THE MOVING PICTURE BOY ARCHIVE

THE FIRE-RAISER

Title: The Fire-Raiser
Production type: TV Mini-Series
Year of first transmission: 1986, the series was shown over August and September that year in New Zealand.
Director: Peter Sharp
Screenplay: Maurice Gee
Country of Production: New Zealand
Genre: Historical drama, crime, thriller
Length: 5 episodes, each around 25 minutes in length
Language: English
Boy actors: Darryl Beattie as Noel Wix and Miles Murphy as Phil Miller
Availability: The full miniseries does not seem to be available anywhere. However, the miniseries was subsequently edited into a TV movie lasting 1 hour and 42 minutes. This latter is available to view (but not to download) on the 'NZ On Screen' website here. (VPNs may need to be switched off.) The TV movie was further cut down for a VHS release, renamed The Undercover Gang, with a duration of 1 hour and 13 minutes.
Censorship: The original miniseries had a certain amount of nudity, since on both occasions in the series when the boys' schoolteacher takes them swimming, the majority of them (but not our two lead boys) go skinnydipping. This nudity was retained in the TV movie, but was edited out from the VHS release. Clearly, casual boy nudity, in contexts in which such nudity would be natural, provoked no complaints from viewers when transmitted in 1986, though director Peter Sharp would later say that some international distributors objected to the nude sequences (see link to Sharp's account below). It is a melancholy reflection on our times that such scenes in television dramas would now be completely unthinkable, such has been the advance of moral panic over the depiction of the young male body over the last forty years.

Synopsis (from Vivien van Rij's paper on "Historical Material in Maurice Gee's The Fire-Raiser", see below for link)
"Set in 1915 during World War I, it depicts four child protagonists [Irene Chalmers, Phil Miller, and siblings Noel and Kitty Wix] and their headmaster [Thomas 'Clippy' Hedges] who set out to solve the mystery of the fires that occur in the township of Jessop, and to pursue the arsonist (Edgar Marwick). Blamed for the drowning of his sister in childhood, and subjected by his parents to corporal punishment, the adult Marwick is unbalanced, as is his mother. Their battle with the headmaster and children over riparian rights to water holes on their land, and Marwick's fires, echo on a smaller scale the battles of the world at war."

Source material and further information
The screenplay of the miniseries was written by the New Zealand novelist Maurice Gee (1931-2025), who quickly turned the five scripts into a novel that was published at the same time as the TV series was transmitted.

Prior to his work on The Fire-Raiser, Gee had researched and published a work on the Nelson Central School (his only ever work of non-fiction, published in 1978), about the history of the Nelson Central School from 1878 to 1978, and much of the material for The Fire-Raiser was drawn from actual historical incident. For example, there was in fact a dispute between the headmaster of Nelson Central School and the owners of land surrounding a river, concerning access of boys to the water. In the case of the real life headmaster F. G. Gibbs, the dispute was with a local landowner named Mrs Richardson, who on one occasion stole the boys' clothes whilst they were swimming. This caused Gibbs to tell the boys to dance naked round Mrs Richardson's house, an action which resulted in the clothes being quickly returned. This incident is reproduced in both the novel and the miniseries. For more information about the parallels between The Fire-Raiser and real life history, see Vivien van Rij's 2012 paper on the miniseries, which can be viewed online here.

In 2024, director Peter Sharp was to write a piece about the filming of the miniseries for NZ on Screen, which can be read here.

A short article on the miniseries was published in the 22 August 1986 edition of New Zealand newspaper The Press, just ahead of the transmission of the first episode the following day. The article can be viewed online here.

The miniseries was shown in Britain by the BBC in 1987, with the first episode being transmitted on Wednesday 7 October. The Radio Times (the BBC's long-standing official listings magazine) for 3-9 October 1987 included a brief article on the miniseries. Below, is a scan of the article, and, below that, the listing for the first episode of the miniseries, in the same edition of the magazine. (Click on images to open full-size scans in new tab. From Editor's collection.)

Screenshots (from TV movie)