Tova O’Brien didn’t get much sleep last night. Her alarm went off at 3am, then 3.10am, and then again at 3.20am, just to be sure for her 3.30am start. She was in the studio at 6.28am until 10am, working from home into the evening. The system works great so long as she’s asleep by 8.30pm.
Former Breakfast host Paul Henry told her the key was not to nap, Morning Report’s Corrin Dan said napping was an everyday “must”. But six months into headlining her own breakfast talk radio show on Today FM, she’s found that unless she passes out involuntarily, staying awake as best she can enables her to sleep through the night.
It works because it’s “stupid early”, she says. As a person who’s inclined to stay up late and sleep in, 5am or 6am starts seem more brutal, she says. “It’s so topsy-turvy that it doesn’t matter.”
While the aim is to find a rhythm once the show is more established so that the team of five aren’t clocking 12-plus hour days, the schedule isn’t out of the norm for the former Newshub political editor. This time last year she would work in the Parliamentary Press Gallery between 8am and 6.30pm unless something pressing – be it securing documents in bathroom cubicles, for example – came up.
Winning Best Presenter at the 2021 New Zealand Television Awards, Political Journalist of the Year in 2019, and Broadcaster of the Year in 2022, it’s hard to imagine that journalism wasn’t always on the cards for O’Brien.
Journalism eventually ticked all the boxes
Born in Papua New Guinea to
