I have been asked to write some seriously silly stories
I have been asked to write some seriously silly stories
The depressing reality of being an entertainment journalist in New Zealand...
Hello! Here’s a funny piece on all of the silly, stupid and stonkingly regrettable stories I was asked to write during various stints in New Zealand’s biggest newsrooms. Warning: some of these get quite weird. Enjoy!
Working in a newsroom means being at the mercy of any editor within shouting distance. Requests like, “How about we do this?” “How about we do that?” “Can we get this?” “Can you do that?” are things you hear every day.
If it’s past deadline, you might also get the occasional: “WHERE THE FUCK IS MY STORY MATE?” I got that a fair few times too.
Sometimes they’re good ideas. Often they’re not. Either way, it’s very hard to say no when these editors are much older than you, appear to know what they are talking about, and could easily get rid of you, if they so wished.
So the answer’s almost always yes. And after spending nearly 20 years in New Zealand’s biggest newsrooms, I’ve had my fair share of inane, awkward and absolutely bonkers requests from editors who really should know better.
A few of them came to mind lately, and the memories made me chuckle, so I thought I’d compile some of them below.
Shortly before Donald Trump was elected US President in 2016, an editor ran over clasping his cellphone tightly with an urgent request: could I interview Lucy Lawless about the time Trump accosted her awkwardly in one of his hotels? He passed me the phone and it really was Xena: Warrior Princess. I did this one reluctantly but got the distinct impression that Lawlesss was not really that keen on it becoming a lead story, which it did.
In 2017, Brad Pitt did a depressing interview with GQ. Angelina Jolie had left him and he was rattling around in a massive Los Angeles mansion on his own, lighting random fires, drinking cranberry juice and listening to R&B to cope with his mid-life crisis. An editor asked me to get Angelina Jolie on the phone to ask for her opinion on GQ’s story. Just call her up, she said, like I had her cellphone number lying around on my desk. It may sound insane, but I did try to do this! I found Jolie’s agent, and called and emailed her. I didn’t get a reply. The story didn’t happen. Soz.
Across most of the publications I’ve worked for, there have been blanket bans on talking to drummers. Singers? Yes. Guitarists? Yes. Keyboardists? Also yes. Drummers? No way. Once, and only once, I managed to sneak an interview with Weezer drummer Patrick Wilson into a news list. It was a terrible interview, and a boring story. It turns out those bans were for a reason. My bad.
This is one I regret. When Duncan Garner took over The AM Show, I was asked to write a review of its TVNZ competition, Breakfast. I got up early and watched every episode for a week, and was pretty shocked by the inanity on offer. It’s way better now with John Campbell there, but back then there were silly chairs and dire in-jokes and Matty McLean reporting from TVNZ’s cafe where he took co-hosts’ coffee orders live on air. I wrote about it in an opinion piece headlined, Why Duncan Garner could eat Breakfast for dinner. Still love that headline! Apparently, Hilary Barry did not. When I asked if I could do a behind-the-scenes piece on Breakfast a few months later, it was flatly declined. She’d read my piece and thought I was a dick. I love Hilz Baz and still feel sad about offending her.
During a mad run at NZ Herald around the same time, I came up with an idea for a series of stories based around dares. One writer on our team could ask another to undertake something silly and write about it. Once they’d completed the task, they could then ask someone else to do something equally stupid. The requests needed to be reasonable, like listening to every Justin Bieber album ever, or rewatching Avatar, a legitimately terrible movie. When it came to my turn, I got revenge dared so bad: I was forced to listen to nothing but Max Key’s absolutely inane single, All the Way, all day, every day, for an entire week. It got weird, quickly. The dares didn’t much longer after that.
Here’s the craziest, most batshit insane request I have ever received. It came early one Monday morning. Over the previous weekend, Beyonce’s bruising new album Lemonade had been released, and the internet was losing its collective mind over the sordid details of Jay Z’s affair. Everyone wanted to know who “Becky with the good hair” was. My news editor at the time was desperate to know. Could I, she asked, get Beyonce on the phone and just get her to tell me? I can do many things, including impressive four-point parking manoeuvres and crafting some decent pancakes. But I cannot get Beyonce to take my calls. It’s unlikely this will ever change. And we never did find out who Becky with the good hair was.
If you liked this, you may also like…