The Man Who Lost His Head

About the show

Published: Thursday, 26 July 2007, 3:12PM

Highly serious museum curator Ian Bennet (Martin Clunes) finds his life turned upside down when he's sent across the world to return an ancient Maori carving to the small fictional New Zealand town of Otakataka on the west coast of Northland. 

Ian is about to marry his boss’s daughter, Fiona Harrison (Caroline Harker). Preparations are underway and Fiona is drawing up seating plans.  So when a repatriation claim comes into the museum for a Maori carving to be returned to a remote corner of New Zealand, Ian isn’t keen to do the job. He is even less keen when he learns what a delicate case it is.

The Ministry has told the museum to be sympathetic to the claim, and while the museum director has agreed to do this, he has no intention of letting the piece go back. Such a job needs an experienced pair of hands. The promotion that Ian has long worked for is dangled before him as a reward. He knows he can’t say no. Meanwhile, out in New Zealand a very determined Maori community awaits.

The carving in question is of an old Maori chief’s son who went to England in 1860 to buy weapons. But the son was seduced and kept by a lady aristocrat and never allowed to return. In desperation, he carved a head of his own likeness and sent it back to watch over his father’s people. But it was lost on the way.

Since then, it’s as if this remote Maori community has been cursed. Having at last traced the head to the museum in England, the people want it back. It will be placed on their marae – the village’s sacred house. Only then will their luck return.

But then Ian arrives with his hidden agenda, and his bureaucratic reasons for rejecting their claim.  The marae, he says, is an inadequate building to house such a precious artefact: no security, no access. Zac, the purist who first traced the head, is enraged. The head is sacred and must be housed in the marae.

He and the other elders delay Ian’s return while they prepare an appeal. Little does Ian know but his life is going to change, profoundly.  

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