Groom's expletive statement at wedding divides online opinion
Today on The Front Page, host of The Fold podcast for The Spinoff, Duncan Grieve, is with us to discuss how this shakes things up.
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The Spinoff
19 hours 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
2 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.
The Spinoff
2 days ago
- The Spinoff
Fazerdaze, Film Fest and Bloc Party: The Spinoff event guide
The Spinoff's top pick of events from around the motu for the week 7-14 August. Welcome to The Spinoff event guide, formerly known as the event noticeboard. If you're new to the guide then welcome to your weekly, curated selection of gigs, events and exhibitions from across Aotearoa. If you want to pitch your event for future guides then please use this handy form. Whangārei An incredible collection of art gathered over many years is to be auctioned off to raise money. Go get a treasure. Leigh Music: Tiki Taane Sawmill Cafe, 142 Pakiri Rd, Leigh, Auckland 8pm Friday, August 8 $40 A live looping, one-man-band experience. Tāmaki Makaurau The Academy, 44 Lorne St 1.30pm Friday, August 8 $19 Body horror aficionado David Cronenberg's 2024 film is screening as part of this year's New Zealand International Film Festival. Studio One Toi Tū, 1 Ponsonby Road, Ponsonby 2pm Saturday, August 9 Free but registration available We Read Auckland is a local lit fest created by Auckland City Libraries. Hoey's event is part of a whole suite of them (read a conversation about 1985 on The Spinoff, here). Rotorua Te Pou Theatre and Dust Palace's beautiful work about the impact of colonisation on the natural world. Tauranga Literature: Writers on Mondays: High Tide – Jennifer Trevelyan and Jenny Pattrick Rongomaraeroa, Te Papa 12.15pm Monday, August 11 Free A series of free, lunchtime events with writers who've recently published a book. Read a review of Trevelyan's novel on The Spinoff, here. Blenheim An homage to kapa haka in Te Tauihu o Te Waka-a-Māui, following four different kapa haka from Te Tauihu over six years. Ōtautahi Music: Bloc Party Christchurch Town Hall 10am Sunday, August 10 $129.90 UK indie band are celebrating 20 years of their album Silent Alarm. With special guest Young The Giant. Lyttelton Music: Fazerdaze The Loons 8pm Thursday, August 14 $49 Winner of Best Solo Artist and Album of the Year at the Aotearoa Music Awards 2025. Ōtepoti Dunedin Public Art Gallery 1pm Saturday, August 9 Free New York-based violinist giving a free concert. Queenstown Literature: An evening with the poet laureate The Sherwood 7.30pm Friday, August 8 $23.25–$28.92 Get Chris Tse while you can! His stint as Aotearoa's poet laureate ends on August 20. Greymouth Magic: Illusionist Anthony Street Regent Theatre, Greymouth 7pm Friday, August 8 $49.90–$59.90 Breathtaking illusions and mind-bending magic.
