The six cast members of the TV show Down for Love, looking happy

The cast of Down for Love (Image: TVNZ/Tina Tiller)

Summer 2022January 11, 2023

Down For Love is transforming reality romance

Alex Casey

Senior writer

The cast of Down for Love (Image: TVNZ/Tina Tiller)

Summer read: Alex Casey goes behind the scenes of a dating show with a difference.

First published May 8, 2022

Nicola is peering through the foggy glass of the penguin enclosure at Kelly Tarlton’s. Inside, her son Josh is on his latest romantic adventure for TVNZ’s new dating show Down For Love. As the penguins curiously peck at the television crew’s rolls of gaffer tape and strappy camera bags, Nicola is happy to sit back and watch the action unfold. “Look, he’s 22, he doesn’t need me in there holding his hand,” she laughs. To be fair, he doesn’t – Josh is already tightly holding his date’s hand as they shuffle coyly across the ice to feed the penguins.

And, like any good dating show, within a few minutes the pair are awkwardly smooching.

In the same vein as shows like The Undateables and Love on the Spectrum, Down For Love looks to celebrate disability and neurodiversity within the primetime dating show format. Created and produced by Attitude Pictures, the series is an original format that grew organically from conversations around Down Syndrome and dating. “We were wanting to do something in the area of love and relationships, because there are significant barriers for people living with disabilities,” series producer Robyn Paterson explains. “And I really wanted to bring more of a documentary lens to it, so that it could go beyond just entertainment.”

Of all the production companies to bring depth to the dating show genre, Attitude is particularly well-placed to handle the sensitivities of a show like Down For Love. Since its inception in 2005, Attitude has had a focus on producing content in the mental health and disability space in Aotearoa. Paterson says founder Robyn Scott-Vincent had the goal “to make a difference to people’s understanding of disability” after her own son, who lives with a disability, was excluded from attending their local school. “She felt like if people understood more about living with disability, that perhaps that would start to change people’s perceptions.”

That was nearly two decades ago, and Attitude has since become a Sunday morning stalwart on TVNZ, focused on telling the stories of people from across the country including activist Dr Huhana Hickey and model and influencer Sophia Malthus. Behind the scenes, the company also helps to mentor and grow the careers of people who live with disabilities, fostering diversity both on and off the camera. “People come and go but a lot of us come back,” says Paterson. “I think that is because the content has a lot of heart and meaning, it’s got purpose.”

It is that commitment to the cause that led to the New Zealand Down Syndrome Association (NZDSA) getting onboard with Down For Love, collaborating from the early production stages all the way through to providing feedback on edited cuts of the episodes. “We were well aware that they were very much a disability-led production company,” explains NZDSA national executive officer Zandra Vaccarino. “They have a mana-enhancing lens where they really want people to tell their own stories and to own the narrative, so that made me feel a lot more comfortable.”

Some of the participants on Down For Love. (Image: TVNZ)

For Vaccarino, Down For Love provided a chance to showcase not just the diversity within the Down Syndrome community, but celebrate a part of their lives that is often misunderstood or ignored – romantic relationships. “People make assumptions that people with Down Syndrome may not want a relationship, or cannot have a relationship,” she explains. “I knew that people with Down Syndrome would be keen to have their stories told and to raise awareness that, just like everyone else, they also want to have meaningful relationships.”

One of the many participants looking to find love on the show is Carlos Biggemann, a 31-year-old man living with Down Syndrome who originally hails from Bolivia. With a CV to wow any dating show casting director, he is fluent in four languages, a professional photographer and a decorated competitive swimmer. Having already starred in his own episode for Attitude’s series Being Me, Biggemann describes Down For Love as “the opportunity of a lifetime”. “I thought ‘yeah why not, let’s give it a shot’,” he laughs over Zoom from his home in Dunedin.

Biggemann was an occasional fan of romance reality franchises such as MTV’s Next and TVNZ’s The Bachelor NZ and The Bachelorette NZ, diplomatically describing them as “interesting to watch”. But being able to star in one of these shows himself was always a dream. “Now I have found that I am in it and I am experiencing it as well,” he beams.

Carlos Biggemann, renaissance man. (Image: TVNZ)

Having only had two relationships before going on the show, Biggemann says he was extremely nervous before his first date, which features in episode two. “It was wonderful but on the other hand it was, ‘is this for real’?” he says. “I was waiting at Larnach Castle thinking ‘how on Earth am I going to handle this?’ My legs were shaking with anxiousness, and when we were having lunch, my legs were still shaking.” He admits there were times when he wanted to pinch himself during filming. “Jesus Christ, lord, I am dating a new girl?! It was an overwhelming feeling.”

It turns out Biggemann had little to worry about. “Two words: interesting woman,” he laughs. “She’s one of a kind.”

By all accounts, Down For Love appears to have a slightly better success rate than the likes of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, which Paterson credits to Attitude’s researcher and match-maker Justin Scott. “We did a lot of work in all our pre-interviews to try and figure out what they wanted in a partner, what they wanted in life, what they wanted to do on a date,” she explains. “We would match them with someone with similar lifestyles and interests. Then, at the very least, if there wasn’t a romantic connection they would get a really solid friendship.”

Dates were carefully planned based on participant preferences. (Image: TVNZ)

For everyone involved in the production, their duty of care was extended to everything from ensuring the scheduling was comfortable for all the participants, to having a disability-specific counsellor available throughout. Giving participants agency over their own stories was also key. “We really wanted people to stay in the driver’s seat of their own stories,” says Paterson. “Especially with intellectual disabilities, because people aren’t often afforded the right to tell their own stories.” It was also important to represent a diverse range of people within the Down Syndrome community, as well as their wider networks of family and friends.

Back at Kelly Tarlton’s, Josh’s mum Nicola stops to chortle at the large baby emperor penguin in the nearby enclosure. “Josh has enjoyed all of his dates, they’ve all been very different,” she says. Still on the ice, Josh and his date, whose name is redacted in the event of spoilers, hold each other in a close embrace and lean in for yet another kiss. “Are they snogging again?” Nicola laughs, exasperatedly tapping on the glass. “Hey, people came to see the penguins, not you two snogging!” Neither of them hear her, but she doesn’t seem to mind.

It’s a candid moment that sums up much of what Down For Love is about – frank, warm, funny, heartfelt, and sometimes even a bit racy. Paterson says it was important to capture all the highs and lows of each romantic journey, including conversations around physical intimacy. “Society tends to treat people with intellectual disabilities like they don’t have the same needs and desires as everyone else,” she explains. “We didn’t want to shy away from big conversations around sex and relationships because that wouldn’t be fair and it wouldn’t be real.”

Zaccarino hopes that Down For Love promotes the idea that people living with Down Syndrome have a right to be included in the “universal experience” that is finding love. “Everyone in society has the right to a relationship,” she says. “I think it is a platform to start having valuable conversations around relationships and inclusion.” Paterson agrees. “I hope people get a better understanding from it and afford people living with disabilities the respect that they deserve, especially in terms of having the same wants and needs as everybody else.”

Without revealing too much, Biggemann says he is “very happy” with his experience as a participant on Down For Love. “It was just amazing,” he says. “It was one of the amazing feelings of my life.” He hopes that people enjoy the series, and that it inspires them to “get involved with new friends and meeting new faces” themselves. “I have made friends from all different backgrounds from Aotearoa, and this is something that I can one day tell to my grandchildren,” he grins.

“I can tell them that this is how I met the love of my life: on Down For Love.”

Down For Love is streaming on TVNZ+

‘Like a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, each member is vital to the whole picture. Join today.’

Calum Henderson
— Production editor

Keep going!

an electric car that is blue with a red superhero cape

Electric cars can be great – but only if you’re being charged fairly for electricity. (Image: Getty / Additional design: Archi Banal)

OPINIONSummer 2022January 11, 2023

Electric cars won’t save us

Hayden Donnell

Contributing writer

Electric cars can be great – but only if you’re being charged fairly for electricity. (Image: Getty / Additional design: Archi Banal)

Summer read: The EV revolution does precisely nothing to combat the motorways strangling our cities and encouraging urban sprawl, argues Hayden Donnell.

First published September 23, 2022

At the end of this year’s Burning Man, nearly 80,000 people staggered out of a carefully constructed utopia into the harsh reality of modern American life. They’d spent eight days exchanging gifts for food, experiencing psychedelic hallucinations, and contracting Covid-19, but the fun was over. They had to get home. Their problem was that the Burning Man campsite, Black Rock City, is in the middle of the desert, a famously unpopular destination for public transport. Unless they were Elon Musk or a Winkelvii, there was really no option but to drive.

Organisers had built a 14 lane highway for the resulting exodus. It wasn’t nearly enough. The traffic jam could be seen from space.

Slow exit from Utopia: the Burning Man superhighway of 2022. (Photo: supplied)

Lately a series of commentators have taken to the pages of the Herald to put forward the Burning Man mega-jam as a vision for Aotearoa’s future. In a piece headlined “Government has declared war on our cars“, National’s transport spokesperson Simeon Brown railed against the government’s goal of enticing people out of their vehicles. “We need to reduce emissions, but the way to do that is by replacing petrol cars with EVs, not by launching a crusade against cars,” he wrote.

His former colleague, the newly appointed Auckland Chamber of Commerce chief Simon Bridges, agreed, claiming the “greatest opportunity for progress lies with decarbonisation of the vehicle fleet”, and “this must be prioritised ahead of efforts to get Aucklanders out of their cars”.

Longtime commentator and John Key biographer John Roughan said Auckland mayoral candidate Wayne Brown clinched his vote by saying he would tell Auckland Transport to “serve the way we live, not change the way we live”.

“Seldom have I heard a candidate for any public office these days challenge so succinctly the notion that the only possible response to climate change is to give up things we like, especially motorised personal transport,” Roughan wrote.

The common theme is that chipping away at car dependency is pointless. Electric cars, they say, will save us. None of these writers back up their assertions with any hard evidence, likely because they’re built on a foundation of pure reckon and constructed mostly out of uncut magical thinking.

Electric cars won’t save us. The most optimistic government estimates project that 30% of New Zealand’s vehicle fleet will be electric by 2035. If, in the words of Brown, the “emissions are the problem”, then electric vehicles are unlikely to make a profound dent on those numbers alone.

But numbers don’t tell the whole story. Just like their petrol-powered predecessors, electric cars incentivise urban sprawl. Centering our transport system entirely around them would mean paving over wetlands and riparian fields. Laying bitumen over a grove of native trees isn’t great for the climate, even if the resulting commutes are slightly more carbon efficient than before.

There are also the problems unique to EVs and their batteries: the health hazards and waste, the poisoned water in parts of South America, the potential birth defects in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Then there are the deaths to consider. Electrified SUVs and light trucks are heavier than their petrol-powered counterparts, making them much better for mowing down an unsuspecting pedestrian while checking TikTok.

If that’s not enough, we just don’t have space. This is what the Burning Man traffic jam would look like if it was all electric vehicles.

Here’s a data model of what a future version of Auckland will look like if we keep up our current level of driving, and just switch out petrol and diesel for electricity.

The Herald’s contributors say we need to plunge headlong into that future anyway because New Zealanders love their cars and that’s not going to change. Roughan spells it out plainly. “Like Wayne Brown, I don’t do ‘visions’,” he says. “I just notice what people like to do and believe the function of government is to enable them to do it as efficiently and safely as possible.”

These commentators will be devastated to learn that transport engineers have always manipulated our choices, and our reliance on cars is their grandest and most enduring social experiment. If they’d been writing in 1950, they might have said Aucklanders love their trams. Back then, residents took 100 million trips on the city’s electric tram network every year, or 258 each on average.

That changed with the tabling of a document called the Master Transport Plan in 1955. It proposed a state-of-the-art new motorway system for Auckland, alongside pictures of figure 8 interchanges in Indiana and eight-lane highways in California. In the following years, the city’s tram tracks were ripped up, the suburb of Grafton Gully was bulldozed, and the Central Motorway Junction was built over its remains. Similar processes happened across the country.

The reason we appear to love our cars is because we usually have no other way of getting around. Our relationship with them is less like love, and more like Stockholm Syndrome*. For 70 years, we’ve been locked in the Sisyphean cycle prescribed by Roughan, where our planners have noted people tend to drive, and provided for more of the same, until nearly all our transport investment and space has been devoted to one mode. But just like releasing better iPhones gets more people using iPhones, building roads entices more people to drive. The new lanes fill up. We build more, and every time we do, people get hurt or shunted out of our public realm.

In the late ’70s, 20% of children cycled to school. Today that figure is around 2 or 3%. Auckland’s population is set to grow to roughly 2.5 million by 2050, and its roads are already clogged. To cater for that growth with electric cars alone, we’d need to widen many of them to something akin to the Burning Man superhighway, further forcing children, the disabled, and anyone who can’t drive away from the streets, along with killing people, causing pollution, and still not solving our congestion issues.

Other cities saw this destructive pattern, and made different choices. In Amsterdam a formerly car-clogged city has been transformed. More recently, Paris has undergone the same process.

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Toby Manhire
— Editor-at-large

Commentators like Roughan have always opposed our half-hearted efforts to echo these cities’ moves. The Northern Busway is perhaps the most successful transit project in Auckland’s history, transporting up to 50% of all commuters across the Harbour Bridge at peak times. When it was built, Roughan cast doubt on it. He had also scorned the idea that people would use park and rides. In 2018 the Herald ran a campaign to increase their capacity because they were too full. The construction of Britomart saw rail journeys jump hugely, far ahead of projections. Roughan had predicted it would be an economic disaster. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that if planners had done the opposite of what Roughan proposed for the last 50 years, many of our worst transport issues would be solved.

At least Britomart and the busway went ahead. In his piece this week, Roughan briefly mentions our biggest transport mistake, noting that 50 years ago he covered council meetings where planners proposed railway lines fed by buses, and light rail in the western isthmus. He’s likely talking about mayor Dove Meyer Robinson’s proposal for a rapid rail network, which would have seen trains running every three minutes in transport hubs across Auckland. Robinson’s plan was opposed by other mayors and eventually scuttled by Robert Muldoon’s administration. Even high-ranking figures in the National Party now see that as the city’s greatest missed opportunity.

Lamenting Robbie’s Rail, aka Mayor Dove Meyer Robinson’s proposal for a rapid rail network throughout Auckland.

The next few years represent our best chance to right that wrong, and enable a new transformation of our transport network. Electric cars should be a part of that story, but not the only one. We could have electric buses everywhere. A cycle network that gives people a chance of biking past the end of their driveway without being run over by a Ford Ranger. Maybe even that elusive light rail. In the past, we’ve caved in at the point of change, opting to listen to the naysayers and status quo warriors who dominate the opinion pages of the Herald. Doing so has made our streets hostile, and left us with fewer choices. Let’s not make the same mistake again.

*Fun fact: Stockholm Syndrome is contested and likely doesn’t exist. It was invented by a misogynistic psychiatrist to discredit a kidnapping victim who criticised police.