Cover story

Oscar Kightley is a television legend. For real – he’s being bestowed the honour at the New Zealand Television Awards this week. To mark the milestone, he takes us back through his life in front of – and on – the ‘box in the corner of the lounge’.

It’s hard living life as a legend. There’s such pressure with that kind of designation. What if my card declines at the supermarket? That’s not very legendary. How is one supposed to walk, talk, brush your teeth like a legend? It doesn’t feel sustainable. Lucky then, that being considered a legend of television in New Zealand is like any honour given out in this country. It’s not so grandiose as the title suggests, but more like a collective warm pat on the back and people who care, saying “well done, good on ya mate”.

As a four-year-old running around my dad’s village in Samoa, I always felt like a legend so it is lovely to have this echoed by an industry I love dearly.

Still, as someone who grew up in lovely old Aotearoa and has taken on all the odd cultural foibles that come with that, it feels a bit funny taking this honour on board.

It probably goes back to when in 1953, when Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay did the hardest thing imaginable to humans at the time – climb Mt Everest – and Hillary’s reaction was to shrug like it was no big deal. Thereby, setting in stone, how casually all subsequent New Zealanders are supposed to behave, after doing something cool.

But also, it’s a bit tricky taking this honour onboard because, in television, nothing is ever done on your own. Even someone painting a picture, or a solo performer, needs people to help if they ever

“It’s a bit tricky taking this honour onboard because, in television, nothing is ever done on your own.“

want their work to see the light of day.

To misquote the poet John Donne, no one is an island, and that’s particularly true in the arts.

Like Liam Neeson in Taken, I too have a particular set of skills that I have acquired over a long career, but the skill I’m most thankful for is having met legends and being sensible enough to listen to them, and also working with friends who are all legends. All geniuses, all dear people whose lives and work have added to mine, so I could take part in one of the most fun activities known to humans – make cool stuff for other people to watch.

The real inspiration, for any kind of story-telling, is the audience.

I joined the television audience of New Zealand in the early 1970s, aged four, having moved here from Samoa. TV here at the time seemed a hotchpotch of programmes from the US and the UK and just a few local news or entertainment shows. But eventually, in addition to homegrown classics like Romper Room, Play School, Beauty and the Beast, Close To Home and Country Calendar, soon more New Zealand shows were made and our television screens started to reflect back to us a picture of what New Zealand perhaps looks like.

And I lapped them all up. The magnificent John Clarke was the first Kiwi to make me laugh and Billy T James carried on that great work. I can remember, at 15, thinking to myself how great it →

would be to do a television comedy about Pacific Islanders, like how Clarke did for Pakeha and James did it so wonderfully, not just for Māori, but the whole country.

When I left Rutherford High School in Te Atatu North after form 6, my first job was as a cadet reporter for the Auckland Star newspaper. I thought that would be my career until retirement. But four years later, I was made redundant, as evening newspapers around the world began closing down and so that was my journalism career done.

In 1991, landing a job at TV3’s publicity department writing press releases was the closest I thought I’d get to a job in TV, but Nightline had just started and it was breaking new ground.

I loved it and so when the producer Mark Everton asked me if I’d do a story for the show, about this Samoan guy in Ōtara who looked like MC Hammer, of course I jumped at the chance. He was a lovely guy, it was a lovely story and that was my first time on TV.

A TVNZ teenage magazine show called Life In The Fridge Exists must have seen it, and when they were looking for new presenters, interviewed me. I ended up moving to Christchurch to work on that. A highlight was meeting the Play School toys, and I thought this would be my new career, but six months later the show didn’t get funding for another season, and that was the end of that.

It was my first sobering lesson about working in TV – it doesn’t last forever and if a project doesn’t get funded, that’s the end of things. I’ve taken that knowledge into every job, never expecting it to last forever, and always ready to do something else when it finishes. It’s an approach that must have worked on some level, because 32 years later I still manage to get work in TV.

A personal favourite project was Harry, the cop drama I did with Sam Neill. My gosh, I wish we’d got to do more than one series, but

I was grateful we even got to do one. And it brought Sam Neill back to work on television in New Zealand.

Theatre was always there though, in between the TV gigs. Some dear friends and I started a theatre company, we called it Pacific Underground, and set about making the stuff we wanted to see on TV, but for the stage. And theatre was where me and my homies started the Naked Samoans, the real heroes of my career. And so much screen work that people know I’ve done, has come from the Naked Samoans. Whether it was bro’Town, which my old friend Elizabeth Mitchell created for us, or the Sione’s Wedding films, which my mate James Griffin conceived with the Naked Samoans in mind.

What this country could look like, according to our TV screens, is still evolving, as more people find their voices, and different communities become part of the landscape in New Zealand. That’s what I always loved about the power of television. That it could tell stories about who’s here, and why, and what they love.

I wish this award came with some money or even a stamp I could put on future New Zealand on Air applications, because I plan to still keep making things. And if I could offer a plea from a ‘legend’ soapbox, it would be for our funders to fund more children’s television, both scripted and unscripted. TikTok and YouTube are great, but television offers a path to a whole industry of people telling stories, making work and making lives.

It’s a path that could lead anywhere, even to a bigger screen. Last month I got to go to LA for the premiere of Taika Waititi’s new film Next Goal Wins, which I act in. That wouldn’t have happened without all the up and down fun times in theatre and television I’ve had over the years. Please go see it when it opens in cinemas here this week.

Television is supposed to be dying and its alleged demise has been signalled for years now, as people of a certain age stop watching terrestrial TV and get their entertainment online. But that picture of what our country looks like on screen keeps growing because it’s being built by so many dedicated and passionate people who still believe in television and its power to be something useful and inspiring – not just a box in the corner of the lounge.

“What this country could look like, according to our TV screens, is still evolving, as more people find their voices, and different communities become part of the landscape in New Zealand. “