The journalist and author takes us through her life in television, including her biggest live TV regret and the Succession moment she witnessed first hand.
This week, journalist and broadcaster Ali Mau released No Words For This, a “gripping, generous, revelatory and layered” memoir that reveals shocking family secrets, explores unseen parts of a life lived publicly, and takes the reader inside the media ecosystem from Australia to London to Aotearoa. Mau airs deeply private and personal details, and tells The Spinoff this was always part of the plan: “I’ve read journalist memoirs that have no interiority at all, no self examination, and they’re quite dull,” she says. “I didn’t want it to be anything like that.”
Although she had plenty of stories from four juicy decades in journalism, Mau chose to cherrypick the ones that resonated “ethically, personally and emotionally.” One of the more breathtaking accounts is the scene inside TVNZ the day Princess Diana died. “Up until five o’clock, we all thought she had a broken arm, and then at five o’clock, she was dead,” says Mau. “It was absolute chaos.” In the book she describes racing to the newsdesk, staring at a completely blank autocue, and telling the country that the people’s princess had died.
And while she admits “television was very good to me”, Mau doesn’t miss her time on camera. After working on the 6pm news, Breakfast, Fair Go and Seven Sharp for TVNZ, she went to RadioLive and relished in the intimate conversations with listeners. “I loved talkback because, for some people who ring in, this might be their only human connection in a day,” she says. Next came her hugely impactful investigative journalism project #MeTooNZ with Stuff, for which she won Reporter of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards in 2021.
Now Mau is the co-founder of Tika, a soon-to-be-launched digital platform delivering legal help and support to survivors of sexual violence across Aotearoa, and a far cry from the bright studio lights of TV. “It’s not that I ever hated working in television or anything,” says Mau. “It’s just that I haven’t missed it because I’ve done, dare I say it, much more interesting things since.” Lucky for us, she was happy to look back at her life in television, including her early memories of Australian soaps, why she loved Fair Go and the live TV moment she regrets to this day.
My earliest TV memory is… It would probably be the moon landing when I was four years old. Aside from that, I remember the Graham Kennedy show on the black and white television, and all those mid 70s variety shows that they used to have that were like the Australian version of the Johnny Carson Show.
My earliest TV crush was… Countdown was a very famous music show in Australia that started in the mid-70s, hosted by this madman in a cowboy hat called Molly Meldrum. It was what brought music into a young person’s life. I discovered people like John Farnham, Icehouse and Australian Crawl. I’ll never forget when I first saw James Reyne, the lead singer of Australian Crawl on Countdown, and I fell instantly in love.
The TV I would rush home from school to watch was… I have a very strong memory of coming home with my sister Lisa from school one day – we were latchkey kids who let ourselves in – and finding that there was a brand new television sitting on the dining room table. We just stopped in our tracks, looked at it, and then looked at each other like we were in Scooby Doo. Lisa walked over, she plugged into the wall, turned it on, and it was colour. That was when we saw colour television for the first time. I’ll never forget that day.
My first time on TV was… I had blagged my way into a job in London, very inelegantly, because I was desperate. I was in a bar and somebody pointed out John Sellwood, who’s a journalist, so I introduced myself, and I basically said, “giz a job”. He said “have you ever written for television?” And I said, “no, but I know I can do it”. I basically told him to take me on for two weeks, he didn’t have to pay me, and at the end of the two weeks he could either tell me to go or keep me on. He said yes, and I had two weeks to make myself indispensable.
About eight weeks later, once again at the pub, he said to me, “we’ve got a new contract with Taiwan. Can you bring a nice jacket with you on Monday? I want you to do a screen test”. I did the screen test, and a week later I was on live on Taiwanese television, about to become a big star in Taiwan. In 1991 I went there to speak at a conference, and as soon as I touched down in Taipei, I was just followed around constantly by crowds of people. Every time I poked my head out of the hotel, they would go “Alison!”
The TV moment that haunts me the most is… One regret I have is that I should have stood up and walked out when Paul Henry was publicly teasing that woman during what became “moustache-gate”. I was sitting there live on Breakfast, you can see me begging him to stop, but it never occurred to me that I had the power to just unclip my microphone and walk away. I should have done that and I would do that in a heartbeat these days. But your job in television was always so precarious. They made sure we were under absolutely no illusions that there was a queue of people waiting to take our job, so you never did anything that might look like stepping out of line. I really regret that.
My favourite TV project I’ve ever been involved in is… Fair Go. I wanted to put Fair Go’s coverage of the Christchurch earthquake in the book, specifically because we weren’t doing breaking news. We were not the ones standing in front of piles of rubble, but we were still doing something completely different and really personal for people, like shuffling them in and out of my motel room bathroom so that they could wash themselves after five days with no water. I just thought it was a nice way to illustrate Fair Go, which was my favorite job in television, by far.
A close second favourite would be Breakfast. It was a lot of fun, but the hours are so shit. Trust me to say this, but it’s also a really inequitable show for men and women. You get up at three o’clock in the morning and you drive in, and the blokes get a quick powder down and a bit of hair product, and then they go to the newsroom and have an extra hour of solid research time, whereas you have to sit in the chair for a full hour. I will say though, the makeup artists are absolute magicians to make you look presentable at that time morning.
My favourite television genre to watch is… I am very partial to crime, and Karleen [Mau’s partner] and I love shows based on true stories. We just watched Lockerbie, which was very good. I also really loved Succession. There was one particular scene in Succession, where Logan walks into the newsroom and stands on a bunch of boxes of copy paper. I actually saw Rupert Murdoch do that in the newsroom just after he bought The Herald in Melbourne. I was just sitting there transfixed, reliving this memory from decades ago that I actually witnessed.
My TV guilty pleasure is… It might surprise people to know that I don’t watch the news. I am an absolute news junkie, so by the time six o’clock comes around, sorry Sam [Hayes], sorry Simon [Dallow], I’m done, and I want to watch The White Lotus. As for my true guilty pleasure… I want to first say that I hate Jeremy Clarkson. I hate him. He’s a horrible person for so many reasons. But, because I now live rurally, I quite like watching Clarkson’s Farm. I like it because he’s just constantly humiliated. Every five minutes Jeremy gets humiliated by either himself or his wife, or his farm manager, and I just can’t get enough of it.
My most controversial TV opinion is… I think that most reality television is incredibly damaging. I did sit down and watch an early season of Love Island with my son, who was in his mid-teens at the time, and we used it as a forum to talk about relationships. I got quite creative with my parenting there. That was helpful, but I’ve talked to so many women who have been on Married at First Sight, or whatever it might be, and come out of it so disillusioned and damaged. I get that it is an escape for people, but I think it is an abomination.
The last thing I watched on TV was… We’re watching Toxic Town, which is like an Erin Brockovich story, but set in the town of Corby in Britain. And has got some great actors in it, and it is very, very good. But my recent top pick would be Landman. It’s set in Texas in the oil fields with Billy Bob Thornton, who I’ve never liked, but he gives the most insane performance and it’s really, really good. Like most series, you’ve just got to ride out the first couple of episodes.
No Words for This by Ali Mau ($40, HarperCollins NZ) is available to purchase from Unity Books.
