Throng

Anyone know what the music is that TV2's using?

To mark 50 years of television in NZ, TVNZ has trawled back through the archives and compiled a list of the most notable programs to have graced our screens over the past five decades.

Divided into decade blocks, this list features some cracker shows but also one or two that should never have made it to TV in the first place.

Check it out below.

TVNZ has compiled a comprehensive timeline of significant and memorable events that have occured in and around the television industry in New Zealand over the past 50 years.

From the broadcast of the Wahine disaster footage in 1968, to the very first screening of Shortland Street in 1992, it's all there.

Take a trip down memory lane below.

Ok how to begin.....

First you give away the finalists for American Idol in the Advert Break just before it was announced in the Top 3 show. Shocking.. Really shocking. You should know better.

Next you make a big deal about Lost being shown this coming weekend.. Heck you are a week late.. This is the 21st Century.. Do you really have any idea how hard it is to avoid spoilers? A week for a show that is this big globally is a long time.

Coming back to Idol.. Great we are getting the final a couple of hours behind the US.. Fail on two levels.

One.... You cut the end of the final performance. Why? I'd be happy with the overrun for once to hear the winner finish their track..

This may not be important news but TV One and TV2 have begun celebrating 50 Years of Television in New Zealand by adding said fact to the DOG's, effective this morning.

I'm hoping they begin screening, very soon, old school network ID's from the 70's to the mid-late 90's.

6:00am Friday, December 25 on TV2

To celebrate Christmas Day, TV2 has a festive and fun-packed line-up of movies for the whole family to enjoy, from dawn until dusk.

For the early risers, A Miser Brother's Christmas, at 7.05am, is a family animation following Santa as he gets stuck in the middle of the Miser brothers' feud. Can the brothers overcome their differences and save Christmas?

In Santa Buddies at 12pm, Puppy Paws, the feisty son of Santa Paws, forgets the true meaning of Christmas, and it's up to the Buddies, a group of puppies - Budderball, B-Dawg, Rosebud, Buddha, and Mudbud - to remind him that Christmas is not about what you get; it's about what you give. Join the Buddies on an exciting journey to the magical world of the North Pole.

From 7:00pm Monday, December 21 on TV2

On Monday at 7pm, TV2's Christmas animation movie-spin-off, Monsters And Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins From Outer Space, finds the gang now working for the US government, as the world comes under threat from an invading army of mutant vegetables, that must be stopped at all costs. Featuring the voice talent of Reese Witherspoon (Legally Blonde), Seth Rogen (Knocked Up), Hugh Laurie (Stuart Little), and Kiefer Sutherland (24).

Adam Sandler (50 First Dates) and Drew Barrymore (Charlie's Angels) star in TV2's Monday Christmas Week Movie, The Wedding Singer at 8.30pm. Robbie, a singer, and Julia, a waitress, are both engaged to be married to the wrong people, until fortune intervenes to help them discover each other.

I think you can tell just by watching the ads that this show will turn out to be as bad or even worse (if possible) than So You Wanna Be a Popstar or Sing Like a Superstar, or whatever they were called.

I see it has washed up 'celebrities' as judges with people such as that ex-Shortland St actor from several years ago and what's-his-name ex-shock-jock radio host/NZ Idol judge. Very exciting...not.

Please tell me this is not a sign of what local television on TVNZ is going to look like in the years to come.