The More FM host and returning star of Celebrity Treasure Island on grieving, the joy of fishing shows, and the dad bod that stopped the nation in its tracks.
An unspeakably bronzed Simon Barnett is shimmering away in a studded leather vest while perched on a raft in the middle of a field. It’s a surreal scene, but the topic of conversation could not be any more real. “You think of your fist as grief, and that’s all you can see at the start,” he says, placing his own fist right between his eyes. “But what happens with time is this–” he slowly draws his fist away from his face. “You have the ability to see more than just the grief.”
It’s been over two years since his wife Jodi passed away, and Barnett says he can now see more than just the grief. “I’m doing OK, but funnily enough it’s doing these new adventures without Jodi that still make me a bit nervy and a bit twitchy,” he says. “It’s those terribly mundane things that one does, like packing my suitcase to come here, where I’ll get flustered. She was just always the planner, the wisdom, the brains behind stuff, and now I don’t have that.”
We’re speaking amid a bunch of shipping containers and props for Celebrity Treasure Island, where Barnett and Black Fern Portia Woodman-Wickcliffe are set to arrive as surprise team captains in week one. Having first competed in the reality series back in 2004, Barnett says it was his children who convinced him to return, over two decades later. “They said, ‘Dad, if you don’t do it, you’re just going to sit at home’, and I realised they’re probably right,” he says.
“This is less about winning, and more about me just trying to find some new things in life.”
Barnett will be competing for the White Matter Brain Cancer Trust, and says that $100,000 would be “life changing and game changing” for the small charity. But even with one season of Celebrity Treasure Island under his belt, the new era “terrifies” the More FM radio host. “The old series was more geared towards physical challenges and now it seems a bit more cerebral,” he says. “I’m a reasonably intelligent sort of a bloke, but puzzles I’m not very flash at.”
While he practiced his code cracking, we asked Simon Barnett to take us through his life in television, including the joy of World’s Deadliest Catch and his Dancing With the Stars trauma.
My earliest TV memory is… It was black and white, and it took forever for the valve to warm up. You could turn it on, and then you could practically go to Australia and back and the picture would just be coming through, it took that long to warm up. I also remember the innovation of colour television. We couldn’t afford it, but my grandparents got it, and I just remember feeling like the whole world came to life. From there, I would just always want to go to any mate’s place that had colour TV.
My first time on television was… Probably doing What Now. And I got the opportunity because Telethon came to town and I did a few things for it. Long story short, the main host for the nationwide breakouts was in Nelson when I was doing Radio Nelson. He wasn’t available for one break and they needed somebody to fill the spot. I said “I’ll do it”. And they were like, “anybody?” I said, “I’ll do it”. And they said, “anybody?” They truly didn’t want me. But they had no other choice, so I did it, and it went well, and then What Now offered me the job.
The TV moment that haunts me is… Every single time I took the floor on Dancing With the Stars. That’s genuinely PTSD for me. ‘Rock DJ’ was the first song I danced with Vanessa, and the judges said I was a disaster, and I knew I was a disaster. I was whiter than the whitest man in the history of the world. I had no rhythm. I was bashed from pillar to post by the critics and the public. And I said to Vanessa, this can never happen again. So we trained for 10 hours a day, every day, and every week you’d take to the floor and the voiceover would say “Simon and Vanessa, doing the paso doble”. Even when I say that now, my heart starts racing. Dreadful. It was dreadful. Bilious. Dreadful. Horrific. Traumatic. I hated it.
My favourite TV ad of all time is… I think the one that was the most impactful was probably Dear John, with the guy that had gone to war, and then the old mate gets a tape, and it’s this person basically giving him the flick while he was at war. It’s old school, but it’s very moving.
My desert island movie is… I know I’ll sound like an absolute dropkick, and people will read this and go “what a cheesy man he is’”, but it’s The Notebook. Jodi and I went to that movie and we drove home from the theatre in different cars because she’d pick the kids up from school. I rang her on the way home from the movie saying “when we die, I want to die like that” and doing a real big snot cry. I’d take that movie with me any day, and I’d cry myself to sleep every night.
My TV guilty pleasure is… It’s a shameful admission, but it’s World’s Deadliest Catch. Most people would find it boring, but I would often find myself watching this stuff, being enthralled, and just think “what is wrong with me? I am a sad man. It’s three in the afternoon, and I’m watching cray pots come out of the Alaskan sea.” I think because I’m from a small town and very earthy in some respects, and these people were real people. They were these real hardened old fishermen and everything else that that entailed – their families, the drugs on the ship, the wait to see if there was a crab in the pot and whether they were going to earn a living.
My favourite TV project I’ve ever been involved in is… There’s the athlete challenges with Clash of the Codes, there were the game shows like Face the Music and Wheel of Fortune, which were really good fun. People mock game shows, but I actually loved what happened with people who were on them. They would get so dreadfully nervous and my role, I felt, was to be a conduit to helping them relax and then do well. I really enjoyed doing that.
But if I’m honest, I don’t know if I could ever go past What Now. There’s something so refreshingly honest about children’s TV. Back then it was live TV, and while there were the backbones of a story and a script, it was absolutely spontaneous. I worked with a great co-host in Cath McPherson and it was just fun and so challenging. We got to sing, we got to dress up, we got to write commercials, we got to act. We got to do everything, and I loved it.
The difference between TV and radio is… I love the fact that radio is spontaneous and it’s warts and all – you can’t mask it if you tell a story and it’s boring. Apart from shows like this [Barnett gestures at the CTI set], television tends to be a bit more staged and managed. Truthfully, I probably would opt for the spontaneity and the realism of radio over television if I had a choice. There’s the fact that you can turn a radio on and you can be in your bathroom, you can be at work, you can be in your car. As a consequence of that, you really do feel like you are a part of people’s lives. It’s a privilege that I take very seriously, but also a great joy.
Watch Celebrity Treasure Island on TVNZ2 and TVNZ+.
