Kate Hawkesby has a warning about talking to her famous father John on the subject of his illustrious 26-year career in New Zealand television. “Allow plenty of time, because he loves to talk. He’ll still be going three hours later, trust me!” she laughs.

“She’s right,” admits John a little later. “Apparently I was a huge embarrassment to her at the photo shoot. Here was I – thinking I was being very hip and down with the young women who work for the Weekly, talking about how much I enjoyed the movie Boy and things like that – and then Kate rings her mother and tells her I wouldn’t shut up.”

This light-hearted exchange is fairly typical for the father and daughter broadcasters who could be considered Kiwi TV royalty. They’ll notch up a combined 38 years on our screens as New Zealand television celebrates its 50th anniversary.

Yet both started out in the TV studio reading the news for the first time as an accident, rather than as part of a carefully thought-out career plan. “I was mowing the lawns one Saturday afternoon,” says John, “when I got a call from one of the editors of the evening news saying that they had a major problem. Tom Bradley was on holiday, Jennie Goodwin was away getting married and Phillip Sherry was otherwise engaged so could I get in
there as quickly as possible?

“It was like a nightmare. My adrenalin buzz disappeared very quickly when thingsstarted going wrong. They were rolling the wrong tapes and one story was about the then Minister of Roading, who was retiring because he had lost his voice and could no longer debate in the house. I introduced the story and the pictures appeared, but there
was no sound. Someone screamed in my earpiece to apologise and quickly move on and when I turned back to the camera all I could think to say was, ‘It appears the politician has lost his voice already.'

“The cameraman doubled over with laughter, hitting the camera with his shoulder, which meant it started leaning. I’d been taught to follow the camera so I started leaning with it!” recalls John.

Despite this disastrous first outing, John was given the job of weekend newsreader before later moving to the
News at Six with Tom Bradley in 1978. Kate’s newsreading debut was just as hectic and unexpected.

“I was miles away from town on the southern motorway in rush hour when I got a call from the Head of News and Current Affairs telling me to get my arse back into the building, find a jacket and get into makeup to read the six o’clock news because there was no-one else to do it,” says Kate.

“Dad always said to me, ‘Take every opportunity that comes your way,’ so I raced back to the newsroom, but the
traffic was horrible and I was paranoid about being late.

“My first thought was to ring Dad and tell him as we’d be on competing stations at the same time for the first time, given he was reading the news on TV3,” she says. “He gave me some really sound advice, like get your earpiece in early, make sure you have paper copies of the scripts, and pretend you’re talking to Mum at home as opposed to reading an autocue.

“Everything he said made sense and helped me to keep calm. “I’ll always remember one crazy bit of advice he used to give us, which was, ‘Brush your teeth.’ That’s always pretty much been Dad’s big mantra with us all
our lives: ‘Clean your teeth and you’ll feel good about yourself!’”

John says when Kate later became the fill-in 6pm newsreader on TVNZ, they’d often be reading the news on different channels on the same nights. “Kate had the number of my direct line so she’d call me at 5pm and ask me what our lead story was. Just like that. She’d wind me up by saying things like, ‘Well, I suppose you got
the interview with the mother. Everyone got that.’ Then I’d hang up and think, ‘What interview? What mother?’”

Although Kate was happy enough to trade on her relationship with her dad in those days, it was a different story when she first started her career in TV. She had arrived back from overseas in 1995 and, at the age of 21, made the decision not to join her father at TV3 but rather to apply for a job at the opposition network, TVNZ, making the initial telephone call under her mother’s maiden name of Miller.

“It was a plan I hatched with Mum while Dad was at work, because I didn’t want people to scream nepotism. But it was quite an unpopular thing to do within the family because TV3 was the underdog and all of the Hawkesby family was very pro-TV3.”

“Kate just wanted to row her own waka,” says John. “I wasn’t at all upset with her. I thought, ‘Good on you for making it on your own merits.’”

And he still clearly remembers the day his daughter did her very first piece of reporting on the Holmes show, which once again came about due to an urgent situation in the newsroom.

“A plane had gone down in Palmerston North and one of the survivors had used a cellphone to call out from the crash site. It was the first time someone had done that. Kate was in the building with no defined job, just learning the ropes – I don’t think she was even getting paid at that point – when a producer came running out,
pointed at Kate and said ‘Come with me, we’re off! We’re jumping in a plane to go get the survivors on air by seven o’clock!’

“She did a wonderful job and secured a full-time contract after that night. We were all so proud of her,” says John.

“There was a lot of fun to be had. One Friday night Kate had been reading all week on TV One and things got a bit loose over at TV3. It was a light news day and at the end of the show, they put a shot behind me just over my shoulder which was a live cross to Kate reading on TV One. John Campbell walked on to the set and said, ‘Excuse me, John, but before you get into your next story, turn around and have a look behind you – I believe this is the first time a father and daughter have read the news on competing channels.’

“At the end TVNZ rang my boss and said they thought it was brilliant.” Kate says her interest in TV was nurtured
from a very young age by her father.

“I always loved the buzz of a newsroom when I was a kid. We were dragged through newsrooms from a young age because Dad always loved his job and I remember him coming in the door full of the latest news and drama. My family loves to discuss politics, which is probably why I majored in political studies at university,” says Kate.

“At the time I had grand ideas of myself heading off to the parliamentary press gallery to fight the good fight, exposing crooked politicians and championing the underdog, which isn’t quite how it panned out,” she laughs. “By the time I’d finished my degree, I was over the politics and I buggered off overseas to travel like most Kiwi students.”

Both John and Kate credit much of their success to Joyce, the family matriarch, who has always been a solid supporter. “Mum is intensely loyal and would watch every single thing I did, even if it was a graphic with a voiceover I had written that I wasn’t even on camera for. Everything we did, she celebrated and praised,” says Kate.

The first story Kate ever did for the 6pm news was about the building of the Sky Tower. “I did a tragic piece to camera but Mum taped it and made everyone watch it. My sister Jessica and brother Duncan were wetting their pants, but Dad played it back and gave me a good solid critique. He used to say really constructive things,
while Jessica and Duncan made fun of me.”

Joyce also understood when John had to leave the family at short notice for work reasons. Kate says, “I remember we were on a family holiday in the South Island when the Gulf War broke out, and Dad had to fly back. Mum was so cool about being abandoned with three kids!”

Kate says the best thing John taught her over the years was to remember that you’re just a cog in the wheel and the behind-the-scenes crew are the most important people on set. Dad always said to find out every crew member’s name and get to know them because they are the key players in getting you smoothly to air.

“I’ve seen a lot of people come and go who perhaps didn’t have that approach and treated the crew like bottom-feeders. That’s a big mistake, when you fall for the delusion that it’s all about you. Dad always said, ‘The product is the star, not you.’”

John is known in the TV industry for mentoring young hopefuls and his top piece of advice is to “be in the building”.

He says, “I remember being in the building at South Pacific Television in the 1970s. I was just there looking at scripts and preparing for my role as the voiceover guy. This man called Kevan Moore, who was the programmer and essentially The Man in the office, came in wearing his three-piece suit and smoking his pipe and
looked around at us. ‘Is anybody here in the room not actually doing anything and just occupying a seat?’ he asked the whole office. It felt like we were all back at school and my hand shot up straightaway.

“He ordered me to follow him and I had the best day sitting in the viewing room looking at bits of programmes and giving them a young person’s opinion. Not only was I in the building but I was with the CEO and the head of programming. They knew my name and I’m not completely sure but I think that had a lot to do with me getting my first job on camera.”

These days, Kate works as a newsreader on NewstalkZB’s Breakfast show, hosted by her partner Mike Hosking, and says she has no wish to go back to TV at present.

“While I wouldn’t rule it out, I’m not ruling it in either. I have too many children – Jackson (11), Josh (9) and Marley (3) – and too much else going on to think about it now. I’m enjoying being a mum too much and the hours I work suit that.”

And John is definite that, after 26 years in the business, his TV career is over. “I’m 63 and it’s a young person’s game now. I’ve turned my passion for wine into my job by doing commentary on National Radio and NewstalkZB and some work as an MC for corporate events. I have a mild obsession with wine – but that doesn’t
mean I drink a lot of it,” he says.

“It’s like people who collect cars. They might have 12 in the garage but it doesn’t mean they drive around in them all the time. With the wine and nine grandchildren, there’s not a lot of time for TV.”