What Was I Thinking: A Memoir (7 page)

Because I liked the look of the place, I bought a building in Featherston and opened a cafe and arts and crafts shop called the Inkley Doovery Emporium. Inkley Doovery is a West Country name for something which has a specific purpose but is being used for something else, like a milk bottle that is being used to collect coins. It’s a very useful word.

While I was still running it, I joined the Carterton Dramatic Society and went along out of the blue to audition for the part of Macbeth. Of course it was a clique and they had their Macbeth well and truly chosen, which is lucky because it was a much bigger part than I thought. I was Banquo in the end, and I was a damn good Banquo, but I didn’t want to be part of a clique. They socialised a lot, and I used to socialise with them a bit because I’d just moved there. I was a local businessman and I knew I had to get to know people. Maybe they’d come and buy a cake or a pie.

Custom at the cafe was sporadic. But sometimes the whole shop would suddenly go dark in the middle of the day because a tour bus had pulled up, blocking the windows. ‘Oh fuck,’ I thought. ‘We’re going to need every spoon, cup and plate in the place. We’re really going to have to pull finger.’ I was there on my own, with my mum working for me part-time. So I had to ring around and get casual staff in if we got busy. We didn’t get many coaches, though, because the coach driver always wanted a free cup of tea and I didn’t want to give anyone a free cup of tea.

I became a baker and I used to make cakes and they turned out very well. I made tomato soup from real tomatoes. Occasionally, it could get a bit
Fawlty Towers
. Once, as I was walking away from a table, I heard a customer say, ‘This is not home-made. This is tinned soup.’

‘Oh God, have I given you tinned soup by mistake,’ I said. And I took it back to the kitchen and never went back out. They had to leave. 

The cafe was never hugely successful but I lived off the money it made and then I sold it and got a job selling roofs.

Selling roofs was not something I had planned on doing. I had noticed over the years that most people’s houses tended already to have some sort of covering that kept out water. But it was just like the encyclopaedia business — you were selling everything but the product you actually talked about. The strategy with selling roofs was to knock on a door, introduce myself and say, ‘I happened to be passing and I couldn’t help noticing your roof. We need some show roofs in this area, and the position of your house relative to the road would be absolutely perfect for a show roof. It means you’ll get a huge discount on the roof if we can just take a couple of photos for our promotional material, that’s all we need. Maybe people will drive by to have a look, but you won’t know they’re there. You’ll get quite a discount on the roof, and I have noticed actually that your roof is beginning to deteriorate.’

Ideally, they said, ‘What would it cost?’ and they didn’t know this, but when they asked that question they had as good as bought a new roof.

‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘I’ve got my stuff in the car, I’ll just quickly measure it up and I can give you a proper quote.’ By the time I got back in with the quote all they could think about was their house with a new roof.

‘It’ll probably double the life of your house,’ I said. ‘If we can get that weight of the concrete tiles off and a lovely low-maintenance roof popped on there, imagine the relief to the house.’

You have got to knock on a lot of doors to sell a roof, but it’s not hard to knock on a door. Many have knockers to get you started.

I think they were good roofs. I hated doing it but I made money. I had to be able to make money because I knew so many people with no talent or ability who were making money doing the simplest things. These people were not particularly bright 
but they were doing well. I worked out what it was that made them successful. My father had been right: they were doers and not talkers.

Eventually, I got off the sales treadmill and got the announcer’s job I had been training for — at 2ZD Radio Wairarapa. The first time I went in to introduce myself they asked me to record a couple of ads on the spot. They were happy with that and keen to use me but said I needed to do an announcer’s training course because — and I know this will be hard for many readers to believe — there were a few things I didn’t know, such as Maori pronunciation.

I had always — and I still do — prefer radio as a medium. I went on the course, which was as much about qualifications and pay scales as announcing. The A scale was the announcers’ scale and the one to be on. The top grade was A9 — Lindsay Yeo and Merv Smith were both A9 so that was obviously what I needed to aim for. The fact I had done some announcing meant I was certain to pass, which I did. I hate to think how many times I reminded them that nearly all my previous announcing had been with the BBC. 

WHILE I WAS DOING
breakfast on 2ZD, the TV show
Top Town
came to Masterton. Whenever they turned up somewhere, they went to the local radio station and got the breakfast host to be the field announcer. He didn’t appear on television but turned up at the event and helped liaise with the crowd and get them organised for the games. As 2ZD Radio Wairarapa was the only station in town that meant me.

To be honest, I did a phenomenal job for the two days it took. I know that because it seemed so easy. I had a radio mike and stood in the middle of a field with the people up in the rugby stands. The games were huge and as the contestants watched,
I had to run around the field enthusiastically demonstrating the games for them. That was all there was to it, so it really was easy.

As a result I was asked to audition for a game show called
Every Second Counts
, which went to air in 1987 and ran for two seasons. I got the job and made $500 an episode. It was up against
Coronation Street
on TV1, so was always a dodgy prospect, but the main reason it didn’t go longer was that the fee for the rights to produce it locally made it too expensive.

I was amazed by the sheer size of the TVNZ machine. I had my first-ever publicity shots taken. There was a big group working on the show, which was one of the first to make full use of flashing lights and loud music. Everything about it was in your face, especially my suits. I got measured for some extraordinary checked suits that were to be made for me by Bullick & Blackmore in Masterton. I was the trailblazer for that particular style and I think the trail ended with me.

Although the show and the people on it were incredibly professional in all sorts of ways, little things tended to get overlooked. For instance, no one ever told me to look at the camera. At my first rehearsal, I began talking directly to the studio audience, assuming the camera would find me.

The format took three couples who were related in some way — husband and wife, or mother and son. In the first two sections of the game they answered questions and accumulated seconds. The last section of the game was where you won prizes by spending the seconds you had accumulated. The last segment does actually hold up today because it’s so quick-fire while they’re using their seconds. That makes up for the fact that the questions are banal. It’s going so fast you don’t really notice that. Also, the prizes were just embarrassing. Looking at it today, I can’t believe people were willing to get so excited about the prospect of winning a pop-up toaster.

In the last section you had to pick a subject — say, Maori language or beaches. The contestants all went through a similar thought process: ‘Well I know a little bit about the Maori language, but I know a bit about beaches, too. Surely beaches must be easier.’ I knew that giving away lots of prizes — say, a trip for two to Club Med Moorea — on any given night would help kick along a show if you thought it wasn’t rating. So I learnt the skill of saying, ‘Would you like Maori language or
beaches
?’ and giving away with my eyes which one they should pick because it would be easier for them.

I continued to multi-task. I’ve always been of the opinion that if a job is worth doing, another job is probably worth doing as well. At one point, I was setting up my own radio station, which we’ll get to later, reading news on Radio New Zealand and filling in for George Balani and Mike Hosking. George Balani was doing the late night talkback and Mike Hosking was doing
New Zealand Tonight
. These were network shows that the community stations used.

I’ve always loved newsreading, and I have gone back to it several times to fill in. I love the discipline of it. I love the fact that you simply cannot fuck it up — you need to pronounce things correctly, but you also need to make your delivery match the magnitude of what you’re talking about. The unspoken message was ‘All right, you’ve had a bit of fun listening to your music. Now sit down, shut up and pay attention.’ To do a perfect bulletin is a wonderful thing.

For a while I was in charge of the racing show on Radio New Zealand, which was reticulated to the community stations. I can only imagine that branching out into this area — a sport about which I had no knowledge and in which I had no interest — was part of my subconscious wish to become skilled in every aspect of broadcasting.

I worked with the big names of radio racing: Paddy O’Donnell,
Mary Mountier, Alan Bright. Racing had such a following that the people became stars — the sort of broadcasters who could put out books of jokes or recipes using beer. They were giants in their field, which was fortunate given the depth of my ignorance. However, I was very good at the technical side of things. I could cope easily with three different feeds in one ear — linking, timing things out and putting them into a programme in a seamless way. The relevant authorities had discovered this and decided I could handle the racing show.

Racing was nothing if not chaotic. For a start, as Radio New Zealand’s racing controller, I had to organise what races we would cover and when. Some were obvious but not the international ones, like those from Australia, which listeners were also interested in. Saturday was huge. I got in early, went straight to the TAB and got the racing sheets and the latest scratchings. Then I sat in my office at Broadcasting House with these giant, bigger-than-A3 race sheets, printed out from computers on the paper with the holes in the side. I had to time things out — work out from the schedules which races would clash and plan it so we could fit in as many as possible. In some cases we had to record them to play later — and then you had to decide which was more important and should be live.

When the first races started, so did racing control. We had TV feeds of the races and just worked our way through them. The stations would break off their Saturday sports shows to take the feed from racing control, and then resume their other sports coverage. You tried to do the race live, then give the results and preview the next race. You tried to do that live because if you started to record things, suddenly you had a stockpile to get through and quickly fell behind.

Then, all of sudden, something would stuff up — if the first race of the day was at Addington and it began late you were fucked. That meant every race at Addington was going to be on
at the same time as the Ellerslie races. All the stations on the community network were doing their scoreboards. In one ear they had me, racing control, but they were trying to do motor racing and rugby, and God knows how many other things at the same time.

Compared to that, TV work was relaxing. As a result of
Every Second Counts
I got to do
Telethon Tonight
, little slots leading up to Telethon. Part of the job was to meet the overseas stars at the airport, show them around a bit and take them out and do some taped pieces with them. Su Pollard from
Hi-De-Hi
!
came the year I did it. I was with Patsy Rigger, the country singer, and trying to introduce them. I turned around to point out Su Pollard and turned back and poked Patsy Rigger in the eye with quite a lot of force, because I was enthusiastic in those days. I could feel her eyeball denting against my finger. I was impressed because she was so dignified about it, just emitting a low groan. I carried on: ‘Look, Su Pollard’s just over there when your eyes come good.’

That was one of the last big Telethons. Outside the Avalon studios in Lower Hutt, we had a row of portaloos for people who were queuing up to come into the studio. They ended up queuing to get to the portaloos instead. The weather was shocking that year — shocking Wellington wind. We had a helicopter bringing in one of the stars and the wind from it was just enough to send these portaloos over like dominos. Doors fell open. People fell out. I can’t believe we didn’t get it on camera — it was the best thing about the whole Telethon.

My biggest break in television nearly came just after that. Expo 88 was being held in Brisbane and I was asked to go and host a series of programmes from there. That would have been a huge break because it was an opportunity to practise hosting skills but also to be a bit playful and ad lib. You were showing the expo to people who weren’t able to afford a ticket to Brisbane. But my
wife, Rachael, and I had our second child due about that time.

I had met Rachael when she was a teacher at Featherston Primary School, which was a few blocks from my shop and cafe. She was just out of teacher training and that was her first assignment. Her parents were both educationalists so that was their expectation. She comes from a family of academics. We were very different in many ways — my father would say the doers and the talkers have got together — but sometimes that works out well.

She used to take her kids for walks and they used to slide their hands along my windows, which used to infuriate me. ‘That’s great,’ I thought to myself. ‘These teachers, all the holidays in the bloody world, I’m paying their bloody wages with my
hard-earned
taxes and the best they can do is come around and dirty up my windows.’

So that’s how we met. I invited her out when I was in
Macbeth
and in lengthy rehearsals. We got engaged very quickly. We didn’t get married quite so quickly. And we didn’t start a family for a while because she hadn’t been overseas and she wanted to do that first. After we were married she went to Europe for a month or so.

So when the Brisbane offer came up, everything was relatively settled. I thought it would be perfectly reasonable for me not to be around. I thought the birth of our second child would be very much like the birth of our first; I couldn’t see it having much to offer in the way of novelty.

‘There’s no way I would miss the birth,’ I told Rachael, when we were discussing the Brisbane offer, hoping like hell she’d say, ‘Of course you must go.’

‘Of course you wouldn’t miss the birth,’ she said.

‘Of course not,’ I agreed, but I was thinking, ‘Please God give me a break here, let me go do this great job. Make her insist that I go.’ But she didn’t. Good for her.