A Shortland Street Star

I stopped watching NZ's favourite soap, Shortie, about the time I left TVNZ (yup, around the same time the unicorns were refusing to get on the ark).

But that didn't stop me from spending time today with one of the programme's best loved actors, Pua Magasiva, and his twin bro Tanu for a woman's magazine.

They were all kinds of fun to interview and have given me something else to write on the horrendously long flight to Oman tomorrow (I am now up to three stories...thank God for the tranquility of the Emirates lounges in Auckland and Brisbane, is all I can say...)

  

Not everyone wants to be on tee-vee

Yesterday afternoon, while desperately trying to force words from my brain onto the screen, an email plopped into my in-box.

It was an invite from a member of the No Kidding group we joined last year. Seems one of NZ's main current affairs shows is doing a piece about why educated folk are increasingly choosing not to have kids and needed some talking heads. It wasn't a live i/view and there was the chance to set some boundaries, etc around what we were, and were not, comfortable talking about.

As much as I love banging the drum for over-population/depletion of the world's scarce resources/indiscriminate breeding/voluntary child-free-ness, I had to decline. Not only because I'm doing a similar piece for another (print) channel, but also because it's a news outlet I despise and because journos make the worst interview subjects. And, just quietly, because when I worked at TVNZ about a hundred years ago, we got to record ourselves reading the auto-cue at the newsreaders desk (a surprisingly hard task), and I realised then that I was not cut out for TV.

Still, it was nice to be asked...

         
(Pic credit: someecards)