms race during World War 2, when Britain needed to arm itself, and limited resources meant weapons manufacturers (who are viewed rather dimly by most nowadays) had to improvise.
Winston Churchill set up a secret research institute tasked with coming up with super weapons.
The institute was known as Military Defence 1.
Military Defence 1, a good 40 years before the 1980 Maxwell Smart comedy The Nude Bomb, came up with a much more unpleasant weapon called The Castrator.
What was it?
I don't know, but it sounds absolutely wicked and I'm really keen to find out.
I'm sure it had razor-sharp twirling blades that made a low piercing whine as they honed in on their unsuspecting target.
Not only that, but Military Defence 1 also came up with the Pencil Bomb, the Kangaroo Bomb and the Rocket-Launched Bridge.
Oh, the devious horrors of man's imagination.
- by Charles Loughrey
