Liz Gunn – TV presenter, journalist and one of the nicest people I know; she did a wonderful job presenting Good Morning on TV.
Do you miss working in TV?
I miss the chance to build and participate in a sense of community with people through the medium. With everyone doing their own separate devices now, there’s a lack of coming together which we had in that first year of Good Morning when people across New Zealand would call or fax in with their views and encouragements and it felt – on a lot of mornings – as if we were having a wonderful, nationwide town hall meeting of caring Kiwi souls! That caring and connecting is what I most loved about TV.
Tennis has played a big part in your life, why?
My uncle, Jack Gunn, was captain of the NZ Davis Cup team and, as a young man, was national champion. We grew up in a tennis household.
My father played at least once a week in to his 90s. He was the Over 90s National Champion. When asked by a journo what training he was planning for the event, he replied, “To keep breathing!”
Uncle John coached Chris Lewis as a young player and was always heading to Wimbledon each year where the redoubtable Rod Laver would come up to him with, “How ARE you Jack?” on the few occasions I was lucky enough to go with him.
In those days there was no high level security and Uncle John would stop over en route in Singapore and pick up duty free whiskey which he then liberally offered to the doorman on the Players’ Stand, so that we could go in and see what they did once they lost a game.
The best example was in 1987 seeing Yannick Noah come in to the players’ area, after being knocked out of the tournament, and getting as many players as he could persuade with his wide smile and Gallic charm to start doing shots in an ever more competitive drinking game. Suddenly, tennis players didn’t seem ‘all work and no play’ to me.
I’m sure things are much more serious and much more focused at Wimbledon now. I know a bottle of whiskey, and the fact you had played there, wouldn’t get you entry to those secure areas any longer.
What was your childhood like?
My father married late and I was his second child, later in life, so he was the age of most of my friends’ grandparents. He was active though, and loved to hike on the West Coast especially and, of course, to play tennis with me. He married late because he had gone to fight in WW2 and would not marry until he had built up a career and the funds to pay for a mortgage free house. He simply did not believe in borrowing money. He had experienced the Great Depression as a boy and had been very burnt by that.
His big motto which he instilled in me was that privilege breeds responsibility – meaning that the privilege of a good education means that once you start to earn big, it’s crucial to give back to others who are having a hard time in life, to lift them up as well, when you are doing well. I loved that about him. There were many things I loved about his ethos and his courage. I had a very difficult relationship with my mother whose bad back pain was often numbed by alcohol and I have an abiding horror at how much alcohol destroys the fabric of families and how the silent suffering victims of its excesses are so often the little children.
Something that you really disapprove of?
Selfishness. And those men of whom one hears many stories from broken-hearted women, who are now having middle-age crises and seem willing to abandon their sons or daughters, or to turn their backs on the women who in many cases have given them support for their career-building as well as doing most of the child raising.
Those men who are without honour, who just take and move on without taking care of the women who stood by them, sometimes for 25, 30, 40 years. That is going on, on a far bigger scale in society at the moment than is discussed openly. I think it’s why many older women get cancer. The sheer trauma of it all. And it’s wrong and deeply unethical. (DAVID HARTNELL MNZM)