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Design: Tina Tiller
Design: Tina Tiller

Pop CultureFebruary 15, 2022

Holy sheet: Fair Go returns for 2022 with a fitted sheet shock

Design: Tina Tiller
Design: Tina Tiller

Fair Go is back for another year of sticking up for consumers. Tara Ward watched the first episode for 2022 and discovered it’s the little things that make a difference. 

Last night, Fair Go kicked off its 45th year of listening to New Zealanders complain. For nearly half a century, TVNZ 1’s top rating and much loved consumer affairs programme has been in our corner, fighting battles big and small to improve the lives of ordinary New Zealanders. They’re even on TikTok. After all that time and all those grumbles, you’d think we’d have run out of problems for Fair Go to solve. What could we possibly have left to complain about in 2022?

The answer, New Zealand, is fitted sheets.

We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them in the bedroom (Screengrab: TVNZ)

Fair Go returned for 2022 with a cracker of a story about Kath from Christchurch, who contacted the show after experiencing absolute scenes every time she changed her bed linen. Kath has a king single bed, but struggles to get her king single sheets to fit the mattress. Either the sheets are too small or the mattress is too big, but either way, life is one long journey of inanimate objects fucking us over in a variety of ways, and Kath has had enough.

Luckily, a fitted sheet shitfest is the stuff Fair Go thrives on. Last night’s episode saw the show cover serious issues like the accuracy of skin cancer checks and pesticides in imported flowers, but the sheet scandal hit hardest. Big Sheet is corrupting us one mattress at a time, and Fair Go unleashed some investigative journalism that made a difference. Forget Sunday, turn off Q&A. This is the news that matters.

Save yourself (Screengrab: TVNZ)

Fair Go dived deep inside the fitted sheet – or the “scrunchy buggers”, as Pippa Wetzel called them – and the results were shocking.

Reporter Kaitlin Ruddock discovered sheet sizes don’t have universal measurements, that the depth of a fitted sheet can vary by 10 centimetres, and that the sheet often has the exact same measurements as the mattress, hence the difficulty in making it fit. That’s why fitted sheets are such dickheads. It’s like trying to do up your jeans after Christmas, the time-space continuum just doesn’t allow it.

The solution? Fair Go spoke to a staff at a fancy linen store, who suggested we double-check our mattress measurements before we go sheet shopping.

Kath from Christchurch wasn’t putting up with that bullshit. “That’s not something you would normally do,” she told Fair Go, speaking for all normal, non-mattress-measuring New Zealanders. Kath is us. All we want is to smell our flowers and get our moles checked and change our sheets without having to ask the country’s favourite consumer affairs show to battle on our behalf. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

Fair Go’s Haydn Jones, Pippa Wetzel and Scrunchy Bugger (Screengrab: TVNZ)

As customers, we put our trust in business, but Fair Go is here to remind us that’s the last thing we should do. Kath eventually got her bed made, the nation voiced its mutual distrust of fitted sheets, and Fair Go was over for another week. Back in the studio, Pippa held one of those scrunchy buggers in her arms. It lay limp in defeat, shamed by the light that Fair Go had cast on its fraudulent existence.

As always, Fair Go wanted to help us until the very end. “There’s usually a tag on the bottom right hand corner,” Pippa said, revealing the sheet’s seedy underbelly, moments before the credits rolled. “Start there and work your way around.” It was simple advice, but in my head a choir of angels began to sing.

Fair Go’s return was 22 minutes of learning and self discovery. All I did was put on the television, and now I felt more empowered than I had all year. “Better living, everyone,” Haydn Jones said. I couldn’t agree more.

Catch Fair Go on Monday nights on TVNZ1 and on TVNZ OnDemand. And TikTok.


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Joe Daymond at West Park (Image : Stewart Sowman-Lund & Tina Tiller)
Joe Daymond at West Park (Image : Stewart Sowman-Lund & Tina Tiller)

MediaFebruary 15, 2022

Joe Daymond is ready to shake up the media

Joe Daymond at West Park (Image : Stewart Sowman-Lund & Tina Tiller)
Joe Daymond at West Park (Image : Stewart Sowman-Lund & Tina Tiller)

Comedian turned reality TV star Joe Daymond is gearing up for the launch of a brand new show he produced with Māori TV. He tells Stewart Sowman-Lund how it came about – and why he’s so excited.

From a small office overlooking Auckland’s Britomart precinct, Joe Daymond is plotting to take on the mainstream media. The comedian turned Instagram personality turned reality show contestant turned content producer always dreamed of having his own office in the heart of the Auckland CBD. And now, at 26 years old, it’s a reality. His TV production company West Park has nestled into a downtown apartment complex just five years after it was launched in a garage of one of Daymond’s old flats.

For most of that time, West Park had just a single staff member. Now there’s seven and a new deal with Māori Television will see Daymond and his team responsible for producing original content for the network. 

I profiled Daymond less than a year ago, when I called him “the next big thing” in NZ comedy. That was after he’d managed to sell out Auckland’s Skycity Theatre (twice) and popped up on comedy shows like Have You Been Paying Attention? and 7 Days. But, sitting across from Daymond in this small, bright room above Customs Street, I wonder if “next big thing” was an understatement. In the nine months since our chat, he’s made it onto mainstream reality TV with a stint on Celebrity Treasure Island, finished working on an original series for Comedy Central that he co-produced and is preparing to launch his first show as part of the Māori TV deal: Rags Are Riches. 


Duncan Greive chats to Joe Daymond on this week’s episode of The Fold. 

Follow The Fold on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.


The Māori TV partnership started to take form around July last year. Daymond approached the network with his vision to produce social media-centric TV shows but with television resources. He’d already sat through dozens of meetings with big TV executive types, and Daymond says he’d got used to being told that everything he knew about TV was wrong – or that everything the network was doing was right. That was not his experience with Māori TV. “Maramena Roderick [director of content] saw the vision and was very upfront. She said: ‘I don’t exactly understand everything but I know there are better ways to do things and I think the way you’re thinking will be a way that works.’ I’d never heard that before.”

Daymond says he finally met someone who backed his way of thinking and was “super open to it” from the start.

Māori TV offered to internally fund a full TV series with Daymond’s production company as a sort of trial run for his vision. That show, an unscripted reality series (but on a much smaller scale than the likes of Treasure Island), launches at the end of the month. It’s called Rags Are Riches, and sounds a bit like a mash up of Project Runway and money-saving shows like Eat Well For Less. Hosted by comedian Courtney Dawson and Mai FM’s Randy Sjafrie, the show’s aimed at making high fashion accessible, with the help of an assortment of recognisable TV personalities who need advice on their wardrobes. “It’s about how people who don’t have a whole lot of money can still dress well,” explains Daymond. “It’s all about the sustainability and accessibility of high fashion.”

In one episode, Treasure Island alums Chris Parker and Lance Savali are challenged to create the best outfit possible from clothes bought at The Warehouse. Another episode focuses on the benefits of reusing old clothes. The likes of Breakfast co-host Matty McLean, social media star Tegan Yorwarth and actor Tammy Davis all pop up throughout the series.

While Daymond says the show will be “relatively small” he expects it will unlock bigger opportunities for many of the team involved. Aside from the guest stars, most of those on the show, including the hosts, have had little to no television experience. The entire production crew are still in their 20s. 

Daymond says that was intentional. “I was no less capable three years before the time I got opportunities,” he says. “There are so many of these people who are ready.” He points to Shit You Should Care About, the Instagram-centred news service run by three young women originally from Blenheim that’s garnered millions of online followers. “Building Shit You Should Care About makes them just as qualified as anybody else in that space. It’s about getting the people with the resources to recognise it,” says Daymond. “And if they don’t recognise it, they’re missing out on a goldmine.” 

Daymond intends for West Park’s future TV output to similarly offer opportunities for up and comers. “[TV networks] need to be open to people who have never done television. They’re not ‘inexperienced’, they’ve just never done TV,” he says.

Perhaps surprisingly, Daymond cites his run on Celebrity Treasure Island as part of the reason he is now confident in producing his own shows. In addition to giving him a higher public profile – thus opening more doors to him within the media industry – Daymond says it taught him how to run a production from behind the scenes. “I paid a lot of close attention to the producer on the show, like how he’d keep time and how he ran the set,” he said. “I took a lot of the lessons from Celebrity Treasure Island and pulled it into our productions.”

For now, Daymond’s getting ready to shake-up New Zealand’s media landscape. Along with Rags Are Riches, he’s got five shows already in development – both unscripted and scripted. He’s doing it all from his little office in Britomart now, but let’s see what happens in another year.

Read more: Joe Daymond is the next big thing.

Rags Are Riches launches later this month on Māori TV on demand.


Follow Duncan Greive’s NZ media podcast The Fold on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast provider.

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