From the archives: Broadcaster Susie Ferguson is the new host of RNZ’s “well-loved” Saturday Morning show, following Kim Hill’s departure in November. Ferguson is a familiar voice to RNZ listeners having presented Morning Report for eight years. More recently, she has worked as a senior journalist and presenter, on special projects and presenting programmes across RNZ, including filling in on Saturday Morning. In 2022, Ferguson talked to Michele Hewitson about stepping back from Morning Report, stress, menopause and being stern on politicians. That interview is revisited here.
Sometimes, in a taxi, say, people will say to Susie Ferguson after hearing her voice: “Do I know you from somewhere?” Or, “Have we met before?”
She is on the other end of the phone from Wellington. I know her, or think I do, from somewhere. We have, after all, met before, most mornings, via the wireless, where she has been for eight-and-a-half years, the calm, crisp, Scottish-accented co-host on RNZ National’s Morning Report.
The relationships we have with those voices on the wireless are weird, really. We do know what the face behind the voice looks like these days, but they are, as she says, different from the relationships we have, or think we have, with the faces on the telly.
A voice on the radio is disembodied, as is one on the phone. It’s funny, I say, hearing her off the radio. That she sounds, surprise, just like her. “People tell me that,” she says. Her wit is as crisp as her radio persona.
Our interview did not get off to the most auspicious of starts. This was entirely my fault. I had pushed some muting button on my phone, so I couldn’t hear her.
“Hello. Hello. Hello,” I shouted.
I un-pushed the button. “Can you hear me?”
She said, calmly, “I can.”
This was akin to a parody of a sober and sensible RNZ interview gone awry. Her interviews seldom go awry. I was flapped. She wasn’t.
It is her job to be unflappable. It is also, you suspect, pretty much her nature.
On Friday, October 7, she leaves Morning Report. There will undoubtedly be some sort of marking of the occasion on air, including some gentle RNZ-style ribbing. Unflappable? Just don’t mention the rats. Once, she and co-host Corin Dann were talking about rats on air and “people were texting with all their stories about rats. There had been reports of rats coming up through drains. Horrible. And we started getting all these amazing rat stories. And I think that is the only time I just completely lost it.”
She was reduced, she says, to “a quivering, sort of squeaking” wreck. That is an interesting image: the sober and sensible Susie Ferguson as a hysterical, giggling rat.
There was the time she had been chasing an interview in the UK all morning. “Finally, at about three minutes to nine, we got him live on the phone. And at this point … you’re coming up to the news and the pips at nine. You can’t run over the pips because that’s the cardinal sin. I started asking the first question, and that’s fine. And then I start asking the second question and I start hearing these dogs barking in the background. And he can’t hear me over the dogs.” Then the geezer asks her to hang on a minute. The dogs are barking because somebody is at his door and he has to go and answer the door. “And you can hear in the background him answering the door. And I think you can hear him saying something along the lines of, ‘I’m doing an interview.’ And I’m thinking, ‘No, you’re not.’ It’s about a minute till the top of the hour … and we start laughing. I very nearly started corpsing on air.”
Ferguson likes the relative anonymity of radio. She originally planned to work in the dramatic arts. She did a three-year degree at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. It is telling that she had no ambition to be on a stage. She wanted to direct until she found out that there is seldom a dime to be made in drama. She switched to a journalism degree. She is pragmatic.
She is at home behind a microphone. She hopes to make more podcasts. Her first, Unthinkable, about the death of the baby of friends, won the gold award for Personal Lives Podcast at the New York Festivals Radio Awards last year.
She will remain at RNZ National in a new role created for her as senior presenter and journalist. She thinks her time on Morning Report is about up. Her new job won’t involve getting up at 4am on the days she works in the studio. She works from home three days a week. She has been whacked hard by perimenopause, which is one reason for wanting to take on another role. “You know, some people sail through it … and other people just get smashed.”
There is another reason. “I don’t necessarily believe in a job for life. So I think once you’ve done something for eight-and-a-half years, [that’s] a decent crack, and it’s maybe someone else’s time.”
To be a Morning Reporter is to be a chameleon of sorts. You fit into the tone of whatever the story is. I reckon you can hear her smile, or frown, without ever having seen her do either. The job is part performance. She can be stern, when being stern is required.
One aspect of her life that incurs steely sternness is being nosy about her family. As it happened, her mother had been in touch with me about some orchid plants, and I took the opportunity to ask for some funny Susie stories. I thought I’d better let Ferguson know, after which I got a right flea in my ear from the RNZ publicist. When I tell Ferguson this, she says, “Good.” So, no funny Susie stories for us, then.
She grew up in Edinburgh – she gets messages from a serial complainer about her pronunciation of Edinburgh, which she finds amusing. She found the city parochially oppressive, like its weather. It was a place, she has said, where you were asked where you went to school and judged by the answer.
Where did she go to school? “I went to St George’s.”
Is that a posh school? “It’s a private all-girls school.”
So, posh. “You want to call it that.”
Is she posh? “I don’t know. I might be – what do you think?”
I’m not keen to offer an opinion, as I still have that flea in my ear.
She has a husband and two kids. Her husband “is not super keen about me talking about him and I’m not super keen talking about my personal relationships. Really, I mean, I’m not an elected official.”
She is as open about her health woes as she is closed about her family. There is the perimenopause. In 2017, she announced she would be taking six weeks leave for a hysterectomy to end the chronic pain from endometriosis she had suffered since her teens.
She decided to speak publicly for a few reasons, she says. “I was going to be off for six weeks – there can be speculation.” And, “we’re an organisation that tells stories. How about we tell our own? How about we just tell people the truth? If I was having surgery on my shoulder, I’d have said I was having surgery on my shoulder.”
She also suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, a legacy of her time as a war correspondent. In Iraq, in 2003, the vehicle she was in was shot at and had stones hurled at it. There was fear of the then-purported weapons of mass destruction. She did further stints in Kuwait, Afghanistan and other war zones; she reported on Sri Lanka after the tsunami and an earthquake in Pakistan.
Oddly, she experiences no anxiety at juggling the reporting of major news events: “The big earthquake, the natural disaster, … that doesn’t faze me. I stay very calm. I’m able to talk my way through it and, hopefully, make sense. I can process information – I suppose that’s my super power. But if I get stuck in traffic, and I’m going to an appointment and going to be late, then I find that quite stressful.”
Ferguson had become an accidental war correspondent. Does she know why journalists want to report on wars? “No. I think it’s probably because it’s exciting. But I remember a soldier once saying to me that war was 95% waiting around and 5% shitting yourself. And that’s quite a good barometer.”
She and her husband came to New Zealand for a break from her accidental adventures. There were family connections. The Fergusons emigrated from Scotland in the 1860s and landed up in Gore, possibly best known for that distinctive Scottish burr. Her grandfather taught at the University of Otago. He and his wife and their two sons, one of whom is her father, returned to Scotland when the kids were young.
New Zealand would provide a safe and happy haven for a new generation of Fergusons: she and her then-new husband settled here in 2009.
So, safe and happy, but she doesn’t think PTSD ever completely goes away. Over the years, she has taken anti-anxiety and anti-depression medication. She does yoga, which she finds helpful. She walks her dog, a schnoodle named Rainbow. I imagined she got some strange looks when she called “Here, Rainbow. Good dog,” at the park. She said, crisply: “People tend to think it is quite a nice name.”
It is not her job to be thought to be nice, or, conversely, nasty. It is not her job to be liked or disliked. The Spinoff’s Duncan Greive wrote of her interview with opposition leader Christopher Luxon – after Luxon was pinged for posting on his social media account that he was in Te Kuiti when he was actually in Hawai’i – that her grilling of him was disproportionate to the scale of the alleged crime. She says, “I’m probably a friend and an enemy of all politicians of all stripes at various times.”
She feels no sense of ownership of the chair she occupies five mornings a week. “I was actually talking about this with Corin this morning – that it’s not my programme or our programme.” They just happen to be the current guardians, and their role is simple: “Asking questions that, hopefully, New Zealanders want to get the answers to. Personalities perhaps come and go.”
But it’s kind of is their show, isn’t it? There is certainly a perception that RNZ has become more personality-driven in recent years. “I don’t know about personality-driven. I mean, there are certainly high-profile people who are on RNZ … I think, inevitably, as you get people who’ve been on the TV, they do have perhaps a bigger name recognition.
“When I started my career [in the UK], it was much more that you stayed in print or in broadcasting, whereas here there’s much more movement – which is actually, I think, a real plus for the industry here.”
I wonder what you can tell about her from her on-air personality. “I don’t know. The feedback will tell me that I’m everything under the sun. Morning Report is a serious programme. The news is not usually cheerful, uplifting, positive stories wall-to-wall. So, people probably think I’m quite serious. And they maybe think I like detail. That’s one side. And sometimes you get to do something that’s a bit more fun. You can have a bit more of a laugh with it.”
I still couldn’t make up my mind whether she was posh or not. A bit, maybe. Or what you can tell about her from listening on the radio. I decided to employ a scientifically reliable character test. People are said to be like their dogs. I investigated what schnoodles are like, and they are “charming, funny and smart, and their alert nature makes them excellent watchdogs. They typically have a curly coat that must be clipped regularly.”
Other than describing them as “charming, in their stern fashion”, that’ll about do.
This article was originally published in the October 1, 2022 issue of the NZ Listener.
As part of the review of Saturday Morning, RNZ is considering whether the show could benefit from a co-presenter being introduced.
