TVNZ prepares an English breakfast

Rawdon Christie has been named as Petra Bagust's new co-host on TVNZ's Breakfast.

The British-born presenter will be stepping in to fill the void when host Corin Dann moves to Wellington to be TVNZ's new political editor.

Christie co-hosts the Saturday Breakfast show with Toni Street and has acted as 4.30pm presenter and as a news reader for Breakfast and Midday.

Dann will move to Parliament's press gallery on May 21, just before the Budget is announced, to replace former political editor Guyon Espiner, who is now with TV3's 60 Minutes.

In a statement confirming the move this morning Christie said he was excited about his new position.

"I love hosting Saturday Breakfast, and so to be able to present Breakfast five days a week is, for me, the perfect job,"

Bagust joined the morning magazine show at the same time as Dann following Pippa Wetzell's decision to leave to have her third child.

Originally from Oxford, Christie came to New Zealand after doing a music degree at Edinburgh University in the early 1990s.

He taught performing arts and coached sport at King's School in Remuera.

In 1999, Christie returned to Britain to study broadcast journalism and won the Young Broadcast Journalist of the Year award a year later.

After working as a reporter at the BBC in both radio and television, Christie returned to New Zealand in 2003 to take up a position as a reporter with One News.

Auckland is now his long-term home, where he lives with his Kiwi wife and two children. When the youngsters allow him the time, he can be found at the keyboard of his piano, on the golf course or watching England play cricket, according to his biography on the TVNZ website.

TVNZ's Editor of Daily Programmes John Gillespie welcomed Christie into the role:

"Rawdon has the kind of journalistic integrity, insight and personality that our viewers really enjoy."