spinofflive
The AM Show
Bernadine Oliver-Kerby, Ryan Bridge, Melissa Chan-Green and William Waiirua host Three’s new AM show. Image: Supplied/Tina Tiller

BusinessFebruary 7, 2022

Breakfast TV wars: Is ‘ruthless’ Melissa Chan-Green the X factor that will help AM win?

The AM Show
Bernadine Oliver-Kerby, Ryan Bridge, Melissa Chan-Green and William Waiirua host Three’s new AM show. Image: Supplied/Tina Tiller

New look, new hosts, new vibe. From Tuesday, Three’s AM is taking on TVNZ’s Breakfast head-to-head. Can it hold its own?

Melissa Chan-Green is a 15-year TV news veteran, a calming screen presence known for being stoic in the face of chaos. According to her friend and new morning show co-host Ryan Bridge, there’s another side to the presenter that viewers haven’t yet had the chance to explore.

“She’s fucking funny,” says Bridge. “She can be ruthless. She can be hilarious    there’s a whole different side to Mel that maybe people haven’t seen.”

Bridge and everyone else putting Three’s morning show reboot AM together have high hopes that Chan-Green has the X Factor that will bolster the show’s fortunes when it debuts on Tuesday. 

No pressure, but it needs the boost: AM is up against the bigger, flashier Breakfast, the consistent ratings winner that returned last week with its superstar line-up that includes the veteran broadcaster John Campbell, plenty of pep and the strangest, most expensive set ever seen on a New Zealand morning news show. 

Don’t count AM out early. Joining Chan-Green and Bridge on their four-strong team is news junkie Bernadine Oliver-Kerby, who will host her own half-hour show at 5.30 before joining AM at 6am, and social media star William Waiirua, the show’s roving weather presenter.

This, it seems, is Three’s biggest shot yet at putting together a fully-fledged rival for Breakfast after more than a decade of attempts. It entered the morning TV fray in 2007 with Sunrise, Carly Flynn and Oliver Driver’s upbeat, lightweight offering that lasted three years. Paul Henry then gave Breakfast a run for its money with his self-titled 2015 show which aired simultaneously on Radio Live.  

Since then, The Am Show’s Duncan Garner, Mark Richardson and Amanda Gillies fronted a programme that felt curiously out of time, yet sparked continual headlines over their increasingly opinionated hot takes. Stuff reporters kept a close eye on the show,  writing up everything from Richardson’s views on Covid-19, to speculation over his bloodshot eyes.

Mark Richardson and Amanda Gillies on The AM Show, April 2021 (Image: screengrab).

With its latest reboot, AM’s Chan-Green is the mystery presence. She’ll be letting her personality shine – and that has everyone excited. After stints as a 6pm reporter, Three’s European correspondent, and fronting the weekend news, she’s stepping into a role more challenging than anything she’s done before: three hours of live, unscripted TV every weekday. 

In short, she can’t hide. She doesn’t want to. “With age … I’ve let go of caring what people think about me so much,” she says. Her two year-old son helped change her stance. She cares less about the haters. “With kids, it puts a new perspective on what’s important and where my energy should go. I’m more comfortable in my skin.”

Bridge, her long-time friend, is a big fan. He’s hoping to bring out Chan-Green’s “ruthless” side with plenty of gentle teasing. “There’s a lot about Mel that’s very different to me,” he says. “I’m not saying I’m not an empathetic and warm person (but) she’s all of those things – you can see it all over her face. I’m so excited for (viewers) to see.”

But what will they see? Three’s publicity team has kept the show’s new look under wraps. Despite The Spinoff being invited for a set visit that was later canned because of Discovery’s Covid visitor rules, no photos of AM’s re-design were supplied. Promised rehearsal videos remain unsent. “There’s a desk,” promises Bridge. “And a couch.”

Instead, there’s a single publicity photo to go by. With gleaming grins and airbrushed skylines, it gives the impression AM will be a world away from its previous incarnation. Ask Chan-Green and Bridge what their show’s going to be like and they’ll shake their heads: after just two rehearsals, they still don’t know. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that,” admits Bridge.

AM
Bernadine Oliver-Kerby, Ryan Bridge, Melissa Chan-Green and William Waiirua, the new hosts of AM. Image: Supplied

What the pair does have, says Chan-Green, is chemistry. It was there right from their first Zoom meeting last year. “I feel really comfortable sitting next to him,” she says, looking at Bridge. She believes you can over-rehearse. Instead, it’s better to trust your experience. “You can have all the bells and whistles, if you don’t have the content and the chemistry, it doesn’t really matter.”

It’s a strange time to start: with omicron case numbers rising, AM can’t have studio guests, so up to 12 interviews an episode could be conducted via Zoom. Bridge isn’t a fan of video interviews, calling it “so ugly … the worst thing to happen to television”. Showing their differences, Chan-Green feels the opposite. “It allows us to reach people you normally wouldn’t.”

Another issue: Garner says he quit The AM Show because of the “brutal” hours, and Chan-Green admits her weekday alarm goes off at the last possible minute: 2.40am. Why are they doing this? For Bridge, whose background is in radio, it’s because he’s a live TV addict. “It’s a rollercoaster, the highs and the lows … the adrenaline’s pumping through you.” Chan-Green says she’ll finally have time to read her son bedtime stories, something that was impossible when fronting 6pm bulletins.

How will they know if it’s working? It’s about building a community, says Bridge. A good show is when “you’ve got to the bottom of something and people watching are thinking, ‘that’s fucking awesome.'” As an example, he highlights an episode of The AM Show that attempted to find New Zealand’s worst feet. “We had grandmas and mums sending in photos of their ugly toes,” he says. “You’ve created this random little community for the morning.”

Chan-Green, who spent last year working nights, says episodes like that helped her cope with Auckland’s five-month lockdown. “Every morning I’d turn on The AM Show,” she says. “Connection to people is really important at this time.” She’s a major morning TV fan and over summer, she missed it. She hopes she can provide the same kind of service to others spending too much time at home.

“All we can do is be us, and it will naturally be different, and we have to hope that people choose us.”

AM screens on Three every weekday from 6-9am.

Keep going!
(Image: Tina Tiller)
(Image: Tina Tiller)

BusinessFebruary 7, 2022

The deep unfairness of New Zealand public holidays

(Image: Tina Tiller)
(Image: Tina Tiller)

If you work weekdays you’re probably enjoying a day off today – and if you are working, you’re likely getting time and a half. But a surprisingly large section of our workforce doesn’t get either. Charlotte Muru-Lanning explains.

Public holidays are important. They help nourish mental health, they improve worker productivity and, especially in the case of Waitangi Day, they mark significant events. And who doesn’t love an extra day off?

Most of us are used to 11 public holidays a year, which means a paid day off, or time and a half for those who have to work. This year there’s a new official public holiday, Matariki, bringing the total number of annual public holidays to 12.

But here’s something you may not know: A bunch of full-time workers in New Zealand completely miss out on up to seven public holidays each year. 

That’s because of an anomaly in the Holidays Act. If you work Monday to Friday you’re guaranteed all public holidays, because even if the holiday falls on the weekend – when you usually wouldn’t work – your public holiday is ‘Mondayised’; it gets shifted to Monday. These workers are the lucky ones.

You’re a little less lucky if you don’t work weekdays. If you don’t work Mondays, for example, you’re likely to miss out on more than five public holiday entitlements this year. This is particularly an issue in industries like retail and hospitality, where it’s not unusual to work Tuesday to Saturday. In the restaurant industry, it’s common for restaurants to be shut on Mondays, so none of the staff work.

But why do these people miss out on holidays? Unite Union national secretary John Crocker says it’s due to both legislative and societal changes. “If you look back in New Zealand’s labour history, we were predominantly a Monday to Friday workforce,” he says. Before the 1980s, it was rare to find a shop open on the weekends; in fact it was illegal for most retailers to trade on Saturday or Sunday. It was only when the National government passed the Shop Trading Hours Amendment Act in 1980 that Saturday trading was allowed – despite campaigns against it from the Shop Employees union. In 1989, trading on Sundays was made legal too. But even then, when people did work on the weekend, “penal rates were built in” Crocker says, so they were compensated for missing out on public holidays. These penal rates were removed under the Employment Contracts Act of 1991.

Back in the 80s, Crocker says, “those missing out were a minority”. But now there’s a growing workforce who work outside of the traditional working week. Statistics New Zealand’s 2018 survey of working life found that two thirds of employed people had worked at a non-standard time (any hours worked outside of 7am to 7pm, Monday to Friday) at least once in the past four weeks. The most commonly worked non-standard time was during the day on Saturday. Considering this, the fact that public holidays are still based on a Monday to Friday working week starts to seem archaic.

In the restaurant industry, it’s common for restaurants to stay shut on Mondays. (Photo: Getty Images)

Crocker was on the Holidays Act Taskforce that reviewed that Holidays Act in 2019. He says one of the reasons the law doesn’t account for non-traditional work weeks is that those who create legislation tend to be weekday workers themselves, and so are less likely to recognise anomalies in weekend workers are treated. The public holiday issue also reflects the lack of political representation for people who work non-standard hours. 

Crocker says Unite Union is planning to lobby for a change to the legislation to ensure all employees benefit from a minimum number of public holidays, or get days in lieu based on the number of days per week they work.

Change is imperative, he reckons. “New Zealand society has changed and we are more of a 24/7, seven days a week workforce now,” he says. “The legislation should reflect that”.

The current discrepancy is also an equity issue, he notes, with young, female, and Māori and Pacific workers more likely to be shortchanged by the current rules around public holidays. 

He adds that while some industries have been able to negotiate better public holiday arrangements by unionising, a change of legislation is important to protect the most vulnerable workers who can’t unionise.

David Williamson, senior hospitality and tourism lecturer at AUT, agrees that change is “absolutely needed”, arguing that hospitality and tourism is too often overlooked when employment legislation is written. He worries that even with a change of legislation, a lack of enforcement could mean employers will fail to comply with the new law. 

In the years following reports of widespread non-compliance with the Holidays Act, many larger employers resolved the issue through worker remediation – but there are still huge parts of the workforce that haven’t, Crocker notes, and that’s a bad sign for any future changes to the act.

To Williamson, improving holiday entitlements would be an easy win for the hospitality industry, which is suffering from intense worker shortages and high employee turnover. Giving hospo workers the same number of holidays as Monday-to-Friday workers would encourage more people into the industry, he says.

Under the current system, too many in the workforce are missing out on holidays the rest of us take for granted. As the introduction of the Matariki holiday this year shows, the government has the power to give us a break from grind – to make our working lives a little better. And surely we’d all enjoy our long weekends even more if they were fairer.

But wait there's more!