You contemplate the list of jobs Alastair Carruthers has now and has had and then you contemplate having a little lie-down. He does not do little lie-downs. He hasn’t got time. He is 58 but could be 108 in job years. All of his jobs are serious jobs. He is the director of Homeland NZ Enterprises, the restaurant, cooking school and “food embassy” he co-founded with his bloke, the famous chef Peter Gordon. He and Gordon have been together for 14 years, he thinks. He calls Gordon his “boyfriend”, or BF, which is much sweeter and much nicer than “partner”, isn’t it?
Let the lie-down commence. He is also chair of the NZ Film Commission, which he says is most definitely not a conflict of interest with his role as chair of the TVNZ board, despite some rumblings. He recused himself from the NZFC decision to approve $800,000 in public funding for a $3.2 million documentary film on former PM Jacinda Ardern.
He is a trustee of Auckland’s Cornwall Park. He is the director of Carruthers Consulting. That is not an exhaustive list. Perhaps his most serious job, as of July last year, is the TVNZ role.
He has taken jobs that have made him gulp. It is no use asking whether he is currently taking some rather large gulps. TVNZ is consulting staff over the proposed cutting of up to 68 jobs, including some news roles.
I knew, and he knew that I knew, that as chair of TVNZ he wouldn’t be able to tell me anything. Just as he was unable to tell me anything beyond what the board has already announced relating to the looming demise of Three’s Newshub and the almost certain loss of up to 300 jobs. The implication from the owner of Newshub, Warner Bros Discovery, appears to be that TVNZ and RNZ should ride in on a pair of white horses to save the day. (Glen Kyne, Warner Bros Discovery’s senior vice president and head of networks, expressed disappointment that the TVNZ board had discussed the proposal for a shared news gathering service. But, he said: “...would be passing on it without any further discussion.”).
Carruthers said, a number of times, that he didn’t want to be rude. I don’t think he could be rude if he tried. He has very good manners without being in any way mannered. But “I’m not going to comment on it, Michele. I’m really sorry. I just can’t do that.” That would be overstepping his role? “Because we’ve already made a statement, yeah.”
He did say, with sincerity, about Newshub: “I think it’s terrible for the people involved, those really amazing journalists there. I feel incredibly sorry for them.” What a funny job he’s got. He would no doubt like to express the same sentiments about those who will be similarly affected at TVNZ.
Act leader David Seymour is gunning for TVNZ. “You’ll have to ask him.” There may have been a flicker of a grin. Or I may have wanted there to be such a flicker.
“The problem with doing this interview – and I almost called it off, and, please, this is truly to respect you – I thought this was just going to be a general profile on me. And, of course, the context has changed. I know you want a bunch of stuff, stuff that I’m not going to go near.”
Then he laughed and said, cheerfully, as he well might, “But you gave it a good try!”
A last good try: Is Shortland Street in peril? What do you think, he said? Good guess. He said, “I’m not going to say.”
He is a serious fellow with an infectious enjoyment of the sillier things in life. Here are some silly things: his nicknames. I tell him one– and this is news to him – Chairman of the Cheese Board. This, I was told, is because he is known for presiding over the cheeses at Homeland. “I’m pretty keen on cheese. Peter seems to think that if we were going down at sea and if there was a choice between a block of cheese and him, I’m taking the cheese.”
He found out after leaving one of many previous CEO roles that his nickname was Big Gay Al after the flamboyant gay guy in South Park. He loves that.
His youngest nephew calls him Uncle Owl because he thinks his uncle looks like an owl. He looks like a very kindly laughing owl. Really, do not take on a tussle with an owl no matter how jolly an owl it appears. You can’t win. An owl wins by simply shutting its beak and refusing to answer the question you have just asked it.
His is “absolutely not a political job. One of the most important things for me and all the board members is to have absolute neutrality.”
He and Gordon went to Jacinda Ardern and Clark Gayford’s wedding. They are friends. I fished for the names of other politicians he counts as friends. He wasn’t going to take that bit of cheese. “I’ve got numerous friends from across the political spectrum. From right across,” he said, owlishly.
We were talking on Zoom. One good thing about talking to somebody on Zoom: you sometimes get to have a bit of a nosy around their house. Carruthers and the BF live in a quietly stylish and fairly flash apartment in downtown Auckland’s Wynyard Quarter. They have what might be described, in curatorial terms, as a shed load of art.
Behind Carruthers is a 2021 work, Vespers, by Gretchen Albrecht, from her Eight Hours series. I am supposed to be looking at its owner but I can’t stop looking at the Albrecht. When I tell him how wonderful it is, he wants me to tell him exactly what it is that I like so much about it. He is not being an art pedant. One of his skills is explaining complex ideas to “lay people”. He has turned the tables on me. He wants a lay person to explain a complex idea to him. He is not doing this to show off how clever he is but it does show off how clever he is.
He is most certainly not an art tosser. When I say the white brush strokes look like feathers falling from the sky, he says, “Yes. Or I’ve got a giant fascinator.” Once this image is suggested, you can’t stop seeing it. He does look as though he is wearing a giant fascinator. You can imagine him trotting off to the races in it. He would look very fetching.
He and the BF chef share their place with two dogs. Of course, they have exotic dogs. Pixie and Fiver are basenji dogs. They are the descendants of ancient African hunting dogs, given as precious gifts to pharaohs of Egypt. They are depicted in hieroglyphics. They can’t bark but they can yodel. Fiver is named after every three-legged Staffordshire bull terrier living with street people the couple encountered while living in London’s East End.
Pixie and Fiver have matching cages, on the tops of which are meticulously folded red blankets. I suggested that they actually sleep on the bed. “I’m not going to tell you where they sleep. They love to dive in but we keep that under control.” I think this was said hopefully rather than with any degree of conviction. Basenjis are fastidious about cleanliness. From my brief Zoom nosy around, I’m prepared to hazard a guess that the dogs’ owners resemble their pets in this regard.
Family heartache
Here’s the bad thing about talking to somebody on Zoom: if the person you are talking to becomes upset, you can’t do the human thing and put your hand on their shoulder. I obviously had no intention of upsetting him, but my questions did. He apologised for being upset. I apologised for upsetting him. He left the room for a few minutes.
We had been talking about his family and how, after he told his parents that he was gay, he and his father didn’t speak for nearly 10 years. “You know, he grew up in a time when gay people got arrested. It was just full of shame. And my parents had a quite deep religious faith.”
Then one day his dad phoned and said that he and Carruthers’ mum would like to come and stay with him and his then partner the next weekend. His father said, “I guess you’re wondering why I’m here. And it’s to say, ‘I’m sorry. I got it wrong.’” And then, within a year, his father was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer and died. He was only 67. “And the reason that I’m sad is because I didn’t let them back into my life quickly enough. I knew he loved me. And all of it was sorted out but it was just so short … it’s just that we had wasted years, you know.”
His mother, Muriel, is still alive. His father’s name was Ian. But he and his sisters called them Ruby and Hudson after the cook and the butler in the telly show Upstairs, Downstairs. His younger sister, Fiona, who did her PhD in gene splitting in Switzerland, died in a dementia ward at the age of 53. She had a neurological cancer for more than half her life. “She lived an incredibly optimistic and beautiful life.” His other sister, Catherine, is a clinical paediatric dietician.
All of these things have, obviously, shaped him and they are also what makes him push himself to do hard things. As does being “queer”, he says. “In my case, at least, the absolute knowledge that at the age of 21, one-third of voting New Zealanders signed a petition to keep me a criminal. And I will never, ever forget what [the passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Act 1986] was like, to be decriminalised. But also, many people still wanted me to be a criminal. I know that a lot of my drive came from that time, to outperform my bias. I just had to do better. And prove some people wrong.”
It helps that he’s brainy. His whole family was brainy and hard workers. Muriel, who originally did clerical jobs, worked for a time as a private secretary at Parliament. Ian, who never went to secondary school, worked his way up to becoming “a really well-respected executive in the cement industry”.
I had been trying, and struggling, to figure out exactly what he is. He went to university to study music. He didn’t want to go to university but his father wanted his kids to get a higher education. His son dithered – quite possibly the only time you could ever use that particular word to describe him – about what to study.
His father helpfully said he believed there was no money to be made in subjects ending in “ology”. But he fairly quickly realised he was never going to be good enough to become a professional musician. During a holiday he got a job as a sort of delivery boy, running messages between the then director-general of social welfare, John Grant, and Ann Hercus, the then minister of social welfare.
He went off to North Carolina to study how to teach writing, then returned to write speeches for Phil Goff and eventually became his executive assistant. He ended up at law firm Chapman Tripp as its chief executive. Ended up is about right because he regards that thing known as a career “as a verb”. He means he’s careered about.
This is an apt image. And an appropriately silly one. You can see him careering about, wearing his giant fascinator, hopefully.
