Television seemed like magic to journalist Diana Wichtel. Her words were like magic to Listener readers over decades, but she had her share of hate mail, and she’s kept it all.
This is quite strange. I am about to interview the journalist and critic Diana Wichtel and I realise I don’t have the foggiest idea how to do it. She wrote for the Listener for 36 years. It seems somehow presumptuous to now be interviewing her for the Listener. She is one of the best interviewers in the country. Hence the strangeness.
She feels it, too. “I just think it’s, you know, when you see someone out of context, it messes with your head a bit. After years and years of interviewing people, it’s always absolutely weird to be interviewed at all.”
Also, we have known each other for more than 20 years. I spent some years at the NZ Herald sitting in one of those pod prisons across from her partner of years, the journalist Chris Barton. I can’t call them Wichtel and Barton. That would be patently ridiculous.
We have both spent many years interviewing famous people. She is a formidably brilliant interviewer. The prospect of interviewing her is akin to interviewing, say, Lynn “The Demon” Barber, formerly of the Observer. Or John Clarke. Or Barry Humphries. She interviewed those last two. She has another one up on me.
She has interviewed a murderer. The murderer was Anne Perry, who, when she was a teenage Juliet Hulme, helped her best friend Pauline Parker bash in Parker’s mother’s head with a brick. She’s the only murderer Wichtel has interviewed, “as far as I know”.
She has a keen eye, and ear, for the absurd. “Life is absurd,” she writes in her second book, Unreel: A Life in Review, a memoir of her life as a television critic and life in general, released on November 26. It is funny (very), sad (very). Pointed (often very) and piercingly observed. Which is what you’d expect from “the sort of child who pulled wings off butterflies”.
That is a quote from whatever is the opposite of a fan letter. She has a collection of such things. Here’s another: “I read your article wichteling on about Prince Charles … biased, unbalance [sic] and silly. I think you’re going to be a great journalist when you grow up. Keep working on it, swettie [sic].” That “swettie” is laugh-out-loud nuts. But that “wichteling” is pretty good. It ought to enter the lexicon. As in: to be Wichteled.
She’s nice. She’s kind. She’s empathetic. All of which are good traits for an interviewer and a writer.
Who collects and keeps hate mail? Somebody who has always had a journalist’s eye on the possibility of a memoir, perhaps. This is her second. Her first, Driving to Treblinka, is the story of the search for what became of her father, Ben, a Polish Jew. As a boy, he had escaped out of the window of the train taking his family to the Treblinka extermination camp where they would all, inevitably, perish.
Her father, increasingly unstable, she was told, would follow her, her mother Patricia, a New Zealander, sister Ros and brother Jeffrey from Canada when the family emigrated here. He was never going to. She found out much later he was not required on the journey. She lost contact with him. He died, she discovered, in a mental institution in Canada. Alone and mad.
Years before, her mother had attempted to have divorce papers served. Wichtel imagines the servers opening the door to his room, seeing a mad man within, and quickly shutting the door. Which is what she had done for years. There were no family, no friends at his burial. If that doesn’t break your heart you don’t have one.
Now he has a headstone. A stranger who read Driving to Treblinka wrote to her. He visits Ben’s grave almost every day and has a cigar with him. That is magical, she agrees. She later met the stranger at the grave. “And we had a hug and I said, ‘Thank you for taking care of my dad’, and he whispered in my ear: ‘He’s been a good friend to me.’ There’s not much that’s comforting about these stories but …”
Droll and dry
Here’s a funny thing about her. She’s nice. And kind. She’s empathetic. All of which are good traits for an interviewer and a writer. And, as anyone who has read her already knows, she is dryly, often drolly, funny. She reserves her finely honed acerbity for her writing. She is never bitchy, although some readers clearly think she’s a bitch, as evidenced by the pulling-wings-off-butterflies letter.
Which does not mean she’s not a murderer. It just means that her weapons of choice are elegantly constructed sentences. She finishes off other people’s creative endeavours with a knife-sharp wit rather than a brick to the head. She reviewed the TV film Rage, written by then-Listener columnist Tom Scott. His response to her review: “I must admit my first thought was to wonder if Diana and I had just recently gone through a particularly nasty and brutal divorce.” He had been Wichteled.
A passage in her new book might sum-up her life as a television critic: “On Gilligan’s Island some randoms are shipwrecked. One is a scientist. Nevertheless they fail to escape or be found for three seasons. All of this plus a talking horse [Mr Ed] and a flying nun counted as adult viewing.”
Your career is weird, I say. “Yeah, absolutely. [People were] constantly saying, ‘When are they going to let you write about something proper … and how can you bear to watch all that television?’ But, you know, they started to pay a bit more attention to it. And there were people like Clive James writing about television in a way I loved.”
Her taste is for the absurd. She writes about Michael Galvin playing Dr Chris Warner on Shortland Street for more than 30 years, “making him the Ken Barlow of local soap. And worth every minute for adding this to the alarming list of things New Zealand is world famous for: Chris, brandishing some sexting he has discovered on his son Harry’s tell-tale iPad and demanding, ‘Please tell me that is not your penis!’”
“Magic,” she writes, “is just not knowing how shit works. Television seemed like magic to me. It still does.”
She’s a visitor from Mars bearing witness to the latest bonkers manifestation of modern culture.
She started her love, and sometimes hate, relationship at age 3. She was mesmerised. She asked her mother how those people got inside the TV. “Considering her later wild attempts to explain where babies came from, complete with alarming hand gestures, I was barking up the wrong tree.”
She can appear to be passive. It’s a good disguise, although not, I think, a deliberate one. It is what observers do. And cats. There is something cat like about her. She sits at a safe distance and has a good squint sideways at you while she decides whether she likes you or trusts you.
I, more puppyishly, liked and trusted her from the moment I met her. Most people do. In the days of that telly “talent” show NZ Idol, I once witnessed a fellow journalist go up to her at the pub, kiss her on the cheek, and say, “You’re my New Zealand idol”. I’m glad that journalist wasn’t me. But it could well have been. She was easily New Zealand’s most famous, and best, journalist. She remains one of the country’s best writers. Here she is writing for the University of Auckland’s Ingenio magazine in 2021, after Bauer Media’s shock withdrawal from New Zealand – killing, in one fell swoop, a swag of publications, including the Listener – about being in lockdown: “Self-isolation as a mass undertaking turns out to be strangely absorbing, like some arcane spiritual practice where you sit atop a pillar or self-flagellate or just hole up in your house for weeks, offering up baked burnt offerings to dangerous gods.”
If I’d ever managed to write a sentence half as good as that, I’d develop a swagger and go about being entirely up myself. Of course, she must have an ego; anyone who is very good at what they do does. But she does not swagger, not even a bit. She just writes. The other thing that makes her so good is that you can hear her voice in every sentence. That is a harder thing to achieve than you might think. Very few journalists ever achieve it.
Culture shock
Her career as an observer is the classic outsider story, really. The journalist Adam Dudding once summed up her television criticism like this: “Her reviews often strike a tone of tolerant bemusement. She’s a visitor from Mars bearing witness to the latest bonkers manifestation of modern culture.”
That’s about right, isn’t it? “Yeah. I think it is … I’ve always said and thought, too, that part of that was to do with a formative moment, coming from one culture to another culture. And when you’re a fish out of water you notice things, don’t you? You notice the language. You notice the television. You notice everything. How people go about things is different. And I also think growing up in a household with a Kiwi mother and a Polish father, you become attuned to the slippage with language. You know, things sounding funny and not like everyone else’s households.”
She has always been an observer. “Our family was more random than most. I knew early on, at some cellular level, that even beyond the normal cosmic calculations, given what happened to a hundred members of my family just before I managed to be born, my chances of being on Earth were vanishingly small. Television imposed some order on the swirling improbability of existence.”
She was actually a visitor to Mars. She had arrived in New Zealand in 1964, aged 13, “leaving behind the co-ed, backcombed, kitten-heeled freedoms of Handsworth High for Auckland’s North Shore and a St Trinian’s-style uniform”. A fish out of water? She was gasping, and aghast, at how empty her new environment was. There was one telly channel. Programming ended at 10.30pm, with a prayer on Sundays.
Reckless
Her path to the Listener was unlikely. She intended to be an academic. She was a junior tutor at the University of Auckland. She was supposed to be writing her thesis on Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, the beginnings of which are “under the house somewhere”. Chris spotted an ad in the newspaper for a telly reviewer at the Listener.
She loved the telly so, he figured, why not? She applied, “recklessly”, and got a call asking her to go to an interview with Caterina de Nave, the TV producer. Diana, who couldn’t type and didn’t own a tape recorder, turned up with her partner’s ginormous ghetto blaster as a recording device. “I somehow got the job. Crazy.”
How’s this for crazy? She and Chris met on a week-long “encounter” group. In a tree house. On Waiheke Island. Well, she says, it was the early 80s. Chris had an afro. They were long-haired and barefoot. There was the curry made from a possum “someone had shot out of the window of a Grafton Gully flat”. There was “nude swimming and alfresco sex”.
I’ve known her for more than 20 years. I spent those Herald years sitting across from Chris. So I Do Not Want To Know.
Pre-Chris, she had been married to the former TV reporter and presenter Philip Alpers, now an academic in Sydney. They have a son, Ben. Chris also has a son named Ben. Diana and Chris have a daughter, Monika. I do want to know whether she wore floaty kaftan things and strings of beads in her hippy days. “I wasn’t a floaty sort of person, really.” I’m fairly sure I’ve never seen her wear anything that wasn’t black. “I try on other colours and then say: ‘I’ll take it in black.’”
She sticks at things. She and Chris have been in their nice, comfortably-lived-in Devonport villa for 40-odd years. It is a welcoming sort of house. They are welcoming sorts of people. They don’t mind guests getting tipsy. They don’t mind getting tipsy. They might be bourgeois now. “No! Not really. We’ve been here since nobody wanted to live here.” She is 73.
She’s been writing for almost her entire working life. Does writing make her happy? “A lot of the doing makes me anxious and it’s incredibly hard and there’s no pleasure in it. It always feels to me like trying to hack something out of stone.”
She laughs and says, incredulously, “It’s a ridiculous thing to choose to do for a living, over and over and over again.”
I have no sympathy. At least she didn’t have to attempt to interview a bloody New Zealand idol.
Diana Wichtel’s Unreel: A Life in Review (Penguin, $40) is out on November 26.
