How do overnight millionaires get made? Varsha Anjali visits the Auckland studio where, twice a week, the live Lotto draws take place. She speaks to the production crew and host Sonia Gray about how they make it all happen.
It begins with a coin toss.
In the foyer of the TVNZ studios in Auckland’s CBD, right across the road from the Sky Tower, on a Wednesday night, two Lotto representatives and three more from Audit NZ sit on the sofa.
Audit NZ, the official scrutineers from the Government, normally send just two reps, but there has been a big system upgrade for Lotto’s twice-weekly draw. One must tread lighter. Tighter.
Each set of representatives has a set of keys and a thick black case. Each thick black case has a set of balls. Each key speaks to one of two Powerball machines, one of two Lotto machines and one of four sets of balls. Heads or tails - which ones will be used?
We’re live on TV in one hour and 30 minutes. It’s 6.50pm.
The studio is hotter than you’d expect. In the front is a huge, delicately concave video wall. Coating the ceiling are camera lights gawking like a thousand-eyed bug. The floor is snaked with wiring wrapped in fat orange rubber. They warned us not to step on it. We might slip.
Inside a grey room beside the studio are four giant lockers for four giant ball machines.
“This is why we need those keys,” explains Lotto New Zealand marketing manager Brittany Gardener.
“We have to have both of [the reps] in studio to be able to [open] it, so we ... couldn’t run the draw just on our own.”
There are many, many rules to a Lotto NZ draw. And they were followed by the crew almost sanctimoniously.
It was a feeling that forced me to proclaim; “It almost feels religious”, to different people on set. They all agreed, or said they did.
One major rule is that the presenters, Sonia Gray and Jordan Vandermade, who alternate draws, cannot touch the machines.
“I’ve never touched a machine. Ever,” Gray tells the Herald. She’s worked on the show for 20 years.
“I’ve never touched a ball except for ones when they’ve been taken out of circulation ... it’s a no-go zone.”
But is she allowed to play the game and buy a ticket?
“I am and I do. Am I successful? Not really.”
Gray explains one of the reasons she keeps playing is that she plays the same numbers each draw.
She’s done this hosting job hundreds and hundreds of times. But she still gets nervous.
“You’re always aware, you’re always alert,” she says.
Sandy from Lotto starts putting the balls in the machine. Now and then, they get a wash, not for cleanliness but for sameness in weight.
Production bellows out the countdown. “Five, four, three, two...” Gray is looking at the auto-cue, the draw representative and the floor manager. Lights on.
“Let’s play Lotto, and look at what you’re playing for tonight,” she tells a camera. Off-screen, a crew member asks his colleagues what dinosaurs would taste like. He must have seen this one thousand times.
The first of three rehearsals before the live draw begin. It’s 7.27pm.
“It has to start on time,” says Lindsay Benbrook, a TVNZ floor manager. Benbrook’s worked on Lotto since the beginning and with TVNZ for decades more. He’s like that older relative you trust to tell you what you need to hear, not what you want.
“So if one of my crew is not here [on time], tough.”
The auditors then do their checks. Benbrook says he can’t start the rehearsal until they give him the green light.
“They’re the only ones who can delay the rehearsal if there’s an issue.
“After the next rehearsal, they’ll unlock this,” he says, pointing to another thick black case.
“They’ll take the balls out. We can’t mix them, so you’ve got to wait until those balls are packed away before we start loading these balls into the machine.”
A Lotto rep stands behind the camera holding two large cards, ready to flash them at Gray if needed. One reads: “ABORT”. The other reads: “NUMBERS”.
If the presenters call out the wrong number, the rep will hold out the numbers card, Benbrook explains, and he will then speak to the control room.
“The director in the earpiece will say you called number 26 instead of 16 or whatever. They then have to recap on that,” he says.
“And then the abort is, if the machine doesn’t pick up a ball ... So it must always pick up a ball.”
Aborts were more common on the older machines, which ran electric motors and belt drives. But Lotto got new ones that run on compressed air five or six years ago, Benbrook says.
Another Lotto rep gets a call from the operation centre telling them all the ticket terminals around the country have closed. It’s 7.30pm.
Benbrook says they are not allowed to start the dress rehearsal “until that call comes through”.
Lotto recently asked 33,000 Kiwis what they would do if they won big. In the first episode of the TVNZ series Counting the Beat, Gray talked about some of the findings.
“What surprised me is that only 22% said they would stay in their current job ... We also know that not many people wouldn’t tell anyone they had won - 81% said, no, they would not,” she said.
The first Lotto draw happened on August 1, 1987. Its purpose was simple: to raise money for the community. Since then, more than $16.5 billion has been won by Kiwis all over the motu, and $6.8b has gone back to community groups and charities. The biggest win was a nudge over $44 million, which an Aucklander nabbed in 2024.
We’re in the control room to watch the live draw. It’s 8.20pm.
It is dark and bright like a nightclub. Screens paint the walls. Computer monitors stare at crew who speak to them in sturdy half-phrases. The air is weighted. Mistakes don’t belong in this room. But the movements are effortless.
Out in the studio, balls are spat out by the machine, Gray calls them correctly and then, in two and a half minutes, it’s over.
Did we just witness sheer perfection or a trainwreck in disguise? There are no high-fives nor looks of panic.
“Every draw is different, right?” Gardner says, explaining they usually notice small nuances not obvious to the general public, such as a slight stumble on a word. But all she needs is an email. Three words. “Clean to air”. Then, she rests.
People suddenly dash like mad to get out of there. It’s 8.30pm.
“No one is staying here longer than they need to,” Gardener says. Lights out.
Varsha Anjali is a journalist in the Herald’s lifestyle team. Based in Auckland, she covers culture, travel and more.