'Kaleidoscope' returns on One tonight

Press, 9 March 1984, Page 15

'Kaleidoscope' returns on One tonight

“Kaleidoscope” will be back with a new look and new vigour, on One at 8.30 tonight. The presenter, Heath Lees, has swapped his sitting room for a starker setting and the programme will offer New Zealand content throughout the year, says TVNZ. The producer, Jillian Ewart, is delighted. “People look to ‘Kaleidoscope’ as a vehicle for information about the arts in New Zealand and that’s what we want to provide.. The overseas programmes we’ve had to include in the past have been alien to our style and now we can get on with what we consider to be our brief,” she says. The first programme will include a profile of New Zealand’s well-loved opera singer, Heather Begg, and the first of a series of six programmes on New Zealand architecture. Ms Ewart regards the

architecture series as particularly important. f ‘lt’s part of our drive to examine indigenous things that concern us all as New Zealanders,” she says. “We want to make people aware that arts are the everyday things that are all around us — not just something you go to the theatre or the art gallery to see. Last year we ran a series on design — this year it’s architecture and we will continue to explore along these lines.”

Also in the pipeline for this year is a series on New Zealand composers. There will be a series which looks at women in the arts, a same-day telecast of the prestigious Fletcher Brownbuilt Pottery Award, coverage of the Te Maori exhibition in New York, and profiles of leading New Zealand artists including the London-based writer, Dan Davin.

The programme aims, however, to look not just at the established art scene, but at worthwhile aspects of the fringe as well. The format will continue to be magazine-style — “which for most people is a palatable way of digesting fairly serious information” — but the time slot is still a bugbear. “Friday nights are for collapsing — not for thinking,” says Ms Ewart. “The arts are really too challenging for that”