New Zealand Listener

Kerre, quite contrary

If this interview with the journalist and broadcaster Kerre Woodham was destined for a woman’s mag, the headline would surely be: “Dancing with the Stars Saved My Sanity!” She is the queen of the women’s mags, having appeared on more covers than the actual Queen has had corgis. Like the actual Queen, she, too, endures.

She is just back from a holiday in Rarotonga. She went with her Dancing with the Stars dance partner Jared Neame and his partner, Xander Schubert. “Throuples,” she tells me, are the new thing. This is one of her jokes, designed to horrify the long-suffering Neame.

She claims the couple are fleeing Auckland to get away from her. She reckons that if she’d worked on her dance steps as assiduously as she worked on plotting ways to shock Neame, she might have gone further in the competition.

The pair were eliminated in the third week – to her relief – only to be called back after another contestant contracted Covid. She has said the show was harder than either climbing Mt Kilimanjaro or the six marathons she has run.

She does like to put herself through things. She says she gets talked into things, a sign

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from New Zealand Listener

New Zealand Listener3 min read
Upwardly Mobile
Slowly but surely, the transport mode shift we’ve been told is required to cut carbon emissions is happening around the country. In some places, it’s also having unintended consequences. In my part of Wellington, Oriental Bay, a new bike lane at the
New Zealand Listener3 min read
Uncovering Our Past
There’s a Māori whakataukī (proverb) that says, “Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua. / I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past.” The loop of past, present and future speaks to New Zealand Wars: Stories of Tauranga Moana, the la
New Zealand Listener7 min read
Fast Track To Destruction
What exactly is meant by red and green tape (Politics, April 20)? A favourite term used by our prime minister in his commentary on our democratic processes. Red tape in the past referred to the binding around administrative files. Perhaps the referen

Related Books & Audiobooks