New Zealanders just can’t get enough of a 56-year-old TV show about farming. Tara Ward asked longtime Country Calendar producer Julian O’Brien why.
In July, peaceful documentary series Hyundai Country Calendar featured an episode that shocked viewers around the country. It followed Geoff and Justine Ross, owners of Lake Hāwea Station in Central Otago, and initially seemed like any other gentle Country Calendar journey into rural New Zealand. Like other farmers the show has profiled over the years, the Rosses were passionate about living on the land and wanted to do things differently. This included regenerative planting and some unconventional ways of improving animal welfare, like playing classical music in the shearing shed and providing soft mattresses for freshly-shorn sheep to land on.
Those little sheep mattresses were the last straw. Viewers flocked to Country Calendar’s Facebook page to express their outrage, voicing their objections to the “wokeness” of the episode and accusing the show of abandoning “real farming” for stories about wealthy urban entrepreneurs. Some announced they’d turned their televisions off in disgust, while others declared it the worst episode of Country Calendar they had ever seen.
All of a sudden people were talking about humble old Country Calendar with a furious fervour usually reserved for All Blacks losses. Series producer Julian O’Brien knew viewers would be surprised by the Lake Hāwea story, but he was taken aback by the “vociferousness” of the online response. Country Calendar had previously featured stories on regenerative farming without experiencing any backlash, but this was different. This was something he had never seen before.
After 56 quiet years on our screens, Country Calendar was suddenly the most controversial show on New Zealand television.
Since 1966, Country Calendar has been a soft mattress for New Zealand television viewers to land on. What began as a 14-minute rural news bulletin for farmers has grown into appointment viewing, a placid yet inspiring show that celebrates the diversity of New Zealand’s farming industry. O’Brien thinks it’s extraordinary that Country Calendar is our longest running and arguably most beloved programme. “If somebody was to put a proposal to NZ On Air or TVNZ to make the show now, it would be ‘that doesn’t sound very exciting’. We wouldn’t ever get it across the line.”
Figures supplied by TVNZ confirms we love watching farmers talk about their lives almost as much as we love the Country Calendar theme song. The show consistently ranks in the country’s top five highest rating programmes across all viewers ages 5+, and during the past five years, each episode has reached over three quarters of a million viewers. Most surprisingly, Country Calendar bucks the yearly trend of falling television audiences, pulling a larger audience now than it did in the pre-Covid environment of 2019.
But it’s not only traditional television audiences who are hooked on rural life. Last year, online viewers watched a record 1.1 million streams on TVNZ+, a massive 43% year-on-year growth from 2020. Nearly 900,000 streams have already been generated this year, and two of every five of those are episodes from previous seasons, proving that Country Calendar remains popular with viewers long after the episodes screen on broadcast television. Even dogs get excited about it. We’re a nation of thirsty beasts with our heads in the Country Calendar trough, and it seems like we’ll never be full.
Julian O’Brien first joined Country Calendar as a reporter-director in 1985, and began producing the show in 2006, watching the show grow from 12 episodes a year to the current 40. It’s our nation’s television love affair that shows no signs of slowing down, and O’Brien reckons that’s all down to our relationship with the land. With the majority of New Zealanders living in towns and cities, O’Brien says Country Calendar connects us to a world many of us can’t easily access. “I think it helps to provide a little window into rural life that people want, but don’t have an easy way to achieve.”
Those high ratings prove Country Calendar isn’t just a show for the rural community “To be honest, if only farmers watched the show, it probably wouldn’t exist,” O’Brien says. With just under 50,000 farms in New Zealand, O’Brien says the reality is more people are watching Country Calendar in Parnell or Te Atatū than in rural Paeroa, something his team is always conscious of. “We try to pitch the show in a way that farmers won’t feel like we’re teaching them to suck eggs, but at the same time, city people don’t go ‘I don’t understand this’,” he says. “That’s always a bit of a delicate balance, but I think the numbers show we get it pretty right.”
The key to the show’s success, O’Brien reckons, is that it lets rural people tell their own stories. There’s nothing flashy about Country Calendar and usually nothing showy about the people they profile. While the rest of the world has changed around it, Country Calendar is made today in much the same way it’s always been, and O’Brien is proud of the show’s traditional craft. It uses simple, observational storytelling anchored in some of New Zealand’s most spectacular landscapes, and rather than making a lifestyle series, O’Brien says it’s crucial they present the realities of rural life. That way, the audience knows the show is authentic, and that they’re choosing to spend time with “good people who won’t have the piss taken out of them”.
Longtime Country Calendar fans have fond memories of vintage episodes like the 1974 Fred Dagg special or the iconic spoofs, but O’Brien reckons the old shows might not be as gripping as people remember. Perhaps they’re part of our collective nostalgia for a simpler time when farming was farming and fences serenaded the nation, but these days, Country Calendar is more likely to feature stories about sustainability and climate change. The show continues to innovate and evolve where it can, and the current season features a Northland pineapple orchard, a pāua farmer on Rakiura Stewart Island, and the iwi owners of an East Coast beef and sheep farm.
Every Sunday night, the show takes us to corners of Aotearoa we might never have seen before, and the Country Calendar team wants each episode to appear artless. “We want it to look as though we were just driving past a farm and went, ‘I wonder what goes on there’ and they turned out to be quite friendly and said, ‘come and have a look’,” O’Brien says. Of course, the reality is different, and it’s a challenge to turn around 40 episodes every year while making each one feel gentle and unhurried. “Making something that looks artless requires a lot of care.”
Of course, the response to the Lake Hāwea Station episode was anything but gentle. “I think it tapped into the feeling among a lot of rural people that nobody cares about them anymore,” O’Brien theorises, adding that although the Rosses didn’t set out to lecture people, they did say they were determined to do things differently. “I think a lot of people interpreted that as being lectured by city people, even though the Rosses aren’t city people. It is a growing feeling at the moment in the rural community that everyone’s slightly against them.”
O’Brien is optimistic about the controversy, in the same way that Country Calendar is always upbeat about farming. He feels that any response – even negative – is a sign that New Zealanders feel ownership of the show. It also means he doesn’t see Country Calendar going anywhere soon. “There will always be a demand for good storytelling about New Zealanders from other New Zealanders,” he says. “As long as we can be true to the origins of the show and meet that demand, then I think it’s very likely to be around in 20 years time, maybe more.”
Our enduring love affair with the sedate farming show looks set to continue, sheep mattresses and all. “People are fundamentally interested in other people,” O’Brien says, adding that most of Country Calendar’s stories are about New Zealanders getting on with things in “their own quiet way”. It’s ordinary people doing interesting things, and that’s what makes the show special. “It’s just very nice after half an hour of watching Country Calendar to go ‘what great people, what a great thing they’re doing,’” O’Brien says. “Country Calendar isn’t rural current affairs, it’s personality profiles, and I think people do like watching it.”
Hyundai Country Calendar screens on Sunday nights at 7pm on TVNZ1 and streams on TVNZ+.