From rock stars and Oscar award-winning film directors to property developers and turtle rescuers, this collection brings together Listener profiles of the people who intrigued, enchanted, entertained and, sometimes, polarised readers in 2024.
‘It gave me a hell of a fright’: Love It or List It’s Phil Spencer on his time in NZ
When Phil Spencer filmed the pilot for Location, Location, Location with Kirsty Allsopp, he thought it would be a one-time deal. He explained this to Russell Baillie when asked how long his TV career would last: “The honest answer is a weekend because we did a screen test and the producers said ‘Channel Four have asked us just to make a non-transmittable pilot.’ We filmed that over the weekend so we could look after our clients during the week. And I thought that was it. I’d never worked in telly. I didn’t know what was going on.”
Location Location Location is up to its 42nd season and some 400 or so episodes. The pair’s renovation show Love It or List It – originally a Canadian format – is up to its ninth. Both have been prime-time fixtures on Antipodean TV for years…”
Aussie writer Anna Funder on uncovering George Orwell’s ‘smelly little truths’
In the summer of 2017, Australian writer Anna Funder had hit “peak overload”, dragged down by the weight of domestic duties crowding out her work deadlines. Her frustrations came to a head one day after yet another “soul-sapping” trip to a mall to get groceries because that was just part of being a wife, mother and multitasking homemaker…
Funder felt her overcrowded life had reached an impasse. “How did I get here?” she asks in her new book, Wifedom, describing the day she drove around the mall car park, mocked by the “empty promises” of the exit signs. “I could never really leave,” she writes in the book. “The mall had sucked out my privileged, perimenopausal soul. I had to get her back.”
Catherine Taylor: I was born in NZ, but stayed away for 47 years because I thought it was cursed
In 1977, a 9-year-old girl and her mum spent 36 hours on a series of aeroplanes flying “back home” to New Zealand for the holiday of a lifetime: two months with extended family; halcyon days on sun-kissed beaches eating pipi straight from the sandbars; fishing on her uncle’s boat; and nights under clear skies picking out the Southern Cross.
When author Catherine Taylor returned to England, home since she was two-and-a-half, it seemed “old and grey and tired”. Nevertheless, within days, after an announcement from her parents, she vowed never to return to New Zealand; she thought if she did, “some yet unforeseen catastrophe” would result.
Mark #$@*! Todd: He’s rich, opinionated and believes in doing good
Mark Todd, the “accidental” property developer whose company is the chief sponsor of the country’s biggest literary awards, the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, is pretending to be apoplectic. He excels at pretending to be apoplectic and sometimes he actually is. He shouts: “I’m not a fucking leftie. I’m a fucking thinker.” He uses the F-word the way other people use commas. If I inserted every example of every time he swore, the Listener letters inbox would implode.
The Hewitson Profile: Ginette McDonald’s timeless comedy honoured
Ginette McDonald is good with voices. Now, a new anthology celebrates the long and varied career of the actor who brought us Lynn of Tawa. Just don’t call it a valedictory.
This is supposed to be an interview with the actor, producer and writer Ginette McDonald. It is, I realised swiftly, useless to even attempt interviewing Ginette McDonald. I happily admit defeat. Best just to sit back and enjoy her brand of entertaining stream of consciousness. You might not end up where you planned to go but her road trip is more thrilling. It involves careering head first along off-road detours, skidding through potholes and charging through gates.
Sir Ian McKellen on criticism, ageing and still being Gandalf
With a genial, whiskery grin, Sir Ian McKellen is peering down into his Zoom camera, the angle familiar to anyone who might have played a hobbit to his Gandalf. He’s at home in East London’s Limehouse, where he’s the co-owner of a nearby riverside pub and where he’s been spending more time after an accident at work. Playing Falstaff in Player Kings, a condensed take on Shakespeare’s Henry IV: Parts 1 and 2, he tumbled off stage during a fight scene at the Noel Coward Theatre in June, fracturing a wrist and chipping a vertebra. It could have been worse, he says later, but the extra padding of the famously corpulent character’s costume cushioned his front-row landing.
Author Tim Winton and his terrifying vision for a near-future Australia
When Australian writer, eco-activist and surf-break devotee Tim Winton began working on his new novel, Juice, which considers how humans might function in an overheated, unstable world, he had two grandchildren. By the time he finished the book, he had six.
Winton’s visualisation of this chaotic near-future, which he has built around a range of climate-data projections, has solidified his fears for his grandkids’ generation, and beyond, and for the natural world he cherishes.
Queen of the ball: Lady Shaka, the queer Afro-Pasifika DJ taking on the world
Three years ago this month, Lady Shaka was at the centre of an excited crowd in a basement club on Auckland’s Karangahape Road. “I’m your girl, Lady Shaka,” she said. “And I want to dedicate this set to my beautiful people of the Pacific, of our moana! Lessgo … cheehoo!”
A lot of people have heard and seen what happened next. Shaka’s DJ set was part of an event staged by Boiler Room, the UK-based global music media enterprise. Boiler Room’s video of Lady Shaka fiercely twirling poi as the beats roll in and the crowd lights up has been viewed nearly 200,000 times since.
The Minister for Everything, Paul Goldsmith, is being uncharacteristically, annoyingly and, quite possibly, deliberately boring. In other words he is being a minister. You would not put it past him to be playing at being a caricature of a minister. Just to be annoying. He is very good at being annoying – he enjoys it, you suspect. He manages to be boring and mischievous at the same time. He has a lively sense of fun.
Except when he’s being boring. For example – he gets only one otherwise we’ll all nod off – when asked about ambition, he says: “Well, I don’t know really what the right answer is to that. I’m ambitious for the country.”
From arthouse to outhouse: How Wim Wenders’ toilet cleaner film became an Oscar contender
Peering through his small blue spectacles, Wim Wenders looms in owlish close-up on the screen from his suite at the Sunset Marquis, the very rockstar hotel in West Hollywood. It might seem odd that the veteran German director, whose films include Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire and Buena Vista Social Club – and whose latest, Perfect Days, is a very modest, very delightful film about a dutiful Japanese ablutions cleaner – is ensconced deep in luxury La-La Land.
But he’s there on a campaign. The new film is on the Oscar shortlist of 15 for Best International Feature after the Japanese awards committee named it as the country’s entry. Yes, Wenders was surprised when he got the news. He thinks it’s due to the high regard in which his leading man Kōji Yakusho is held in Japan, especially after his best actor award at Cannes last year for his expressive, minimal-dialogue performance.
When I finish work as a nurse, I come home to 60 turtles
Donna Moot is a community mental health nurse, and the founder of Turtle Rescue. Right now, she has around 60 turtles at her Christchurch home – including one of the first turtles, Rocky, she bought 38 years ago: “The first time I ever saw turtles was in Singapore. I was 17 and had just started nursing and I had a bit of money saved up, so I went and had my first overseas trip. It was back in the day when we had pen friends. I had a pen friend called Wendy who lived in Singapore, so I went to stay with her Chinese family for three weeks... Everywhere we went, there were turtles.”
Don’t call it a crisis: High-profile media couple on leaving the rat race
At the Whananaki General Store in Northland, Dallas and Donna Gurney are living a different life from the one they might have imagined. When the short-lived Today FM closed in March last year, Dallas, 46, was ripe for a big change. The former manager of Newstalk ZB was on “gardening eave” when bosses moved to close the station he was in charge of creating. He was tired of watching the media ‒ a sector he’d worked in since he was a young journalist in Northland ‒ burn to the ground. “Everything we took for granted has changed. You never knew how long the place you were working at was going to be there.” A major health scare ‒ a heart attack for Dallas – spurred the couple to act on a long-held dream.
Kaliane Bradley: Time-warp tale - debut novelist on how her sensational sci-fi romcom hit
It started as a bit of fun to entertain friends during one of Britain’s endless, unnerving lockdowns but Kaliane Bradley ended up with a debut novel. And what a debut. The Ministry of Time is a cracking time-travel story, a tender romance, a shrewd workplace comedy and a mystery with a couple of great twists – all delicately threaded with curly issues such as identity politics and climate change.
Writers like Mark Haddon, Francis Spufford and Eleanor Catton are shouting its praises. Catton called it “outrageously brilliant”. And even before it was published, it was snapped up to be made into a series for the BBC.
Neil Finn: ‘I was offered a knighthood and I said no’
He is one of New Zealand music’s best-known elder statesmen, one who, alongside brother Tim, was awarded an OBE in 1993, but there will never be a “Sir Neil”. He already turned down a knighthood a few years back.
It was a combination of things, he tells the Listener, among them, his views on the royal family. “I think it’s a symbol of something quite rotten in the core of our society, not them personally, just the institution and the way that the world is organised. So I didn’t want to be slagging off the royal family at any point and for that to seem hypocritical.”
Also, the letter saying he had been nominated for the honour listed his achievements in a way he thought was a bit curious. “I read it and I went, ‘Well, you know, I don’t even think those are the best things I’ve ever done.’ They’d cherry-picked a few things, like I’d done in Australia for some charity, and that was one day in my life.
“I’m very grateful for being thought of but it didn’t resonate why they were giving it to me.”
Quiet achievers, rebels and dreamers: 50 of NZ’s most inspiring people listener.co.nz celebrated its first birthday by celebrating the quiet achievers, the rebels and dreamers whose names and faces might not be as familiar as some but are make a positive impact on their communities. They included artists and writers, architects and captains of industry, environmentalists and educators, farmers and foodies, and sportspeople.