Phil nails it:
Phil Keoghan’s debt to his grandfather.
Shovelling coal and building brick walls might sound on a par with watching paint dry when it comes to entertainment. But these displays of practical skills make for exhilarating viewing in a show hosted and created by Phil Keoghan.
In Tough As Nails, tradespeople compete in a series of challenges to win the ultimate prize of $200,000 and a 2020 Ford Super Duty truck.
Keoghan says that the show is, “About getting back to honouring working-class people.
“It was inspired really by my grandfather, Jack Keoghan, who I spent a lot of my Christmas holidays with when I was at boarding school in Christchurch.
“He taught me how to use tools and how to be very practical. I have some of his tools that I still use today. And there isn’t a job that I do where I don’t think about some of the lessons or apply some of the lessons that he taught me back when I was a teenager.”
Tough As Nails is in many ways a tribute to Keoghan’s entire family, which over the generations has comprised “coal miners, gold miners, carpenters, farmers, people who work with their hands”.
But it’s also a chance to celebrate the strength, both physical and mental, of working men and women.
Keoghan, whose first TV role was on children’s show Spot On, says there were no institutions offering film and television studies after he finished high school.
“So I learned the value of hands-on experience and being taught by people more experienced than me in a real apprenticeship situation. It always has annoyed me that because somebody hasn’t been to university that somehow people think less of them than anybody else. Because education doesn’t just come from going to university.”
The Tough As Nails contestants come from a range of professions including an ironworker, firefighter, farmer and fisheries worker.
For Keoghan, it was important to show that age and gender are not a barrier to working in physically demanding roles. “There’s so much age discrimination that drives me
insane, because we need to respect our elders more than we do. We write some of these people off and yet they can be some of the toughest people out there,” he says.
“Same with the male/female thing where many people make an assumption that a man is always tougher than a woman when it comes to physical jobs and I just couldn’t disagree more.”
The challenges are all based on practical skills and set on actual job sites. Many are inspired by Keoghan’s grandfather.
“He would tell me stories about how at the coal mine down there in Westport they would have shovelling competitions, like who could shovel a ton of coal faster.
“The idea with the show is that all the challenges take place in real-world locations, real-world job sites rather than building some obstacle course or some reality set.
“We get our people to do the jobs that people do in real life,” says the Los Angeles-based TV personality.
The value and importance of team work is emphasised throughout, especially in what Keoghan describes as “a big format change from other reality shows”.
Although someone is eliminated each week from the competition for the main prize, they still remain on the show for team challenges.
The Amazing Race host says that to ask people to take time off work to compete “when they’re working pay cheque to pay cheque” only to go home empty handed “just seemed too
unfair. And so this way, yes, we have an overall Tough As Nails champion but we also have a team competition and there are lots of cash prizes to be won.” Keoghan, 53, who is an executive producer on Tough As Nails along with his wife, Louise, says New Zealanders will understand the series. “I think if the show’s going to work anywhere, it’s going to work in New Zealand because we get these people, we understand these people, we’re closely connected to these people. Because of the way New Zealand works, we respect them. And so this is a celebration of that and I’m hoping that, eventually, New Zealand will have their own version of Tough As Nails.”