©Rebecca McMillan Photography
Tom Sainsbury on set in Small Town Scandal.
Film and TV producer Georgina Condor’s involvement in TV series ‘Small Town Scandal’ all started when she was out walking her dog. “Tom Sainsbury’s podcast popped up, and I pressed play. My dog got very well walked that day... By the end, I’d binged three episodes, contacted a friend and said, ‘I need to meet Tom.’”
Tom Sainsbury loved Georgina’s enthusiasm and vision for the podcast to become a TV series. Adapting a book to film is a familiar process, but adapting a podcast to TV is much rarer and took lots of iteration. “Development for us was really long. We had a writer’s room with a lot of collaborators who Tom had worked with before... We went from a six-part podcast to an eight-episode TV series because we felt it needed more storylines.”
The ‘Small Town Scandal’ TV series follows a disgraced investigative journalist (Tom Sainsbury) as he tries to solve the suspicious death of his millionaire uncle at the hands of an automatic lawnmower. In the podcast series by the same name, Tom voiced all the characters himself, but for the screen, he needed a cast as eccentric and brilliant as the characters he’d created.
“Because Tom has a lot of theatre links, as well as working in TV and film, he knows so many people. Our casting process was a lot of going straight to people, which is quite unusual.”
The suburb of Waterloo in Lower Hutt provided the perfect film location for the series. “I got myself lost on purpose [searching for film locations],” said Georgina. “In the podcast, the first season is set in Te Hoiho, a fictional equestrian town. Tom is from Matamata, so it’s kind of a nod to his hometown.”
©Rebecca McMillan Photography
Leaning on local resources and the hospitality of the town was key to the success of filming. “We worked with Screen Wellington a lot, right at the beginning... The council were pretty amazing too. They helped us with a few little improvements... We changed the Plunket into a police station, and the council also allowed us to hang little flowerpots.” The production team based itself out of Avalon Studios and filmed the whole show over a whirlwind thirty-five days. “The shop owners were really great, they loved it and were really hospitable to us.”
Georgina was born and bred in Wellington, and her pride for the city is evident in her work. “It’s pretty important for me to be making my shows and films here,” she said. “We’ve got a great crew who really enjoyed working on something of this scale.”
The show, just like the podcast, had a decidedly Kiwi feel to it, but Georgina is always thinking about an international audience. “We want our content to look as good as the internationals. We want to serve our audience, we want them to fall in love with it.”
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