THE WISDOM OF JACK TAME
Jack Tame lives by himself in an apartment off K’ Rd. From his living room you can see the expanse of Auckland in three directions — west, down Great North Rd to Mt Albert and the Waitakere Ranges; south over spaghetti motorways to Mt Eden, One Tree Hill and Mt Wellington; to the north, on a clear day, you can see Tiritiri Matangi and Little Barrier Island. On Friday nights, he likes to look down on the car park across the road, guessing which cars will get towed. (“The guys who run it are ruthless,” he says with a grin.)
The apartment is impeccably clean and orderly, and not in a way that is clean and orderly just for the benefit of a writer with a dictaphone, but clean and orderly in such a deep way that is only achievable if it is, in fact, never anything but clean and orderly. The apartment gives the impression that its occupant has never heard of Marie Kondo because someone like Jack Tame has never needed to hear of Marie Kondo. (“Tidy house, tidy mind,” he says, like a true believer.) When I visit to interview him, there isn’t even a couch, just two comfortable armchairs facing each other, like a mid-century-modern Frost/Nixon. The next time we meet, he asks if I noticed there wasn’t a couch (I had) and tells me he’d recently added one — his friends had been giving him shit about it.
Jack Tame is a 32-year-old who, for the first time in a long time, is thinking as much about his life outside of work as work itself. Since he was 19 and still at broadcasting, he went to bed at 8.30pm to get up at 3.30am, sleeping in on Saturdays till 6.30 to get up for his morning radio show on NewstalkZB. In May, he took over from Corin Dann as host of , a current affairs and political interview show that airs at 9.30pm on Mondays.
