The star of Wellington Paranormal and Paddy Gower’s Got Issues takes us through her life in television.
When Karen O’Leary was a kid, she used to film herself doing fake news reports with a camcorder and make her parents watch them. “I’d do all sorts of little stories about a pickled onion that was doing bad stuff,” she says. These days, on Paddy Gower Has Issues, the audience is slightly bigger than two, and her stories are slightly more real than an adverse allium, but O’Leary still feels lucky to have made a childhood dream come true. “It’s like how I also wanted to be a police officer growing up, and then I got to become a pretend one on telly.”
As the roving reporter on the show, O’Leary has stumbled upon a few big stories in her time. “I really loved the Paywave story,” she says. “Because now the government’s abolishing Paywave fees, and I basically take that as a win for me.” She also got a scoop from Chris Hipkins “completely by accident” while investigating the price of hot chips. “I just asked him if he would remove the GST from potatoes to make them more affordable,” she says. “He looked a little bit flustered, and then he announced the policy to remove GST from vegetables the next day.”
In this season of Paddy Gower’s Got Issues, O’Leary wants to tell more of these consumer stories from around the country, picking up the mantle from the likes of Fair Go. “There is nobody advocating for the everyday consumer on television anymore, so that is something we wanted to look at more specifically,” she says. These issues include everything from illegal rubbish dumping, to stubborn subscription services, to destroying the supermarket duopoly. “If anyone’s going to be able to fix that for New Zealanders, it’s definitely me,” she laughs.
While we wait for The O’Leary Effect to hit shelves nationwide, the actor and comedian took us through her life in television – including an early interview with the prime minister, a haunting Wellington Paranormal memory, and her favourite forklift jingle.
My earliest TV memory is… Watching shows like MacGyver, The Love Boat and MASH as a family. I’m not quite sure what that says about me, and whether I’ve turned into a romantic person who likes adventure and war. I don’t like war, so maybe it’s that I just like hospitals and helping people.
The show I would rush home from school to watch is… I used to love Olly Ohlson and always wanted one of his massive foam telephones. I also used to love Constable Keith and Sniff the old police dog. Then I started to get a bit too old for that kind of thing, and moved onto watching Santa Barbara which, to be fair, was a bad choice.
My earliest TV crush was.. I used to really love Judy Bailey, but my first official crush was actually John Timu who used to play for the All Blacks.
My first time on TV was… When I was 10 years old I interviewed Geoffrey Palmer, who was the prime minister at the time, on The Video Dispatch. At my school we had the school newspaper where you interview amazing people like your Mum or the dairy owner, and I just remember thinking “surely I can come up with someone better than that”. So I looked up the phone number for parliament in the White Pages, rang it from school and said, “Hello, my name is Karen O’Leary and I would like to interview the prime minister.” I got put through to about 20 different people, and eventually they said “Yes, Geoffrey would love to chat to you.” I think they needed some good publicity, because the Tomorrow’s School thing was just going through, which meant they were basically about to screw up education. I remember turning up to meet with the prime minister, but being way more excited to meet the host Michèle A’Court.
The TV moment that haunts me is… The one and only time on Wellington Paranormal that me and Mike Minogue had a little bit of a falling out while we were filming. It’s towards the end of the cloning episode, and you can see clear as day that me and Mike are standing about a metre apart from each other, and we both look so sad and so depressed. I can’t watch it without getting a bit teary. We talked about it on our podcast and we both started welling up, because that was how much we hated it.
My favourite NZ TV ad is… “There is nothing like a Crown, for picking it up and putting it down.” It’s an amazing song, and I used to always want to own one of those forklift things.
My TV guilty pleasure is… Look, every now and again I watch a little bit of Love Island, OK? It’s so horrific, but I just find it so intriguing. It’s like, “Wow, imagine being like that?” I also have an unhealthy relationship with MasterChef. I do love cooking, so I just pretend I watch it because I’m gonna learn cooking stuff – even though I could never cook any of that food.
A TV show I wish I was involved in is… I used to want to be MacGyver when I was growing up, and I also really wanted to be in game shows like the Krypton Factor and those kinds of shows. I did also watch a little bit of Prisoner and I remember thinking it would be quite cool to be on that. But I think there’s lots of stuff going on with me thinking that – a lot of layers.
My controversial TV opinion is… There’s obviously not as much local TV as there used to be, and it’s kind of a dying art now, which is really sad. I think we still stay within a very stereotypical and safe bubble most of the time. It’s getting better with the internet, but in terms of New Zealand terrestrial television we’re still lacking so much diversity in terms of what we can see.
A show I will never watch, no matter how many people say I should is… I’ve never watched Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead or Succession. I watched The White Lotus because Morgana O’Reilly was in it. She once played my lesbian partner in a movie, which means I’ve basically been on White Lotus as well.
The last thing I watched on TV was… The Dog House UK. It was beautiful. It’s always just so happy seeing these people who have always been through a bit of a sad thing, and then these dogs just change their lives. We’ve just got a new kitten called Wonder, and she watches it too.
Watch new episodes of Paddy Gower Has Issues on ThreeNow every Tuesday
