When fame casts a shadow

By MICHELE HEWITSON

There is a lovely moment which comes at the end of tonight's DNZ: Out of the Shadows (TV One, 8.30). It shows Dunedin Mayor Sukhi Turner, her husband and ex-cricketer Glenn and their daughter Natasha at Natasha's graduation from film school.

As they settle into their seats to watch Natasha's short film, famous Dad and famously gruff Southern man Glenn says, "What's all this about?"

Natasha: "It's about an eccentric lesbian couple [deciding] to have a baby."

Dad: "Right oh."

The shadows from which tonight's subjects have had to emerge are the long ones cast by their famous parents. Here are the children of Robert Muldoon, one of Barry Crump's abandoned brood of nine, Donna Awatere Huata's oldest daughter and Sam Hunt's son Tom.

Muldoon's children and Awatere Huata's daughter have had to put up with being blamed for their parents' political leanings. Anyone would think, complains Muldoon's daughter Barbara, that she was personally responsible for everything carried out under her father's leadership. Think Big? "I had absolutely no input." She married, changed her name and found some relief in it.

Hinemoa Huata, who was raised by her grandmother after her mother and father separated, changed the colour of her hair.

Fed up with people who "look at me as if I'm a paler imitation of my mother, and I don't just mean paler skin," she went blonde and stayed blonde.

She, too, has borne the brunt of negative comment about her mother's political activities. But what is almost as bad are the nice things that well-meaning people say: "How much they love your mother or how good she looks." These things have "also got nothing to do with me".

And pity poor Tom Hunt who has endured what must seem like an eternity of bad Sam Hunt impersonations.

Martin Crump, who looks and sounds quite a bit like his famous father, didn't meet his father until he was 9 when Barry called, promising an outing. He said he would turn up "around tea time". He finally turned up at 11pm, with a hammer for a birthday present and a couple of burgers.

Martin didn't see him again for five years. The shadow cast over his life has been as much about learning how to be a good father himself as it has been living with the myth of the good keen man.

But it is Natasha Turner's story which makes the documentary. An intensely shy and private child, when faced with growing up in Dunedin the daughter of two famous parents, she withdrew into her bedroom and her mind. She says she wanted, "my parents to disappear," like any teenager. "You have to learn to find your own place in the world."

She knew that place did not involve appearing alongside her mother in pictures in the women's mags. Now in her mid-20s Natasha is finding her own place from the other side of the camera. She is articulate, engaging and says of her mother, "I think she's an amazing woman".

So, here it is, mostly, not so much a case of your famous mum and dad, to paraphrase politely, stuffing you up, as an admission that they must have done something right somewhere along the way.