Mark Williams: the pop hero from Dargaville NZ

Mark Williams should really have been born hollering: “Here I come, ready or not.”

I often see or hear the work of former journalism students on radio or TV who I taught at university a few years ago, and it’s always a pleasure. But such an experience is even more pleasing when it comes out of the blue, as an unexpected blast from the distant past.

When I was working recently on my post about our life in Dargaville, New Zealand, I happened across an image that rang a faint bell. I almost missed it, but even as it flashed by I thought I recognised a schoolboy called Mark Williams, who I knew briefly when I worked as a teacher at Dargaville High School in the late sixties.

What I not could know then was that Mark would become a national pop sensation only a few years later, the first local act to top the New Zealand National Sales Chart on June 27, 1975 with ‘Yesterday Was Just The Beginning Of My Life’. I had no idea until now.

Season’s Greetings 2018

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all, dear readers and followers.

Thanks for all your comments – keep them coming. More musings in the pipeline for 2019!

 

New Zealand Days: Part 5 – Dunedin

1972

We didn’t choose to live in Dunedin. It was a decision made by my employer, the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, with no consultation. It was also the result of a promise made and broken by the head television producer, Roy (aka “Rosie”) Melford. I had just qualified as a producer, having “passed” Roy’s Producers’ course, which apparently gave the NZBC the right to post me, and my family, to any of the four state-owned TV stations in New Zealand, Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. Roy had promised that if I passed I would be posted to Auckland, as soon as a vacancy occurred. This edict came at a very bad time, shortly after the birth of our second child.

Bear in mind that Wellington, where we lived at the time, and Dunedin are 492 miles apart by air. This wasn’t too bad a prospect for the family, but I would have to get there by road and ferry. The plan was go ahead to find somewhere to live and check in for duty at DNTV2.

When I arrived in Dunedin it was eight degrees below. I had been seasick on the overnight ferry from Wellington to Lyttelton (Christchurch), facing the 230 mile drive in our campervan down the East Coast of the South Island, to find a hotel in Dunedin. I’m not usually fussy about accommodation, but my mood was not improved by finding the only heating in the room was a two-bar electric wall mounted heater. I spent a cold sleepless night fuming about the turn of events and working out what to say in the morning to my new station manager Alf Dick, whom I had never met.

New Zealand Days: Part 3 – first steps in the NZBC

Previous Post

The man in the Dargaville pub turned out to be Keith Bracey, presenter of the local TV regional news magazine programme Town and Around, produced daily by the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation station Northern Television, formerly AKTV2, Auckland. I’m not sure why I had been invited to the Northern Wairoa hotel, and I was a bit embarrassed anyway because we didn’t have a TV then and I hardly knew who Keith Bracey was. I had also never quite got used to New Zealand beer or the “six o’clock swill”, i.e. drinking to excess with colleagues in public. To a deadline. Or at all, really.

Well Keith turned out to be an affable kind of guy, happy to spend NZBC expenses on the locals, presumably on the pretext of boosting viewing figures, even though at the time there was only one TV channel in the country. I remember little of the conversation, except talking about my fall from grace at Dargaville High and the probability of going back to the UK. Keith had a different idea; why not come and work in TV? 

New Zealand days – part 1

Warning: this post contains scary insects……..

Our rather sudden decision to emigrate to New Zealand in 1967 was really just an impulsive lark. It just seemed a good idea at the time. We were newlyweds and with my mediocre degree my prospects in the UK did not seem in any way promising. At the time commonwealth countries were making some tempting offers to teachers and nurses, so we fitted the bill.

Once the idea took hold, it was a Goldilocks’ porridge choice between Australia (too hot), Canada (too cold) and New Zealand (just right?). A choice based on stereotypes and skimpy research, and in my case influenced by the example of a boy at Fryent primary school who, years before, had beamed down in London NW9 one day from planet New Zealand. Actually I don’t think he remembered much about NZ, but I became so fascinated with this kid from a country on the other side of the world that I read up about it  in my second home, Wembley town hall library. (No internet then). The land of the long white cloud must have lodged itself in my young brain as a romantic aspiration; after all for us Brits it’s as far as you can go south without starting to come back.

And it has people called Maoris, covered in tattoos………

Working for Auntie in the seventies (continued)

Previous post: 1973 – 74

A few more incidents and situations come to mind from my relatively short stay in BBC TV presentation department in the mid seventies.

 

 

Disqualified!

I got a surprise when an outside broadcast involving royalty was scheduled to be transmitted during one of my shifts. I haven’t been able to track down what the occasion was, but I remember that I was told that I should leave the control room prior to the broadcast, to be replaced by a colleague.

Thank you, Miss Bugler

Someone recently asked me what the best job I ever had was. I found it quite hard to answer. For a start, define “job”; would I include all paid employment, self employment and voluntary work? I decided to exclude voluntary work for the time being, but then I had to work out what I meant by “best”.

I decided that it meant the most enjoyable, rather than the best paid, or the easiest. The answer still did not jump out immediately; I have done a lot of jobs in my time. Running through the chronological list, they all seemed to have their pros and cons. So I took another angle, and rephrased the question – what job do I most regret not doing for longer?