Calum Henderson helps the bloke from 800 Words finish writing his column, then sends it to three New Zealand editors to see if they’d give him a job.

The main character of TV One’s Thursday night comedy-drama 800 Words is a middle-aged Australian bloke called George Turner, who has just moved to a small town in New Zealand with his teenage kids for a fresh start after his wife died.

He’s apparently an extremely big deal weekly newspaper columnist in Sydney, so much so that he didn’t seem to have had any other form of employment. His editor Skypes him to say his readers are begging for his column to come back. So he does.

Sprinkled throughout the first episode are shots of him tapping away at his MacBook Pro, slowly reading aloud as he types like some kind of murderer. Yeah sure he’s popular – but is he any good?

I wanted to pitch his column to some New Zealand newspaper and magazine editors and see if they’d give him a job. But when I transcribed every word he’d written in episode one, it only came to around 300 words. There was a beginning, some middle, and an end. It didn’t make a jot of sense. I had to ghostwrite the other 500 words myself.

Stopping short of setting up a fake email account and trying to fully Catfish them, we instead sent three esteemed New Zealand editors the column and asked them to reply as if they’d received it ‘on spec’ from George Turner himself. Here’s the column (ghostwritten additions in italics) and, below, the responses.

George Turner: On rash decisions and new beginnings

Logically, the best place to start the story of the new beginning, is at the beginning. But where is the beginning?

I guess the beginning is that I’m back. I went away for a while because our lives changed, and decisions needed to be made. And the rule about decisions – especially big, life-changing ones – is that opinion is always divided.

So it was when I told my kids – Miss 17 and Mr 14 – that I had bought a house in New Zealand. “OMG Dad!” sighed moody Miss 17, “WTF!” She was firmly in ‘Team No Way’. Mr 14 barely glanced up from his computer game. Later, he told me he backed my decision, but I could tell he wasn’t sold on the idea. Call it parent’s intuition.

The truth was, ever since their mother died, our lives just stopped. If our family was a computer, she had been the hard drive. Without her, no matter how many times I pressed the reset button, the damn thing just wouldn’t boot up.

I looked at my kids, and I began to reminisce about my own childhood. I yearned for a return to those endless summers at the beach, in a small town called Weld on the West Coast of the North Island, Aotearoa. On a whim, I searched Google and found a real estate listing for the exact house my family used to rent back in the day. It was fate.

The experts on this stuff reckon some of the most stressful things in life revolve around death, buying and selling real estate, emigrating, and international travel. Only an idiot would do all these things at the same time.

I am that idiot. And things didn’t exactly get off to the best start. Within seconds of arriving in Weld, our rental car was written off by a runaway artwork. The fire brigade, ambulance and tow truck were called out – which is to say half the town were there. What a way to introduce yourself!

Things only went from bad to worse. If I thought the car I rented off a woman in town was a pile of junk, it was only because I hadn’t seen my new house yet. I was beyond livid. You know what they say about real estate agents – there’s nothing ‘real’ about them and they never ‘(e)state’ the truth!

In short, the place was a wreck. No power, no wi-fi. Uninhabitable. It wasn’t even the one I had spent summers at all those years ago after all.  What had I been thinking?!

When you make big, life-changing decisions, you get used to the voices of opposition, and tune out the loud ones. Then there is a little voice in your head that says you’ve made the biggest mistake ever. Then you pray for a silver lining.

I went looking for that silver lining at the beach, in the roaring surf. I wanted the salty water to wash away all the muddled thoughts that were clouding my mind. I wanted to catch the perfect wave, literally and metaphorically. I nearly drowned.

Sometimes with big decisions, there is a need to go backwards, to reclaim the things you’ve lost along the way.

What had I lost? How about everything. The love of my life, for starters, but also my surfboard, and perhaps also my dignity. The ship carrying all of our belongings from Sydney sunk. So had my heart. I looked at my kids, and thought, strewth, have I ruined their lives?

Then it hit me like the wave that knocked me off my surfboard. I hadn’t lost everything at all. Far from it, in fact. I still had my kids. And they still had me. We were – and we always will be – a family. And now, we were members of a small and tight-knit local community with an improbably high number of beautiful single women.

I guess where you live – and why you live there – are secondary to who you’re living with. Because, after all, they’re the most important things in life.

So I find myself in this strange little country at the arse end of the world, surrounded by strange people, with a whole new set of responsibilities.

And at the end of the day, when a new beginning has begun, it’s the new people in your world who define a new start. They make your rash decision stand or fall. It always comes back to the people in your life.
I now live in another country, in a town called Weld, which is where my rash decision has led us. Opinion is still divided as to the wisdom of this decision, but for now this dead-end town on the edge of nowhere feels right. Like home.

Rose Hoare, former editor of Sunday magazine, replies:

Nicola Legat, former editor of Metro, replies:

Dear Mr Turner

Thanks so much for sending in a sample of your writing and suggesting that Metro might like to run a monthly ‘Report from Weld’ column.

You and your children are obviously coming to terms with all sorts of confronting issues there, and I’m glad it’s mostly working out.  But I’m afraid that I found the column pretty superficial. Have you tried Woman’s Day?

Kind regards

Nicola Legat

Editor

Click here to watch 800 Words on TVNZ OnDemand.

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