Polly has stepped away from the mic, relaunching herself into a new career. Photo / Nicola Edmonds
Polly has stepped away from the mic, relaunching herself into a new career. Photo / Nicola Edmonds
After retraining and lots of therapy, the radio legend reveals her surprising new chapter.
There were many years during her stellar radio career when broadcasting legend Polly Gillespie simply couldn’t have imagined doing anything else. Radio was her home. It was where she felt most atease, and where her ability to entertain and connect with listeners cemented her as one of the industry’s finest talents.
Yet after a rollercoaster few years, Polly has stepped away from the mic, relaunching herself into a new career and finding true fulfilment in the process.
“I’m a happy little soldier,” she tells us at our photo shoot in her hometown of Wellington, where she introduces us to her beloved grandkids, Roseanna, 7, and Malone, 2.
Polly with her two grandkids, Malone and Roseanna. Photo / Nicola Edmonds
It’s been a big few years for the inimitable star, who proudly shares that she’s traded in the airwaves to become a qualified counsellor and therapist. While the prospect of reinvention was daunting at first, Polly feels she’s landed right where she’s meant to be.
“What I’m doing now feels very meaningful,” she reflects. “I’ve always been interested in therapy, I’m certainly no stranger to trauma and I just love people. I love hearing their stories and being of some help. And I’m genuinely at peace that my radio days are possibly over. I never say never, but I have no regrets.”
Polly’s change in direction came after the shock 2023 closure of Today FM, the talk radio station where she hosted a popular evening show. She was upset to lose her job overnight, but not hugely surprised given it was her third redundancy in about as many years.
If anyone understood the tenuous nature of the media industry, it was Polly, who’d earlier been made redundant from More FM and lost a regular writing gig thanks to the Covid shutdown.
“I’d got pretty good at losing my job,” she says with a wry laugh.
Polly – whose career began in the 80s alongside her then-husband Grant Kereama – adored working in radio, but she decided “enough was enough”. Instead of joining the long queue of journalists and broadcasters on the job market, she took the opportunity to reassess where she wanted to head in life.
The former broadcaster is also setting up her private therapy business and looking forward to taking on clients. Photo / Nicola Edmonds
She turned her mind to what really interested her and the answer was simple – people – so Polly enrolled in an online university, where she studied papers in psychology, counselling and therapy, and soon found she was hooked.
“It’s such a fascinating subject,” she enthuses.
And now, with an exciting new role at Trauma Recovery Aotearoa – where she travels the country to help workplaces understand trauma and how it affects people’s everyday lives – she feels like she’s making a real difference.
At the same time, she’s setting up her own private therapy business and is looking forward to taking on clients. But Polly brushes off any suggestion that switching careers and retraining at this stage of life is a brave move.
She insists, “Sometimes you don’t have any choice but to stand to attention, switch your brain on and go, ‘Right, what am I going to do?’
“It’s a good reminder we can do hard things and make big decisions. It’s never too late for a fresh start.”
And there’s no doubt Polly will have plenty of experience to call on when it comes to helping others. She’s open about her own mental health struggles, telling us she’s battled anxiety since her teens and that therapy has been an enormous help.
Polly has also suffered some crushing lows in her adult life. Photo / Nicola Edmonds
Along with some huge highs, Polly has also suffered some crushing lows in her adult life, including her heartbreaking 2015 split from Grant and periods of extreme workplace stress. The most traumatic experiences came with a late-term miscarriage when she was in her 30s, followed by the devastating death of her sister Jeanette from flu complications in 2000.
Polly says she was cut from “that stoic UK cloth”, where asking for help was seen as a failure. “It was a matter of, ‘Chin up and box on!‘”
Instead, she found herself turning to alcohol to help numb the pain at times – “never a helpful approach”!
She gave up booze five years ago and began seeing a new therapist, who helped her to understand her feelings and embrace them. She’s channelling this experience into her own work now.
“I remember telling him, ‘I don’t get angry.’ He asked, ‘Why don’t you get angry?’ He said we shouldn’t be afraid of feelings and that everyone has the right to be angry – it’s about how we use that anger.
“We really got into my hang-ups, like being an unfortunate-looking teenager, and looked into how that continues to affect me. I’d never talked about it before and it made a huge difference. There’s still a stigma around going to therapy and talking about mental health, but there shouldn’t be.”
Polly says being a grandma to Katherine’s kids is her greatest role yet. Photo / Nicola Edmonds
Family is everything to Polly, whose three children, Tom, 31, Katherine, 29, and MacGregor, 26, all live nearby. She feels lucky to be so involved in their lives and says being a grandma to Katherine’s two kids, who call her “Minnie”, is her greatest role yet.
“They are the lights of my life,” she says. “I’m a better Minnie than I was a mother because I have so much fun with them. I go down the slide with them at the playground, we craft together and we go to the dairy for treats. It’s a joy.”
While she’s currently single, Polly says she’s far from lonely and admits she’s having a great time on the dating scene. She’s not a fan of dating apps, instead preferring to meet people as she goes about her everyday life.
“Dating is a lot of fun – and I’m not talking about sex!” she laughs. “I’m talking about going for dinners, concerts and fun things like that. I’m meeting lots of lovely, interesting people.”
She admits she’s been guilty in the past of falling in love too fast. This time, though, she’s keeping her options open.
“I’ve learned that putting your eggs in one basket doesn’t always work out. Perhaps I’m getting sensible!”
Certainly, she’s feeling fulfilled and happy. Polly grins, “I’m safe, I have a great family and friends, and I’m about to launch into something I really believe in. There’s a lot to be thankful for.”
