Susan Wood: current affairs broadcaster extraordinaire...

Interview – 2011

Susan Wood is one of New Zealand’s most experienced TV news and current affairs presenters. Beginning in print journalism, Wood soon moved to TVNZ, where she stayed for 20+ years. Wood has a number of firsts to her career, including TVNZ's first foreign correspondent (Sydney), and being the first host (with Mike Hosking) of TV One’s Breakfast show.

In this ScreenTalk interview, Wood talks about:

Developing the ‘fine attributes of a thief’ to source footage as TVNZ’s first foreign correspondent
Using her feminine wiles to get interviews with Australian PM Bob Hawke
Feeling terror during her first live interview while filling in on Holmes
How a tiny team of women put out an hour of news a day on Midday News
Co-hosting with Mike Hosking on the first two years of Breakfast
Nerves and tension behind the scenes before the first broadcast
The emotion of interviewing her colleague Angela D’Audney on Today Live when D’Audney was terminally ill
Being up a mountain when she learned that Paul Holmes had left TVNZ and she had just hours to come in and host a new prime time show: Close Up
The incredible competition between three 7pm current affairs programmes
Public humiliation and heartache, after she sued TVNZ over changes to her contract

This video was first uploaded on 5 January 2011, 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

You learn to beg, borrow and steal; you do have the finely-attuned attributes of a thief . . . my deadline was three thirty in the afternoon Australia-time, so you compress things. You're forever grabbing a bit of this tape, you're chatting to that reporter, that cameraman. 'Can I have a bit of that grab?'
– Susan Wood on the many skills she needed as a TVNZ foreign correspondent, at the start of this interview

Susan's Full Profile