I’ve been terrified by Kim Hill, twice. In 2012, I braced myself at her Wellington door as her dog hurled himself at the glass. I might have been arriving to interview the Queen.
In a way I was. She has always been top of my short
Kim Hill’s last Radio NZ show: Diana Wichtel farewells a broadcast legend
NZ Herald
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Kim Hill during her final Saturday Morning show on RNZ, signing off after 21 years as host. Photo / RNZ
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She was a bit suspicious. She knows how the game can go. “Schmooze, schmooze, schmooze and then stick the knife in,” she mused, eyes narrowed. She was excellent company, funny and frank. I wrote afterwards that her interviewer’s armory includes an aptitude for empathy and evisceration, sometimes simultaneously. Qualities she demonstrated when asked about her famously tetchy interview with John Pilger. “If Pilger wasn’t an egomaniac he wouldn’t have done the work he’s done,” she noted before going in for the kill. “He turns out to be a prick. So it goes.”
Those sort of interviews – Monica Lewinsky, Jeffrey Archer - are the most fun, I said. “For you, perhaps,” she said. “It’s like being flayed alive in public.” Like tightrope walking, she said. You have to keep your nerve.
Then there was the time she interviewed me. It involved a hangover - mine, not hers. I had launched my family memoir the night before and arrived at the Auckland studio late, a mess. “Shoe’s on the other foot now,” she said, in her most sepulchral tones.
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She was frighteningly well-researched, so perceptive she made me gasp and we shared a moment of black humour involving a mishap on a train in Poland. She was rigorous, kind and defended me from patronising feedback.
Morning Report, Checkpoint, Nine to Noon – she has been at RNZ for 38 years. After 21 on Saturday Mornings, she’s packing it in. She can be polarising. There are always those who hate it when world-class New Zealanders insist on going around being brilliant. She has been internationally recognised essential listening.
Hill’s last morning was available to watch. So you could see she was crying when British children’s writer Michael Rosen talked about the death of his son, Eddie. Other people – Gary McCormick, Hill’s daughter Hannah – choked up about what great radio should be and the end of something extraordinary. Though she will be back, doing something. “It’s not over, dammit,” she told Jim Mora the next morning. The voice which, she said, had become a “damaged baritone” would go on. Listeners sent in messages. “I’d be happy to teach you the cello,” said one. “Kim is like a dolphin,” said another.
On her last show, McCormick revealed he and Hill had once sung karaoke until dawn. “Ne-he-ver happened,” she said. “Does the name Tavistock Hotel, Waipukurau, mean anything to you?” said McCormick. She finished the morning by playing a great song: Anthem, by her favourite, Leonard Cohen, in his damaged baritone, with lines she has on her wall and which may be her mantra: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
The words underscored the unique, kinetic, pen-clicking messiness she brings to the game. And the goodwill that propels her urgent inquisitiveness; a sort of underlying faith that her fellow humans will rise to the occasion. What I’ll miss is how often they did. Nobody does it better.
