Channel: UHF 56 (100W, Christchurch)
Coverage: Christchurch city-wide
Location: Marleys Hill, Port Hills, Christchurch
Format: Music video television channel
Founded: July 1993
Active: 1993–1997
History
By 1993, New Zealand’s television landscape was still finding its footing after the deregulation of the late 1980s, which had cracked open the state broadcasting monopoly and allowed private operators to chase UHF frequencies. TV3 had launched in 1989, Sky Television in 1990, and new regional and specialist channels were appearing around the country. In Christchurch, two young men saw an opportunity that no one had yet taken — a channel devoted entirely to music video.
Christian Birch and Chris Clarkson founded CRY TV in July 1993, winning a licence to broadcast on UHF channel 56 at 100 watts from a transmitter shed on Marleys Hill in the Port Hills, near the Sugarloaf Transmitter. The studio itself was improvised and intimate: presenter Petra Bagust later recalled it as “a double garage attached to a former nunnery, high in the Port Hills” — about as far from a glossy broadcast facility as it was possible to get. The signal reached the Christchurch basin below, and anyone with a UHF aerial could tune in.
The channel’s first transmissions were cheerfully makeshift. For approximately a month during July and August 1993, while the team finalised its regular programming, CRY TV broadcast a camera trained on a fish tank — twenty-four hours a day. The aquarium shot became something of a signature: once the station moved to regular programming, the fish tank continued to air during downtime and at shutdown each night, when the lights and camera were turned back toward the tank as an overnight holding pattern. It was low-budget television in the most literal sense, but it gave the station an endearing identity.
When programming proper began, CRY TV did something straightforward and radical in equal measure: it played music videos, wall to wall, with a focus on New Zealand music at a time when domestic artists had almost no dedicated outlet. The major networks gave music limited airtime. CRY TV gave it a home. Presenters mostly hosted their shows live-to-air, which meant they had to be quick on their feet and comfortable with the unexpected. If they needed to pre-record segments, they learned to self-film — setting up a handycam, recording their continuity pieces, then driving or walking them to the studio. It was scrappy, energetic, and genuinely local.
New Zealand’s music video industry had been quietly growing since 1989, when NZ On Air introduced a music video fund as part of its mandate to promote New Zealand music on screen. The fund supported local artists in commissioning videos, but the resulting clips often had limited broadcast options: national television gave them little airtime, and the international channels arriving on Sky offered no path for domestic content. By the time CRY TV launched in 1993, there was already a growing body of NZ-funded videos — many of them modest in production budget but genuine in ambition — looking for somewhere to be seen. CRY TV broadcast them: clips from Pumpkinhead, Head Like A Hole, the 3Ds, Headless Chickens, and Bic Runga sat alongside local Christchurch submissions that had never received any official funding at all — bands who had shot something in a weekend on borrowed equipment, with friends filling the frame. Where major networks demanded broadcast quality, CRY TV’s own lo-fi aesthetic meant that lo-fi videos were not only accepted but entirely in keeping with the station’s spirit.
The channel holds a place in New Zealand broadcasting history as the first dedicated music television channel in the country. Auckland’s MAX TV — which launched on 28 October 1993 on UHF 49 — is sometimes cited as the pioneer, but CRY TV beat it to air by approximately three months. Both channels occupied a similar niche: independent, UHF, music-video-focused, running on tight budgets and large amounts of enthusiasm. Both would last until 1997.
CRY TV’s most lasting legacy may be the careers it launched. Petra Bagust, who had been studying fine arts at the University of Canterbury, was lured into regional television and began hosting a music show Monday to Friday, 6–9pm, driving her Morris Marina up to the Port Hills studio after her daytime classes. Her first moment on camera was an exercise in controlled panic — she later said her entire body told her to run when the countdown began — but she persevered. From CRY TV she went on to co-host TV3’s youth show Ice TV from 1996, followed by Breakfast, Hot Property, What’s Really in Our Food?, and a long career as one of New Zealand’s most familiar television faces.
Jason Fa’afoi, born in Christchurch in 1972, also found his feet in front of a camera at CRY TV. He went on to present What Now? and became a working journalist before entering politics as a Labour MP, serving as a minister in the Sixth Labour Government. Francesca Rudkin, later a film and music critic for the NZ Herald and host of Newstalk ZB’s Sunday Session, began at CRY TV before moving to MAX TV in Auckland, where she worked as a movie reviewer and presenter until MAX TV closed in 1997. D’Arcy Waldegrave, who became a prominent sports broadcaster on Newstalk ZB and Radio Sport, also started his broadcasting life at the channel.
Among the musicians who passed through was Dave Yetton, guitarist and vocalist with Christchurch indie band the Jean-Paul Sartre Experience (later abbreviated to JPS Experience to avoid legal complications with the Sartre estate). Yetton presented a show on CRY TV in the mid-1990s, and it was through the station that he and Jason Fa’afoi connected and eventually formed The Stereo Bus — Yetton’s post-JPSE pop project, which grew from a solo vehicle into a popular five-piece whose albums appeared on Festival and EMI in the late 1990s.
The financial pressures that plagued CRY TV were structural. Christchurch in the mid-1990s simply did not have the advertising market to sustain the cost of music licensing, equipment, and staffing that a broadcast operation required. As a regional UHF channel with no audience measurement data to offer advertisers, the station relied on good faith and local support. It managed four years — a respectable run given the constraints — before closing in April 1997.
The frequency did not remain dark for long, though its immediate successor fared even worse. The Family Television Network acquired the channel 56 licence and launched a local franchise on 14 July 1997, airing programming for precisely three days before its liquidator intervened and pulled the plug. The fish tank briefly returned. When TVNZ launched MTV New Zealand in mid-1997, the era of independent music television in New Zealand effectively ended: both CRY TV and MAX TV had already closed, and the major network’s attempt at a local MTV proved short-lived in its own right.
CRY TV’s significance lies not in its scale — it was always small, always underfunded, always doing more with less — but in its timing and its spirit. It arrived at the precise moment when New Zealand music needed somewhere to be seen, and it gave that space to a generation of artists, presenters, and broadcasters who would go on to shape the country’s media and music culture through the decades that followed. The double garage on the Port Hills was where it started for a remarkable number of them.
before being lured into regional TV station Cry TV. And so began a screen career during which she has hosted many of New Zealand’s most popular shows
NZ On Screen, on Petra Bagust’s start at CRY TV