During the process of filming Journey to New Edinburgh, Seán Brosnahan produced a very regular blog. And it provides so much information!

One of the wonderful images that will always stick with me from reading the blog is that of a certain vacuum-cleaner salesman.

Will McKee was the one who did all the hard work getting the crew through locked gates and bolted doors. Many of the places they wanted to film were houses, farms, public buildings. Places where you couldn’t just wander on up and turn a camera on. And when they came across one of these places that required a wee bit of sweet talking, Prince Charming was sent out to do the work.

It’s first referenced in a blog post from the 5th day of filming in the UK, when Will was deployed to sweet talk the owners of a house where Thomas Burns once lived in his childhood. Chris Kwak, the videographer, apparently remarked that with his charm Will would have made a good door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. And the moniker stuck, with Will being referenced in this way at least seven times throughout the journey.

You can find that particular blog here https://journeytonewedinburgh.wordpress.com/2022/05/23/over-the-border/

And you can navigate through that website to find blogs from throughout the entire filming process.

This week, we look at episode 4: Big Players, Little Enemy. Steady progress in building Dunedin from the ground up came to a sudden halt with the collapse of the New Zealand Company and Otago Association. Criticism of the Free Church leadership also saw the embryonic settlement plagued by bitter sectarian disputes.