She is the queen of New Zealand reality TV. But as Bridget Jones discovers, Dame Julie Christie is going off-script in her new series Forever Auckland FC.
In the second episode of Forever Auckland FC, Nick Becker, the club’s chief executive, calls Wellington Phoenix coach Giancarlo Italiano “a twat”.
It isn’t caught during a gotcha moment or even a private one – he’s staring directly at the camera when he says it, microphone in plain sight.
“When I showed the A-League [in Australia] they asked, ‘are you sure he wants to leave that in?’ and I said, ‘well, they bought into real’,” says the show’s executive producer Dame Julie Christie.
For the sceptics and the snobs, the combination of Christie and “real” television might sound like the punchline to a joke. “Celebrity Treasure Island? More like Z-Grade Wannabe Island?” or “reality TV is as real as the tooth fairy”. You know, that kind of thing. But she reckons a chief executive throwing boardroom insults around proves her new project is about as honest as it gets.
“To me, sport is the only thing that’s real left on TV. You can’t fake it, and you couldn’t skew it. It just was what it was,” Christie says.
Perhaps she’s in on the joke, perhaps the joke (and television) has just changed, but that was her one rule for making this eight-part documentary about the birth of a football club: all access, all honesty – or nothing.
In the series, players let cameras into their homes, coaches are always mic’d, even when they don’t want to be (a deal’s a deal) and club co-owners Ali Williams and Anna Mowbray are the perky cheerleaders for the whole, emotional ride. Christie calls it the first full-access sports show in New Zealand: club bosses could fix factual errors but otherwise sat on their hands.
“I think they trusted me – I have been around for a while,” Christie says, only just resisting a self-aware wink.
“[The club] committed to being honest and you can see that. It becomes a warts-and-all story. They took the criticism, they took the good with the bad ... [There are] honest lines like, ‘when we don’t want you guys to use the footage, we just swear a lot’ – well, that didn’t work because we used it anyway.”
Of course she did. This is not Christie’s first rodeo.
![“[Auckland FC] committed to being honest and you can see that," says Dame Julie Christie. Photo / Jason Dorday](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/resizer/v2/CMFZKM3ZS5HL7PHOXF2VDA2VTE.jpg?auth=5743400ef4d69bbb49c95fc40d0e36e98772c623f9fa251a960cd185740b08ff&width=16&height=25&quality=70&focal=572%2C707&smart=false)
Made a dame in 2017 for services to governance and the television industry, she is the brains behind Celebrity Treasure Island, Missing Pieces, Game of Two Halves ... and honestly, the list could go on.
At the same time, she created TV stars out of David Lomas, Marc Ellis and Matthew Ridge. She made ex-Silver Fern April Ieremia New Zealand’s divine primetime host on April’s Angels and gave former Black Cap Mark Richardson his spot fronting The Block NZ.
After almost a decade away from TV spent sitting on boards and bringing events like the Women’s Rugby World Cup to life, she is back in the game, as owner and chief executive of Natural History New Zealand. These days, she’s focused less on celebrities behaving badly on beaches and instead sating growing audience appetites for true crime and the power of those all-access sport documentaries, like how Netflix’s Drive to Survive turned a generation of Toyota Corolla drivers into Formula 1 tragics.
Christie has been making TV about sport since her first producing job on 1989’s Mud and Glory: Great Rugby Stories. And the same night Forever Auckland FC launches, she’s also releasing Triple Threat, a series following three Black Ferns – Jorja Miller, Maia Joseph and Katelyn Vahaakolo – as they defend the Women’s Rugby World Cup.
“Sport is always a drama,” Christie says, likening Forever to an “unscripted Ted Lasso”, the hit comedy about an English football team winning hearts and fans that she binge-watched with her daughter during lockdown.
“[In Forever], we’ve got tears. At times, they were grumpy. The players disagreed. There is some wonderful honesty and [it’s] quite raw.”
Even failing to make the A-League final was a perfect outcome – for the series, at least.
“These [shows] are always best when they are a journey ... if they’d won, we wouldn’t have it ending in tears. Which, depressed as we were at the time, actually is a better story.”
Much has been written about Christie’s own story, and her childhood on the West Coast. The fifth child of seven (including her brother, 2022 Auckland mayoral candidate Leo Molloy), her father, Kevin, died when she was 5, and mum Maureen raised the family with what she had, all the while pushing the importance of education.
Christie trained as a journalist – the course was two years shorter than teacher’s college, and she’s famously said she could only stand being a poor student for a year – before working as a sports subeditor, and eventually a TV writer at the Auckland Sun. Then came TV proper, working with Communicado boss Neil Roberts before leaving in 1991 (they turned her down for a pay rise, so she walked) to set up her own production company, Touchdown. The rest, as they say in the biz, is history.
But it was that tough childhood that honed the talents she would eventually turn into a career.
“We didn’t go on holidays, we were relatively, you’d probably say poor now. But television was the only real entertainment in our house.
“I loved shows, I loved local television ... and New Zealand television was incredibly strong. I always had a common touch, which I have found hard to find in other people. There has been, perhaps, a snobbery at times [about popular TV].
“But when I found myself working in television, it was like a lightbulb went on. You know what? That common touch? I think I know what people like.”
And what people like is the same in 2025 as it was in the 1990s. Recently, NZ on Air made headlines by funding the next season of Celebrity Treasure Island to the tune of $1.3 million. Another of Christie’s formats, My House, My Castle returns with $250,000 in funding.
“I feel like I’ve been reincarnated through my shows ... I don’t have any of the rights to any of them anymore, I don’t have anything to do with any of them anymore, I sold them when I sold the company. But I do feel like we are going back to the future,” she says.
Christie believes it’s necessary to fund reality TV – just like Shortland Street, which gets $2.5m from NZ on Air for the 2026 season. They are proven formats – and New Zealand IP – that have stood the test of time (My House, My Castle ran for 10 years when it launched in 2001, and this will be the 16th year of the Treasure Island format).
But she says a plan is needed so there’s enough money for projects like Forever Auckland FC, which Christie made with investment from the likes of the club and Sky Television, as well as her own money, after she was turned down for funding.
She knew she didn’t have time to waste, and Christie doesn’t seem to like waiting, probably for anything, but particularly for TV. She gets frustrated waiting for weekly episodes of favourite shows like The Buccaneers (think Bridgerton with Americans) and The Gilded Age (think Downton Abbey with Americans). She’s even on the fan pages for that one, ducking and diving spoilers like a football goalie.
The American-ness of her tastes makes sense – even in the work she makes here, there is an eye across the Pacific.
“I never make anything without the world in mind. There’s no money in this country to make television, truthfully ... And if you’re really proud of something, wouldn’t you want the world to see it?”
It’s no secret she has felt the full force of critics. Some of them have attacked her shows, and others the woman herself. But she says most of the harsh reviews have had “virtually” no impact on her because, in the end, the choice was to make unscripted television because it was where New Zealand could make a mark in the world.
“So if someone here doesn’t like it, as long as they like it in the US, I’m all good,” she says.
“In the last two years, I’ve made a paranormal show in Tasmania with Jack Osbourne, I’ve done a shark show on Disney+ ... why would you worry about what somebody says here? You’ve just got to be proud.
“We’ve had a lot of very high-rating shows in my career, and that’s by far the best thing. In the end, I don’t care as long as the audience loves them.”
Forever Auckland FC premieres on Sky Open on August 27 at 7.30pm, with all episodes available to view on Sky Go, Neon and Sky Sport Now. Weekly episodes of Triple Threat follow at 8.30pm on Sky Open or you can watch now on Sky Go and Sky Sport Now.
Bridget Jones joined the New Zealand Herald in 2025. She has been a lifestyle and entertainment journalist and editor for more than 15 years.