Peter Williams: veteran sportscaster and newsreader...

Interview – 2015

Peter Williams has had a distinguished career as a sports broadcaster and newsreader. He began in radio while still in his teens, then joined state television as a sports reporter and commentator in 1979. He went on to present major events such as the Olympic Games and the Rugby World Cup, and did extended runs reading the news on both Breakfast and primetime weekend bulletins.

In this ScreenTalk interview, Williams talks about:

Being very nervous for his first live studio broadcast
The stresses of putting together weekend show One World of Sport
Interviewing Kiri Te Kanawa for A New Zealand Night at Covent Garden
The unsophisticated yet groundbreaking coverage of the 1987 Rugby World Cup
Being involved in sports quiz show A Question of Sport
Preferring the early morning newsreading shift on Breakfast
Working with the mercurial broadcaster Paul Henry
The daily grind of covering the Commonwealth and Olympic games
Getting the tone right when hosting the Pike River Remembrance
How much he rates himself as a broadcaster

This video was first uploaded on 20 January 2015, 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

By today's standards [it was] pretty unsophisticated you'd have to say. It certainly wasn't in HD. The replay technology was nowhere near as bold and all-encompassing as it is now. But for the time it was high quality. It was shown all around the world . . . we thought our coverage of rugby in terms of camera angles was certanly superior to what they were doing in say France or Australia, and even to a certain extent in the UK.

– Peter Williams on New Zealand's coverage of the 1987 Rugby World Cup

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