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Michael Galvin as the iconic Dr Chris Warner in Shortland Street (Photo: South Pacific Pictures / Design: Tina Tiller)
Michael Galvin as the iconic Dr Chris Warner in Shortland Street (Photo: South Pacific Pictures / Design: Tina Tiller)

Pop CultureFebruary 3, 2024

‘That will be on my gravestone’: Michael Galvin on the TV moment that haunts him

Michael Galvin as the iconic Dr Chris Warner in Shortland Street (Photo: South Pacific Pictures / Design: Tina Tiller)
Michael Galvin as the iconic Dr Chris Warner in Shortland Street (Photo: South Pacific Pictures / Design: Tina Tiller)

The man behind New Zealand’s most iconic TV doctor shares his secret love for the Bionic Woman, the existential power of Time Team and the worst thing about Love Island.

As Shortland Street returns to our screens in 2024, fans of the long-running soap should prepare to see Chris Warner as we’ve never seen him before. Actor and playwright Michael Galvin has played the genius surgeon and heaving heartthrob through a series of natural disasters, numerous wives and explosive singalongs, but as 2024 dawns on a Ferndale besieged by tragedy and trauma, things have really changed. 

“Chris has had some very bad things happen to him, but this time, he gives up on his personal appearance and caring about the hospital,” Galvin tells The Spinoff. A hopeless Dr Love sounds miserable, but Galvin couldn’t be more thrilled. “Even after all these years, Chris has never been to a place where he just doesn’t care about things. It’ll be great to be this character who has nothing but disdain for everyone. I can’t wait.” 

After three decades of playing the same character, Galvin says the role of Chris Warner never goes stale. He credits the show’s writing team for keeping the character fresh and the storylines challenging. “I have nothing but admiration for the writers who keep coming up with this stuff,” he says of the juicy drama that lies ahead. “There are always new people coming through, and they bring their own energy and quirks and so you’re always bouncing off of them.”

We asked Galvin to scrub up and dissect his own life in TV, including his passion for surreal telly, a love for digging up old stuff, and a fierce hatred for reality TV.

My earliest TV memory is… I had a big Catholic family, and we’d all watch Dave Allen. He was an Irish Catholic comedian, and he’d sit in his suit and tell stories and he’d smoke and drink. My dad absolutely loved him, because my dad smoked and drank. Very old school, but he’d sit in this chair and tell funny stories, and my dad would just laugh and laugh and we’d laugh along too.

The TV show I was obsessed with as a child was… The Prisoner. It was made before I was born and starred Patrick McGoohan, who plays a spy who quits and then gets abducted. They take him to this weird island where everybody wears beautiful blazers, but it’s never kind of fully explained what the island is. He tries to escape, and every time these enormous bouncing balloons come and smother him. 

It was extremely surreal, very exciting and completely unpredictable. Everyone had a number, and he was Number Six. Number Two was the boss of the island, and Number Two’s job was to interrogate Number Six for information, but it was never made explicit what the information was. You never knew who Number One was, and when the final episode aired in the late 1960s in England, it stopped the UK because everyone wanted to know who Number One was. Number One was him! It was this enormous extended metaphor about being your own worst enemy. 

My earliest TV crush was… The Bionic Woman. I was really in love with her, but it was a secret love. It wasn’t like a Farrah Fawcett love when you could buy her that iconic poster and put it up on your wall. It was more like a secret crush that I couldn’t tell anyone about, because she was the Bionic Woman. I don’t know why I couldn’t tell anyone. Maybe because I was Catholic. 

The TV ad I can’t stop thinking about is… Togs, Togs, Undies. It’s this wonderful comic idea, perfectly executed. I just loved it. It was so funny.

The TV moment that haunts me to this day is… The classic “Please Tell Me That is Not Your Penis” line. That will be on my gravestone. 

My favourite TV moment of all time is… The final moment of the first series of Severance. There’s this absolute jaw dropping moment where one of the characters discovers who they are in the outside world. I highly recommend Severance, it’s one of my favourite shows. So clever and funny and brilliant.

My TV guilty pleasure is… Time Team. I absolutely love this show. I can understand why most people would find it vaguely boring and sad that I would like it, but I love the history and the way there’s a detective element to it. Something suddenly turns up, and at first they think it means this, but then oh no, it means something else, as they piece together the story of whatever place they’re in. There’s something incredibly reassuring about life going on, about how life was around hundreds and hundreds of years ago. We’re just a small part of it. It’s escaping your own era, in a way, and seeing yourself from a historical perspective. 

The one thing I wish people knew about working on Shortland Street is… It’s a lot of hard work remembering all that dialogue, and it’s a lot of hard work for the crew who are there 11 hours a day, because we’re shooting so much of it. Other TV shows only shoot six or seven minutes a day, but we’re shooting 22. 

The TV show I wish I’d been involved with is… I was obsessed with Arrested Development. Just so clever and hilarious, I just loved it. I thought, wouldn’t be fun to be in something like that and help write it. Excellent. 

The most stylish person on TV is… Personally I have terrible style, but from my perspective, I’d figure someone like Don Draper. He always looks cool. That’s what I’d like to look like, but I don’t. I look like me. 

My most watched TV show of all time is… The Simpsons. So genius and nothing like it. In the 90s, I would religiously watch every episode just because it was so far ahead of everyone else in terms of comedy. 

My controversial TV opinion is… Every time the TV awards roll around, I don’t think Shortland Street is nominated for enough things. I think the acting on our show is terrific, and we’re very seldom nominated. I don’t mean me, I mean everyone else. This year we got an award for best writing, which I think is completely appropriate. I don’t know how controversial it is, but yes, Shortland Street should be better represented in TV award nominations. 

The TV show I’ll never watch, no matter how many people tell me to, is… Love Island. I can’t bear it. I don’t get that whole thing of people performing their lives and then getting really self righteous and indignant about the situation that they have chosen to be in, and suddenly they’re just railing at the universe about this terrible thing that has happened. You decided for that to happen, you chose this environment! If you’d just lived your real life, it wouldn’t be happening. Same thing with Married at First Sight. It infuriates me.

The last thing I watched on TV was… I’m rewatching Game of Thrones. The good thing about watching it this time round is starting to understand it. Watching it the first time, I’m like “I have no idea what he’s talking about”. Watching the second time, I’m like, “wait a minute, I know who they mean”. I’m really enjoying it.

Shortland Street returns on Monday 5 February at 7pm on TVNZ2 and streams on TVNZ+.

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Claudia Winkleman and the cast of season two of The Traitors UK (Photo: Supplied)
Claudia Winkleman and the cast of season two of The Traitors UK (Photo: Supplied)

Pop CultureFebruary 2, 2024

Why is The Traitors UK so bloody good?

Claudia Winkleman and the cast of season two of The Traitors UK (Photo: Supplied)
Claudia Winkleman and the cast of season two of The Traitors UK (Photo: Supplied)

Tara Ward on why The Traitors UK might just be the best reality show… ever.

This is an excerpt from our weekly pop culture newsletter Rec Room. Sign up here.

Season two of The Traitors UK came to a dramatic end this week, and with it, one of the most thrilling reality shows I’ve seen in a long time. For those yet to discover the delights of the award-winning series, The Traitors is a murder-mystery game that takes a group of strangers, chucks them in a Scottish castle and asks them to knock each other off. Three people are secretly chosen as Traitors (responsible for “murdering” the other players one by one), while the rest become Faithfuls (they must turn detective, expose the Traitors and banish them from the game, before they themselves are murdered).

In a delicious twist, the Faithfuls and Traitors have to work together to raise money for the prize pool by competing in a series of delightfully weird missions. If the Faithfuls weed out the Traitors at the end of the game, they win the money, but if a single Traitor remains standing at the end, they take all the cash. It sounds complicated, but in reality, The Traitors is simple. It’s an intriguing game of strategy, skill and luck, and season two delivered oodles of heart-stopping, mind-boggling, absolutely gripping telly. Here’s a few thoughts on why The Traitors UK is so bloody good.

It feels like a Shakespearean tragedy

What’s that sound? It’s old mate Shakespeare rolling in his grave, wishing he’d thought up this classic battle of good and evil. The Traitors is pure theatre, from the dramatic Highland setting to the big tartan curtains in the castle, to the traitors lurking in those long, dark cloaks. Tragic heroes everywhere! Hubris aplenty! Greed and revenge for all! If murder be the food of love, then crack on, as The Bard loved to say.

But also, it’s absolutely bonkers

See again: those cloaks, those missions, someone saying “am I or amn’t I” and meaning it. Also, every one of host Claudia Winkelman’s outfits was gorgeous and suitably ridiculous, and surely I cannot be the only one spending their free time Googling “where can I get Claudia’s coat that looks like Dougal from The Magic Roundabout”? Didn’t think so.

It features a cast of regular people 

The Traitors UK reminded me how fun it is to watch a cast of quirky regular people who, by virtue of only being themselves, make truly captivating television. While The Traitors NZ features a mix of celebrities and “normies” together, the game seems to unfold more organically with a civilian cast. Players like clairvoyant Tracey and chess master Anthony arrive as strangers and must quickly build relationships to survive the game, and with such a diverse mix of ages, backgrounds and personalities, we get to watch people who are essentially like us play a game that’s like no other.

These strangers arrive without preconceived ideas about who their mysterious competition is, which is different to The Traitors NZ, where half the cast attended each other’s weddings. Plus, this season’s Traitors were more ruthless and calculated than last season, and you’ll rarely see those sort of shady shenanigans from a celebrity influencer whose livelihood depends on securing that lovely new teeth whitening campaign. You heard it here first: please put regular people in everything.

A typically low key scene from season two of The Traitors UK (Photo: Supplied)

It’s the perfect length for a reality TV series 

The Traitors UK only has 12 episodes, but I hereby petition (ie I write my name in chalk on a piece of slate) for every TV show to be no longer than this. It’s the perfect length to pull you into the drama, get you hooked and then leave you wanting more, and it means the tension never wanes. Imagine if Love Island or Married at First Sight was only 12 episodes?! Good luck to one and all.

Maybe Claudia Winkleman is the best traitor of all

It’s a wild idea, but so is banishing a player because they didn’t raise a glass of water during a toast. Claudia Winkleman plays the perfect game as host of The Traitors, treating the Traitors and Faithfuls exactly the same, never dropping her guard or playing favourites. She is equal parts aloof and kind, stern and darkly funny, and she also doesn’t mind running into the dining room and cackling like she just stole the immunity shield. The way she shut that coffin lid in episode seven? Give her all the BAFTAs.

The finale was the best episode of reality TV…ever?  

I haven’t shouted so much at the television since the first Survivor finale when Susan dropped her famous “snakes and rats” speech. Without spoiling it, this finale was a masterful piece of television that climaxed with a shocking, unpredictable, emotional final banishment. I’m still thinking about it days later. It was a tactical masterclass – The Traitors at its finest.

Seasons one and two of The Traitors UK streams on Three Now.

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