spinofflive
Photos: Getty Images; additional design by Archi Banal
Photos: Getty Images; additional design by Archi Banal

OPINIONMediaApril 7, 2022

Farewell, Ashley Bloomfield. We knew you far too well

Photos: Getty Images; additional design by Archi Banal
Photos: Getty Images; additional design by Archi Banal

In the early days of the first lockdown, Anna Rawhiti-Connell penned a column that fuelled the emerging mania around a certain public servant. For that she is truly sorry.

On April 1, 2020, the most deranged piece of writing I have ever penned was published. The date holds no irony.

The product of a diseased mind, “The Ashley Bloomfield Show – an ode to Ashley Bloomfield” hit Newsroom, then social media, where it exploded. It went about as viral as a column in Aotearoa can go. Tess Nichol included it in a round up of our infatuation with him for Slate

In it, I wrote:

I tweet about Ashley Bloomfield as if I am invoking an ancient protection charm. As if urgent, punctuation-free tweets about Ashley Bloomfield will keep Ashley Bloomfield safe. Every tweet is a feather in an invisible korowai, wrapped around Ashley Bloomfield, protecting him from the Rona. I fear what will happen if Ashley Bloomfield is ill and unable to reassure us every day at 1pm with nothing but calm factual statements and nice hair. Ashley Bloomfield is a balm for our furrowed brows.

This was not the writing of a well-adjusted person. I referred to Ashley Bloomfield by his full name throughout and it became a thing people referenced online. For one last outing and for old time’s sake, I will adhere to this here. 

The 2020 piece was the writing of someone with a deadline who was losing her mind. As a columnist in lockdown, who only had a husband and dog to talk to and no world to observe, I was examining every single thought and contemplating whether I could get 800 words out of it. 

Remember this meme format? (Image: Supplied)

We weren’t even a fortnight into the first of several lockdowns in Auckland when this piece was published – the jaded, critical husk beasts we were to become still a lockdown or two away. It was early on in the pandemic. I had watched a lot of pandemic movies and documentaries including the Netflix one that basically predicted the whole thing (no one talks about this enough) and was legitimately worried about dying and anarchy. As much as the information conveyed at the 1pm press conferences was important and good, I also tuned in to make sure the TV channels were still broadcasting. The beginning of anarchy, and the descent into eating our pets, is always visualised as dead air on the telly in the movies.

I had also changed my Twitter name to “The Ashley Bloomfield Fan Club”, which I now have to shamefully admit was more of a bit than anything. I received a phone call from a journalist at the Guardian asking me to speak in my capacity as the president of that fan club and had to quickly backtrack and confess it was a joke. She granted me the dignity of reporting that I had “jokingly” changed my handle, but I am still named in the piece as the unofficial leader of the nation’s Bloomfield devotees. My first mention as a writer in the Guardian and I am quoted as saying that Ashley Bloomfield “has nice hair”. A true career highlight. 

I remain forever grateful to Mediawatch’s Hayden Donnell who granted me further dignity by  putting “self-aware” in brackets when describing my paean to Ashley Bloomfield in a piece that began to chart the backlash against Ashley Bloomfield’s popularity. But my chickens were coming home to roost and my contribution to the mania that emerged around this previously little-known public servant remains one of my pandemic regrets.

I regret it for two reasons – and that’s hard to admit regarding a very popular piece – but with news of Ashley Bloomfield’s resignation yesterday, it’s probably time to come clean and reflect on that strange, strange time. Columnists seldom get the chance to apply a retrospective eye to things they’ve written because they are so “of the zeitgeist”, but we do impact cumulative effect.

It was only last week that I wrote about my concerns about the celebrity politician and our role in not making the call to public service seem like a trip to high-risk hell. Ashley Bloomfield may be our first and last celebrity public servant. I sincerely believe he didn’t ask for, or want, the pop-culture status he obtained. His tenure may serve as a cautionary tale to others. His resignation and the resignation of other senior officials at the Ministry of Health perhaps points to the toll such public profile takes. It is highly unusual for public servants to be as well known as Ashley Bloomfield, let alone inspire idolatry unseen since the days of the Romans. I’m sorry to all the other leaders of government ministries and departments but I don’t know your names because I live in Auckland, not Wellington, and none of you were unexpectedly called to the podium of truth to steer us through a pandemic. I know a few public servants and I don’t think any of them enter this arena with fame in mind. 

An Ashley Bloomfield hand towel and t-shirt (Images: stfabiola.co.nz/fortee.co.nz)

I imagine there were days Ashley Bloomfield went home and wondered “WTAF” as cushions, candles and bags were made with his face on them and Twitter whip-rounds were done to buy flowers for a highly paid public servant with gift register obligations. Ashley Bloomfield handled all of this remarkably well (directing the funds raised to charity), but there are few public servants who’ve even had to contemplate that reality, let alone develop a plan to deal with it. If he ever had knowledge of the erotic fan fiction that developed with him in a starring role, he never let on.  

The celebrity status I contributed to undoubtedly made Ashley Bloomfield’s job more difficult. It also made the work of those whose job it is to hold the public sector to account more difficult, and that is my second regret. As he gained gargantuan celebrity status, anyone daring to criticise the Ministry of Health was set upon. This was particularly evident in the way people responded to journalists asking questions at the 1pm press conferences. As it turns out, many of them were on the money, particularly questioning around the vaccination rollout. A healthy democracy requires that we be able to hold the government and its ministries to account, especially during times of high anxiety and even higher levels of government control over our lives. Two years and one week on from my column about Ashley Bloomfield, I think it’s crucial we try to remove some of the lenses we had when we were freaked out and relying on the comfort we found in clear and consistent communications from the government and its officials. 

In order to move on, we need to shed some of the very natural and obvious grudges we developed during those times when things felt more perilous and dangerous. I spent several months cringing on Twitter after my Ashley Bloomfield piece was published as I watched journalists defend their actions against a prevailing wind I contributed to.

Scrutiny is necessary, important and justified, and we must find a way to allow it to sit comfortably with us, but that doesn’t diminish Ashley Bloomfield’s service over the last two years. He probably expected that scrutiny, and in his responses to criticism you see a man doing his job. I doubt he expected the daily scrutiny or the pitfalls of celebrity status. His tenure must come as close to a tour of duty as work in the public service ever could. If we think we’ve aged five years in two, I imagine Ashley Bloomfield feels he’s aged 10.  

In my column in 2020, I said I’d spontaneously combust if I ever met Ashley Bloomfield. I think now, I’d simply shake his hand and say thank you like a normal person who has, as he has, lived through an extraordinary two years where we have all changed, made enormous sacrifices and felt immense pressure. Ashley Bloomfield has handled his mantle extraordinarily well in the most difficult of times. It deserves noting.

So farewell Bloomie with the good hair. We thought we knew you far too well and I’m sorry for that.

Keep going!
A host of sleepy hosts (Image / Archi Banal)
A host of sleepy hosts (Image / Archi Banal)

MediaApril 4, 2022

How do our breakfast broadcasters hack the horrific hours?

A host of sleepy hosts (Image / Archi Banal)
A host of sleepy hosts (Image / Archi Banal)

They have to be on air and presentable before most of us have even woken up. So how do they do it? Stewart Sowman-Lund asks some of our breakfast radio and TV stars about their early morning routine.

On her Today FM breakfast show last week, Tova O’Brien revealed the secret to her being broadcast-ready by 6.30am. Unsurprisingly, it involved a lot of coffee. At least three long blacks before 8am, to be precise. This sparked a fairly strong reaction from her co-workers, the audience and, in me, a desire to know more. Three coffees before 8am when you’re starting work before dawn has come anywhere near to cracking seems… perfectly reasonable to me. But is that how all our brekky stars manage it? And is there a better way to feel refreshed before the sun rises? I set out to find out more. 

O’Brien admits she’s never been a morning person, but reckons she’s settled into the new hours on Today FM surprisingly well. That being said, it’s only been two weeks since her show debuted. “I’m usually very late to bed and as late as possible to wake,” O’Brien tells me. She has her first coffee around 4am – “it was 3am last week” – then smashes back “a metric shit tonne of Berocca”. 

Tova O’Brien before and after her morning coffee – probably (Photo / Today FM)

Now she’s trying to curb the caffeine (or at least the Berocca) by using a technique passed down by her new executive producer Carol Hirschfeld. “She suggested starting the day with apple cider vinegar in water,” says O’Brien, who started this new acidic wake-up last Wednesday. 

O’Brien’s certainly not alone among our brekky hosts in drinking a lot of coffee. Newshub’s AM newsreader Bernadine Oliver-Kerby, who’s on air at 5.30am every weekday, confesses to drinking eight to 10 cups of the good stuff every day. Six of those are during a show, “say between 4am and 9am”, she tells me. Her co-host Ryan Bridge is a bit more mellow: “Usually two, both instant,” he says. “And then Bernie makes me a cup of tea at 7.30am after she’s read the news.” 

Bernadine shows off one of her many coffees (Image: Supplied)

Q&A host Jack Tame may have managed to escape the graveyard shift but the taste of coffee probably still lingers in his mouth. Tame fronted the revamped Breakfast on TVNZ1 alongside Hilary Barry for just under three years, starting in 2016. “You’re not just awake, you have to be alert, energetic and enthusiastic,” Tame says of his time on the show. “I used to have about four coffees during a shift on Breakfast. I’d finish a show and feel completely wiped out. I’d exhausted my day’s worth of social energy and I had nothing left.” 

The coffee – he thinks it was Nespresso – probably didn’t help with his overall exhaustion, admits Tame. “I reckon morning shifts age you two days for every day you work. It’s like constantly being jet-lagged. I always had an afternoon nap, but it goes against all the body’s natural impulses to be rising before 4am.” 

Tame’s former co-host, Hilary Barry, has just one simple tip: “Don’t ever under any circumstances hit the snooze button when the alarm goes off. And also, have an afternoon nap.” 

Is it all about coffee?

Surprisingly, no. Not all morning risers rely on a caffeine fix to get them through the day. Newstalk ZB’s Kate Hawkesby, who starts her show at 5am and often arrives at the newsroom before 3am, says she has no caffeine whatsoever. I tell her she’s mad. “I haven’t drunk coffee for 20-plus years,” she says, instead advocating for “lemon in hot water and loud music on the drive-in in the car”. Husband Mike Hosking drinks espresso, says Hawkesby, “but only after work”. 

AM’s Melissa Chan-Green sounds equally maniacal. “I don’t have any coffee in the mornings – or ever,” she confesses. “I get through the day far better without it. I’m usually just running off two Weetbix and a banana.” 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by AM (@amshownz)


Shockingly, there’s more than two caffeine-free morning hosts – ZM’s Breakfast co-host Hayley Sproull is the same. She finds the morning hours alright. “I’m handling it remarkably well considering I’m a night owl boozer from way back. But it’s early days, maybe it’ll catch up to me,” she says. Along with staunchly avoiding the snooze button, Sproull’s routine involves an early bedtime and ditching the drink during the week. “And when you get home after work don’t sit on the couch or you’ll fall asleep for hours and ruin your routine,” she says.

John Campbell, who looks more awake at 6am than I feel at 10am, tells me that getting up at 3.15am means you often don’t feel “fully human”. When I ask him how he deals with his hours, he gives a perfectly Campbellian reply. “As I drive to work, I notice who else is on the road – and I think about where they’re off to, and what work they’ll be doing, and I daily remind myself that making television, even that early in the morning, is a privileged kind of life,” he says. 

His tip? Don’t give into the desire to eat easy, snackable foods once you head out of the office at the time most people are arriving. “I walk the dog. Listen to music. Read. Come up with story ideas. Talk to the team about what’s on tomorrow. I have no techniques for dealing with this, and no advice for people doing it, other than don’t feed your tiredness with pies and sugar, which your body is constantly asking you to do.” 

So what does the science say?

Buckets of coffee? Apple cider vinegar? Ditching alcohol? I wanted to know whether there was any proven way of functioning well on a morning shift. Turns out, not really. Dr Karyn O’Keefe, a senior lecturer at Massey University’s Sleep/Wake Research Centre, says a 3am alarm is always going to feel like you’re working against what your body wants – because you are. “Sometimes people ask if we can adapt our circadian body clock to our work schedules but there is good evidence that this happens very rarely,” she explains. “The jet lag feeling comes because our internal circadian body clock timing is out of alignment with our social activities and sleep.” 

Despite that groggy feeling after a nap, getting some kip in the afternoon is recommended if you’re on an early shift. Most adults, says O’Keefe, need seven to nine hours of sleep all up. “A nap will always provide you with benefits to get through the rest of your work day.”

It may seem counterintuitive when you’re struggling to stay awake at 5am, but limiting caffeine intake is also important. “We recommend using caffeine strategically,” O’Keefe says. “Only when you need it and at the minimum dose to increase alertness.” You don’t want more than 300mg per day, and try to avoid caffeine in the three to eight hours before bed. According to Medsafe, a standard cup of coffee (the good stuff, not instant) contains 70 to 180mg of caffeine. Of course, caffeine can be used as a strategy to “temporarily boost alertness”, O’Keefe adds.

Hayley Sproull mentions she’s given up alcohol on weeknights in order to help her get up in the morning. O’Keefe suggests going teetotal might not be needed, but it can’t hurt. “The recommendation is to limit alcohol intake to moderate doses – no more than two standard drinks – and to ensure you drink well before bedtime so that the alcohol is processed before sleep.”

As for tips like apple cider vinegar or lemon in hot water? Sadly, “there is no evidence that these improve alertness or your ability to cope with missing out on sleep or working against your body clock.”

But when you’re waking up at 3am, do you really care what the science says?

But wait there's more!