The wonderful world of Suzy Cato

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Inside Suzy Cato's world everything is brightly coloured and everyone is smiling. You can be transported there with the click of a mouse. Go to her website and look at the pictures.

The drawings, sent by her fans, are of two-legged horses, flying teddy bears, and of Suzy on the telly. Even the horse is smiling hugely. Quite possibly because it is watching Suzy on the telly. Cato has that effect.

For 12 years she has been the queen of kids' TV.

What the kids who watch Cato are likely to be blissfully unaware of is that TV3 has unceremoniously dumped the queen from her papier-mache throne. The broadcaster - hereafter to be referred to as "that swine" - by me, not Cato - has turned down a proposal for a new series of Cato's science-oriented show, Suzy's World.

Suzy's World answers questions on topics ranging from "what makes slime slimy?" to "why don't I feel happy all the time?" It does not answer questions such as: "Why are those TV people being mean to our Suzy?"

At the supermarket, grown-ups are saying "what a shame". Cato's getting calls, and emails: "shock-horror" and "what are they doing?"

Wait until the kids get wind of it. I have a vision of a line of littlies outside TV3's Flower St headquarters waving placards: Save Our Suzy. The kids will not get wind of it from the website. Because, says Cato, she is not in the business of serving up "doom and gloom".

The idea of pint-sized placard-wavers is not the sort of idea that appeals to Cato. "There's no need to save Suzy." Look, she says, she's a businesswoman and she can understand that when a broadcaster says her programme doesn't fit its future line-up, well, that's just business. She will still be on the TV, there will be reruns for years. She and TV3 are talking.

Here's one for the website: Is Suzy happy? "Yeah, I am happy. I'd be lying if I said that once I heard the news I was ecstatic. I've had the full range of emotions and, yeah, there was a great deal of surprise and disappointment there."

But let's move on. That's the Cato way.

Now, if Cato ruled the world, "it would be a fabulous place. Oh, it would be all smiles. Here's the Pollyanna in me: War? What war? We wouldn't even know how to spell the word."

She makes Pollyanna look like an old sourpuss. Here's Cato on getting dumped: "TV3 has offered me this wonderful opportunity to take stock, to look back over the 12 years that I've had and to think, 'okay, what do I really want to do?'."

She is more savvy than I am making her sound; savvier than she makes herself sound. There were negotiations over an interview. Her business partner and husband, Steve Booth, asked, in the nicest possible way, whether Cato would be able to look over the piece before publication. Good try. And he took it well. He's a nice guy. Of course he is, he's married to Cato.

And an interview is a way to let people know that she's available. "I have a profile now that is 12 years' strong. I see valuable opportunities of being able to utilise that in other areas."

And, anyway, being Suzy Cato is to be happy. She could no more be miserable than a cicada could stop rubbing its legs together to make its summer song.

She valiantly tries to pretend she's normal. She says she has "bad hair days" and has to deal with "the trials and tribulations of being a woman".

She's not fooling anyone. Her blonde hair is so healthy and shiny you imagine she must brush it 100 times a day, like good girls once did. Her skin glows, her teeth are whiter than an ad for toothpaste.

She says things like, "I respect everybody as an individual and don't judge them on comparisons of one child to the next. They all need to be supported and they all need love. It doesn't matter what age that child is: whether they're 34, like me, or 54 or 104 - or just four."

She talks about how, when a kid gives you a hug, "then they give that hug to their parents ... and you think 'wow, I just shared a hug that's gone just a bit further'. You feel how good that is."

W HEN Cato was an ankle-biter growing up in Kaikohe, singing along to musicals on wet Sunday afternoons on the couch with her mum and younger sister, she was a "sensitive wee thing".

She loved South Pacific. She loved "the whole drama and theatre of life". She was the little girl who watched cowboy movies and thought that when the cowboy got shot "yeah, that was pretty sad, but ... the horse! The horse has just fallen over!".

She discovered that "the big softy who would cry at the drop of a hat" could take refuge in drama. "I remember doing the Basil Brush version of Goldilocks, and I was the narrator. That was the first taste of making people laugh."

It was preordained, really. She would grow up to dispense happiness; to be the glitter fairy at the never-ending birthday party.

Before going to see Cato I'd been struggling with composing a question about whether she was more childlike than most adults. I didn't want to offend her. I needn't have bothered. She is joyously in touch with the child within.

"I get to still be a big kid," she says in a stage whisper, sharing an ill-kept secret. "I get to get dirty and get mucky. I sit in tubs of slime. I do handstands and cartwheels." She doesn't feel 34. "Sometimes I feel as though I'm only nine and sometimes I feel sweet 16." She revels in the fact that "hey, I get to wear pigtails and plaits and fountain hairdos and all kinds of crazy, crazy things. I know a lot of other 34-year-olds say 'oh, I wish I could.'."

The flipside of being Suzy - when we take her to Ponsonby Primary to get her picture taken, all the little eyes and mouths go round with the delight of recognition - is that she has to be more grownup than most grownups. She is hardly likely to go out on the town and get drunk, now, is she?

"In my youth ... Oh gosh, we've all been there, done that. I will go into a bar, I will go nightclubbing. I don't sit there saying 'ooh, people shouldn't smoke and drink'. I'm not passing judgment." She likes a glass of red wine; she drinks her Jack Daniels with dry.

She knows she's a role model. It's a "treasure", not a burden. If she's not feeling friendly she tends not to leave the house.

Now that's about enough. So I say, "Okay Pollyanna, what's the meanest thing you've ever done?"

"Ooh. Oh. What's the meanest thing ... ? I mean, when you're going through the various emotions that you do when you've had a bad day, you always take it out on the ones you love the most ... I'm just trying to think of something that could be classified as being mean. No, you'll have to come back to me on that."

She says she'll call if anything occurs to her. She didn't. And it's too late now, I won't be here. I'll be up at Flower St waving my placard.