It’s the Friday afternoon before the third-to-last Saturday Morning with Kim Hill. It’s also two days after Hill has become a grandmother for a second time. She is holding the new baby girl as she talks and laughs at broadcast decibel levels. Her granddaughter is unperturbed, but for an occasional newborn chirp. Even when Gran is getting animated about those infamous interviews with Monica Lewinsky or Jeffrey Archer, among others.
“You know, I’m talking in quite a loud voice and this baby is sound asleep on my chest. So cute.”
This disturbance to Hill’s childcare duties is all very last minute. The Listener had asked for an interview to mark her exit from the airwaves after 38 years.
After all, she has been on the magazine’s cover regularly and a valedictory was surely called for. End of an era, last of her kind and all that. It would be fair to say that a fair proportion of Hill’s audience are Listener readers, too, and vice versa. They possibly read a lot of the same books. They would possibly read a Hill memoir. More of which later.
Hill didn’t like the idea of an exit interview. Instead, she offered to write a column, musing upon her departure, and possibly explaining why she was reluctant to be interviewed about it. Yes, please, we said.
But a few days before her deadline, and with the new arrival and three shows still to do, she realised writing something wasn’t actually easier than talking to someone.
So, here we are a few hours later: Hill, her daughter’s daughter and one slightly intimidated writer interviewing our greatest broadcast interviewer … and underachieving columnist. “Yes, sorry, I over-promised and under-delivered,” she says. “I feel terribly guilty.”
So, given that she was going to be writing her own valedictory piece, how should the story start?
“Well, it is good to leave before they throw you out …”
Kim Hill’s life in the form of a Kim Hill interview introduction:
“Born in the West Midlands in 1955, Kim Hill came to New Zealand as a teenager with her Irish veterinarian father and Scottish physiotherapist mother when they swapped Shropshire for the King Country. At university, she studied languages and eventually journalism, worked for newspapers in Nelson, Greymouth and overseas and started her radio career in Gisborne. She rose up the ladder at National Radio, moving into its flagship shows. She presented Checkpoint, co-presented Morning Report, then flew solo on Nine to Noon for nine years, then Saturday Morning for 21. On television, she did stints on Fair Go and, in the early 2000s, three seasons of Face to Face with Kim Hill.
“As Diana Wichtel wrote in a 2012 Listener profile, Hill’s twin interviewing aptitudes are “rapport and evisceration, sometimes simultaneously … .”
Hill has known 2023 would be her last year on air since the beginning of it. Aware her daughter Hannah was expecting her second child, she signed a one-year contract saying she planned to go at the end of the year. RNZ hoped she would change her mind, eventually asking if money was a factor. “I said no, it’s not a question of money, and explained that it was personal circumstances, and they said all right then. It was a dignified agreement.”
Was her decision influenced by the state of RNZ? “No, absolutely not. I mean, RNZ comes and goes. It’s an icon and it’s a desperately important public broadcasting organ and it has its trials and tribulations, but actually, none of them affect me. You know, I do my thing. As long as I’ve got a good producer and a good operator in the studio, that’s all I need.”
She has been there a rather long time: 38 years in one media organisation is possibly some kind of record. Or possibly unhealthy.
“That’s the weird thing. It doesn’t seem so long. And because I work from home a lot, it’s not like it’s a 9-to-5 job. It’s a several-evenings-a-week-and-on-a-Saturday-morning job. And every Saturday is different. And before that, every Morning Report was different. Every Nine to Noon was different. So, it’s all been a rich tapestry, and it doesn’t feel like Radio New Zealand is being torn off my epaulettes. It feels like my raison d’être has, maybe, but I don’t feel like I’ve been institutionalised, per se.”
Balancing life & work
It hasn’t always been easy at RNZ. Though it wasn’t revealed at the time, Hill says she quit Nine to Noon in 2001 after “a horrendous experience” with a producer she won’t name. “It just shook me completely and I thought, ‘Okay, I have to leave now.’”
At the same time, Saturday Morning host John Campbell left due to his growing TV3 commitments. Hill got the job, going from 15 broadcast hours a week to four.
“And it felt divine. I didn’t have to get up at six in the morning. I didn’t have to sweat blood every night trying to stay on top of this and that. It just felt like a holiday. Of course it is not a holiday. But in contrast, it just felt fantastic.”
Her years from Morning Report to Nine to Noon were also fraught, personally. “It was a tricky time, both on Report and on Nine to Noon, with a break-up, solo parenthood and a lot of complications. So, I found work very therapeutic – I had to do it. I had to focus on it to the exclusion of everything else.”
Which might sound like workaholism … “No, not workaholism. I’m just a swot, basically. I’ve always been a swot. It doesn’t sound very glam, does it?”
What does she think she’s been like to work with? “I don’t waste words and people might think I’m being brusque when I’m not meaning to. I don’t have time to shag around, and if you get that, then everything’s fine.”
You know it will get a laugh before you ask, but given that her boss for much of Hill’s time at RNZ was former broadcaster Sharon Crosbie, did she ever have management aspirations? With all her experience, shouldn’t she be running the place by now?
“Oh, who would want to manage?” she says with a mad cackle. “I mean, it would be my idea of hell running other people. No, never. It would never have occurred to me. Never.
“It’s my observation that broadcasters and journalists don’t necessarily make good managers, not mentioning any names – and not talking about [RNZ chief executive] Paul Thompson.
“In the past, there have been some pretty high-profile broadcasting journalists of whom it was thought they would lend a veneer of exoticism to the management team, but it didn’t work out particularly well.
“I don’t even think I’m a very good journalist. I’m just quite good at talking on the radio. It’s about my limit.”
At which point you want to shout down the phone, “Oh, come on!” with the same emphasis Hill has employed over the years. She has won awards, notoriety, respect and the fear of generations of NZ politicians. Some must have got quite a surprise in recent years when Hill was sometimes injected back into the news cycle as relieving presenter and interviewer on Morning Report.
“I missed the cut and thrust of Morning Report because when there’s a story on, you know, it’s really good. But those five-minute interviews I find incredibly frustrating. And a good short interview is much harder to do than a longer one.”
From Mandela to Monica
Saturday Morning has mainly been a politician-free zone, save for the occasional former British or Australian prime minister flogging a memoir.
“That was a very strange interview – Theresa May, wasn’t it?” she says of her September encounter with one former resident of 10 Downing Street. “Well, you could just completely understand why they called her robotic because she just stayed completely on the level, did not react, failed to understand or answer the question, just stayed on the track and kept on going. Maybe that’s what you’ve got to be like.”
Also in her collection of world leaders past and present are Tony Blair (“I was never a huge fan … he was a bit knowingly charismatic”), John Howard, Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama.
She has interviewed every New Zealand prime minister – or aspiring prime minister – since Robert Muldoon, though she got the post-1984, put-out-to-pasture version of him.
Some of those politicos were on Face to Face with Kim Hill, her three-season TVNZ show in the early 2000s. That series featured one of her most famous trainwrecks – prominent maverick journalist John Pilger, who claimed Hill hadn’t done her research and called the interview a disgrace.
“The thing is, if Pilger wasn’t an egomaniac, he wouldn’t have done the work he’s done,” Hill told Wichtel in 2012. “I was keen to talk to him, but he turns out to be a prick. So it goes.”
Television, despite her other forays which included a stint on Fair Go and a trip to Cuba on Intrepid Journeys, was never her thing. She has no regrets her small-screen career didn’t last longer. Too much of a fidget, she says, couldn’t keep her face still, couldn’t steer an interview to a commercial break.
“I was terrible at television … I felt like a complete fraud.”
Still, on Face to Face, she could confront Winston Peters about his Islamophobia, David Lange about his mortality, Don Brash about his attitude to Māori – not for the only time – and regularly, then-PM Helen Clark about the issues of the day.
On radio, her first major derailment had been in the early days of Nine to Noon, when Jeffrey Archer, life peer, successful potboiler-writer and, later, jailed perjurer, took exception to Hill’s line of questioning. The visiting UK Conservative politician had been told by some new National Party chums that Hill would be gunning for him, so he got in with the retaliation first.
“I found that very bruising and weird and quite mad and I didn’t know what was going on,” she says about the memorable encounter 30 years later. “But I suppose I must have hardened up after that and so I didn’t particularly take them personally. It’s just sometimes you get off on the wrong foot with people and you can’t get back on the right foot. Most of the people who I have fallen out with are quite important people … and possibly self-important, and so if you haven’t got the right tone with some of those people then it just goes off the rails immediately. So maybe I’m a bit tone deaf.”
Unprompted, Hill brings up her 1999 Nine to Noon interview with Monica Lewinsky, who was on the promotional trail for Monica’s Story, written by Andrew Morton. Midway through, Hill memorably asked: “You performed fellatio on President Clinton the same day you exchanged your first words with him. In retrospect, was that a smart thing to do?”
“Well, that’s a really interesting way to put it,” replied Lewinsky before carrying on.
In retrospect, Hill doesn’t think the exchange was her finest hour. “The interview with Monica Lewinsky was, in today’s terms, absolutely terrible.”
Because? “Because, you know, I think I asked her whether she thought the best way to be an aide to President Clinton was to give him a blow job. I can’t remember, but it was pretty shocking. And, these days, we would interpret it as an imbalance of power. He would be seen as a predator; she would be seen as an innocent.
“It’s a bit like, I’m always very glad that I’m not on social media behaving terribly badly at a party 40 years ago, but that interview with Monica Lewinsky could constitute a me-behaving-badly moment because I don’t think I’d be able to listen to it now without feeling very ashamed of myself.”
More light than heat
Yes, like everyone who heard them at the time, Hill remembers the trainwrecks most. Honourable mentions of other derailments include English author Tony Parsons – whose first words to Hill after she read out something of his was, “You’ve got your head up your arse” – and Joyce McKinney, the subject of the Errol Morris documentary Tabloid, who was on quite a roll verbally until Hill implored, “Joyce, I’m losing the will to live”, and cut the interview short.
But any fair assessment of Hill’s career would be that it has produced far more light than heat. Among the best examples were her regular spots in her first decade of Saturday Morning with late physicist Sir Paul Callaghan. They were ahead of the curve when it came to the fusion of science and media. Their discussions became a book.
“It was great, because he was so good at putting things into simple language and Paul was overflowing with enthusiasm. So, it was a really lovely thing. Since then, science has become much more popularised, I think. I’m not attributing that to us, it’s just the fact that we are more at ease with scientific discussions perhaps than we were then.”
Talking of books, yes, publishers have been beating a path to her door to write a memoir. “They’re really nice and they’ve had good ideas, and they mean well, but, you know, I couldn’t even write you a column. And if I ever have the time, then would I have anything to say?
“There have been some fantastic memoirs like Diana Wichtel’s or Noelle McCarthy’s. I’ve read so many other good ones that I can’t even begin to think that I could possibly do it. You’d have to write a very good one, otherwise, why bother?”
If someone else was to attempt a biography? “I don’t care. I wouldn’t have anything to do with this because I just don’t think I’m fodder for it. It’s not like I’m Paul Holmes, is it? Whereas Paul was larger than life, I am smaller than life.
“After each Saturday Morning I just want to go to bed. Not because I’m tired but I just want to be underneath the duvet, very quiet. That’s not the stuff of which scintillating memoirs are written.”
A hard act to follow
The day after our interview, Hill’s third-to-last Saturday Morning is something of a classic. The interviewees include prominent Canadian activist writer Naomi Klein, on many things including far-left and far-right conspiracy theories and Gaza; Australian feminist writer and podcaster Clementine Ford, on why marriage is terrible for women; and celebrated English classicist Mary Beard (who, like Hill, was also born in Shropshire 68 years ago), talking about Roman emperors.
The guests’ respective new books amount to more than 1200 pages Hill has read in preparation. Among the locals are Rhodes Scholar and foster care children’s advocate Isaac Heron and GNS principal scientist Graham Leonard. Providing some light relief and banter is The Chase host Bradley Walsh, who asks Hill, “What are you going to do now that you’re finishing up?”
Hill: “I don’t know. I’ve got, you know, grandchildren, Brad.”
Walsh: “That’s brilliant. The great thing about it is you’ve got all that wonderful time now to spend with them as well.”
The four hours are high-brow and mid-brow, provocative and entertaining (especially Hill’s responses to listener feedback), zeitgeisty and historic. It would have been a good show to end on.
Hill will be a hard act to follow. If she was interviewing applicants to be her successor, what would she ask them? “I would ask them whether they realised that it was, in fact, a job that would take over their lives. Because I do think a lot of people think it’s a bit of a part-time thing and they’ll have time to do all sorts of other things. Well, they will, because you can curate your own working week up to a point. But you still have to read a lot and listen to a lot and it doesn’t leave a lot of time for other stuff. So, I would make it clear that it’s not a little hobby.”
So, plans for the November 25 finale? When she left Nine to Noon, Hill jokingly played Wind Beneath My Wings as a feigned thank-you to her listenership before cutting the song off a few bars in. It won’t work a second time.
“Genuinely, I haven’t thought about it. I’m hoping I have people to do that. Because I’m still in denial. People say, ‘God, how many shows have you got left?’ and I genuinely haven’t counted and don’t know because this next show is the only one that matters.”
As for when the “on air” light goes off and she swings open the heavy soundproof studio door for the last time? “I imagine I’ll go through the stages of grief, whatever they are, but I will feel, you know, probably start humming Is That All There Is? I’ll have an existential crisis and then I’ll get over it.”
And no, she won’t be providing any listener feedback to whoever’s next.
“When I stop, I will not listen to the radio on Saturday mornings. Because whoever it is is bound to be better than me, is my thinking, and I’ll just feel shit and I’ll think, ‘Oh my god, I might have wasted the last 500 years of my life.’”
Once again, there’s a temptation to shout, “Oh come on …” but a small baby is stirring, and we say our goodbyes.
Click here for Michele Hewitson’s essay on Kim Hill’s career.
Saturday Mornings with Kim Hill, final show, 8am, Saturday, November 25.
