New Zealand Listener

As a 14-year-old Wellington schoolgirl, my mother, Ngaire, was chosen for an international broadcast of the 1939 Empire Day greeting on May 24 to King George VI. As a presenter on 2YA’s daily children’s show, Ngaire was no stranger to the microphone,

For our Headline Competition, we asked for a headline in seven words or fewer on the government tripling the fee to $100 for international visitors. FINALISTS: Levy increase a wallet wallop for tourists. –Eliza Reed, Kuaotunu Tax triples, tourists

Sometimes it seems like providence is screaming in our ears. A few days before confirmation that the Winstone mills in the central North Island were closing due to high wholesale energy prices, with the loss of more than 230 jobs, the Australian phys

Is Australia’s Labor Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, a vanishing comet or will he win a second term? With a general election due by May next year, the phoney campaign is under way. Albanese, holding power with just a three-seat majority in Australi

No more eulogies any time soon, I said, before saying yes to another one. The deceased was my old friend Doug Hood, ONZM, who had finally succumbed to the predations of his cancers. Doug had been too sick to travel to Dunedin for the funeral of Marti

A new etiquette question is simmering in Europe: should you be allowed to text and scroll with your mouth full? The European Union has yet to draft regulations governing mobile phone use in restaurants, but a French restaurateur has started an unoffi

Fisheries Minister Shane Jones’ reference to High Court Justice Cheryl Gwyn as a “communist judge” at a private meeting with seafood industry representatives in May came back to bite him when, inevitably, it reached the public domain. The meeting dis

Martin Bennett had been spraying ragwort and thistles with his dad on the family’s Waikato dairy farm when, as they sat down for lunch, he noticed the pot plants in the dining room wilting. It was 1975, the year of Abba the band, Jaws the movie and,

The tūī couldn’t keep a secret even if you paid them. The pōhutukawa trees, rattling as the wind blusters across the small war memorial park, are full of the birds’ excited chatter. From up there, they can see a lot. This pleasant and unremarkable co

The student demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election of Nelson Mandela, the first Gulf War, the siege of Sarajevo, IRA bombing campaigns in England, the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales: each one is a

There’s a swamp behind the houses on SH67 in Birchfield, just north of Westport. A scraggly swamp, giving way to paddocks giving way to beach giving way to the driving surf of the Tasman Sea. “It wasn’t not dangerous,” recalls Becky Manawatu. “It had

by Sebastian Smee (Text, $40) This year marks 150 years since the first exhibition of Impressionist art in Paris. That has a significance for Aotearoa as well. The artist Richard Wallwork, head of Canterbury College’s School of Arts in the 1930s, us

by Craig Brown (Fourth Estate) You could blame seasickness. You could blame sunstroke. Or too much ice cream. I blamed the monarchy. It was February 13, 1963. Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh were leaving Picton aboard the royal yacht Br

Chelsea Dawson knew she wanted to audition for the musical Six even before she left drama school. She’d already been listening to the soundtrack on Spotify for a couple of years before there was talk of the award-winning UK musical coming to Australi

Another show announced for next year’s Te Ahurei Toi O Tāmaki/Auckland Arts Festival ahead of the release of the programme next month is the Scottish Ballet’s acclaimed adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire. The piece has b

The heart-warming, true-story Mexican classroom drama Radical is the inspirational tale of Sergio Juárez (Eugenio Derbez), a teacher who moves to an impoverished, crime-ridden border town. There, he injects his own brand of optimism and good faith in

by Nick Lowe andLos Straitjackets Few from the punk era underwent the transformation Nick Lowe did: from boozy Brit, self-confessed cheeky chappie to elegant, white-haired crooner of soulful American country ballads. He wrote (What’s So Funny ’Bout)

‘Cancer consumes 24 hours of my day,” says Dai Henwood, looking into the camera at the beginning of his three-part documentary. “It’s just in the background as white noise. I think so often … what did I think about before I had cancer?” That’s not ac

Sky TV is adding another BBC-branded channel to its offering from the beginning of October. It comes with the promising title of “BBC First”, and its launch publicity promises it will be the “go-to destination for premium British drama”. However, if

The intimate thoughts of Liz Screening: Sky Arts, 8pm Elizabeth Taylor’s name is no longer, in 2024, the embodiment of entertainment industry fame: that mantle is now carried by another woman called Taylor. But in 1964, when she sat down for a seri

“Inconceivable!” TVNZ 2, 7pm Like many a cult comedy of past decades, it creaks a bit around the edges, but the swashbuckling fairy-tale spoof that legendary screenwriter William Goldman adapted from his own 1973 novel for director Rob Reiner is st

A series that could be frighteningly instructional. US film-maker Lauren Greenfield, whose films include The Queen of Versailles and Generation Wealth, delves into the lives of the first generation raised on social media. She follows a group of LA te

Crime takes place in the glaring hot sun in this film adaptation of Jo Nesbø’s short story The Jealousy Man. The lovely location is Crete, which star Joseph Gordon-Levitt was unsuprisingly pretty happy about, telling People, “I feel so lucky. There a

Picked early on by the Guardian as a potential 2024 “banger” and also “a whole lot of full period glam”. Anna Symon, who wrote Mrs Wilson and The Essex Serpent, turned her pen to Joan Hannington’s 2004 memoir I Am What I Am: The True Story of Britain

The first season of Wonderland examined the golden age of British children’s literature, from Peter Pan and Narnia to The Lord of the Rings and Peter Rabbit. It also explored the pain behind some of these stories, and in season two, subtitled Gothic,

It’s been two years since David Gelb’s last Chef’s Table series about pizza, but Gelb has never been one to rush a food story. Since 2015, he’s explored the lives and food of some of the world’s best chefs, as well as made series focusing on France,

Oliver Sacks might be the world’s most recognised neurologist, but his life and works have largely resisted adaptation. This new series might be a larger-than-life dramatisation for US network television, but it is inspired by Sacks’ books The Man Wh

Just when you were thinking, “haven’t we heard enough about lip-syncing fakes Milli Vanilli?”, along comes a documentary that, according to Variety, “adds another, richer layer to the saga”. It does this by telling the story from the point of view of

Eve de Castro-Robinson is one of our leading composers. She is a retired associate professor of music, two-time winner of the SOUNZ Contemporary Award, and composer-in-residence of Orchestra Wellington and the forthcoming At the World’s Edge Festival

QUESTION: I’ve found a recipe in a magazine with instructions to soak Brussels sprouts in cold water with a teaspoon of baking soda before cooking to make them greener. My mother used to do this back in the 1940s but stopped when told it destroyed t

Mum’s tarator has a large handful of finely chopped parsley tossed through it, which gives it a freshness and rustic texture that works so well against the fried cauliflower. Although traditionally, the tarator is served in a small bowl beside the ca

There’s no shortage of good wine on the shelves. The real challenge in wine buying – and the greatest satisfaction – lies in discovering wines that deliver great value for money, or more bang for your buck. To assess value for money, after rating a w

The motion for our second annual staff-student VicTeach Debate? “That this house lives for the applause”. Staff team leader Professor Richard Arnold opened with a fact self-evident to every academic: if academics live for applause, then many a lectur

State agency Callaghan Innovation’s move to pilot GovGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot to help you deal with government bureaucracy, is the first step in the automation of the public sector. GovGPT will initially help businesses navigate govern

When the hoiho won the Bird of the Year Te Manu Rongonui o te Tau in 2019, Marlon Williams, no less, wrote a song about the creature, also known as the yellow-eyed penguin. “Let’s go, hoiho, there’s no stopping you now…” he sang, somewhat hopefully.

The photograph for this column was supposed to be a portrait of my pet ewe, Elizabeth Jane, frolicking with her newborn twin lambs. I confidently predicted she would deliver them on September 13, my birthday. Miles the sheep farmer, who might know a