Polly Gillespie
Rise and fall of a radio legend
She has sold her lavish city apartment, queued up at the Work and Income office and taken a paycut to stay in the radio industry, but Polly Gillespie says she’s no longer ‘‘hemorrhaging money’’.
The veteran radio host has moved back to her old family home in Island Bay, Wellington, and says she’s learning to be a little more humble.
The Work and Income queue was her Damascus moment.
Having lost her longstanding gig with NZME’s The Hits breakfast show, Gillespie realised she could no longer afford the rent on her inner city Wellington apartment on top of the mortgage on the family home, so went to pursue an accommodation supplement to cover the rent for her mother’s new granny flat.
Walking in to the Newtown Community Link office, Gillespie was surprised to be asked to show ID before she was allowed to enter. It made her realise that here was a world she clearly knew little of any more.
‘‘There were all these security guards walking around inside and then I was standing in line and I was thinking, this is all really weird for me... this is quite a humble experience for me,’’ said Gillespie.
‘‘This is not quite normal for me, but it was good to see what other people are doing and what’s happening and how things have changed and how things worked.’’ Gillespie needed their help. ‘‘It used to be that I could afford to have my mum living in my family home, and me living in my apartment, and I was hemorrhaging money, really,’’ she explains.
‘‘Now it’s important that I go back and live in my family home and pay the mortgage and I rented mumma a small granny flat which is lovely.’’
Gillespie says her old lifestyle meant never checking the price tag on the David Jones outfits she bought that made her ‘‘look 18’’. If she wanted it, she got it. ‘‘It’s easy to get into a bubble where you stop really looking at the prices of things too often and you just kind of expect that you’re going to be able to buy what you want when you want it,’’ said Gillespie.
The bubble burst. Gillespie lost her job and her apartment, and next week she’ll watch ex-husband and radio show partner Grant Kereama walk down the aisle with his new love.
On the other hand she’s smitten with the arrival of her first grand daughter and is back on the airwaves.
And she reveals that she sacrificed her career with NZME to help Kereama.
Before NZME decided not to renew her Hits show, Gillespie was offered the chance to go solo: The Polly Gillespie Show.
She’d run the show from Wellington, talking about the things she loved (similarly to her sometimes-strange Facebook page postings) and she would be able to make the same ‘‘ridiculous amounts of money perhaps that I was making before’’.
But NZME were getting rid of Kereama. ‘‘I did feel a loyalty to Grant,’’ says Gillespie.
And she worried what her listeners would think.
‘‘If Grant had disappeared and I had done The Polly Gillespie Show, I don’t think people would have gone, ‘hey this is really cool’, I think people would have gone, ‘she’s not very fair to him’, (or) ‘wow that’s pretty harsh’.’’
More worried about what her
"I certainly don't expect every day to be sprinkles and cupcakes and joyful and sparkly. There are moments in my life where I feel complete and utter joy but I'm content."
Polly Gillespie
listeners would think than her employers, Gillespie revealed clauses that she disagreed with in her not-yet-signed NZME contract via Facebook.
The bizarre selfie video, taken from her bathroom wearing just a towel while dying her hair appeared to be the last straw for the company, which she described as more of ‘‘a machine’’.
Gillespie and Kereama were replaced by TVNZ weatherman Sam Wallace and Seven Sharp cohost Toni Street. Gillespie had to serve three months’ gardening leave, so filled the time posting car radio video selfies to her Facebook page.
It was a way to stay relevant, she says. And she had a lot of time on her hands.
‘‘I came up with the idea of doing car radio which I thought would be fun and continue to talk to our audience somehow,’’ she said.
‘‘(Restraint of trade) is a long time and it’s time enough for people to go, oh I missed them but I kind of got used to it.’’
She did consider leaving what Kereama calls a ‘‘cut throat’’ industry, but after 25 years in the game, radio was her life.
Then an offer arrived from rival MediaWorks’ More FM.
She says the smaller pay cheque wasn’t so much a step backwards but a chance to understand how the average joe worked.
‘‘I was a bit stupid really,’’ she admits. ‘‘And now I am, through circumstance, forced to think about things more and I think that’s a step forward because I think I was a bit stupid, so maybe I’m learning to be a real person. That’s not a bad thing.’’
While it may seem as if Gillespie was willing to show the world everything in those strange video diaries, she says that behind the big personality there’s a lot she doesn’t share.
‘‘I don’t tell anyone (those private things). Nobody really knows what’s going on,’’ she says. ‘‘I’m not the sort of person that phones up a friend and goes ‘life is so hard right now’, I just try to keep my really really private things private.
‘‘That’s important to me to have that privacy, to have my own little thing. Some of my friends go, ‘you know you really should share more about what’s really going on inside’, and I’m like, ‘no I’m good thanks’.’’
Is she happy? ‘‘I don’t know about happy – I’m content,’’ she says.
‘‘Happiness is an interesting state. I think happiness is what you feel every now and then when you feel joy, so I feel more content.
‘‘I’m content with my life and then I feel moments of happiness. I certainly don’t expect every day to be sprinkles and cupcakes and joyful and sparkly. There are moments in my life where I feel complete and utter joy but I’m content. I am content.’’
She’s settling back into the house she once shared with Kereama. Soon she’s off to Martinborough to look after her granddaughter – so her daughter can see her father walk down the aisle again. And back at home, the garden fence needs mending.
The old Gillespie would have forked out for a handyman.
The new one is digging out the tools, and possibly an instruction book, and doing it herself.