Linda Clark wired for radio action

By CARROLL DU CHATEAU

Linda Clark in the flesh is different from the TV version. Abrupt, yes. Super-direct, yes. Skinny and sharp, yes. But aggressive, no, not really.

Arriving at Bambina Cafe on Ponsonby Rd, just a couple of blocks from the Vermont St villa she shares with her partner Alan Doak and twin sons, Arlo and Harper, Clark looks like any other breastfeeding mother. She slides into her seat, slightly late, slightly breathless, sightly crumpled, looking incredibly slim but moaning about how she still can't get into her pre-pregnancy clothes.

"We're trying to wean Harper off this feed," she says after ordering a decaf flat white and without even a glance towards other brunchers who might be a little excited by spotting a TV star in their midst. This is her local after all.

Back home, the comfortable, sunny house is preparing itself for chaos. The packers are due on Monday. Clark and Doak have said goodbye ("we all cried actually") to the nanny who helped them through those first four exhausting months ("there were a couple of weeks when we never slept more than an hour and a half") with the twins.

In a few days a friend is flying up to Auckland to take charge of one twin on the flight to Wellington while Clark looks after the other - and while Doak heads south in the car with the dog.

Then there's the job to worry about. How does it feel to take over what is undoubtedly the highest-profile radio slot in New Zealand - the Nine to Noon show on National Radio that Kim Hill made brainy - without having uttered one syllable of radio journalism before?

Clark opens her big, startlingly blue eyes a fraction wider. "It can't be that hard - it's just yakking," she says, in her down-to-earth way going on to point out that her pre-TV career was all in print journalism. And to remind me she makes a habit of jumping in the deep end, as she did with Grace magazine which lasted just eight months after she took over as editor in 2000.

Despite her obvious love affair with her sons and husband, Clark never completely submerged into the world of babies. Throughout those sleep-deprived months her mind remained on alert. And now that the boys are older, the familiar restlessness is returning. She is constantly hungry for news, seriously well-informed (with much of her knowledge these days cribbed from her employer-to-be, Radio New Zealand) and despite the huge family pressures, jumping at the chance of getting back to work.

"Though I do feel really maternal," she says. "I've got mixed feelings like any new mother - about how I'll cope being away from them as well [as them missing me] ... One of the fabulous things is that I'm going to be home in the afternoons.

"I've taken a pay cut to go," she continues. "But it's never about money - I've never made a career decision based on dollars. God, if I did I'd be in PR!"

And what does it feel like to be moving into the same building as Kim Hill herself? "I do know her, but not well," says Clark. "I've been interviewed by her. It was terrifying."

Linda Clark terrified? "Yes. She's incredibly intelligent, always well briefed and she can hold anger for a long time."

And you don't? She smiles, "Motherhood has mellowed me ... " She stops herself and rephrases. "Well no. Motherhood changes you totally but I don't know if it's mellowed me."

Clark is one of that short list of hungry, aggressive TV and radio journalists who have become the darlings of broadcast journalism over the past few years. Mike Hosking, Kim Hill, Sean Plunket (said to have taken legal action because he didn't get the Nine to Noon job) and Clark herself can all be relied upon to ask the tough questions, interrupt and front up to the most ferocious interviewee. Now, while Hill is collecting dollops of criticism from listeners and critics alike for the jarring note she brings to Saturday mornings previously lulled into a warm glow by John Campbell and Brian Edwards before him, many people are ready for a tougher stance on weekdays. And despite the babies and the new air of softness about her, they'll surely get it with Linda Clark.

She, remember, also caused a few waves in the world of magazine journalism. Here, where cut-throat tactics are normally kept for editors out-bidding each other for "celebrity" stories, Clark made her debut at Grace with a series of ad campaigns featuring a filing cabinet and other paraphernalia being biffed out of an office with a big Editor sign on the door. The voice-over went something like, "Out with the old and in with the new".

The campaign, plus Clark's disdainful speech about local travel writing at the TravCom (NZ Travel Communicators') dinner, so offended outgoing Grace editor Lindsey Dawson's supporters, it took several months for Clark to be accepted among her magazine publishing contemporaries.

It was probably only when INL suddenly closed Grace and threw her out of the editor's office that Clark was truly recognised by her peers as a talented and stylish editor.

Meanwhile she had put together a "grown-up, sophisticated, nothing cheesy" woman's magazine that looked good on the coffee table while attempting to make readers think. As she said, men liked it too.

"I was just trying to be a little bit different - but being different takes time."

Clark was "gutted" by the decision to close Grace after she had produced just eight issues.

"It was the greatest disappointment," she says now. "I still think it could have worked ... the galling thing was that in the weeks following its demise a number of advertisers told us they had money set aside for next year [to run campaigns in Grace]. People still say to me, 'I wish Grace was still around'."

She looks wistful. "And I do too."

But Clark is not the sort of woman to let a disappointment get her down.

"I was determined not to take it personally," she says. "It's a really small country, New Zealand - too small to have a hissy fit, stamp your feet. You've got to move on and find another opportunity."

For Clark, the opportunities were there already. Throughout the Grace days she was fronting Face the Nation on TV One. When the magazine folded she took on Late Edition as well. As she said later, no matter the internal anguish, her policy is to keep going, never miss a beat.

Her babies were born, five weeks premature, on January 20 this year.

Now 39, Clark met Alan Doak when she was 19. They will have been together, happily, for 20 years this August. As she says, he is a photographer, and photographers - even ones who won Photographer of the Year in 1998 - "are not very egotistical".

Certainly Doak, who now designs websites, is ever-smiling. He stands there, fair hair shining, tropical island shirt which he seems to wear winter and summer glowing through the dim winter's day, and explains that Arlo, the more relaxed twin, is more like him. Harper, who likes to stay up late and is more restless, is like his mother.

Clark agrees. "Alan's just a remarkably flexible person ... quite self-contained, steady, very solid and incredibly creative."

She started her career as a print journalist, working with some of the country's best. Back in the early 80s and grounded with a degree in English literature and political science, followed by Brian Priestley's one-year journalism course at Canterbury University, Clark landed a job at the Manawatu Evening Standard in Palmerston North. "I lasted nine months."

Next came the now-defunct New Zealand Times (predecessor of the Sunday Star Times), working alongside people such as Herald assistant editor Fran O'Sullivan and INL's Kate Coughlan. Her third move was to the National Business Review during those heady pre-crash days of the mid-80s.

"It'd just become a daily, everyone had shares and was interested in business," remembers Clark. "I worked as their junior political reporter in the [Parliamentary Press] Gallery".

Again she was alongside talented people - such as Patricia Herbert, now Michael Cullen's press secretary. "When I started, Jim Eagles [now editor of the Business Herald] was editor.

"When I left Warren Berryman [now editor of the Independent] was in charge, everything was lean and mean and it was back to a weekly.

"I always had good role models, mentors who were generous with their skills who helped me get a grip on the craft," she says. "My success in journalism is definitely due to these people. There was a lot of intellectual rigour about the place. I was 23 and just like a sponge really."

Clark headed for TVNZ as a researcher for Frontline, working with Bill Ralston and Amanda Miller, moving only after the airing of the infamous 1990 programme, For the Public Good, which looked at funding and allegations around the Lange/Douglas Government. Says Clark: "The whole programme had the smell of death about it ... things were never the same again - tainted."

Always quick to make a move, she called Shaun Brown and asked to be transferred to News as TVNZ's political editor where she worked for six years until the move to Auckland, Grace and Face the Nation.

Today, with a big smile on her face, Clark ticks off the things she's going to enjoy about her new job as host of the Nine to Noon show.

"If you sat down and thought about it you'd be daunted. I mean, 15 hours on air a week is a long time. But for me this is a fabulous job. There's the time to devote to one subject; the freedom the programme offers; the beauty of the format" - meaning the slide from tough, high-research, hard-hitting interviews to more magaziny subjects such as books and cooking.

"There's not much cheerfulness in daily journalism. I'm a reasonably happy person and in this job you can do stories about people ... "

Also "it feels really good to be going back to Wellington," she continues. "I've got so many friends and family down there. Everyone's so excited about us coming back."

The immediate problems are mechanical. Because Clark could not leave the twins and their feeds, Doak was dispatched to find somewhere to live.

He rented a house in Kelburn, only five minutes from RNZ headquarters on The Terrace. Says Clark, "No, I haven't seen it, but I do know it's got nine steps, which is good for Wellington."

Meanwhile, friends are boiling the soup - "Auntie Karen is going out to buy Farex so we can start solids when we get to Wellington." Although they said goodbye to the Auckland nanny, they couldn't cope and called her to come back a day later. With the twins now 7kg each and demanding with it, their first task will be to find an energetic Wellington nanny.

On the upside there will be a couple of weeks to settle in before Clark starts her early-morning scramble to Radio New Zealand, another week before she slides on those headphones for the first time on July 8 - and 19 days before the election.

Which is like a gift from heaven for Clark. "I'm relaxed about those sorts of interviews. Being dropped into the middle of it will be a great way to start." And later, especially if things get messy around the National Party leadership, and the Greens do well - which she is picking - it will become seriously interesting. "A great time to be a journalist," she says with relish.

But will she try to equal Hill's prodigious habit of reading practically every book reviewed on the programme?

"No!" she says emphatically. "Kim's remarkable in this area. She's got all the skills. I simply don't have the time - or inclination. We choose really good reviewers - they can tell us all.

"I've got new responsibilities. I'm not going to make my children fit into the cracks."