Back to results INTERVIEW : Putting the Te in Radar The ubiquitous self-styled “opinionist” Andrew Lumsden (aka Te Radar) talks to Nick Grant about the new series of B&B on Mäori Television, how a loathing of work got him where he is today, and a great deal more. So, am I supposed to refer to you as Te Radar? I get called Te a lot, actually, particularly by Mäori and viewers of Mäori Television. I like it, it’s great. For the record, are you prepared to admit to your given name? Andrew John Lumsden. This is like a police interview. Of course, before Te Radar, you were simply Radar. How did you come by that handle? University. When I went to study law at Otago there was an ongoing tradition at my hostel, Selwyn College, that each year they had a Radar. Presumably it was the person who most closely resembled the character from MASH and, thanks to wearing spectacles at the time, in my year that was me. After that it stuck primarily because in the early 1970s the name Andrew was inordinately popular with mothers, and in my social group there would have been six or seven Andrews, none of whom were referred to as Andrew because it would have been too confusing. So it was a nickname that went through university and then I started doing stand-up and before long I realised it had become a brand and that to change it and go back to, “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Andrew Lumsden!”, would have resulted in the audience going, “Who’s that?” Rebrand at your peril. A while after that I created another identity – The Radar Foundation – because it amused me, and Te Radar evolved out of that. I was doing a stand-up tour with Mike King that had a Mäori theme – maybe six years ago? – and I just changed the English “the” to the Mäori “te” because I thought it was funny, little knowing that would become the brand. Anyway, I just treat “Te” as an honorific, like “doctor” or “mister”. One day I’ll drop Radar off the end and just be “Te” – nice and simple and short. Just like Diana and Prince and Madonna. [laughs] So it’s your eventual ambition to essentially be referred to as “The”?* Except in Mäori. So, Te. Yes. So how would you explain the brand that is “Te Radar” – what does it encompass? At the moment it encompasses social comment, documentary, and comedy – sit-com and chat, and stand-up. Basically everything from newspaper columns to radio comment to television camp-ness and documentaries. People probably used to think of it as a bit surreal and quirky, but now because of the Herald column and National Radio it’s become more mainstream. Whether the humour has changed at all, I’m not sure – I’m probably not the best person to ask that. How do you describe what you do – entertainer? Hmmm, I guess so. I’m often confronted with the problem of what to put on forms, particularly immigration and exit forms: “What’s my occupation?” At the moment I put “opinionist”, because I basically earn most of my money by giving my opinion. I suppose that is a valid description, except for the small matter of “opinionist” not being a real word. Yeah, I made it up. What’s wrong with that? William Shakespeare made up, what, 600 words? He just made them up. People went, “That’s not a word”, and he said, “But it’s in the script.” Opinionist – I’m paid every week to give my opinion on what is happening. It’s what I do. Yeah, yeah, okay. In terms of being an entertainer, I guess I do most of my entertaining at Mäori Television – they let me sing. No-one else has let me sing, ever. I suspect there’s probably a good reason for that. Yes there is [laughs] but they don’t seem to care. Perhaps they do, but they haven’t said anything. Speaking of which, tell me about the new series of B&B, your show on Mäori Television. B&B is going into its third series. [It started on Tuesday 5 September – Ed] Each series is six episodes; we won’t do anymore than that. Apparently when they asked us if we’d like to do 12, we said, “No, don’t want to; too stressful.” The attitude that Hori [Ahipene] and I have is we’d rather do six and do them well, and then have a look at them and make sure they’re working and give the formula a tweak and do another six. I mean, when you’re developing a programme, why go out in a big burst and do 12 that are fatally flawed in some way? In other words, we wanted to be sure we could deliver the product to a standard we’d be happy with. Now, they might come back next year and say, “We want 12”, and we might say, “Yeah, we’re now in a position where we can do that.” As an aside, about five or six years ago I had a few meetings with various network people, but nothing came of it. What was interesting was that I was saying, “Why do you have to make 13 episodes of something, why can’t we make six or seven?” “Oh no, you can’t do that.” Their reason being, it’s easier to programme that way, but it badly affects the show. Now, sure enough, that’s becoming much more common now – better episodes, stronger episodes… Anyway, the thing with B&B is, it’s recorded live on Sunday and broadcast the following Tuesday. There was talk about doing non-live records but we really didn’t see the point – part of the concept is to keep it as topical as possible, so often storylines are being changed on the Friday and Saturday. If someone had told me I’d be involved in a programme like this I would have laughed at them, because it’s so different from what I’ve done before. It’s very broad, it’s got an element of camp-ness – someone described it to me as “very regional television”. I think of it as mad-camp. It’s really the marriage of two humour traditions isn’t it – British Blackpool music hall and Mäori? Yeah, it’s going back to the light entertainment of yesteryear – getting guests to do stupid stuff, and sitcom. We really try to concentrate on the sitcom side of it, to make sure the storyline between Bevan and Beverly is funny and interesting, and then you bring in your guests for the chat show part and then try to incorporate them in the story. How did B&B get off the ground in the first place? Livingstone Productions got in touch with me about the fact that MTS was looking for comedies. They said, “We’ve got an idea for a bi-cultural comedy where you and Hori play long-lost brothers.” Someone had just watched Twins then? Clearly. “And there’s a B&B you’re both running, guests come in, and there’s a clash of cultures” – what they were really interested in was that Mäori and Pakeha clash. And somewhere along the way we thought, “This isn’t very interesting; what if we were married?” Which is a much better analogy for New Zealand’s race relations. Yeah, it’s fantastic. So it wasn’t my idea, I was brought in. They said, “You’re the two people we want to work with, here’s the idea.” It got mulled over, mulled over, and then was put in for funding. I didn’t think it was going to be funded, because it was a bit wacky. Then it did get funded and I went, “Yay!” And now, at the beginning of series three, which represents episodes 13-18, we’re going great guns… It’s a very small writing team. For series one, it was Dave Armstrong, Hori and me. Dave was great – he was kind of the head writer and script editor and he brought a real sense of professionalism and invaluable experience. And he would leave on Thursday and watch the programme on Tuesday, and he was fine with the fact that often not a lot of his material appeared to make it into the show. Or so it seemed. [laughs]. But he’d provide an incredibly solid base on which we’d build a teetering pyramid of comedy. Series two was Hori, Albert Belz and me. Greg Mayor, who’s directing, is also kind of involved in writing – he’s there most of the time – and various other people sort of flit in and out. And now for this third series, there’s me, Hori, Albert, Greg, and Mark Prebble, who was helping out on stuff last series. So it’s still quite a small team. The sitcom part is the most difficult thing to put together, because you want to make sure the eight to 12 minutes of each episode that’s sitcom is really tight. And it’s great, you’ve got great perimeters – one room, two actors, and the guests, who generally don’t have a script. The guests are greeted, chatted to and usually put in an uncomfortable situation, to which they respond admirably. So yeah, it’s a really tight brief as a writer, and as a result I think we’ve had some great episodes. How involved in the creative process is producer Johnny Givins? He kind of stayed clear of it in the first series, and the second one he was more involved because there was stuff that required his input. But he’s great. We do read-throughs and bring in Johnny and various people, and he’ll say, “I don’t get that. What about this? How about that?” And it’s great to have people challenging what you’re writing, so you can say, “That’s a really good point. We’re so far up our own arses that we’ve missed the essential bit of this comedy.” And the other thing I really like about B&B is it takes very little time to get from the script to the screen. What you’re writing on Sunday morning is on screen two days later as a fully realised programme. So it’s not over-developed, you’re not suffering a lingering death in development hell, you’re not filming it and then having to wait four months before it’s played at three o’clock in the morning. In a perfect world, is there anything you’d change about the programme or the process? Oh sure, you’d have a revolving stage and a huge song and dance number – no, I don’t think so. You’d throw some more money at it and bring in some more gag writers probably, and have more people around the table, and some stuff would be tightened up, but it’d be essentially the same. It is what it is – some people love it and I’m sure some people hate it. It’s just entertainment that fills the space between the ads. So is that your basic attitude regarding making TV – filling the space between ads. Oh god no. So in your worst moments, you don’t sometimes – No, I don’t. The reason I don’t is I’m being paid to do something that I find really enjoyable. And the fact it does happen to fill a space between ads, let other people worry about that… The thing with B&B is that it can probably keep going and going. Our aim is to make it better and better every single week, so that more people tune in and we get more series and we can keep going until we’re old people. As long as we don’t run out of Mäori celebrities, which I’m sure we won’t. So guests are required to be Mäori celebs then? Yeah, basically – you want to have people who are pretty high profile. Having said that, we have had Jacqui Clark, who’s not Mäori, and coming up on this series we’ve got Suzanne Paul, who is, you know, as Mäori as an Englishwoman gets. How does making a show for MTS compare to your other forays in TV? Making TV for Mäori Television is a completely different experience from anything I’ve been exposed to. I mean, in the past, because as a comedian I’m self-centred and egotistical, I’ve been known to complain, “Fancy the network trying to tell me what’s funny and telling me to do this and change that!” With MTS it’s totally the opposite. We got commissioned to make B&B and, as basically the head writer and male lead, I’ve yet to receive a directive from the network about not doing something or doing something else. I think once they’ve said, “We’d like some younger guests and increase the use of reo.” And the latter was, I think, a TMP directive, and that’s fine, that’s their job. So we did, and the programme is all the better for it. But I’ll say to some of the executives there, “We’re thinking of doing this”, and they look at me as if to say, “Why are you telling me this? You’re being paid to do this; if you think it’s going to be funny, put it in. Who are we to tell the programme maker what to do?” Now, I’m sure if there was something they really hated, they’d say. But the rest of the time they let you get on with it, and as a result it’s really easy, convenient and fun. And it seems as if the attitude at the station is different – there are a lot of people making stuff they’re personally interested in, rather than just turning out product. They’re doing something that’s important. Okay, but to be fair to TVNZ and TV3, MTS has the luxury of being able to take greater risks without worrying too much about the bottomline. Yeah, they’re the television equivalent of a student radio station. If TVNZ makes a mistake, they stand to lose millions; if MTS makes a mistake, not such a problem. But I think it’s not so much a matter of taking risks as a matter of philosophy. You have to ask why elderly white women say they’re watching MTS because they think it produces what they consider to be charter television. Possibly because it’s demonstrably true. Anzac Day, anybody? The tangi of the Mäori Queen? Swearing in of Governor General? And I’ve never believed that you can’t marry a commercial imperative with charter aims. “Oh, no one watches charter programmes.” Really? Is that because they aren’t any good or because they’re on at bad times? Everyone gets up in arms about how difficult the charter is but basically it’s this simple – if we’re not going to make programmes about ourselves, no one else is going to. Why would they? And there’s plenty of great stories around, and more than enough competent television makers to realise them. Okay, perhaps to finish off we could touch on how you got your start. Would I be right in thinking that taking drama papers at Otago University was crucial to where you find yourself today? Definitely. When you signed up for drama there, had you had any previous thespian experience? I’d played Bottom in our seventh form production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and I was the narrator in our primary school version of Treasure Island. And you enjoyed that? Yeah, I got to meet girls. And that was why you took drama? Yeah, that and I’d failed law by then, and philosophy didn’t seem as if it’d be that useful. Law fell apart because it required actually working, as opposed to stage one English, which I managed to pass without reading any of the books. Can’t do that with law, unfortunately, otherwise who knows where I might be. Drama was fantastic – I did it not so much with the aim of becoming an actor as a director or a playwright. Writing always came quite easily, as did humour, so I assumed there’d be an outlet for that somewhere. I don’t think it was a particularly conscious thing though, it just seemed like a fun way to fill up some of my degree. So at what point did you think you’d actually have a crack at making a go of it? Really I think it was when I was in a comedy sketch group called Spleen, with Duncan Sarkies, Aaron Watson and Jesse Griffin, and the first show we did together we won the university comedy competition, in ’93 I think. And suddenly comedy seemed like an option. Then I went to live in Auckland and started doing stand-up, because Scott Blanks and Paul Horan were booking comedy nights at Kitty O’Brien’s, and Auckland seemed to be the only place with a comedy scene. Even with stand-up, though, I didn’t really know what it was until I saw Alan Brough on stage hosting the university competition, and I thought, “Wow, that doesn’t look that difficult, I can do that.” I’d never been a big follower of stand-up. You know, I’d listened to Bill Cosby and people like that, but wouldn’t buy a stand-up album. And even when I started doing stand-up, it was never the sole focus – to me it was a gateway drug to other things. And it was an easy way to get paid money. You turn up and speak for 10 minutes and they pay you. So how much of it was part of a career plan as such – Not much. – and how much of it was a matter of being fundamentally work-shy? A lot of it. I didn’t want to get a job, didn’t like working, and stand-up seemed like a viable way of being an entertainer, while I sat around and tried to figure out what it was I wanted to do with my life. I think I wanted to make television at that stage, though in what form I didn’t really know. Actually, the main reason I got into comedy was the idea that it’d be a good way to meet girls. But it’s not – the only groupies comedy attracts merely demonstrate that community care for people with mental difficulties really isn’t working… Anyway, shortly after that I got through to the finals of A Bit After Ten, which was a televised nationwide comedy competition, and as a result of that I thought, “Maybe I can foot it with these well-known people.” Then Pulp Comedy started a couple of years after that and it gave stand-up a real boost, because finally it was a way of getting comedy on television that wasn’t bad sketch comedy or lame satirical nonsense. It was a great way to expose New Zealanders to a whole lot of comedians and an indigenous comedy voice that, a lot of the time, was talking about events and people they knew. And it was obviously a cost efficient way of doing that. It’s cheap as chips – all you have to do is build a stage, get some cameras and pay your talent. And the pay wasn’t that great, given you were most likely the writer and performer. If you broke it down, it was ludicrously cheap for them to make. And Pulp was obviously crucial to people like King, and yourself to a degree, being able to make a living by doing provincial tours. Yeah, I see it as being exactly the same as music videos. Before the recent explosion of NZ music videos there was a lull and NZ videos weren’t really being shown on TV. Then they started getting screened, and the songs were played on the radio and bands were able to make a living from touring. Comedy was exactly the same – if you don’t have that exposure, what’s the point of having your name on a poster, because nobody knows who you are. They’re not going to go along just because it says “Comedy Night”. The cancellation of Pulp was obviously a blow to the development of stand-up in NZ and, one would think, to what would have been potentially fertile cross-overs into other forms of TV comedy… The biggest problem we have with the development of television comedy is there’s no Pulp Comedy, there’s no sketch comedy, there’s barely any comedy. So where do people working in comedy – either in theatre or stand-up – get their exposure? It’s a very daunting thing for people to go to a network with an idea. Because first they’ve got to sell their idea to a production company, which then has to go and sell the idea to a network – there’s a lot of rigmarole involved in that and a lot of people don’t do it. Not because their ideas are bad but because it’s very daunting. “Well, they just need to keep persevering.” But the problem is there are just so many gatekeepers. Then, if the network picks up the idea, chances are you find yourself making a show that bears very little resemblance to what you wanted to make in the first place and it turns out terribly. And you know, something that continues to puzzle me is: if you’re a network and you say you have an active interest in making comedy, why do you not go to the comedians? I think the standard retort is that stand-up is different from TV comedy. To which I’d say, “Who knows how to make people laugh? People who do comedy. And where do many of the great sitcoms come from? Stand-up comedians. Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond, Everybody Hates Chris, Drew Carey – all stand-ups.” Doesn’t seem like rocket science to me. Okay, back to your, um, erratic career… Stand-up of one sort or another for about 10 years was your primary thing, yeah? Yup, my first television gig was Newsflash, which was one of the most hideous experiences of my life. That was a classic example of the project I was recruited to make ending up being completely different from what was made. It was supposed to be satirical and edgy, and I had stand-up arguments with people at the production company, because at the same time we were making it, the first series of Havoc came on. And I said, “Look at that, look at what they’re doing.” We were putting in scripts in that style that I thought were more satirical and better, and we could not make them. We had to make what ended up being a very conventional and unfunny programme that failed really badly. And then they wondered why we got really angry about it… And the next thing I made I think was Timor ODDyssey. There was nothing coming through as far as TV goes and I was doing theatre and stuff like that. I thought the comedy programmes being made were atrocious – they didn’t interest me. So I thought I’d go and make my own programme and then work out what to do with it. I’d always wanted to make documentaries and fortunately for me – not so much for the people of East Timor – there was a conflict there and I had enough air points to get part of the way there, and someone [Aaron Watson] who’d go with me. We shot that on High 8 because no one would give me a camera, and I funded it myself, and presented it as a multi-media show at a comedy festival. Then I got money from the Screen Innovation Fund to do a reworked version that’s still touring today. So basically you decided to seize control of the means of production. Yeah, which I’m still kind of doing now because now documentaries are the thing to see, thanks to the rise of reality TV and Michael Moore and so on. Then there was the Israel one [Christmas in Bethlehem], which basically turned into a four-part radio programme and half an hour on TV; the film version was never really finished because no-one was paying for that and I was too busy. My legacy will be the biggest pile of unedited documentary material in NZ. And then there was The Battle for Pahrump, about the American presidential election, which I shot with Dean Cornish and was funded by his air mile points and my free ticket to LA, a prize from the 48Hour Film Festival. And I’ve recently presented Hidden in the Numbers for Razor Films, which successfully screened on TV One, despite being programmed against the irresistible force that is Desperate Housewives. Okay, we’re out of time. Finally, while I hesitate to suggest that people use you as a template – [laughs] Oh god forbid, don’t do that. – what advice would you give to someone who wants the kind of career that, perhaps inadvertently, you’ve built for yourself? Just do it. Don’t sit around and complain about not getting anything. If you think you can do it, then do it. I’m sick to death of hearing people sit around and whinge, “No-one’s funding this,” and “No-one’s doing that.” Why should they? If you think you’ve got a product that’s good, do it yourself. Get on to it and start figuring out ways of getting it done. But don’t come to me and complain that you haven’t got anything to do. Haven’t got any work? Make some work, find something to do. Oh sure, you’d have a revolving stage and a huge song and dance number – no, I don’t think so. You’d throw some more money at it and bring in some more gag writers probably, and have more people around the table, and some stuff would be tightened up, but it’d be essentially the same. It is what it is – some people love it and I’m sure some people hate it. It’s just entertainment that fills the space between the ads. So is that your basic attitude regarding making TV – filling the space between ads. Oh god no. So in your worst moments, you don’t sometimes – No, I don’t. The reason I don’t is I’m being paid to do something that I find really enjoyable. And the fact it does happen to fill a space between ads, let other people worry about that… The thing with B&B is that it can probably keep going and going. Our aim is to make it better and better every single week, so that more people tune in and we get more series and we can keep going until we’re old people. As long as we don’t run out of Mäori celebrities, which I’m sure we won’t. So guests are required to be Mäori celebs then? Yeah, basically – you want to have people who are pretty high profile. Having said that, we have had Jacqui Clark, who’s not Mäori, and coming up on this series we’ve got Suzanne Paul, who is, you know, as Mäori as an Englishwoman gets. How does making a show for MTS compare to your other forays in TV? Making TV for Mäori Television is a completely different experience from anything I’ve been exposed to. I mean, in the past, because as a comedian I’m self-centred and egotistical, I’ve been known to complain, “Fancy the network trying to tell me what’s funny and telling me to do this and change that!” With MTS it’s totally the opposite. We got commissioned to make B&B and, as basically the head writer and male lead, I’ve yet to receive a directive from the network about not doing something or doing something else. I think once they’ve said, “We’d like some younger guests and increase the use of reo.” And the latter was, I think, a TMP directive, and that’s fine, that’s their job. So we did, and the programme is all the better for it. But I’ll say to some of the executives there, “We’re thinking of doing this”, and they look at me as if to say, “Why are you telling me this? You’re being paid to do this; if you think it’s going to be funny, put it in. Who are we to tell the programme maker what to do?” Now, I’m sure if there was something they really hated, they’d say. But the rest of the time they let you get on with it, and as a result it’s really easy, convenient and fun. And it seems as if the attitude at the station is different – there are a lot of people making stuff they’re personally interested in, rather than just turning out product. They’re doing something that’s important. Okay, but to be fair to TVNZ and TV3, MTS has the luxury of being able to take greater risks without worrying too much about the bottomline. Yeah, they’re the television equivalent of a student radio station. If TVNZ makes a mistake, they stand to lose millions; if MTS makes a mistake, not such a problem. But I think it’s not so much a matter of taking risks as a matter of philosophy. You have to ask why elderly white women say they’re watching MTS because they think it produces what they consider to be charter television. Possibly because it’s demonstrably true. Anzac Day, anybody? The tangi of the Mäori Queen? Swearing in of Governor General? And I’ve never believed that you can’t marry a commercial imperative with charter aims. “Oh, no one watches charter programmes.” Really? Is that because they aren’t any good or because they’re on at bad times? Everyone gets up in arms about how difficult the charter is but basically it’s this simple – if we’re not going to make programmes about ourselves, no one else is going to. Why would they? And there’s plenty of great stories around, and more than enough competent television makers to realise them. Okay, perhaps to finish off we could touch on how you got your start. Would I be right in thinking that taking drama papers at Otago University was crucial to where you find yourself today? Definitely. When you signed up for drama there, had you had any previous thespian experience? I’d played Bottom in our seventh form production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and I was the narrator in our primary school version of Treasure Island. And you enjoyed that? Yeah, I got to meet girls. And that was why you took drama? Yeah, that and I’d failed law by then, and philosophy didn’t seem as if it’d be that useful. Law fell apart because it required actually working, as opposed to stage one English, which I managed to pass without reading any of the books. Can’t do that with law, unfortunately, otherwise who knows where I might be. Drama was fantastic – I did it not so much with the aim of becoming an actor as a director or a playwright. Writing always came quite easily, as did humour, so I assumed there’d be an outlet for that somewhere. I don’t think it was a particularly conscious thing though, it just seemed like a fun way to fill up some of my degree. So at what point did you think you’d actually have a crack at making a go of it? Really I think it was when I was in a comedy sketch group called Spleen, with Duncan Sarkies, Aaron Watson and Jesse Griffin, and the first show we did together we won the university comedy competition, in ’93 I think. And suddenly comedy seemed like an option. Then I went to live in Auckland and started doing stand-up, because Scott Blanks and Paul Horan were booking comedy nights at Kitty O’Brien’s, and Auckland seemed to be the only place with a comedy scene. Even with stand-up, though, I didn’t really know what it was until I saw Alan Brough on stage hosting the university competition, and I thought, “Wow, that doesn’t look that difficult, I can do that.” I’d never been a big follower of stand-up. You know, I’d listened to Bill Cosby and people like that, but wouldn’t buy a stand-up album. And even when I started doing stand-up, it was never the sole focus – to me it was a gateway drug to other things. And it was an easy way to get paid money. You turn up and speak for 10 minutes and they pay you. So how much of it was part of a career plan as such – Not much. – and how much of it was a matter of being fundamentally work-shy? A lot of it. I didn’t want to get a job, didn’t like working, and stand-up seemed like a viable way of being an entertainer, while I sat around and tried to figure out what it was I wanted to do with my life. I think I wanted to make television at that stage, though in what form I didn’t really know. Actually, the main reason I got into comedy was the idea that it’d be a good way to meet girls. But it’s not – the only groupies comedy attracts merely demonstrate that community care for people with mental difficulties really isn’t working… Anyway, shortly after that I got through to the finals of A Bit After Ten, which was a televised nationwide comedy competition, and as a result of that I thought, “Maybe I can foot it with these well-known people.” Then Pulp Comedy started a couple of years after that and it gave stand-up a real boost, because finally it was a way of getting comedy on television that wasn’t bad sketch comedy or lame satirical nonsense. It was a great way to expose New Zealanders to a whole lot of comedians and an indigenous comedy voice that, a lot of the time, was talking about events and people they knew. And it was obviously a cost efficient way of doing that. It’s cheap as chips – all you have to do is build a stage, get some cameras and pay your talent. And the pay wasn’t that great, given you were most likely the writer and performer. If you broke it down, it was ludicrously cheap for them to make. And Pulp was obviously crucial to people like King, and yourself to a degree, being able to make a living by doing provincial tours. Yeah, I see it as being exactly the same as music videos. Before the recent explosion of NZ music videos there was a lull and NZ videos weren’t really being shown on TV. Then they started getting screened, and the songs were played on the radio and bands were able to make a living from touring. Comedy was exactly the same – if you don’t have that exposure, what’s the point of having your name on a poster, because nobody knows who you are. They’re not going to go along just because it says “Comedy Night”. The cancellation of Pulp was obviously a blow to the development of stand-up in NZ and, one would think, to what would have been potentially fertile cross-overs into other forms of TV comedy… The biggest problem we have with the development of television comedy is there’s no Pulp Comedy, there’s no sketch comedy, there’s barely any comedy. So where do people working in comedy – either in theatre or stand-up – get their exposure? It’s a very daunting thing for people to go to a network with an idea. Because first they’ve got to sell their idea to a production company, which then has to go and sell the idea to a network – there’s a lot of rigmarole involved in that and a lot of people don’t do it. Not because their ideas are bad but because it’s very daunting. “Well, they just need to keep persevering.” But the problem is there are just so many gatekeepers. Then, if the network picks up the idea, chances are you find yourself making a show that bears very little resemblance to what you wanted to make in the first place and it turns out terribly. And you know, something that continues to puzzle me is: if you’re a network and you say you have an active interest in making comedy, why do you not go to the comedians? I think the standard retort is that stand-up is different from TV comedy. To which I’d say, “Who knows how to make people laugh? People who do comedy. And where do many of the great sitcoms come from? Stand-up comedians. Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond, Everybody Hates Chris, Drew Carey – all stand-ups.” Doesn’t seem like rocket science to me. Okay, back to your, um, erratic career… Stand-up of one sort or another for about 10 years was your primary thing, yeah? Yup, my first television gig was Newsflash, which was one of the most hideous experiences of my life. That was a classic example of the project I was recruited to make ending up being completely different from what was made. It was supposed to be satirical and edgy, and I had stand-up arguments with people at the production company, because at the same time we were making it, the first series of Havoc came on. And I said, “Look at that, look at what they’re doing.” We were putting in scripts in that style that I thought were more satirical and better, and we could not make them. We had to make what ended up being a very conventional and unfunny programme that failed really badly. And then they wondered why we got really angry about it… And the next thing I made I think was Timor ODDyssey. There was nothing coming through as far as TV goes and I was doing theatre and stuff like that. I thought the comedy programmes being made were atrocious – they didn’t interest me. So I thought I’d go and make my own programme and then work out what to do with it. I’d always wanted to make documentaries and fortunately for me – not so much for the people of East Timor – there was a conflict there and I had enough air points to get part of the way there, and someone [Aaron Watson] who’d go with me. We shot that on High 8 because no one would give me a camera, and I funded it myself, and presented it as a multi-media show at a comedy festival. Then I got money from the Screen Innovation Fund to do a reworked version that’s still touring today. So basically you decided to seize control of the means of production. Yeah, which I’m still kind of doing now because now documentaries are the thing to see, thanks to the rise of reality TV and Michael Moore and so on. Then there was the Israel one [Christmas in Bethlehem], which basically turned into a four-part radio programme and half an hour on TV; the film version was never really finished because no-one was paying for that and I was too busy. My legacy will be the biggest pile of unedited documentary material in NZ. And then there was The Battle for Pahrump, about the American presidential election, which I shot with Dean Cornish and was funded by his air mile points and my free ticket to LA, a prize from the 48Hour Film Festival. And I’ve recently presented Hidden in the Numbers for Razor Films, which successfully screened on TV One, despite being programmed against the irresistible force that is Desperate Housewives. Okay, we’re out of time. Finally, while I hesitate to suggest that people use you as a template – [laughs] Oh god forbid, don’t do that. – what advice would you give to someone who wants the kind of career that, perhaps inadvertently, you’ve built for yourself? Just do it. Don’t sit around and complain about not getting anything. If you think you can do it, then do it. I’m sick to death of hearing people sit around and whinge, “No-one’s funding this,” and “No-one’s doing that.” Why should they? If you think you’ve got a product that’s good, do it yourself. Get on to it and start figuring out ways of getting it done. But don’t come to me and complain that you haven’t got anything to do. Haven’t got any work? Make some work, find something to do. © Copyright Onfilm magazine September 2006 All material appearing is copyright and cannot be reproduced without prior permission of the publisher. Please contact the copyright officer: Ph 0-9-845 5114, Email copyright@mediaweb.co.nz.	Username Password Keep me logged in on this computer Forgotten your password? Enter your email address and we will email your password to you:

INTERVIEW : Putting the Te in Radar

The ubiquitous self-styled “opinionist” Andrew Lumsden (aka Te Radar) talks to Nick Grant about the new series of B&B on Mäori Television, how a loathing of work got him where he is today, and a great deal more.

So, am I supposed to refer to you as Te Radar?
I get called Te a lot, actually, particularly by Mäori and viewers of Mäori Television. I like it, it’s great.

For the record, are you prepared to admit to your given name?
Andrew John Lumsden. This is like a police interview.

Of course, before Te Radar, you were simply Radar. How did you come by that handle?
University. When I went to study law at Otago there was an ongoing tradition at my hostel, Selwyn College, that each year they had a Radar. Presumably it was the person who most closely resembled the character from M*A*S*H and, thanks to wearing spectacles at the time, in my year that was me.
After that it stuck primarily because in the early 1970s the name Andrew was inordinately popular with mothers, and in my social group there would have been six or seven Andrews, none of whom were referred to as Andrew because it would have been too confusing.
So it was a nickname that went through university and then I started doing stand-up and before long I realised it had become a brand and that to change it and go back to, “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Andrew Lumsden!”, would have resulted in the audience going, “Who’s that?” Rebrand at your peril.
A while after that I created another identity – The Radar Foundation – because it amused me, and Te Radar evolved out of that. I was doing a stand-up tour with Mike King that had a Mäori theme – maybe six years ago? – and I just changed the English “the” to the Mäori “te” because I thought it was funny, little knowing that would become the brand. Anyway, I just treat “Te” as an honorific, like “doctor” or “mister”. One day I’ll drop Radar off the end and just be “Te” – nice and simple and short. Just like Diana and Prince and Madonna. [laughs]

So it’s your eventual ambition to essentially be referred to as “The”?
Except in Mäori. So, Te. Yes.

So how would you explain the brand that is “Te Radar” – what does it encompass?
At the moment it encompasses social comment, documentary, and comedy – sit-com and chat, and stand-up. Basically everything from newspaper columns to radio comment to television camp-ness and documentaries.
People probably used to think of it as a bit surreal and quirky, but now because of the Herald column and National Radio it’s become more mainstream. Whether the humour has changed at all, I’m not sure – I’m probably not the best person to ask that.

How do you describe what you do – entertainer?
Hmmm, I guess so. I’m often confronted with the problem of what to put on forms, particularly immigration and exit forms: “What’s my occupation?” At the moment I put “opinionist”, because I basically earn most of my money by giving my opinion.
I suppose that is a valid description, except for the small matter of “opinionist” not being a real word.
Yeah, I made it up. What’s wrong with that? William Shakespeare made up, what, 600 words? He just made them up. People went, “That’s not a word”, and he said, “But it’s in the script.” Opinionist – I’m paid every week to give my opinion on what is happening. It’s what I do.

Yeah, yeah, okay.
In terms of being an entertainer, I guess I do most of my entertaining at Mäori Television – they let me sing. No-one else has let me sing, ever.

I suspect there’s probably a good reason for that.
Yes there is [laughs] but they don’t seem to care. Perhaps they do, but they haven’t said anything.

Speaking of which, tell me about the new series of B&B, your show on Mäori Television.
B&B is going into its third series. [It started on Tuesday 5 September – Ed] Each series is six episodes; we won’t do anymore than that. Apparently when they asked us if we’d like to do 12, we said, “No, don’t want to; too stressful.” The attitude that Hori [Ahipene] and I have is we’d rather do six and do them well, and then have a look at them and make sure they’re working and give the formula a tweak and do another six. I mean, when you’re developing a programme, why go out in a big burst and do 12 that are fatally flawed in some way?
In other words, we wanted to be sure we could deliver the product to a standard we’d be happy with. Now, they might come back next year and say, “We want 12”, and we might say, “Yeah, we’re now in a position where we can do that.”
As an aside, about five or six years ago I had a few meetings with various network people, but nothing came of it. What was interesting was that I was saying, “Why do you have to make 13 episodes of something, why can’t we make six or seven?” “Oh no, you can’t do that.” Their reason being, it’s easier to programme that way, but it badly affects the show. Now, sure enough, that’s becoming much more common now – better episodes, stronger episodes…
Anyway, the thing with B&B is, it’s recorded live on Sunday and broadcast the following Tuesday. There was talk about doing non-live records but we really didn’t see the point – part of the concept is to keep it as topical as possible, so often storylines are being changed on the Friday and Saturday.
If someone had told me I’d be involved in a programme like this I would have laughed at them, because it’s so different from what I’ve done before. It’s very broad, it’s got an element of camp-ness – someone described it to me as “very regional television”. I think of it as mad-camp.

It’s really the marriage of two humour traditions isn’t it – British Blackpool music hall and Mäori?
Yeah, it’s going back to the light entertainment of yesteryear – getting guests to do stupid stuff, and sitcom. We really try to concentrate on the sitcom side of it, to make sure the storyline between Bevan and Beverly is funny and interesting, and then you bring in your guests for the chat show part and then try to incorporate them in the story.

How did B&B get off the ground in the first place?
Livingstone Productions got in touch with me about the fact that MTS was looking for comedies. They said, “We’ve got an idea for a bi-cultural comedy where you and Hori play long-lost brothers.”

Someone had just watched Twins then?
Clearly. “And there’s a B&B you’re both running, guests come in, and there’s a clash of cultures” – what they were really interested in was that Mäori and Pakeha clash. And somewhere along the way we thought, “This isn’t very interesting; what if we were married?”

Which is a much better analogy for New Zealand’s race relations.
Yeah, it’s fantastic.
So it wasn’t my idea, I was brought in. They said, “You’re the two people we want to work with, here’s the idea.” It got mulled over, mulled over, and then was put in for funding. I didn’t think it was going to be funded, because it was a bit wacky. Then it did get funded and I went, “Yay!” And now, at the beginning of series three, which represents episodes 13-18, we’re going great guns…
It’s a very small writing team. For series one, it was Dave Armstrong, Hori and me. Dave was great – he was kind of the head writer and script editor and he brought a real sense of professionalism and invaluable experience. And he would leave on Thursday and watch the programme on Tuesday, and he was fine with the fact that often not a lot of his material appeared to make it into the show. Or so it seemed. [laughs]. But he’d provide an incredibly solid base on which we’d build a teetering pyramid of comedy.
Series two was Hori, Albert Belz and me.
Greg Mayor, who’s directing, is also kind of involved in writing – he’s there most of the time – and various other people sort of flit in and out.
And now for this third series, there’s me, Hori, Albert, Greg, and Mark Prebble, who was helping out on stuff last series.
So it’s still quite a small team.
The sitcom part is the most difficult thing to put together, because you want to make sure the eight to 12 minutes of each episode that’s sitcom is really tight.
And it’s great, you’ve got great perimeters – one room, two actors, and the guests, who generally don’t have a script. The guests are greeted, chatted to and usually put in an uncomfortable situation, to which they respond admirably.
So yeah, it’s a really tight brief as a writer, and as a result I think we’ve had some great episodes.

How involved in the creative process is producer Johnny Givins?
He kind of stayed clear of it in the first series, and the second one he was more involved because there was stuff that required his input. But he’s great. We do read-throughs and bring in Johnny and various people, and he’ll say, “I don’t get that. What about this? How about that?” And it’s great to have people challenging what you’re writing, so you can say, “That’s a really good point. We’re so far up our own arses that we’ve missed the essential bit of this comedy.”
And the other thing I really like about B&B is it takes very little time to get from the script to the screen. What you’re writing on Sunday morning is on screen two days later as a fully realised programme. So it’s not over-developed, you’re not suffering a lingering death in development hell, you’re not filming it and then having to wait four months before it’s played at three o’clock in the morning.

In a perfect world, is there anything you’d change about the programme or the process?
Oh sure, you’d have a revolving stage and a huge song and dance number – no, I don’t think so. You’d throw some more money at it and bring in some more gag writers probably, and have more people around the table, and some stuff would be tightened up, but it’d be essentially the same. It is what it is – some people love it and I’m sure some people hate it. It’s just entertainment that fills the space between the ads.

So is that your basic attitude regarding making TV – filling the space between ads.
Oh god no.

So in your worst moments, you don’t sometimes –
No, I don’t. The reason I don’t is I’m being paid to do something that I find really enjoyable. And the fact it does happen to fill a space between ads, let other people worry about that…
The thing with B&B is that it can probably keep going and going. Our aim is to make it better and better every single week, so that more people tune in and we get more series and we can keep going until we’re old people. As long as we don’t run out of Mäori celebrities, which I’m sure we won’t.

So guests are required to be Mäori celebs then?
Yeah, basically – you want to have people who are pretty high profile. Having said that, we have had Jacqui Clark, who’s not Mäori, and coming up on this series we’ve got Suzanne Paul, who is, you know, as Mäori as an Englishwoman gets.
How does making a show for MTS compare to your other forays in TV?
Making TV for Mäori Television is a completely different experience from anything I’ve been exposed to. I mean, in the past, because as a comedian I’m self-centred and egotistical, I’ve been known to complain, “Fancy the network trying to tell me what’s funny and telling me to do this and change that!”
With MTS it’s totally the opposite. We got commissioned to make B&B and, as basically the head writer and male lead, I’ve yet to receive a directive from the network about not doing something or doing something else. I think once they’ve said, “We’d like some younger guests and increase the use of reo.” And the latter was, I think, a TMP directive, and that’s fine, that’s their job. So we did, and the programme is all the better for it.
But I’ll say to some of the executives there, “We’re thinking of doing this”, and they look at me as if to say, “Why are you telling me this? You’re being paid to do this; if you think it’s going to be funny, put it in. Who are we to tell the programme maker what to do?” Now, I’m sure if there was something they really hated, they’d say. But the rest of the time they let you get on with it, and as a result it’s really easy, convenient and fun.
And it seems as if the attitude at the station is different – there are a lot of people making stuff they’re personally interested in, rather than just turning out product. They’re doing something that’s important.

Okay, but to be fair to TVNZ and TV3, MTS has the luxury of being able to take greater risks without worrying too much about the bottomline.
Yeah, they’re the television equivalent of a student radio station. If TVNZ makes a mistake, they stand to lose millions; if MTS makes a mistake, not such a problem. But I think it’s not so much a matter of taking risks as a matter of philosophy. You have to ask why elderly white women say they’re watching MTS because they think it produces what they consider to be charter television.

Possibly because it’s demonstrably true. Anzac Day, anybody? The tangi of the Mäori Queen? Swearing in of Governor General?
And I’ve never believed that you can’t marry a commercial imperative with charter aims. “Oh, no one watches charter programmes.” Really? Is that because they aren’t any good or because they’re on at bad times? Everyone gets up in arms about how difficult the charter is but basically it’s this simple – if we’re not going to make programmes about ourselves, no one else is going to. Why would they?
And there’s plenty of great stories around, and more than enough competent television makers to realise them.

Okay, perhaps to finish off we could touch on how you got your start. Would I be right in thinking that taking drama papers at Otago University was crucial to where you find yourself today?
Definitely.

When you signed up for drama there, had you had any previous thespian experience?
I’d played Bottom in our seventh form production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and I was the narrator in our primary school version of Treasure Island.

And you enjoyed that?
Yeah, I got to meet girls.

And that was why you took drama?
Yeah, that and I’d failed law by then, and philosophy didn’t seem as if it’d be that useful. Law fell apart because it required actually working, as opposed to stage one English, which I managed to pass without reading any of the books. Can’t do that with law, unfortunately, otherwise who knows where I might be.
Drama was fantastic – I did it not so much with the aim of becoming an actor as a director or a playwright. Writing always came quite easily, as did humour, so I assumed there’d be an outlet for that somewhere. I don’t think it was a particularly conscious thing though, it just seemed like a fun way to fill up some of my degree.

So at what point did you think you’d actually have a crack at making a go of it?
Really I think it was when I was in a comedy sketch group called Spleen, with Duncan Sarkies, Aaron Watson and Jesse Griffin, and the first show we did together we won the university comedy competition, in ’93 I think. And suddenly comedy seemed like an option. Then I went to live in Auckland and started doing stand-up, because Scott Blanks and Paul Horan were booking comedy nights at Kitty O’Brien’s, and Auckland seemed to be the only place with a comedy scene.
Even with stand-up, though, I didn’t really know what it was until I saw Alan Brough on stage hosting the university competition, and I thought, “Wow, that doesn’t look that difficult, I can do that.” I’d never been a big follower of stand-up. You know, I’d listened to Bill Cosby and people like that, but wouldn’t buy a stand-up album. And even when I started doing stand-up, it was never the sole focus – to me it was a gateway drug to other things. And it was an easy way to get paid money. You turn up and speak for 10 minutes and they pay you.

So how much of it was part of a career plan as such –
Not much.

– and how much of it was a matter of being fundamentally work-shy?
A lot of it. I didn’t want to get a job, didn’t like working, and stand-up seemed like a viable way of being an entertainer, while I sat around and tried to figure out what it was I wanted to do with my life. I think I wanted to make television at that stage, though in what form I didn’t really know.
Actually, the main reason I got into comedy was the idea that it’d be a good way to meet girls. But it’s not – the only groupies comedy attracts merely demonstrate that community care for people with mental difficulties really isn’t working…
Anyway, shortly after that I got through to the finals of A Bit After Ten, which was a televised nationwide comedy competition, and as a result of that I thought, “Maybe I can foot it with these well-known people.”
Then Pulp Comedy started a couple of years after that and it gave stand-up a real boost, because finally it was a way of getting comedy on television that wasn’t bad sketch comedy or lame satirical nonsense. It was a great way to expose New Zealanders to a whole lot of comedians and an indigenous comedy voice that, a lot of the time, was talking about events and people they knew.

And it was obviously a cost efficient way of doing that.
It’s cheap as chips – all you have to do is build a stage, get some cameras and pay your talent. And the pay wasn’t that great, given you were most likely the writer and performer. If you broke it down, it was ludicrously cheap for them to make.

And Pulp was obviously crucial to people like King, and yourself to a degree, being able to make a living by doing provincial tours.
Yeah, I see it as being exactly the same as music videos. Before the recent explosion of NZ music videos there was a lull and NZ videos weren’t really being shown on TV. Then they started getting screened, and the songs were played on the radio and bands were able to make a living from touring.
Comedy was exactly the same – if you don’t have that exposure, what’s the point of having your name on a poster, because nobody knows who you are. They’re not going to go along just because it says “Comedy Night”.

The cancellation of Pulp was obviously a blow to the development of stand-up in NZ and, one would think, to what would have been potentially fertile cross-overs into other forms of TV comedy…
The biggest problem we have with the development of television comedy is there’s no Pulp Comedy, there’s no sketch comedy, there’s barely any comedy. So where do people working in comedy – either in theatre or stand-up – get their exposure? It’s a very daunting thing for people to go to a network with an idea. Because first they’ve got to sell their idea to a production company, which then has to go and sell the idea to a network – there’s a lot of rigmarole involved in that and a lot of people don’t do it. Not because their ideas are bad but because it’s very daunting.
“Well, they just need to keep persevering.” But the problem is there are just so many gatekeepers. Then, if the network picks up the idea, chances are you find yourself making a show that bears very little resemblance to what you wanted to make in the first place and it turns out terribly.
And you know, something that continues to puzzle me is: if you’re a network and you say you have an active interest in making comedy, why do you not go to the comedians?

I think the standard retort is that stand-up is different from TV comedy.
To which I’d say, “Who knows how to make people laugh? People who do comedy. And where do many of the great sitcoms come from? Stand-up comedians. Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond, Everybody Hates Chris, Drew Carey – all stand-ups.” Doesn’t seem like rocket science to me.

Okay, back to your, um, erratic career… Stand-up of one sort or another for about 10 years was your primary thing, yeah?
Yup, my first television gig was Newsflash, which was one of the most hideous experiences of my life. That was a classic example of the project I was recruited to make ending up being completely different from what was made.
It was supposed to be satirical and edgy, and I had stand-up arguments with people at the production company, because at the same time we were making it, the first series of Havoc came on. And I said, “Look at that, look at what they’re doing.” We were putting in scripts in that style that I thought were more satirical and better, and we could not make them.
We had to make what ended up being a very conventional and unfunny programme that failed really badly. And then they wondered why we got really angry about it…
And the next thing I made I think was Timor ODDyssey. There was nothing coming through as far as TV goes and I was doing theatre and stuff like that. I thought the comedy programmes being made were atrocious – they didn’t interest me. So I thought I’d go and make my own programme and then work out what to do with it. I’d always wanted to make documentaries and fortunately for me – not so much for the people of East Timor – there was a conflict there and I had enough air points to get part of the way there, and someone [Aaron Watson] who’d go with me.
We shot that on High 8 because no one would give me a camera, and I funded it myself, and presented it as a multi-media show at a comedy festival. Then I got money from the Screen Innovation Fund to do a reworked version that’s still touring today.

So basically you decided to seize control of the means of production.
Yeah, which I’m still kind of doing now because now documentaries are the thing to see, thanks to the rise of reality TV and Michael Moore and so on.
Then there was the Israel one [Christmas in Bethlehem], which basically turned into a four-part radio programme and half an hour on TV; the film version was never really finished because no-one was paying for that and I was too busy. My legacy will be the biggest pile of unedited documentary material in NZ.
And then there was The Battle for Pahrump, about the American presidential election, which I shot with Dean Cornish and was funded by his air mile points and my free ticket to LA, a prize from the 48Hour Film Festival.
And I’ve recently presented Hidden in the Numbers for Razor Films, which successfully screened on TV One, despite being programmed against the irresistible force that is Desperate Housewives.

Okay, we’re out of time. Finally, while I hesitate to suggest that people use you as a template –
[laughs] Oh god forbid, don’t do that.

– what advice would you give to someone who wants the kind of career that, perhaps inadvertently, you’ve built for yourself?
Just do it. Don’t sit around and complain about not getting anything. If you think you can do it, then do it. I’m sick to death of hearing people sit around and whinge, “No-one’s funding this,” and “No-one’s doing that.” Why should they? If you think you’ve got a product that’s good, do it yourself. Get on to it and start figuring out ways of getting it done. But don’t come to me and complain that you haven’t got anything to do. Haven’t got any work? Make some work, find something to do.
Oh sure, you’d have a revolving stage and a huge song and dance number – no, I don’t think so. You’d throw some more money at it and bring in some more gag writers probably, and have more people around the table, and some stuff would be tightened up, but it’d be essentially the same. It is what it is – some people love it and I’m sure some people hate it. It’s just entertainment that fills the space between the ads.

So is that your basic attitude regarding making TV – filling the space between ads.
Oh god no.

So in your worst moments, you don’t sometimes –
No, I don’t. The reason I don’t is I’m being paid to do something that I find really enjoyable. And the fact it does happen to fill a space between ads, let other people worry about that…
The thing with B&B is that it can probably keep going and going. Our aim is to make it better and better every single week, so that more people tune in and we get more series and we can keep going until we’re old people. As long as we don’t run out of Mäori celebrities, which I’m sure we won’t.

So guests are required to be Mäori celebs then?
Yeah, basically – you want to have people who are pretty high profile. Having said that, we have had Jacqui Clark, who’s not Mäori, and coming up on this series we’ve got Suzanne Paul, who is, you know, as Mäori as an Englishwoman gets.
How does making a show for MTS compare to your other forays in TV?
Making TV for Mäori Television is a completely different experience from anything I’ve been exposed to. I mean, in the past, because as a comedian I’m self-centred and egotistical, I’ve been known to complain, “Fancy the network trying to tell me what’s funny and telling me to do this and change that!”
With MTS it’s totally the opposite. We got commissioned to make B&B and, as basically the head writer and male lead, I’ve yet to receive a directive from the network about not doing something or doing something else. I think once they’ve said, “We’d like some younger guests and increase the use of reo.” And the latter was, I think, a TMP directive, and that’s fine, that’s their job. So we did, and the programme is all the better for it.
But I’ll say to some of the executives there, “We’re thinking of doing this”, and they look at me as if to say, “Why are you telling me this? You’re being paid to do this; if you think it’s going to be funny, put it in. Who are we to tell the programme maker what to do?” Now, I’m sure if there was something they really hated, they’d say. But the rest of the time they let you get on with it, and as a result it’s really easy, convenient and fun.
And it seems as if the attitude at the station is different – there are a lot of people making stuff they’re personally interested in, rather than just turning out product. They’re doing something that’s important.

Okay, but to be fair to TVNZ and TV3, MTS has the luxury of being able to take greater risks without worrying too much about the bottomline.
Yeah, they’re the television equivalent of a student radio station. If TVNZ makes a mistake, they stand to lose millions; if MTS makes a mistake, not such a problem. But I think it’s not so much a matter of taking risks as a matter of philosophy. You have to ask why elderly white women say they’re watching MTS because they think it produces what they consider to be charter television.

Possibly because it’s demonstrably true. Anzac Day, anybody? The tangi of the Mäori Queen? Swearing in of Governor General?
And I’ve never believed that you can’t marry a commercial imperative with charter aims. “Oh, no one watches charter programmes.” Really? Is that because they aren’t any good or because they’re on at bad times? Everyone gets up in arms about how difficult the charter is but basically it’s this simple – if we’re not going to make programmes about ourselves, no one else is going to. Why would they?
And there’s plenty of great stories around, and more than enough competent television makers to realise them.

Okay, perhaps to finish off we could touch on how you got your start. Would I be right in thinking that taking drama papers at Otago University was crucial to where you find yourself today?
Definitely.

When you signed up for drama there, had you had any previous thespian experience?
I’d played Bottom in our seventh form production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and I was the narrator in our primary school version of Treasure Island.

And you enjoyed that?
Yeah, I got to meet girls.

And that was why you took drama?
Yeah, that and I’d failed law by then, and philosophy didn’t seem as if it’d be that useful. Law fell apart because it required actually working, as opposed to stage one English, which I managed to pass without reading any of the books. Can’t do that with law, unfortunately, otherwise who knows where I might be.
Drama was fantastic – I did it not so much with the aim of becoming an actor as a director or a playwright. Writing always came quite easily, as did humour, so I assumed there’d be an outlet for that somewhere. I don’t think it was a particularly conscious thing though, it just seemed like a fun way to fill up some of my degree.

So at what point did you think you’d actually have a crack at making a go of it?
Really I think it was when I was in a comedy sketch group called Spleen, with Duncan Sarkies, Aaron Watson and Jesse Griffin, and the first show we did together we won the university comedy competition, in ’93 I think. And suddenly comedy seemed like an option. Then I went to live in Auckland and started doing stand-up, because Scott Blanks and Paul Horan were booking comedy nights at Kitty O’Brien’s, and Auckland seemed to be the only place with a comedy scene.
Even with stand-up, though, I didn’t really know what it was until I saw Alan Brough on stage hosting the university competition, and I thought, “Wow, that doesn’t look that difficult, I can do that.” I’d never been a big follower of stand-up. You know, I’d listened to Bill Cosby and people like that, but wouldn’t buy a stand-up album. And even when I started doing stand-up, it was never the sole focus – to me it was a gateway drug to other things. And it was an easy way to get paid money. You turn up and speak for 10 minutes and they pay you.

So how much of it was part of a career plan as such –
Not much.

– and how much of it was a matter of being fundamentally work-shy?
A lot of it. I didn’t want to get a job, didn’t like working, and stand-up seemed like a viable way of being an entertainer, while I sat around and tried to figure out what it was I wanted to do with my life. I think I wanted to make television at that stage, though in what form I didn’t really know.
Actually, the main reason I got into comedy was the idea that it’d be a good way to meet girls. But it’s not – the only groupies comedy attracts merely demonstrate that community care for people with mental difficulties really isn’t working…
Anyway, shortly after that I got through to the finals of A Bit After Ten, which was a televised nationwide comedy competition, and as a result of that I thought, “Maybe I can foot it with these well-known people.”
Then Pulp Comedy started a couple of years after that and it gave stand-up a real boost, because finally it was a way of getting comedy on television that wasn’t bad sketch comedy or lame satirical nonsense. It was a great way to expose New Zealanders to a whole lot of comedians and an indigenous comedy voice that, a lot of the time, was talking about events and people they knew.

And it was obviously a cost efficient way of doing that.
It’s cheap as chips – all you have to do is build a stage, get some cameras and pay your talent. And the pay wasn’t that great, given you were most likely the writer and performer. If you broke it down, it was ludicrously cheap for them to make.

And Pulp was obviously crucial to people like King, and yourself to a degree, being able to make a living by doing provincial tours.
Yeah, I see it as being exactly the same as music videos. Before the recent explosion of NZ music videos there was a lull and NZ videos weren’t really being shown on TV. Then they started getting screened, and the songs were played on the radio and bands were able to make a living from touring.
Comedy was exactly the same – if you don’t have that exposure, what’s the point of having your name on a poster, because nobody knows who you are. They’re not going to go along just because it says “Comedy Night”.

The cancellation of Pulp was obviously a blow to the development of stand-up in NZ and, one would think, to what would have been potentially fertile cross-overs into other forms of TV comedy…
The biggest problem we have with the development of television comedy is there’s no Pulp Comedy, there’s no sketch comedy, there’s barely any comedy. So where do people working in comedy – either in theatre or stand-up – get their exposure? It’s a very daunting thing for people to go to a network with an idea. Because first they’ve got to sell their idea to a production company, which then has to go and sell the idea to a network – there’s a lot of rigmarole involved in that and a lot of people don’t do it. Not because their ideas are bad but because it’s very daunting.
“Well, they just need to keep persevering.” But the problem is there are just so many gatekeepers. Then, if the network picks up the idea, chances are you find yourself making a show that bears very little resemblance to what you wanted to make in the first place and it turns out terribly.
And you know, something that continues to puzzle me is: if you’re a network and you say you have an active interest in making comedy, why do you not go to the comedians?

I think the standard retort is that stand-up is different from TV comedy.
To which I’d say, “Who knows how to make people laugh? People who do comedy. And where do many of the great sitcoms come from? Stand-up comedians. Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond, Everybody Hates Chris, Drew Carey – all stand-ups.” Doesn’t seem like rocket science to me.

Okay, back to your, um, erratic career… Stand-up of one sort or another for about 10 years was your primary thing, yeah?
Yup, my first television gig was Newsflash, which was one of the most hideous experiences of my life. That was a classic example of the project I was recruited to make ending up being completely different from what was made.
It was supposed to be satirical and edgy, and I had stand-up arguments with people at the production company, because at the same time we were making it, the first series of Havoc came on. And I said, “Look at that, look at what they’re doing.” We were putting in scripts in that style that I thought were more satirical and better, and we could not make them.
We had to make what ended up being a very conventional and unfunny programme that failed really badly. And then they wondered why we got really angry about it…
And the next thing I made I think was Timor ODDyssey. There was nothing coming through as far as TV goes and I was doing theatre and stuff like that. I thought the comedy programmes being made were atrocious – they didn’t interest me. So I thought I’d go and make my own programme and then work out what to do with it. I’d always wanted to make documentaries and fortunately for me – not so much for the people of East Timor – there was a conflict there and I had enough air points to get part of the way there, and someone [Aaron Watson] who’d go with me.
We shot that on High 8 because no one would give me a camera, and I funded it myself, and presented it as a multi-media show at a comedy festival. Then I got money from the Screen Innovation Fund to do a reworked version that’s still touring today.

So basically you decided to seize control of the means of production.
Yeah, which I’m still kind of doing now because now documentaries are the thing to see, thanks to the rise of reality TV and Michael Moore and so on.
Then there was the Israel one [Christmas in Bethlehem], which basically turned into a four-part radio programme and half an hour on TV; the film version was never really finished because no-one was paying for that and I was too busy. My legacy will be the biggest pile of unedited documentary material in NZ.
And then there was The Battle for Pahrump, about the American presidential election, which I shot with Dean Cornish and was funded by his air mile points and my free ticket to LA, a prize from the 48Hour Film Festival.
And I’ve recently presented Hidden in the Numbers for Razor Films, which successfully screened on TV One, despite being programmed against the irresistible force that is Desperate Housewives.

Okay, we’re out of time. Finally, while I hesitate to suggest that people use you as a template –
[laughs] Oh god forbid, don’t do that.

– what advice would you give to someone who wants the kind of career that, perhaps inadvertently, you’ve built for yourself?
Just do it. Don’t sit around and complain about not getting anything. If you think you can do it, then do it. I’m sick to death of hearing people sit around and whinge, “No-one’s funding this,” and “No-one’s doing that.” Why should they? If you think you’ve got a product that’s good, do it yourself. Get on to it and start figuring out ways of getting it done. But don’t come to me and complain that you haven’t got anything to do. Haven’t got any work? Make some work, find something to do.

© Copyright Onfilm magazine September 2006

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INTERVIEW : Putting the Te in Radar

The ubiquitous self-styled “opinionist” Andrew Lumsden (aka Te Radar) talks to Nick Grant about the new series of B&B on Mäori Television, how a loathing of work got him where he is today, and a great deal more.