Andrew Mulligan

So, Andrew, Rio. What do you reckon?

‘‘What sort of an opening question is that? What do you reckon? Actually, no … that’s exactly the kind of thing I’ll be saying to athletes at the Olympics. ‘What do you reckon?’ Or ‘How was that?’ But you can’t ask anything too complex or specific when they’ve just won a race or whatever, because they’re still processing what’s just happened.’’

Have you been to Rio?

‘‘No, but I have my g-banger [g-string] packed for the Copacabana, and some industrial strength Deet for the mozzies. It’ll be really interesting to see how ready they are when we get there. The organisers seem pretty behind the eight ball at this stage. It’s classic Athens 2000, with various things still half-built. Beijing, Sydney, London – they were the ones that were the most highly organised. Beijing even managed to control the weather, which was very China of them. But in Rio, they seem to have a severe case of ‘She’ll be right, mate’, except in Portuguese.’’

What parts of the broadcast will you be hosting while you’re over there?

‘‘There’s three other reporters covering other things – Melodie Robinson, Monty Betham and Scotty Stevenson – and I think I’m doing swimming and athletics. I’ll be doing live injects into the many thousands of sports channels Sky seems to have these days, and looking for those key moments so they can then replay the bejesus out of them. I covered athletics before at the London Olympics, and now I’ve been asked to do it again, so I mustn’t have cocked it up too badly.’’

Didn’t you get your start as a fresh-faced cadet on teensy regional station COW

TV in Dunedin?

‘‘I did, and we barely had colour TV then. Nah, it was around 1999 I started, and I rapidly went from a half-hour weekly magazine style show to an hour live every night at 10pm. At its best, it was broadcastable. At the worst, it was car crash television, but we broadcast it anyway.’’

Sounds like the perfect description of your current show, The Crowd Goes Wild.

‘‘Yeah, that’s true. That kicked off around 10 years ago, in 2006. And yes, that can be pretty chaotic, too. I also do the breakfast show on Radio Sport, so I get up before dawn, bleary-eyed, put on a bunch of mis-matched clothes and go and do that, then at the other end of the day, The Crowd Goes Wild is on live at 7pm. But I’m usually home by eight. There’s no big debrief after the broadcast. As a friend of mine once put it, we just flush the dunny and move on.’’

You sound like a man who loves his work.

‘‘I do. For all Hosking says about TV being hard graft, it’s not really hard at all. I get to park next to Mike, actually. He has a brand new Aston Martin, white with red leather seats. I look at it and think ‘how do I get those sorts of gigs’?’’

Andrew Mulligan got his first break on student TV. The Crowd Goes Wild host chats with Grant Smithies about, among other things, heading to the Rio Olympics.