Dave Letele is in Disneyland when the Listener gets in touch to talk about going another round in media-land. But when it comes to roller-coaster rides, even the happiest place on Earth has nothing on Letele’s own down-and-up life.
He’s the former NRL player and boxer whose dad was the boss of the Mongrel Mob’s Auckland chapter, one whose much-documented struggle with obesity made him a social then mainstream media star. These days he’s the boss of his charity, Buttabean Motivation (BBM), bringing health, fitness, food and employment programmes to communities in West and South Auckland and Tokoroa. Now, he’s combined his community activism and celebrity into Heavyweight with Dave Letele, the first of what he hopes will be a series of documentaries tackling social issues from his been-there-done-that perspective.
The first one targets alcohol and drug addiction. Letele interweaves his own booze battle as a younger man with an impressive range of interviewees, including former All Black Zac Guildford, Police Commissioner Andrew Coster, Letele’s former meth-dealer uncle and a raft of recovering addicts and alcoholics from all walks of life, as well as medical experts and therapists such as Dr Hinemoa Elder.
Heavyweight arrives on TVNZ 2 the same week as Three screens another one of Patrick Gower’s usually high-rating stand-alone social issues docos. It was, Letele says, his impassioned turn on a panel for Gower’s alcohol episode last year, in which he ranted about the proliferation of bottle stores in vulnerable communities, which got him his own show.
Still fired up after his Gower outing, he suggested to eventual Heavyweight executive producer Amanda Wilson they should do their own show. “I reckon we could do it from a different perspective of not being a journalist and the access to the different types of people we have,” he told her. Wilson pitched it to TVNZ, which said yes almost immediately.
Letele says he didn’t pay much attention to the questions the show’s researchers prepared for him. “I don’t read anything,” he says with a laugh. When he sat down with Coster, he says his first question – which didn’t make the cut – was: “Why are you guys so racist?” The enquiry apparently gave the commissioner’s media minder conniptions. “It breaks the ice, I reckon.”
He also told Coster that perhaps the chip on his shoulder was understandable – his first police encounter was at age three when the family home was raided and police confiscated his Christmas presents. But Letele concedes his conversation with the nation’s top cop gave him a lot of hope.
Among the most powerful accounts in the show is from Guildford who discloses how his life had spiralled out of control on repeated occasions through many addictions. He talks about a suicide attempt in 2021 before a conviction and home detention sentence for stealing $41,000 from his grandfather, which he lost gambling, and his ADHD diagnosis.
“He said to me afterwards that was the most authentic and open he’d been in an interview. It’s just two mates talking and people there capturing it. He just felt really comfortable, and he opened up the most I think he’s ever opened up.”
Letele hints that this is the first of what he hopes will be one of three documentaries.
If his once notorious father “Big Dave” Letele doesn’t feature in this, other than in animated flashback form care of Bro’town artist Ant Sang, that’s because he’s a likely candidate for a possible episode on gangs.
In the meantime, Letele, his wife and four sons have another day of Disneyland queues and Californian heat to deal with. But even that has given him a teaching moment. “What we’re trying to do is break cycles and it’s so hard. But when I look at my children here that’s what breaking the cycle looks like … and that’s what the show is about, right?
“It’s possible – now f...ing go do it. The guests we interviewed, they wanted the change, they had to change and they’ve done the work.”
Heavyweight with Dave Letele, TVNZ 2, Thursday, August 3, 8.30pm; TVNZ+
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