Clarke’s wedding hint:
Jacinda Ardern’s fiance and Shark Lockdown presenter Clarke Gayford says the couple have been too busy to plan the big day, but it’s definitely on the menu. Kerry Harvey reports.
Clarke Gayford talks about sharks, weddings and his DIY ambitions.
It looks likely Jacinda Ardern, who has already made history by having a baby while in office, will add a wedding to her list of Prime Ministerial firsts – sometime. “There will be a wedding at some point,” says fiance Clarke Gayford, adding there has been little time for wedding planning lately. “I’m just pleased to be able to get up in the morning and see my family and spend a little bit of time together because we’ve just had a non-stop year. We basically haven’t taken a break this year and there have been quite a few things that have taken priority. So planning for things have, let’s say, slipped a little.” While Ardern has been preoccupied with keeping the country going during the Covid-19 pandemic – and triumphantly leading Labour to victory at last month’s election – Gayford has had a full schedule himself.
Not only did the fifth season of his series Fish Of The Day – now on Three – have to be ‘rejigged’ when the pandemic made travel to the Pacific Islands impossible, he also started work on something new.
He will be fronting TVNZ’s new property series Moving Houses which he describes as a Grand Designs-type look at people who relocate existing houses to new sites.
The country’s first man says the new show caters to both his interest in people and what they are doing, and a newfound passion for home improvement that has surfaced since he became a homeowner after years of living in rentals.
“I’m always pestering Jacinda for a new shed and a new deck that I want to tackle building,” he says.
“It scratches my itch in that regard and some of these people are just so brave and adventurous in what they are doing.”
Gayford is no slouch in the adventure stakes himself. As his partner battled political sharks, Gayford took time out from caring for the couple’s daughter Neve, two, to join a hunt for ocean predators.
The result is Shark Lockdown, part of Sky TV’s Shark Week.
While Gayford jokes there are similarities between wrangling a toddler and getting up close with
great whites, the latter definitely have much bigger teeth.
“We had a couple of moments during filming that reminded me of my place in the cycle,” he says.
“It’s a controlled environment as much as it can be, but when you are dealing with wild animals it can be slightly unpredictable at times.”
He’s not joking. In Shark Lockdown, Gayford spent two weeks in Foveaux Strait with shark expert Kina Scollay on a mission to find 747, the largest female great white the latter has ever recorded.
She is one of the first sharks Scollay and his team tagged in the area, but the fish disappeared until the start of this winter when she was spotted again.
The global pandemic means the world’s oceans are a lot quieter than normal which has led to a lot of marine life – sharks included – venturing closer to shore than usual, providing an unprecedented opportunity for scientists keen to know more about the giant creatures’ habits.
“Great whites are obviously the biggest sharks that we know and the ones at Stewart Island are significantly large versions of them,” Gayford says.
“We’ve got a population of very healthy sharks, between one and three tonnes, and although I’ve spent my life in the water with bronze whalers and makos and school sharks, nothing prepares you for getting in the water and seeing a great white for the first time. The girth on them is something you can never unsee.”
For the expedition, Scollay built a self-propelled dive cage, dubbed the ‘Snackbox’, to enter the shark’s domain to see how hunting patterns have changed since the lockdown.
“He had never even put it in the water before he put it in with the sharks,” Gayford says. “He picked it up on our way down there so it was completely untested. Initially I thought it looked like a lot of fun and something I’d been keen to have a go at. But after, shall we say, a major incident, I wasn’t so sure.”
Gayford, who admits Ardern has yet to see the documentary and just how close his shark encounters were, stresses strict safety measures were in place at all times.
“There are some heavy moments when sharks come in but we were well aware of limitations and there are significant cages in place to create that safety zone between you and the animals. It’s not like we’re free swimming with them. We’re very, very close to them but with an adequate amount of protection.”
“It’s a controlled environment as much as it can be, but when you are dealing with wild animals it can be slightly unpredictable at times.”
– Clarke Gayford
NOVEMBER 28
1893 – Women in New Zealand vote in a national election for the first time – the first country in the world to allow women to vote.
1974 – John Lennon makes his last concert appearance – with Elton John at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
1979 – An Air New Zealand DC-10 crashes into Mt Erebus in Antarctica (above), killing all 257 people on board. It was, and still is, New Zealand’s deadliest peace-time disaster.
2012 – The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first of the Hobbit film series, directed by New Zealand’s Peter Jackson, premieres in Wellington.
NOVEMBER 29
1935 – Michael Joseph Savage becomes the first Labour Prime Minister of New Zealand.
1975 – The National Party, led by Robert Muldoon (right), wins the New Zealand election. Muldoon was to remain in power until 1984.
1981 – US actress Natalie Wood drowns in mysterious circumstances while on a boat trip to Santa Catalina Island in California. She was 43.
1986 – British-born American actor Cary Grant dies, aged 82, from a cerebral haemorrhage.
2001 – Beatle George Harrison dies, aged 58, of lung cancer.
NOVEMBER 30
1940 – US actress Lucille Ball, 28, weds actor Desi Arnaz, 23, in Greenwich, Connecticut.
1982 – The album Thriller by Michael Jackson is released. It became the best-selling album of all time.
1982 – The movie Gandhi, directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Ben Kingsley and John Gielgud, premieres in New Delhi.
1993 – Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg, premieres in Washington DC. It won the Oscar for Best Picture the following year.
2013 – US actor Paul Walker dies, aged 40, in a car accident in Valencia, California.
DECEMBER 1
1887 – Sherlock Holmes first appears in print in Study In Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle.
1953 – Hugh Hefner publishes the first edition of Playboy magazine, with Marilyn Monroe as centrefold.
1955 – Rosa Parkes is arrested for refusing to move to the back of a bus and give her seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama.
1982 – The movie Tootsie, starring Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange, premieres in Hollywood.
2003 – The Return Of The King, the third and final film in The Lord Of The Rings series, premieres in Wellington. On the same day in 2014, the third and final Hobbit film, The Hobbit: Battle Of The Five Armies, premieres in London.
DECEMBER 2
1933 – Fred Astaire’s first major film, Dancing Lady, is released.
1960 – Louis Leakey, apae lo anthropologist, discovers the 1.4 million-year-old Homo Erectus in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania.
1975 – Greg Chappell, in his debut as Australia cricket captain, scores 109no in the second innings to follow his first innings 123 to beat the West Indies in Brisbane by eight wickets.
1978 – You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, by Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand, hits number one in the US charts.
1986 – Cuban-US actor Desi Arnaz dies, aged 69, of lung cancer.
DECEMBER 3
1894 – Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson dies, aged 45, in Samoa of a suspected cerebral haemorrhage. He is buried on Mt Vaea.
1926 – Crime novelist Agatha Christie mysteriously disappears for 11 days.
1981 – American farmer Walter Knott, who created the Knott’s Berry Farm amusement park in California and reputedly introduced the boysenberry to America, dies aged 91.
1984 – The charity single Do They Know It’s Christmas, written by Bob Geldof (left) and Midge Ure and sung by Band Aid, an accumulation of recording stars of the time, is released in the UK.
DECEMBER 4
1980 – Two months after Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham choked to death after a heavy drinking session, the band announce that they are breaking up.
1981 – Falcon Crest premieres on CBS TV.
1988 – US actor Gary Busey is seriously injured in a motorcycle crash and requires brain surgery. He later said he felt he died and came back to life.
1993 – US rocker Frank Zappa (below) dies, aged 52, of prostate cancer.
2016 – New Zealand Prime Minister John Key resigns after eight years in office.