In the pre-internet era of the 1970s and 1980s, The Listener magazine was a vital source of weekly information on New Zealand cultural life: it held the monopoly on television and radio listings, published Top 20 music charts and reviewed books, albums, theatre and film.

The Listener is 80 this week and Sarah Johnston from Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision looks back at the history of this institution.

The cover of the first edition of “The Listener”, June 1939. (RNZ collection, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision) 1974 Listener cover featuring radio and television announcer Marama Martin (Alexander Turnbull Library) Bogor cartoon from The Listener (Courtesy Bauer Media and Burton Silver)

The Listener started life back in 1939 – just before the start of World War II – and as its name suggests, it was aimed at radio listeners – it was a way of finding out what was going to be on the radio and when. In the decades before TV, this was important information.

The radio listings in The Listener were provided by the Broadcasting Service – which conveniently, also owned The Listener and the government ensured the magazine had a monopoly on those listings.

They were of course, commercially very desirable intellectual property and competitors like newspapers and magazines would complain from time to time about this – even more so when TV was launched in 1960, and The Listener also had a monopoly on listing the new medium’s programmes.

“The Listener was an incredibly powerful force in moulding New Zealand culture in that era,” Johnston says.

The Listener had a long tradition of carrying provocative editorials and the correspondence page was legendary too, she says.

In the 1970s when some left-leaning columns upset Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, he threatened to take away the magazine’s monopoly, which eventually happened in the Rogernomics era of the 1980s.

Indeed The Listener invented the term ‘Rogernomics’.

Editor in the 1970s, Ian Cross, explains how he viewed the magazine’s role in stimulating debate through tackling controversial topics, in a 1979 Insight documentary.

“My whole view, editorial view, was to begin from your readers, begin from your country, begin from your country’s people and express their reactions, explain them sympathetically. Sometimes this took me strongly against prevailing trends, but by doing this I struck for the magazine a chord of recognition among many people that hadn’t read the magazine before. Somehow or other they felt represented by the magazine.

“It chooses the key subjects of the day and examines them, or attempts to examine them, in depth and sometimes gives people with opinions, with a polemic view of the world, scope to express themselves.

“This strong form of journalism is inevitably going to produce a reaction, I think it’s a very desirable reaction, I don’t care whether a strong view is from the left or the right, I think New Zealand society needs stimulating, needs enlivening and we need to be more conscious of our own opinions and one way of achieving that consciousness is to be exacerbated or annoyed by the opinions of other people if you like, and it’s a contribution to a more stimulating and interesting society.”

Readership of the magazine doubled during Cross’s era as editor, partly due to a host of new columnists and cartoonists he hired, who became icons of New Zealand life in the 70s: people like Tom Scott, Rosemary McLeod and Burton Silver – Silver had a long-running cartoon series Bogor in The Listener.

“It was a strip that featured a lonely Kiwi woodsman in a hard hat and his companions - a hedgehog and snail - who were very fond of marijuana, which they grew in his pine plantations,” Johnston says.

Burton says he presented the idea for Bogor to editor Cross, who loved the concept and commissioned the series, without realising the heavy marijuana habit of the characters; he was furious when he found out, but in the end compromised with Burton and said the hedgehog could grow the pot – but not Bogor himself.

And this set up a conflict between the characters which Burton says actually worked really well.

Silver gave a dead-pan interview in 1977, explaining how encouraging marijuana consumption by hedgehogs could help New Zealand’s pastoral industry.

“Every year on our roads we’re killing tens of thousands of hedgehogs and thereby we’re destroying a very important means of controlling pasture pests. Now the reason that hedgehogs are killed in such great numbers on our roads is that when they’re disturbed or frightened they curl up, so instead of running away from approaching car headlights they curl up and are run over.

“But when a hedgehog is stoned on marijuana one of the effects is it induces a kind of mild state of paranoia, something that is well known among pot smokers, and this makes the hedgehog less confident of the preservation effect of its curling up response.

“The psychology of this goes something like this; when a hedgehog’s straight it says to itself now if anything happens to me I can just curl up and I’ll be OK, but when he’s stoned and more paranoid, more worried, he says to himself ‘if anything happens to me I don’t have time to curl up’ and as a result of this, when a hedgehog’s stoned in an area of potential danger, like on a road, he just dashes straight across over the other side and this of course works in the hedgehog’s favour and protects him from being run over.

“If hedgehogs are not stoned they are much more likely to get run over, and if they get run over they can’t eat grass grubs, and therefore I think New Zealand’s future agricultural viability could well depend to a large extent on our planting large amounts of marijuana in pasture areas in order to turn on as many hedgehogs as possible.”

Silver’s gentle, subversive humour helped him a few years later to write the internationally best-selling book Why Cats Paint.