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The Spinoff
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- 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.
Zawya
24-06-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Amazon to expand Prime delivery services in smaller cities, rural areas in US by year end
plans to expand its same-day and next-day Prime delivery services to over 4,000 smaller cities and rural regions in the United States by the end of 2025, it said on Tuesday, as the company doubles down on efforts to grow its domestic footprint. Amazon earlier this year announced plans to spend more than $4 billion to grow its U.S. rural delivery network by the end of 2026, promising faster shipments to drive up demand from consumers in small towns and the countryside. The company said it was already seeing customers purchase more frequently and shop for household essentials at higher rates since it started offering faster deliveries in these regions. With more than 200 million paid Amazon Prime members worldwide, Prime has become a key growth engine for the company. In a bid to boost Prime's performance, Amazon has focused on expanding geographically while also offering discounts to younger shoppers to grow its subscriber base. (Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)
CNA
24-06-2025
- Business
- CNA
Amazon to expand Prime delivery services in smaller cities, rural areas in US by year end
plans to expand its same-day and next-day Prime delivery services to over 4,000 smaller cities and rural regions in the United States by the end of 2025, it said on Tuesday, as the company doubles down on efforts to grow its domestic footprint. Amazon earlier this year announced plans to spend more than $4 billion to grow its U.S. rural delivery network by the end of 2026, promising faster shipments to drive up demand from consumers in small towns and the countryside. The company said it was already seeing customers purchase more frequently and shop for household essentials at higher rates since it started offering faster deliveries in these regions. With more than 200 million paid Amazon Prime members worldwide, Prime has become a key growth engine for the company. In a bid to boost Prime's performance, Amazon has focused on expanding geographically while also offering discounts to younger shoppers to grow its subscriber base.
