Richard Driver: on his serendipitous TV career...

Interview – 2010

Once upon a time Richard Driver was punk singer Johnny Abort. He made his TV presenting debut replacing the irreplaceable Karyn Hay on Radio with Pictures, and hosted the show for three years. Later he made music shows, ran the local arm of production company Screentime, and formed his own, Visionary Productions. Driver has made several documentaries including Hokonui Todd, about an African statesman born in New Zealand, and bike racing portrait Love, Speed and Loss.

In this ScreenTalk interview, Driver talks about:

The difficult task of replacing Karyn Hay on Radio with Pictures
How TV presenting didn’t come naturally to him
The major fight between RIANZ and TVNZ that took Radio with Pictures off air
The challenge of directing his first documentary Hokonui Todd
An emotional journey through the life of bike racing legend Kim Newcombe in Love, Speed and Loss
Why chefs, sharks and Nazis led him to create The Documentary Channel
Being happy with having an "accidental" career in television

This video was first uploaded on 21 June 2010, and is available under this Creative Commons licence. This licence is limited to use of ScreenTalk interview footage only and does not apply to any video content and photographs from films, television, music videos, web series and commercials used in the interview.

Interview, Camera and Editing - Andrew Whiteside

I just pointed out to them they've got a lot of sharks and Nazis and chefs and choppers. The world is full of fantastic real stories, real documentaries, including New Zealand documentaries that were not getting played in this market. And we knew, looking back at the history of Inside New Zealand, and documentary in New Zealand, that there was a big appetite for documentary...
– Richard Driver on why he proposed setting up a Documentary Channel for Sky TV

Richard's Full Profile