Jack Tame: The wonders of old home videos

Author: Jack Tame ,
Publish Date: Sat, 11 Jul 2026, 10:30am

Follow the podcast on

I’m in Wellington for Matariki weekend to see family and celebrate a mate’s 40th. But being Wellington and being the mid-winter school holidays, it was about 4C yesterday at my parents-in-law's house. The wind and rain were coming in sideways, and though I always insist on getting young kids outside and running them as much as possible, most of yesterday was spent in the lounge.

With three generations and four kids under ten in a confined space, board games and books will only get you so far. Enter the old family videos. It was the perfect day for it. My father-in-law pulled out a digitised home videos from the early nineties —which by the way, is a great reminder to hurry up and digitise your old videos before it’s too late!— and we sat down to marvel and delight at what life for our family used to be.

There was something especially quaint about that era of family home videos. It was before the nifty little family handycam era where you’d see tourists documenting every second of their trip to Disneyland. It was earlier, about the very first time the technology made it possible to go and film stuff at home by yourself.

Growing up, I remember my mum coming home from work with an enormous contraption. She’d borrowed it for a couple of days, and from memory it almost required its own coalfired boiler just to fire up and start recording. My wife’s family’s experience was almost exactly the same. A giant camera, super expensive relative to incomes, borrowed for a couple of days.

Watching the videos yesterday, I was struck by a few things. First of all, obviously, they really are time capsules, and for whatever reason back then, people just loved to hit record and leave those things rolling. But it means that over 10 or 15 minutes of the same continuous shot, if you really make the effort to observe, you notice all sorts of little details. There’s the obvious stuff that has changed: the fashion, the floral print dresses, the bowl haircuts, the moustaches, the knitted sweaters with different fruit on the front. But even little things: kitchens without dishwashers, birthday and party decorations that were saved and recycled, old bedsheets slung to protect the couches. No computers. No cell phones. No screens.

The thing that really hit me yesterday was the strength of genetics. Of course, I’ve seen heaps of photos of my wife and her brother as a kid. But the videos we watched yesterday were the first moving pictures I’d seen of my brother-in-law at about the same age as our nine-year-old is today. It was extraordinary. Just the way the little boy in the video was holding his body, laughing, and moving was so shockingly familiar. I was almost spluttering as I watched it, turning my head from the boy on the TV, across the room, to a near mirror-image of a boy in the flesh, giggling as he watched his uncle on the screen.

The other thing that struck me was the value of scarcity. Perhaps I’m romanticising it a bit much, but one of the things that makes the home videos of that era so precious is that there aren’t that many of them. Recording a video back then was an event. Not just because of the coal boiler needed to fire the camera into life, but because cameras were super expensive and it took serious planning to organise them. Obviously we’ve gained a lot by having extraordinary video cameras in our pockets, but I wonder if we’ve also lost something too. There was a genuine sense of wonder —for all of us, three generations— in sitting down and soaking up scenes from three decades ago. It’d be a shame to think it becomes something my kids just take for granted.