It is perhaps not the best way to win friends on a film shoot, to tear off your shirt and leap around like a highland dancer.

But I did at least wait until the director yelled "Cut!"

There I was, notebook in hand, observing the filming of a Country Calendar episode inside an organic greenhouse in Golden Bay. The place was alive - with flowering plants, with vegetables, with swarming film crew and scurrying farm staff. Oh, and bees. There were also bees.



I felt something moving down the back of my shirt. A trickle of sweat, perhaps, from the late summer heat. But then it stung me.



The pain was intense and the timing extremely poor.



"The best thing for that is plantain," said Debbie Campbell, who has owned this place for the past 10 years. "Come with me."



She marched past the camera, yanked up a handful of plaintain leaves from the paddock outside, and rubbed them against the inflamed red area in the small of my back.



Over the fence, a crowd of chickens, ducks and turkeys strutted and pecked, letting loose a cacophony of clucks, squawks and cock-a-doodle-doos. In my pain-addled state, they seemed to be speaking to me. They were saying, "Beware the dangers of the countryside, oh useless townie."



Country Calendar is, believe it or not, the second longest-running TV series in the world.



Established in March 1966, it will have been screening annually for an epic 50 years next year, and this in a media environment in which a TV show is lucky to survive a couple of seasons.



The only series that's been going longer features dour old buggers saying "eeeh, by gum" and supping warm pints in the Rover's Return. And just like Coronation Street, Country Calendar is a ratings winner. Last year, it attracted an average audience of over half a million viewers per episode, making it one of the top five programmes in TV One's target 25- 54 demographic.



"Country Calendar is an institution, and for good reason," says the show's associate producer Dan Henry, who's directing today's shoot.



"It's a gentle, engaging show with high production values, telling true stories of people finding ways to succeed in living off the land. And it's built up an amazing archive over those 50 years, to the extent that you can chart some of New Zealand's wider social changes through Country Calendar episodes."



In the early days, he says, the emphasis was on rural news aimed at farmers themselves. More recently, the show has diversified to show how our relationship to the land has evolved over five decades.

A Country Calendar crew gets footage at a clearance sale at Matarau Station, Eastland, in 1992.

We've met eel farmers, market gardeners, organic brewers, cheesemakers, rural homestay operators. Along the way, we've watched farmers do battle with droughts, floods, blizzards and rabbit infestations of almost biblical proportions.

There have been spoof shows involving mice farmers, radio-controlled sheepdogs, mushroom growers utilising the air-con units of Wellington office blocks, and men who play tunes by plucking a five-wire fence like a primitive rural harp. On the Christmas episode in 1973, Fred Dagg featured, alongside his six sons named Trevor.



Today, a more traditional story is unfolding in front of the cameras. We're at Bay Subtropicals, where Debbie and her partner Lex have 7 hectares tucked into a frost-free micro-climate between the sea and a bush-covered hill. Besides this massive tunnel house and all that insolent poultry, there are extensive orchards cropping limes, oranges, mandarins, avocados, macadamias, tamarillos and pecans.



For the next scene, Debbie strolls between heavily laden tomato vines, pointing out what's growing all around her. This, understandably, takes a while: there's beetroot, lettuce, taro, courgettes and capsicums. There's cabbage, kale, basil for Africa, Scotch Bonnet chillies, squadrons of fat carrots.



"Making this show, we have to be mindful that these are real working farms," says Henry, as he ticks another scene off his shooting schedule.



"Most farmers are amazed to discover we might need them to repeat something five times to get the right shot, and meanwhile they have a list of more important jobs in their heads that aren't getting done. So we get our shots as quickly as possible then let them get back to work."



The rest of the day is spent getting various outdoor scenes in the can. Cameraman Richard Williams films sheep grazing between huge 40-year-old avocado trees, and sends up a drone to take aerial shots of Debbie driving a trailer-load of bright orange fruit between mandarin trees. Lex is filmed hot-smoking a snapper caught yesterday while out fishing in the bay.



Between scenes, Debbie takes me for a quick hoon around the farm, your trusty reporter perching side-saddle on the back of a 4x4 as it blats down potholed farm tracks.



I am shown drums of liquid fertiliser she has made from comfrey, worm casts and, I kid you not, "fermenting fish guts and eyeballs".



One such drum pongs so ripely it threatens to defoliate my nostril hair.



"That's the real good stuff, that one," says Debbie, lifting the lid to show me a bubbling aerator Lex has cobbled together using the old air compressor from a bouncy castle.



Lex is a legend. In a shed near the greenhouse, he has also built his own chicken-plucker, using the motor from a commercial pizza dough roller, a 44-gallon drum, and some alarming mechanical hands with black rubber fingers. Yesterday Lex killed a chicken and chucked it in there so the crew could film the thing in action. Seconds later, that unlucky chook was bald as a baby's bum.



Lex is fifth generation Golden Bay, and met Debbie while working as a local electrician.



An expat Canadian, Debbie worked for years as a corporate business analyst before deciding to "swap the high heels and Armani suits for chicken s*** and worm tea" 10 years ago.



Both are pushing 60, and precisely the kind of people who make perfect Country Calendar subjects: likeable, articulate and, in their own way, courageous, having made a bold leap into the unknown when they decided to forgo their previous careers for a life on the land.

'A lot of urban New Zealanders feel a very strong affinity for the land,' says Country Calendar Producer Julian O'Brien . for Country Calendar story, SST April 5 first use

"Ideally, we want to point our cameras at nice people leading interesting lives," the show's producer Julian O'Brien told me a few days earlier from his Wellington office. "And if they can talk eloquently about those lives in front of a beautiful backdrop somewhere, so much the better."



Before moving into TV, O'Brien did his time as a journalist on newspapers, magazines and radio. Country Calendar is his favourite gig so far.



"It's such an uplifting show, and that's because it's primarily about people, not rural current affairs. Of course, like all television shows, we live or die on the ratings, so this show wouldn't exist if it was only watched by farmers. We need people in Parnell and Khandallah to tune in, too, and they do, because a lot of urban New Zealanders feel a very strong affinity for the land, even though they don't actually live there.



"Country Calendar is also an aspirational thing for some viewers. They might picture themselves chucking in their city job and moving onto the land someday, and this show features a lot of people who've done just that."



Back in Golden Bay, it's lunchtime. On the table outside Debbie and Lex's house sits an array of salads and a big platter of creamy pasta scattered with fresh herbs and chunks of that unfortunate chicken that met the plucking machine yesterday.



Between mouthfuls, I confess to the assembled family and crew that I hated Country Calendar as a kid. "Me, too!" says everyone else in unison.



It transpires none of us could abide Country Calendar as kids, with its endless dreary sheep and beef farms. Back then there were just two TV channels, and the Wonderful World of Disney was on the other one at the precise moment your parents insisted on watching Country Calendar. Oh, how we sulked and fumed. Then we got older and came to love it.



"When you're an adult, I think you begin to appreciate that these are really compelling stories," says sound recordist Don Paulin. "And better still, they're told without any annoying gimmicks or hosts. Marketing people would no doubt say that Country Calendar has high integrity as a brand. No one has messed around with it too much, so a lot of New Zealanders are familiar with the feel of the show and feel very affectionate towards it."



So affectionate, in fact, that the very theme tune causes strange stirrings in the heart. It's Aotearoa's answer to Duelling Banjos, getting us all in touch with our inner hillbilly.

"People still contact us all the time about that tune," reckons Frank Torley, who has worked on Country Calendar for most of its 50-year run. It's a few days after the shoot when I call him at his home in Waikanae.

"They want to play it at birthday parties, 21sts, you name it, or learn to play it on the guitar. People are always desperate to find out what that tune is called."

Frank Torley on Country Calendar in 1975...

The answer? It's called Hillbilly Child by British soundtrack composer Alan Moorhouse.



"People write in or ring up, wanting us to send them copies of that music so they can use it for their weddings, though I reckon it'd be pretty fast to walk down the aisle to. I wouldn't be surprised if it's been played at a few funerals, too, as some old farmer is lowered into the ground."



If anyone can give us a parting overview of Country Calendar, it's Torley.



Now 74, he joined the show as a reporter in 1968 then worked his way up through the ranks, eventually sitting in the driver's seat as producer for 23 years. Now his main role is as narrator.



"These days I seem to have become 'Mr Country Calendar' to many people. They recognise my voice in the supermarket and come and talk about how much they love the show."

Torley's dry, craggy voice has become almost as iconic as that theme tune. He sounds like he could have just strolled in from the shearing shed and sat down behind the microphone. A former stock agent, he remains a big fan of old-school "sheep and beef" stories. At the Golden Bay shoot, Henry's crew told me Torley used to hate filming episodes on vineyards because "you can't round up grapes with a sheepdog".

Torley laughs when I mention it. "I'll admit the range of rural activities we cover now has improved the show. In the early days, dare I say it, Country Calendar could be boring as bats***, with these guys at agricultural research stations talking at length about changes to farm technology or whatever. The stories are a lot more interesting now.

Tony Benny ... and in 2011. To many fans, he's become 'Mr Country Calendar'.

"If anything, people could accuse us of an editorial bias towards positivity. You don't see much mud or anguish, do you? We don't send cameras into the bank manager's office when some depressed farmer applies for yet another overdraft, and that's part of the reality of working on the land. But there are a lot of more uplifting stories out there, too, and those are the ones we choose to tell."

Country Calendar began its 2015 season last night; it screens on TV One at 7pm on Saturday nights.