Were you first interested in parodying “ken burns style”, telling this story, or just generally doing a farse?
I wasn’t thinking of Ken Burns in particular. The Bio-doco genre has been around a lot longer than Ken. I did want to make it as authentic as possible and use all of the familiar doco conventions. “The first screening of Forgotten Silver, Oct 28 1995, strikes me as more than a fluke. Clearly the intention was to produce an end-of-series effect like Country Calendar spoofs, but how much choice did you have? It seems awfully close to Oct 31 (when the heat came on) and thus not only a birthday present to yourself (perhaps) but also a mirror of the War of the Worlds programme (also a Trick or Treat show). Or was it all a fluke, decided by TVNZ without any input from you?” It was a fluke, with no input from us … although I know that TVNZ decided to play it at the end of the series because it was so different and didn’t really fit into the mold. They didn’t want to confuse viewers about the basic intent of the rest of the dramas.
