Live from the Newstalk ZB Auckland studio - Kerre McIvor at work. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Newstalk ZB host Kerre McIvor on rants, rebellion and why radio needs more female voices.
Half a second before she's live on air, Kerre McIvor stretches. Hands high, torso tilting. This is a sprint, not a marathon.
On Friday afternoon, she was in Hawke's Bay at Horse of the Year. High heels, big smile, the self-described "tits and teeth" show she's been touring for years.
On Friday afternoon, 50 people were killed at two Christchurch mosques. McIvor caught an early flight home to Auckland. And now it's Monday morning. The phone lines are open.
"Hello, Rob."
McIvor's voice is black beech honey with a hint of Cool Charm. Simultaneously deep and bright.
"Just a quick one," says Rob, whose voice is Englishman-with-money. "Shoot him. Move on. Job done. End of story. Have a brilliant day, you and everybody else, and may God bless us all. Goodbye."
McIvor says a radio talk show is a modern-day village well. Today, the villagers are angry.
A week before New Zealand changed, Canvas sat at McIvor's kitchen table in Auckland's Grey Lynn. The Newstalk ZB host who always wears heels and lipstick to work was in bare feet and a bare face, eating a quinoa cookie she had baked herself. She was "off the booze" and fresh back from exercising with a personal trainer.
"I would love to be a bit more moderate," she says. "When I turned 50 I thought I was never, ever going to be anything other than fit and focused and size 10 Sass & Bide."
The reality is a collection of ziplock bags containing bras for every eventuality. They range from 34C to 36FF because life is a sliding scale and McIvor doesn't mind who knows this.
It's not very fashionable for journalists to ask women about their looks (would we ask a man his belt size, etc?) but McIvor did call her first book Short Fat Chick to Marathon Runner.
"When I was first talking about running a marathon, this texter goes, 'a short fat f*** like you couldn't run a marathon.' I'm like, 'Oh. Might be right. But I think I can.'"
Actually, she wanted to use the texter's exact phrase in her book title. The publisher baulked. "I said, 'Well we've got fat there and most women would rather be f***ing than fat.'"
She did, of course, run that marathon. And then a heap of other women went on to run their own marathons after they read her story and (just quietly) it's possible that's the bit about her story she likes the best.
"It really annoys me that women especially go through Insta feeds or social media and look at these artfully curated photos of other women's lives and go, 'Oh I need to try harder and I need to be better with my diet.' F*** off. This is false and this is fantasy."
In McIvor's book there is, literally, a blister on her runner's bum.
Three months ago, McIvor took over Newstalk ZB's 9am-midday show. The morning slot that had, for 33 years, been occupied by Leighton Smith. Conservative. White. Male.
"I'm stunned that there hasn't been more negativity, says McIvor. "Whenever I was filling in, you'd get easily five or six nasty texts an hour. I've had none for weeks and probably the worst it got was three."
She thinks, perhaps, the audience has had just enough of her to realise: "Daddy's not coming home."
At the end of 2015, McIvor was shifted from nights to afternoons, working alongside Mark Dye. She says she was told by her then-boss the move was about ensuring her longevity.
"It was a bit uppity of me, I suppose, to think that I would be consulted, but that was my mindset ... I felt really slighted, actually. Pissed off. I just felt like a cog in the machine and I'd never felt like that before.
"I HATED it with a deep and abiding loathing. I can't tell you how unhappy I was. I've always worked nights, I worked nights for 20 years on ZB and before that I worked nights as a maitre d'. I fire at night. To have to go into work and shut the door and not see the day again — I felt like I was being entombed."
She snorts. "It was all very dramatic!"
McIvor says she came to love working with Dye.
"We had fun together but I don't think I was terribly focused on the job. I was going to leave after two years."
And then the opposition came calling — and they were offering the night shift.
McIvor bought a new dress, new heels and had her hair done for the resignation meeting with her NZME and Newstalk bosses.
"It's very important to look good when you say hello, but equally important to look good when you say goodbye. And then they offered me Leighton's job and six months off while he finished and that turned into a year, which I was thrilled about. It was like winning Lotto."
There are not that many women hosts in commercial talk radio. But when McIvor worked afternoons, her competition included long-time friend Wendyl Nissen. Awkward?
"I just wanted more women on radio!"
Truly, says McIvor, when she walked in to quit, "I thought that NZME would say, 'Don't let the door hit your arse in the way out.' I was 52 and, in broadcasting terms — television and radio, one female year is like seven years.
"Who's on radio over 40? Anybody? Anybody? Nat Rad's got a couple, but even then not many."
McIvor says multiple bosses have told her that women polarise other women.
"Also our voices. Especially when you're debating a point with somebody. Our voices get high, so you have to have a really low voice. You also have to have the skin, like the hide of a Tyrannosaurus rex. Some women who did Talkback just got sick from it. Literally broke out in boils, got skin conditions and nervous complaints."
When the Christchurch mosque attacks happened on Friday afternoon, Newstalk went into breaking news talk mode. McIvor's Monday show is the first "normal" prime time shift since the killing of 50 Muslim worshippers. So she stretches. She takes a sip from her water bottle. She begins like she begins every working day, with an intro designed to turn listeners into talkers.
"I don't know about you, but I still feel a bit numb. A bit shell-shocked after the terror attack in Christchurch and the days that have followed … the sheer number of men, women and children who were slaughtered. Perhaps the utter cowardice of a depraved individual shooting at unarmed people kneeling in prayer with their backs to him. I cannot get my head around that."
Producer Helen McCarthy sits in a separate room, managing eight computer monitors, two headsets and the phone lines. "What would you like to talk to Kerre about?" she says. "Where are you coming from on that one?" She can't hear one man because, it transpires, he's calling from a chicken farm. Time seems to move faster in here. Gun laws. A bravery medal for Naeem Rashid, the Pakistani man killed trying to tackle an alleged gunman. Just how racist is New Zealand and/or Christchurch, anyway? Talk, talk, talk. Rob waits 13 minutes to get his rapid-fire spiel in.
McCarthy wants to know what song to cue to close the show with. "Something by Yusuf Islam," suggests McIvor.
Just before midday, the voice of the man we used to call Cat Stevens fills the booth: "Oh, Peace Train take this country ..."
A week before New Zealand changed, McIvor told Canvas she wanted her talk radio show to provide a forum for sharing ideas and opinions.
"I don't want to be telling them what to think and what to do."
Her predecessor, she says, didn't have listeners, "he had acolytes. I get that in a really uncertain world, people like surety. They don't like ambivalence and dithery and Socratic conversations … I get that, but I don't have many answers."
Some talk show hosts like a platform. McIvor says she'd rather be a sounding board.
"I won't do abortion or the anti-vaxxers, same-sex marriages — although people seem to have calmed their bloody farm over that — conversations where you know people are not going to go, 'Oh, I see where you're coming from. I totally get it.'"
Conversations, "where they won't even walk halfway to understand one view point or another".
Canvas asks her where she stands on those issues, but apparently even a magazine published by the same company that owns her radio show is off-limits.
"I just won't talk about them ... right now, you're saying, 'What is your stance?' And if we were having a conversation, it would become obvious. I would rather that — or if we were just having a drink."
McIvor (used to be Woodham until she asked Tom the Irishman to marry her) is a famous drinker. She thinks her first Champagne may have been in Tauranga, when a copywriter invited her over to drink Moet, smoke Sobranie cigarettes and watch Brideshead Revisited.
"And I just thought I was quite the thing!" (Champagne, she notes, was "cheap as chips" back then).
"I drink too much when I drink. But I've never seen alcohol as that destructive because I haven't lost jobs or relationships ... I'm not an alcoholic in that I will just drink mouthwash, but I do drink way too much. I never do shots. The purpose is not to get drunk. That's just a byproduct of being greedy.
"I don't need it to go on stage, I don't need it to perform. I just really like the taste of it. Really, really like it. And now I don't. I can take it or leave it."
For about six months every year, she quits. McIvor is not sure the Ministry of Health would subscribe to her all-or-nothing approach, but claims it works for her.
"I'm still alive, my blood tests are perfect. I don't want to be a burden on the health system. If I was told that I was going to need a lot of expensive treatment because of my own overindulgences then I would make amends immediately, stop forthwith. You wouldn't put money into an old drunk ... you'd give it to new babies."
Canvas: "I think they still give it to everyone."
McIvor: "Well, they shouldn't. There, I'm making a stand."
Okay, she concedes, there was this one time she took a stand. Princess Diana died on a Sunday. On the Monday night, McIvor-then-Woodham delivered her talkback rant about seatbelts and "how she wasn't a saint and anyway saints don't suck face with hairy old playboys in the middle of St Tropez ..."
If there had been an internet back then, says McIvor, she would have broken it.
"I was completely on the outer with that one!"
And so, today, she avoids taking a platform. She went to university (history and politics, BA Hons) to "learn stuff and it was just so disappointing to find out there were more questions than answers.
"And I find that when I'm talking to people too ... I know how I live my life and I won't discriminate against people and I think people's bodies are their own to do as they will with provided the cause no harm to others. But there are always people with stories that make you think and reflect ... every time I think I'm certain, somebody will say, 'But what about this?'"
That later-in-life tertiary qualification was for McIvor's dad, the bank manager who didn't want his kids to be poor and was, initially, a bit concerned about a daughter who wasn't going to university.
"He was born in a depression work camp and the eldest of six and they grew up in a State house and he hated it. He was determined to get out … so he became comfortably middle class and looked after my brother and I and was happy with where we'd got."
When she was employed by the New Zealand Broadcasting Commission and her brother became an army officer, he left the bank. When he was dying, aged just 59, he rang to tell her he only had three months.
"Oh, Dad. Only three?" And then, she says, she got off the phone and cried and cried and cried.
He was 59 when he died, the man she thought would be upset when she announced her pregnancy, "triumphantly unwed".
He said: "Oh love, what do you need? What can we do?"
McIvor has been on air since she was 21. High school, she says, was quite miserable.
"We just moved so much, and then boarding school and it was only Monday to Friday ... the full-time boarders had this bond. But who enjoys high school? Anyone who peaks at 15 has peaked too soon, haven't they?"
She worked on television's Fair Go and did the celebrity debating circuit back when celebrity debates were a thing.
"I like words and I had the great luxury of doing an apprenticeship with Jim Hopkins and Gary McCormick and Alan Grant and McPhail and Gadsby and Ginette McDonald. I was the young ingenue. I was 19, 20, doing the traps, around memorial halls, around New Zealand. It was brilliant."
Today, she pays it forward. At work drinks, she buys Champagne for junior staffers — and then pours it like a pro. Because there was a time when she did take a break from media.
"Really, the media had a break from me. I was just unreliable and a pain in the arse and couldn't get work really. Yeah, pretty much. And then I moved back to Wellington because Kate turned 5 and I'd always said to her dad I'd move back to Wellington when she started school."
A cautionary tale about unreliability? The David Lange celebrity roast.
"The only way you can conquer your fear is to have the worst thing happen to you and it did. I died on stage and I was dreadful and that's happened a couple of times, where I've misread the audience or drank too much. In the David Lange one, I was just appalling. Absolutely appalling. You look out into a room full of people who are staring at you in stony silence and it wakes you at night. You can't breathe with the humiliation and horror."
But then, "nobody died".
McIvor owns her own bad news; plays her life for laughs.
"I was just so over-excited about doing that debate, I just completely didn't prepare. Thought I could wing it. No. Couldn't, didn't. I think I told two parrot jokes, insulted the audience and sat down.
She recalls Lange said, "Never mind." She was sitting with Neil Roberts, founder of the production company Communicado. He said, "Well, that was disappointing.
"To disappoint Neil? Christ. That's a nadir."
But those "years in the wilderness" where she worked as a maitre d' at infamous Wellington bar Paradiso? Not wasted — even when McIvor was. They taught her, "Who I am isn't tied up in my job ... if I lose it tomorrow, fundamentally I'll still be me."
Sometimes her mother reminds her that, when she was a solo mother, money was tight and times were tough.
"I don't remember bad things. Or, at least, I can turn bad things into a story."
Her daughter Kate lives in London now, with two children McIvor dotes on.
"She couldn't be more rebellious! She was married before she left law school and is a stay-at-home wife and mother and loves her life. She couldn't more emphatically underline that my choices were certainly not going to be hers."
Kate, she says theatrically, LOVES Leighton.
What makes McIvor sad? "If you feel like you've let people down. There were times when I thought I could have been a better mother and beat myself up about that, or a better partner ..."
What does she fear the most? "That would be a 10-day silent retreat. My manicurist told me she was going on one and I literally felt panic welling within me."
Also, she says, knowing what is going to happen next. "It's the wonderful chaos that makes up a life, not one foot in front of another in an orderly procession."
It feels like a good place to end an interview. A made-for-television closing quote. But a few days later, two Christchurch mosques are attacked. Canvas sits in on her Monday show and goes back for Friday's. Gun control. Religious tolerance. Just how racist is New Zealand and/or Christchurch. Talk, talk, talk. McIvor's voice sounds a little tired.
"This time last week we were signing off and a couple of hours later, New Zealand as we knew it had changed forever ..."
She wishes her listeners a safe, happy, peaceful weekend. The show finishes, as always, with a song.
"When the night has come
And the land is dark ..."
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