Family builds memories
Teamwork and a shared history of Lego is the key for a father and daughter team from Nelson taking on a new reality television show.
Georgie Palmer, 19 and her dad Andrew Palmer, from Mapua, have been creating with the small bricks since they can remember, and are set to show off their skills on Lego Masters NZ, which launches on Monday.
The show pits pairs of builders against each other to test their Legobuilding prowess.
Georgie said she remembered playing with Lego when she was growing up. She got her cousin’s hand-medown bricks, and used her dad’s set that he had brought with him from the United Kingdom.
When he made the move to New Zealand in 1997, Andrew said it was ‘‘part of my packing, I brought a box of Lego with me’’. He had been surrounded by Lego in the 1970s, getting it for Christmas and birthdays.
‘‘It stuck with me from then on.’’ Now, with a career in engineering, he said Lego had ‘‘certainly formed my interest in all things technical’’.
But it was Georgie, currently living in Dunedin while completing a Bachelor of Music, who was the driving force in putting the pair forward for Lego Masters NZ.
Georgie said she had aspired to be on the show since she saw the Australian version about three years ago.
‘‘I’m getting on that show, and doing whatever it takes to be on it,’’ she had thought.
She wrote a letter to the New Zealand company that broadcast the Australian show, asking to ‘‘please, please, please make a New Zealand version’’.
The company replied that ‘‘it could be a cool idea, and thanks for getting in touch’’.
A couple of years later, while she was on a ski field in a snowstorm, a friend texted her to say the show was looking for contestants. Georgie filled out the application form then and there in her ski boots.
When she suddenly had to think of a teammate, she decided on her dad because, ‘‘he’s into Lego, he’ll probably be alright with it’’, she said. He was. and it wasn’t his first time being on reality
TV, despite him being ‘‘not really the most avid TV fan’’, she said.
Andrew Palmer appeared in The Naked Choir in 2017, a TVNZ show looking for New Zealand’s best a capella group.
His group, The Split Apple Rockers, made it to the final six.
He said getting on Lego Masters NZ ‘‘was an awful lot more full-on’’.
The pair said there were no disagreements when they teamed up as they had different styles of building. Georgie’s strengths lay in architecture and landscape, while Andrew’s forte is the technical stuff.
‘‘Georgie and I work really, really well as a team – hopefully that comes out in the show,’’ Andrew said.
LEGO Masters NZ premieres Monday May 9 at 7.30pm on TVNZ 2.