An affair to remember:
With Breakfast, The AM Show and The Project returning this week, Melenie Parkes asks three of the key players to chart their careers over the past 10 years.
Current affairs presenters reflect on the past decade.
What would the you of today think of the you of a decade ago?
“Well I think he would be very proud of him,” says Breakfast’s Matty McLean.
“I feel like I’ve come a long way in terms of my confidence in myself and the fact that I’m very happy and healthy and have met someone that makes me happy and that I’ve had the opportunity to do all these incredible lifelong dreams.”
McLean has come full circle on Breakfast, working on the show as a reporter “back in the Paul and Pippa days” in 2010 before taking control of the clicker on the weather desk in 2017.
In the past few years, Breakfast has undergone some major staff changes but unlike the weather, the resident weatherman has remained a constant.
“I’m the glue holding everything together,” he laughs.
“It is a little strange to be the seasoned pro of the team, especially when you’ve got three kind of loose units like John, Hayley and Jenny-May. I’m the one that has to kind of hold control sometimes.” Despite the early morning mayhem, McLean says working on Breakfast is “so much fun”. “The thing about our show at the moment is it’s so collaborative that even though we consider John and Hayley the hosts of the show, there really are now four hosts – more than there ever have been before, I think. “I feel like we set something up really great at the end of 2019 and it’s really exciting that we get to carry that through into 2020 as well.” 2019 was a big year for McLean who also competed on Celebrity Treasure Island, something he says he would jump at it again “in a heartbeat”. But after such a busy year, he is
ready to relax a little more in 2020 with his partner Ryan and their dog Otis.
“We bought a house, got a dog, I went on Treasure Island – it’s all just been very crazy and chaotic. So actually, I’m kind of excited about a year where the two of us just get to chill out a little bit,” he says.
When Jesse Mulligan considers what his life was like a decade ago, he suspects that his past self would have done a swap on the spot with present-day Jesse.
“Jesse of 10 years ago had no children and no wife and no house and one small radio job, so I think if you’d offered Jesse of 2010 the Jesse of 2020 he would have taken it,” says The Project co-host, who has four children aged between six months and eight years with wife Victoria Dawson-Wheeler.
This week The Project – the weeknight current affairs show that Mulligan hosts with Kanoa Lloyd and Jeremy Corbett – returns for its fourth year.
“Year four is the year where we really know what sort of animal The Project is and we get to just enjoy it now rather than spending our time worrying whether something is right for the show,” says Mulligan.
Over the years, The Project team has balanced difficult topics with light-hearted pieces, a mix that Mulligan says is a reflection of real life.
“Although we have loads of fun and lots of laughs and comedy, it’s also about taking some of the thorniest aspects of life and really kind of talking about them and we’ve done that over the past two years,” he says.
“We’ve talked about quite difficult topics – infertility, suicide and mental health, self harm. And we’re not going to shy away from that.
“If something seems like it’s going to be a bit too hard to cover, that’s probably a pretty good sign we should be covering it.”
Alongside his job on The Project, Mulligan also hosts Afternoons With Jesse Mulligan on Radio New Zealand and writes restaurant reviews.
But despite Mulligan being a household name across multiple platforms, he says his kids are more interested in his efforts to protect native wildlife than his media appearances.
“They know I’m a keen rat trapper and so they are really interested in that and the kind of conservation stuff, that’s a big part of our lives,” he says.
“When I’m at home we just have a really, really normal life and you know, mucking about at our house.”
“We’ve talked about quite difficult topics – infertility, suicide and mental health, self harm. And we’re not going to shy away from that.”
– Jesse Mulligan