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At its peak, it was a phenomenon. How did Ready to Roll change New Zealand and our appreciation of our own music?
At its peak, it was a phenomenon. How did Ready to Roll change New Zealand and our appreciation of our own music?

Pop CultureNovember 8, 2020

Internet killed the music video star: The legacy of Ready to Roll

At its peak, it was a phenomenon. How did Ready to Roll change New Zealand and our appreciation of our own music?
At its peak, it was a phenomenon. How did Ready to Roll change New Zealand and our appreciation of our own music?

For an entire generation of music lovers, Ready to Roll was appointment viewing. In this piece, first published by Audioculture, Fiona Rae looks at the impact the show had on New Zealand and our appreciation of homegrown music.

TVNZ’s news hour at 6pm has always rated big, but from the late 1970s it had a rival. At its height, TV2 pop chart show Ready to Roll was reaching 1.2 million New Zealanders – at the time, a third of the population.

Ready to Roll had groovy opening titles, animated by Mike Peebles to the tune of The Commodores’ ‘Machine Gun’, and it counted down New Zealand’s Top 20 singles chart with a selection of overseas and local music video clips.

“For a lot of Kiwis it was where they got their pop fix, their primer for going out on the town that Saturday night, and it influenced their record purchases the following week,” says Peter Blake, who joined the show when it began in 1975 as a talent co-ordinator and became producer in 1981.

Blake, a musician, had been working on Grunt Machine, but as post-hippie rock gave way to 1970s pop, TVNZ decided it wanted something with more mass appeal – and it had the first national sales chart, launched in May 1975, to draw on.

Blake remembers the team searching for a title for the show and that Ready to Roll was “chosen from a short-list of ideas. It was derived from the then-video machine record term ‘ready to roll’ and I guess, it also meant ‘ready to rock’n’roll’.”

The one thing that everyone remembers is the opening music, even if they didn’t know it was The Commodores. Blake recalls the team hunting for theme tracks and that the show’s first producer, Brian Lennane, made the final decision because “The Commodores vibe was hot at the time and their funky clavinet instrumental ‘Machine Gun’ gave punch and cutting potential for programme title animation”.

At its outset in 1975, Ready to Roll was bridging the gap between our variety-show past and music-video future. It was presented by Roger Gascoigne and featured comedy interstitials courtesy of Stu Dennison in his “Nice One, Stu!” persona. As with its predecessors C’mon! (1967-69) and Happen Inn (1970-73), local artists were filmed in the studio covering the hits of the day. You might see Sharon O’Neill singing Linda Ronstadt’s ‘Blue Bayou’; Annie Whittle belting out ‘Love Hurts’; Barry Saunders covering Eric Clapton’s ‘Wonderful Tonight’; or, incredibly, The Scavengers knocking out ‘Pretty Vacant’.

Blake also recalls Mi-Sex doing Elvis Costello & the Attractions’ ‘(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea’; Rob Winch covering ‘Baker Street’; and Wellington band Redeye rocking out to ‘Cocaine’.

The Scavengers perform on Ready To Roll, September 1977 (Photo: Jeremy Templer)

The real story, however, was the growing influence of the show on record sales. In the absence of a video clip for the first big hit from Grease, Blake put Tina Cross and Graham Chapman of Salty Dogg together for ‘You’re the One That I Want’, propelling the song to No. 1 for four weeks in 1978.

“Which meant it repeated every week while it remained at the top of the charts,” says Blake. “The record company was ecstatic, selling many records of the original.”

There were also dance interpretations, à la Top of the Pops’ Pan’s People in the UK. Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision lists many undigitised Ready to Roll clips in its catalogue, including “TV ONE dancers perform dance sequence in park to Tragedy” and “Dancers dance to Herb Alpert music Rise”.

Wellington choreographer Trish Hodgson, who had danced on Happen Inn, was given the task. After Blake selected a current pop track, she would choreograph, rehearse the dancers and a clip would be shot at Studio 8, Avalon.

The middle-of-the-road variety era was still in full swing on New Zealand telly in the mid-1970s, says Blake, although the dancers were discontinued in 1977. New Zealand artists did get a look-in, even though the charts at the time are largely full of international artists. Well before NZ On Air began its music video funding scheme, New Zealanders who made it into the charts were flown to Wellington to perform in the studio.

There’s ‘I Need Your Love’ from Golden Harvest, in which the glare of the studio lights off lead singer Karl Gordon’s shiny pants is fair blinding.


Jon Stevens’ ‘Montego Bay’ was a hit in 1980 and he remains the only local artist to knock himself out of the No. 1 spot, when ‘Montego Bay’ replaced ‘Jezebel’.



In 1975, Mark Williams was the first local act to go to No. 1 (with ‘Yesterday Was Just the Beginning of My Life’) and he was No. 1 again two years later with ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’.

Gascoigne recalled to NZ On Screen, “We churned out covers of overseas hits by the dozen until the arrival of: the music video. I got to introduce Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ one evening … and the world changed forever.”

As the 1970s came to a close, pop music was changing. MTV launched in 1981 in the US and the era of the music video began. In his new role as producer of Ready to Roll and Radio with Pictures, Blake was determined to get rid of the cover versions and start fostering local music.

The hope was that local record companies would be part of this revolution, but there was a reluctance to back local artists from both the record companies and radio.

“Unfortunately few local artist clips were produced by their respective New Zealand record companies, which is why we got involved,” says Blake. Clips made by the rock unit occasionally fitted both programmes, RTR and RWP. “Those in this category were generally played on cutting edge RWP first as it was felt that inclusion on RTR might pigeonhole them in the pop category.”

Bands were filmed in the studio, or Blake would commission videos. Simon Morris, who was working for RWP, directed classics such as Sharon O’Neill’s ‘Maxine’, the Dance Exponents’ ‘Victoria’ and The Screaming Meemees’ ‘See Me Go’, the first local single to enter the charts at No. 1. In Dunedin, cinematographer Peter Janes worked with many of the emerging Flying Nun bands.

Other local clips on RTR that are (now) classics include Th’ Dudes’ ‘Be Mine Tonight’; Hello Sailor’s ‘Blue Lady’; Deane Waretini’s ‘The Bridge’; Netherworld Dancing Toys’ ‘For Today’; The Chills’ ‘Pink Frost’; and the Pātea Māori Club’s mega-hit ‘Poi E’, which spent a month at No. 1 in 1984.



Although Blake and his team were “left to it” by the network, it was tough competing against the slick international clips: in 1985, The Chills and Netherworld Dancing Toys were in the charts up against ‘Flashdance’ and Madonna’s ‘Into the Groove’.

Radio never really came to the party, either. Local songs and other alternative tracks went into the charts despite never being played on radio: both ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and ‘Atmosphere’ by Joy Division went to No. 1 in 1981 and it was the video clip of ‘Poi E’ (first broadcast on Te Karere) that helped propel it to the top, not radio play. There was even a rumour that the sales of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ were fabricated “by the record company buying countless singles or even hipster record shop employees filing false sales returns,” says Blake. “No proof ever materialised.”

The late 80s and early 90s became a boom time for music television. There were so many videos coming in, offshoot RTR shows were created to accommodate the volume and appease the record companies. RTR Video Releases led the spinoffs in 1982 (for songs “bubbling under the Top 20”; later re-named RTR New Releases), followed byRTR Mega-mix in 1988, and RTR Sounz in 1989.

Blake wrote a new theme tune in the early 80s, a bouncy number that sprang from his experiments with the new technology of synthesisers and drum machines, “which were also influencing pop music arrangements at the time”. In 1987, the original show was rebranded as RTR Countdown, and there was another titles update in the late 80s featuring a dancing figure called Start, created by visual effects whiz John Sheils.

Despite all the offshoot shows, the RTR brand was losing its gloss. Competition arrived from new channel TV3, which launched Shakedown in 1989 and TVFM in 1991, the same year that RTR was cancelled. It had set the scene, however, for the slew of music shows that would follow in the 90s, including Frenzy, Music Nation and Squeeze. Max TV began in 1993 and Juice TV in 1994. TVNZ also experimented with MTV.

There was a dilution, says Irene Gardiner, who worked in the TVNZ music unit at Avalon as a trainee director in the late 80s. RTR Countdown left prime-time “because the music video thing just wasn’t so new and special any more” and those massive ratings disappeared. In 1986, a dispute between the record companies and TVNZ about payment for music videos also didn’t help, as TVNZ took all its music shows off air.

Mandy Toogood, who worked on the show between 1984 and 1989 and became producer after Peter Blake, remembers a slow decline in viewership as more options became available. In its heyday, Ready to Roll was, in the pop genre, “the only way you could see what was happening, especially with international music”. The charts were also important as, “back then, you could only buy the CD or the record,” says Toogood, “but now, there’s so many different ways of getting music, it’s not quite the same.

“Nobody would watch a music show now.”

Ready to Roll’s name change to RTR Countdown came in 1987, when the magazine, edited by Gary Steel, was launched. The show, along with all of TVNZ’s music output, was moved to Auckland’s “rock unit” and Robert Rakete shepherded RTR through its final years in the early 90s. Then there was a surprising revival in 2000, which was hosted by Erika Takacs and lasted four years.

But the seismic changes wrought by the internet and music- and video-sharing websites mean that we no longer need a TV show to tell us what is hot or not – we can curate our own charts, especially since the arrival of the first iPod in 2001 and YouTube in 2005. As charts lost their meaning, TV music shows took a hit. In the UK, Top of the Pops, which began in 1964, threw in the towel in 2006.

Sales charts are still a thing: the Billboard 100 is a big deal in the US, but the music industry has had to pivot to a new world in which kids are making and uploading their own music and where an artist on TikTok can have a hit that goes to No. 1 every time it is remixed.

Even music video clips aren’t what they were, but looking back on an era when local music struggled for recognition, as a cultural force, RTR played its part.

This content was published in partnership with Audioculture, the noisy library of New Zealand music. You can read the original piece here.

The Xbox Series X is a powerful machine, but the games just aren’t there. (Photo: Microsoft, Image: Tina Tiller)
The Xbox Series X is a powerful machine, but the games just aren’t there. (Photo: Microsoft, Image: Tina Tiller)

Pop CultureNovember 7, 2020

Review: The Xbox Series X is a powerful beast, but where are the games?

The Xbox Series X is a powerful machine, but the games just aren’t there. (Photo: Microsoft, Image: Tina Tiller)
The Xbox Series X is a powerful machine, but the games just aren’t there. (Photo: Microsoft, Image: Tina Tiller)

The new generation of gaming is almost upon us and Microsoft is first out of the gate with the release of the of Xbox Series X on Tuesday. It’s big, it’s powerful, it’s packed with impressive new features – but is it worth shelling out $800 for? Lee Henaghan took it for a test drive.

New consoles used to be a big deal. Once a decade or so, we’d be blessed with a shiny new lineup of game systems, boasting better graphics, more processing power and most importantly, a raft of jaw-dropping new games specifically designed to persuade you to part with your hard-earned cash and join the new generation. 

As technology has improved, these generational upgrades have become less of a giant leap forward and more of an incremental step. The jump from 1080p graphics to 4K offered by the current crop of consoles was impressive but not exactly the sort of thing that you’d invite your mates over to wow them with. With industry heavyweights Sony and Microsoft both set to unleash new flagship systems this month, can gamers expect to have our socks blown off or merely our eyebrows raised? 

After playing with the Xbox Series X for the past week, I’m leaning towards the latter. It’s an incredibly powerful piece of kit which offers some excellent new features and functions but, so far at least, I haven’t seen anything that suggests that this generation is going to represent a sea change for interactive entertainment. More alarmingly, the decision to launch a new console without a single new exclusive game to play on it is, well, a bit weird to say the least. 

That’s not to say that the Series X isn’t a technological marvel. The immense power of the machine is amazing and the speed and slickness it brings to the overall gaming experience is something that everyone will love. It’s also guaranteed to turn heads in your living room, if only for the sheer bloody size of it. It’s by far the biggest console ever made, measuring 15cm x 15cm x 30cm and weighing in at a chonky 4.5kg. When it was first unveiled, many commented that it looked more like a mini-fridge than a games console, prompting Microsoft to lean into the memes by releasing an actual Series X refrigerator last month. Despite its hefty dimensions, the box doesn’t dominate the shelf much as you might think thanks to some subdued and understated design features – it’s a minimalist monolith.

The Xbox Series X and its controller, front on (Photo: Microsoft)

Part of the reason for the size factor is the super-efficient cooling system which enables it to run whisper-quiet even when games ramp up the action. It is practically silent every step of the way, only ever audible when you’re installing a game from disc to drive. One of my biggest bugbears with current gen consoles was the inevitable whirr that kicked in every time things got demanding, so it’s a breath of fresh air to be able to play games without it sounding like a jet plane is taking off. The box does kick out a fair amount of heat, so it needs to be well ventilated, but there’s no noise whatsoever.

Microsoft has made a huge deal about the Series X being the world’s most powerful console in its marketing and there’s no getting away from it, this is an absolute beast when it comes to processing grunt. The new system-on-a-chip, built around AMD’s latest Zen 2 and RDNA 2 hardware runs at a whopping 12 teraflops, making it about four times quicker than the Xbox One X and putting it comfortably ahead of the PlayStation 5 in terms of raw CPU speed. This means that games look better, run smoother, and most noticeably, load a lot faster than anything we’ve seen before.

The radical reduction in loading times offered by the Series X Velocity Architecture is arguably the console’s biggest selling point. I couldn’t believe quite how quickly games launched, going from boot screen to gameplay in a matter of seconds. It’s so rapid, you barely get a chance to read the gameplay tips most games put on their loading screens. Another neat time-saving feature is Quick Resume – allowing you to jump back into games right where you left off without having to wait for them to load at all. Although this was available on the Xbox One to an extent, you can now store up to four games at once, switching between them as easily as changing channels on your TV even after you’ve unplugged the machine and moved it to another room.

This is all possible due to the new Solid State Drive (SSD). While this technology has been available on PC for a while now, this is the first console to feature it and it’s almost certain to become an industry standard from here on in. Impressively, if you have existing Xbox games stored on an external hard drive you can plug it into the USB port and play them instantly, but if you want to take advantage of all the benefits and speed boosts, you’ll need to transfer them to SSD. This doesn’t take long (I measured it at about 12 minutes to move the 111gb Destiny 2) but with space limited to 1TB on the SSD, you’ll soon find yourself having to shift games around as and when you need them. 

Gears 5, one of the launch titles on X Box Series X, if not much else.

But what about the games? Well, at this stage, there’s not many of them. I’ve been playing on a pre-release build and so far there are only 12 that have been optimised for the Series X, and some of these are older releases like Gears 5 and Forza Horizon 4. Admittedly, these look better than ever and even games which haven’t had the next gen upgrade treatment will benefit features like from auto HDR and smoother processing. Being able to play games at 4K resolution at a solid 60 frames per second is brilliant – a lot of current gen games make you choose one or the other so it’s nice not having to make that trade-off. If you have a gaming monitor or high-end TV capable of displaying 120fps you can boost the frame rate even further on certain titles. Some of the graphics on the optimised games are stunning, particularly the lighting effects. So far, I’ve only played one game that demonstrated the system’s new ray tracing technology (Watch Dogs Legion) but the impact it has on the way reflections and shadows are rendered is pretty incredible.

The elephant in the room, however, is the total absence of any new exclusive games to play on Microsoft’s flagship machine. To my knowledge, this is the first console not to offer any new first party titles at launch. There are a plenty of new third-party games such as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Yakuza: Like A Dragon in the launch lineup but nothing you can’t play elsewhere. It’s baffling that Xbox isn’t offering anything of its own to persuade gamers into investing in its new baby, particularly with the PlayStation 5 coming straight out of the gate with a clutch of big exclusives. With the likes of Halo: Infinite stuck in development hell, it’s hard to see when this system will have any system sellers.

The caveat to this, of course, is Game Pass. This Netflix-style subscription service offers instant access to a revolving library of 100+ games, with new titles added every month. When Xbox does get round to releasing some first party exclusives, they’ll be available on Game Pass on Day One. If you’re on a budget, it’s a great way to get your gaming fix without breaking the bank. And if you skipped Xbox this gen, you’ll have a whole heap of top notch titles to get stuck into straight away as well as some incredible indie offerings. To sweeten the deal even further, EA Play is being added to the service on launch day, which will throw in dozens more games from the Electronic Arts back catalogue. It’s clear that Microsoft is putting all its eggs in the Game Pass basket as a way to sell the Series X and it may well turn out to be a smart move.

Whether the Series X is worth the not-inconsiderable $799 price tag is a moot point – in the short term at least – as every NZ retailer seems to be out of stock with more units unlikely to arrive until next month at the earliest. If you haven’t already pre-ordered, you’ll have a wait on your hands. In raw terms, the hi-tech hardware makes it look like a decent deal – to build an equivalent PC capable of the same level of performance would cost you close to $2,000. If you’re in the market for an upgrade to a new console that will wow you with its speed and graphics, as well as giving you access to a ready-made library of games, this could well be the system for you. The lack of any major exclusives will understandably be a sticking point for many, but there’s no denying that this big, beefy powerhouse is a fantastic piece of kit.

Microsoft ANZ provided The Spinoff with an Xbox Series X review unit. The console releases on November 10.