‘Fluffed my way through': Mike Puru's worst weather faux pas
Mike Puru has loved television ever since he was a little kid growing up in Gore. 'I lived in a very isolated part of the country, and back in the day we just had two channels,' he tells The Spinoff. 'Apart from doing some farm work, television was your window to the rest of the world.' He couldn't have imagined back then that he had a decades-long broadcasting career ahead of him, starting with Flipside and spanning everything from hosting The Bachelor NZ, to hawking wares on the Shopping Channel, to hosting the weather for Newshub.
'When I first started on Flipside, I can remember driving from Christchurch to Gore, and seeing that every single house that I saw had a bloody TV aerial or a satellite on it,' he recalls. 'That's when I realised what a powerful medium it was – it didn't matter what sort of house you had, whether it was big or small, whether it was fancy or falling to bits, every single common denominator was a television.'
Puru was part of the Newshub closure last year – 'a complete shock' – and has since returned to radio, his other beloved medium. He currently hosts the breakfast show for Southern Cross Country Radio, and the afternoon drive show for The Breeze. 'I love the immediacy of radio and being there in the moment,' he says. 'But I still miss the lights, the camera, the action, and the way my heart would always beat so fast when I was ready to go live with the weather.'
Although he may not be on television (for now – here's looking at you, Celebrity Treasure Island 2026), Puru still watches a tonne of local programming every week. 'I love New Zealand television – I watch Rural Delivery, Country Calendar, Moving Houses, Grand Designs, The Brokenwood Mysteries, Tangata Pasifika, Q & A… anything that's New Zealand made that involves real life,' he says. 'It all helps me understand a bit more about New Zealand, and I like that sense of connection that it gives me.'
Positively fizzing about all things TV, Puru happily took us through his own life in television, from his fortuitous first big break, to a Flipside faux pas, to his gripe with Seven Sharp.
My earliest television memory is… I remember watching that show Prisoner with my mum, it was an Australian drama set in a women's jail. Mum loved it, so I used to watch that. Dad always watched MASH, which I never really got into. The Flying Doctors, I think, was one where I fell in love with Rebecca Gibney and wanted her to be my mother.
The show I would rush home from school to watch was… I was besotted by the Mickey Mouse Club back in the early days, there was just something about it that I loved. Of course, Olly Ohlson was always on, and there was the Under the Mountain series which was just so exciting. I remember watching it and wishing that I had the lives of those two kids.
My earliest TV crush was.. Probably Kirk Cameron from Growing Pains. He was the all-American pretty boy who lived in a dysfunctional family, but was trying really hard to do the best that he could. He had lovely, curly hair.
My first time on TV was… I went to Hamilton as part of The Edge to MC this event called X Air, which eventually turned into Jim Beam Homegrown. There was this guy there who was making this late night skating show called XS TV, and he got me to test his cameras by standing on a spot and doing an intro to the show. He filmed it, just to see how his shots worked, but after a couple of takes, he came up to me and went 'shit, mate, you are really good – do you mind if you do a bit more of this during the weekend?' They ended up using me to basically host that show from Hamilton on the telly. I think it was five minutes in total, but I used that five minutes of tape that I had from XS TV as part of my audition for Flipside.
A TV moment that haunts me is… The first time I was on Flipside, I wore this really stylish patterned jersey from a local designer that I loved, and everybody gave me a really hard time about it. I think people likened it to a David Bain jersey. It was the very first episode and people could text in, but most of the comments we got were about the David Bain jumper.
There was also the time I forgot to upload the new weather graphics and so I was standing there, live on TV3, realising that I was playing yesterday's weather. I had written the scripts for the day's actual weather, it's just that the graphics that appeared were all from the day before. I quickly just changed a lot of what I was saying, fluffed my way through, and hoped that nobody noticed. And luckily, only one person did.
My favourite NZ TV ad is… I really loved back when TV1 would start for the day – I used to get up early, if I wasn't at school, to try and capture it. Back in the day, the TV wasn't going 24 hours a day. So when TV1 would start for the day it had this beautiful opening track that was the national anthem of New Zealand. It had people skiing, people in small town New Zealand, farmers waving on tractors to the camera, just people living life. I was besotted by that.
My TV guilty pleasure is… I think Britain's Got Talent is probably a guilty pleasure. I just like watching people's dreams come true, you know? No matter what sort of act they are, they just love it so much and they'll put their heart and soul into it, and they put it all to the test on that big stage. When it all works, and they have their moment, it's just amazing.
My favourite TV project I've ever been involved in is… Probably the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King documentary that Evie Ashton and I made for Flipside. We were given media access to go to the Return of the King world premiere in Wellington, and we went really hard to try and get as much footage as we could. By the time we'd finished filming everything and doing all the interviews with all the big stars, we had so much that TVNZ turned it into a two part documentary, because we had so much good footage. It's just so good to have it as that little snapshot of both Flipside, and this really big moment in New Zealand.
My most controversial TV opinion is… I hate the way Seven Sharp goes: 'we'll be back in a moment with the place to be', then they play five minutes of ads, then they come back and they go, 'well, the place to be tomorrow is Timaru. That's us for the day. Have a good one.' You're wasting my time – just say goodbye and move on.
The last thing I watched on TV was… Clarkson's Farm, season four. I love it. I never really cared about Jeremy Clarkson before, but I like the way he speaks for farmers, and I like seeing the hard graft. It's a bit of a Country Calendar vibe.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Spinoff
an hour ago
- The Spinoff
All the celebrities* running in local elections around the country this year
Alex Casey takes a Hollywood tour through the star-studded candidates list. For those who love to follow weird local celebrity gossip, it's slim pickings out there at the moment. Noel Edmonds has gone quiet, Brad Pitt has left the building by way of McDonald's drive-thru, and Jay-Jay and Minou's love story can only sustain interest for so long (although admittedly mine is yet to wane). We are left with nothing but mourning for Sam Neill's beloved duck Magda, and there's not even a season of Celebrity Treasure Island this year to numb the pain of it all. If you've been left wondering what happened to all the quirky and interesting well-known personalities of Aotearoa, I recently discovered where many of them have been hiding out: local body politics. And while it took a little while to weed out the real big names from the flagrant imposters (looking at you Tony Bennett in Dunedin, Paul Williams in Waimakariri, Bill Hammond in Upper Hutt City), this year boasts a truly impressive number of celebrities* hitting the campaign trail. Anne 'The Champagne Lady' Batley-Burton (Auckland) The champagne importer, cat enthusiast and Real Housewives of Auckland star made big headlines in June, first announcing that she would be running for Auckland Council's Waitematā Local Board before also revealing that she was accidentally bowled over by her husband's car while trying to rescue a roaming cat. Running on the centre-right C&R ticket, Batley-Burton told the Herald she wants to reduce crime in Auckland's CBD ('quite scary'), stop the 'free for all' of housing intensification, and make desexing and microchipping free for cat owners. For more insights, here's a tipsy dispatch after I spent a whole day sipping champagne with her in 2017. Jamaine Ross (Auckland) You may know him for being crack-up on things like Frickin' Dangerous Bro, Guy Mont Spelling Bee, 7 Days and Have You Been Paying Attention, but Waitākere Ranges Local Board candidate Jamaine Ross now has a serious message: don't vote for him. 'Please don't,' the comedian pleaded from the front seat of his car in a recent video. 'This isn't a gag, this isn't a joke, this isn't some kind of weird reverse psychology thing to try and convince you to vote for me. Don't vote for me. I don't want to do it, OK?' Intriguing, confusing and conversation-starting for sure. Michael Organ (Whanganui) Famous for a star turn in the David Farrier documentary Mister Organ, Michael Organ is running for one of 10 Whanganui General Ward councillor positions on Whanganui District Council this year and I am genuinely too scared to write anything else. Pennywize (Wellington) Let the chills continue with this homage to an evil clown who famously lures kids into drains with paper boats and then eats them. Luckily, this Pennywize (with a z) is mostly looking to return 'sanity, common sense, swamps, moa and hokioi Haast's eagles to the streets of Te Whanganui-a-Tara' in their mayoral bid this year. If your blood is curdled by the idea of a horror sound-a-like roaming the streets, you just wait till you hear who is running in Ōamaru (Ferdie Kruger). Teal Mau (Wellington) Hairdresser Teal Mau captured our hearts when he competed with wife Sophia in My Kitchen Rules NZ in 2017. 'The coolest MKR chef remains 'international man of mystery' Teal, who it is revealed everyone is scared of because he looks a lot like Johnny Depp and almost never talks,' we wrote at the time. The comparison appears to have stuck around, not helped by the fact that Mau recently responded to a NZ Herald question about Depp with the phrase 'parley' – a pirate negotiation term lifted directly from The Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Mau is running for one of three Pukehīnau/Lambton General Ward councillor positions on Wellington Council, where he wants to give business owners a voice, keep young people in the city, and presumably find the beating heart of Davy Jones. Will Hall (Christchurch) He's faced down the Ferndale Strangler, but how might he handle the constituents of Christchurch? You might recognise Will Hall as Dr Kip Denton from Shortland Street, or the mutton-chopped Mike McCarthy from Westside, but the actor has more recently been gunning for a new role: repping the good people of Heathcote Ward on the Waihoro Spreydon-Cashmere-Heathcote Community Board. Running with the campaign slogan 'where there's a Will, there's a way,' Hall told Stuff in 2022, when he unsuccessfully ran for ward councillor, that there was Nothing Trivial (another show he starred in for several years) about his acting background: 'I'm new to politics and that's an advantage; no preconceptions, I'm independent, energetic with common-sense.' Mandy Mayhem (Dunedin) In a way, Mandy Mayhem being one of the 1,000 people in the Dunedin Study is about as famous as you can get. OK, so you're involved in the world's most detailed longitudinal study of human development? That DO impress-a me much. The Dunedin mayoral candidate is also a ringmaster, a black belt in taekwondo, spent six years on the Waikouaiti-Coast Community Board, and was elected as a Dunedin City councillor in 2022. She's also been described as a ' pirate queen ' – just don't tell Teal up in Wellies or we might have to hose down the Black Pearl. Suzanne Prentice (Invercargill) She's performed with Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash and basically every single New Zealand child alive for the Kids for Kids national tour in the 90s and 2000s, but these days you're more likely to find country music legend Suzanne Prentice in a meeting than on the big stage. First challenging Tim Shadbolt for the mayoralty in 2010, Prentice has since become a familiar name in Invercargill local politics and is now dreamin' her dreams of being re-elected to the Invercargill Licensing Trust in 2025. (PS: I don't know what the NZ equivalent of an EGOT is, but Prentice has already nabbed a New Year's honour and a star on the walk of fame this year alone.) Steve Broad (Invercargill) Speaking of Invercargill crooners, it's only bloody Steve Broad from NZ Idol and X Factor NZ! First arriving on our screens in 2005, all wide eyes and long hair, the blondini from the south came third in season two of NZ Idol (later won by Rosita Vai). A whole decade later, he returned to the singing competition stage for X Factor NZ in 2015, a season so massively overshadowed by the Kills-Moon explosion that we all forgot his moving rendition of ' Summertime Sadness '. He outlasted suit thief Joe Irvine, but Broad was eliminated in the quarter finals. In 2023, he successfully ran in the Invercargill City Council byelection, and will be looking to ' Stay ' on as a councillor in 2025. Paddy O'Brien (Invercargill) Invercargill's stardust continues to shine with O'Brien, the world's first ever professional rugby referee who is also standing for re-election to the Invercargill Licensing Trust this year. O'Brien refereed the first ever professional match between the Hurricanes and the Blues in 1996, and went on to referee 80 more Super Rugby matches, two Rugby World Cups, and 218 first-class matches. Marcus Lush (Invercargill) OK, Invercargill is basically Madame Tussaud's at this point. Although he called 'bullshit' on the celebrity title back in 2022, there's no denying that councillor candidate Marcus Lush is a heavy hitter to round out the city's cavalcade of celebri– sorry, notable characters. He has been in the public eye (and/or ear) since the late 80s, be it fronting documentary series like Off the Rails and South, or hosting stints on bFM, Radio Live and his current late-night gig on Newstalk ZB. An impressive CV, but even someone as experienced as Lush can admit his shortcomings. 'I'm not a Kardashian,' he once told The Spinoff. 'It's not like I've done a sex tape.'
The Spinoff
2 days ago
- The Spinoff
‘Fluffed my way through': Mike Puru's worst weather faux pas
The broadcasting legend takes us through his life in television. Mike Puru has loved television ever since he was a little kid growing up in Gore. 'I lived in a very isolated part of the country, and back in the day we just had two channels,' he tells The Spinoff. 'Apart from doing some farm work, television was your window to the rest of the world.' He couldn't have imagined back then that he had a decades-long broadcasting career ahead of him, starting with Flipside and spanning everything from hosting The Bachelor NZ, to hawking wares on the Shopping Channel, to hosting the weather for Newshub. 'When I first started on Flipside, I can remember driving from Christchurch to Gore, and seeing that every single house that I saw had a bloody TV aerial or a satellite on it,' he recalls. 'That's when I realised what a powerful medium it was – it didn't matter what sort of house you had, whether it was big or small, whether it was fancy or falling to bits, every single common denominator was a television.' Puru was part of the Newshub closure last year – 'a complete shock' – and has since returned to radio, his other beloved medium. He currently hosts the breakfast show for Southern Cross Country Radio, and the afternoon drive show for The Breeze. 'I love the immediacy of radio and being there in the moment,' he says. 'But I still miss the lights, the camera, the action, and the way my heart would always beat so fast when I was ready to go live with the weather.' Although he may not be on television (for now – here's looking at you, Celebrity Treasure Island 2026), Puru still watches a tonne of local programming every week. 'I love New Zealand television – I watch Rural Delivery, Country Calendar, Moving Houses, Grand Designs, The Brokenwood Mysteries, Tangata Pasifika, Q & A… anything that's New Zealand made that involves real life,' he says. 'It all helps me understand a bit more about New Zealand, and I like that sense of connection that it gives me.' Positively fizzing about all things TV, Puru happily took us through his own life in television, from his fortuitous first big break, to a Flipside faux pas, to his gripe with Seven Sharp. My earliest television memory is… I remember watching that show Prisoner with my mum, it was an Australian drama set in a women's jail. Mum loved it, so I used to watch that. Dad always watched MASH, which I never really got into. The Flying Doctors, I think, was one where I fell in love with Rebecca Gibney and wanted her to be my mother. The show I would rush home from school to watch was… I was besotted by the Mickey Mouse Club back in the early days, there was just something about it that I loved. Of course, Olly Ohlson was always on, and there was the Under the Mountain series which was just so exciting. I remember watching it and wishing that I had the lives of those two kids. My earliest TV crush was.. Probably Kirk Cameron from Growing Pains. He was the all-American pretty boy who lived in a dysfunctional family, but was trying really hard to do the best that he could. He had lovely, curly hair. My first time on TV was… I went to Hamilton as part of The Edge to MC this event called X Air, which eventually turned into Jim Beam Homegrown. There was this guy there who was making this late night skating show called XS TV, and he got me to test his cameras by standing on a spot and doing an intro to the show. He filmed it, just to see how his shots worked, but after a couple of takes, he came up to me and went 'shit, mate, you are really good – do you mind if you do a bit more of this during the weekend?' They ended up using me to basically host that show from Hamilton on the telly. I think it was five minutes in total, but I used that five minutes of tape that I had from XS TV as part of my audition for Flipside. A TV moment that haunts me is… The first time I was on Flipside, I wore this really stylish patterned jersey from a local designer that I loved, and everybody gave me a really hard time about it. I think people likened it to a David Bain jersey. It was the very first episode and people could text in, but most of the comments we got were about the David Bain jumper. There was also the time I forgot to upload the new weather graphics and so I was standing there, live on TV3, realising that I was playing yesterday's weather. I had written the scripts for the day's actual weather, it's just that the graphics that appeared were all from the day before. I quickly just changed a lot of what I was saying, fluffed my way through, and hoped that nobody noticed. And luckily, only one person did. My favourite NZ TV ad is… I really loved back when TV1 would start for the day – I used to get up early, if I wasn't at school, to try and capture it. Back in the day, the TV wasn't going 24 hours a day. So when TV1 would start for the day it had this beautiful opening track that was the national anthem of New Zealand. It had people skiing, people in small town New Zealand, farmers waving on tractors to the camera, just people living life. I was besotted by that. My TV guilty pleasure is… I think Britain's Got Talent is probably a guilty pleasure. I just like watching people's dreams come true, you know? No matter what sort of act they are, they just love it so much and they'll put their heart and soul into it, and they put it all to the test on that big stage. When it all works, and they have their moment, it's just amazing. My favourite TV project I've ever been involved in is… Probably the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King documentary that Evie Ashton and I made for Flipside. We were given media access to go to the Return of the King world premiere in Wellington, and we went really hard to try and get as much footage as we could. By the time we'd finished filming everything and doing all the interviews with all the big stars, we had so much that TVNZ turned it into a two part documentary, because we had so much good footage. It's just so good to have it as that little snapshot of both Flipside, and this really big moment in New Zealand. My most controversial TV opinion is… I hate the way Seven Sharp goes: 'we'll be back in a moment with the place to be', then they play five minutes of ads, then they come back and they go, 'well, the place to be tomorrow is Timaru. That's us for the day. Have a good one.' You're wasting my time – just say goodbye and move on. The last thing I watched on TV was… Clarkson's Farm, season four. I love it. I never really cared about Jeremy Clarkson before, but I like the way he speaks for farmers, and I like seeing the hard graft. It's a bit of a Country Calendar vibe.
The Spinoff
3 days ago
- The Spinoff
A Dog's Show is coming back – what classic NZ TV show should be next?
With news that A Dog's Show is being turned into a film, Tara Ward chooses five more NZ TV shows that would work on the big screen. This is an excerpt from our weekly pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up here. Of all the local television shows I hoped would be revived in 2025, A Dog's Show was not on my list. But it was recently announced that the beloved New Zealand classic series is being made into a movie, written and directed by Alex Galvin. Capturing the rural charm of 1970s New Zealand, the family-friendly flick will tell the story of disillusioned farmer Jack (played by Outlander's Graham McTavish), who reluctantly decides to come out of retirement to win one last sheepdog trial and save his family farm. The return of A Dog's Show will tap into plenty of national nostalgia for the half-hour series, which screened on Sunday nights from 1977 to 1992. Hearing the jaunty soundtrack was always a sign that the weekend was nearly over, and the show itself was oddly captivating. It followed farmers as they competed to move sheep around a paddock, using only their trusty sheepdogs, a big stick and a piercing whistle. It was surprisingly tense and unpredictable television, and John Gordon narrated every episode with a crisp, sustained enthusiasm. In fact, The Spinoff's Jose Barbosa called A Dog's Show the best show we've ever made. 'Some would say the show's premise is simple, even wafer thin. A farmer uses his dog to put some sheep in a pen. Yet within its apparently unyielding limits the show finds true drama,' Barbosa wrote in 2014. 'It is perhaps the purest television example I can find of tension created by uncertainty in competition. Indeed, A Dog's Show is unadulterated contest. It concerns itself with nothing but the game at hand.' The circle of life continues: as we farewell our beloved Jaffas, we welcome back A Dog's Show. But what other television classics should we dig up from the TV grave? Which homegrown shows still claim a big piece of our heart and should be resurrected onto the big screen? Here's five we'd love to see again (with a few modern tweaks). Play School: This beloved educational programme entertained pre-schoolers and sick kids home from school between 1972 and 1990. On the surface, Play School is an innocent children's show where presenters wearing dungarees keep asking what the time is, but behind those square windows lies the potential for a dark, gritty drama that delves into the searing mystery surrounding Little Ted's decapitated head. Fair Go: Journalists at the long-running consumer affairs show endured a lot in their pursuit of justice, including abuse, threats and physical violence – and yet, most of us just wanted to find out how to open a jar. A film about Fair Go's most intense and complex investigation would make for a gripping, action-packed thriller that takes us deep into New Zealand's criminal underworld. Or, maybe we could just… resurrect Fair Go itself? Telethon: The characters! The scandal! The Hollywood pashes! Our obsession with making international celebrities stay up for 24 hours while everyday New Zealanders donated the $13.42 that they fundraised in a bottle drive is ripe for a heartwarming romantic comedy, even if it's just a shameless excuse for the whistling tummies to come out again. It's In the Bag: Whose bag is it? Who put it there, and what nightmares lie inside? Forget the charming TV show that saw small-town New Zealanders win a new washing machine, because a modern It's In The Bag could be a gothic horror film about the unspoken terrors lurking within an isolated rural community. The money or the bag? That's the least of your worries.
