TV producer, mentor and bon vivant
There’s a tale about Vincent Burke that he always maintained was apocryphal. His mate swears black and blue it’s true, even if it does sound like an urban legend.
Film and TV producer Burke, who has died aged 70, probably revelled in the yarn. He always did like a good story. It goes something like this:
Travelling to a ``sharing stories’’ conference in Glasgow, Burke arrived at 6am, 12 hours before his longtime mate and colleague Chris Hampson.
When Hampson checked in, the guy at the front desk gave him the hotel’s whisky list and informed him that, if he got through a substantial number on that list, he would get a free video of the distilleries of Scotland. If he reached an even more, rather magnificent, number he would get a free bottle of 12-year-old malt.
``I looked at the number of whiskies for the bottle of malt and told him I was only staying for three days and that I’d never make it. I turned around and looked across the lobby and there was Vincent. He stood up and waved at me with two video cassettes in one hand and a bottle of malt whisky in the other.’’
Good stories with good mates over a wee dram – those were the things Burke lived for. Stories were his bread and butter. Over his long career he made scores of documentaries, TV series and films. From the successful consumer series Target to the Sam Neill-fronted Cinema of Unease, his output was prolific.
Some of his projects were more personal than others. I Want To Die At Home, about the death of his longtime partner Elizabeth Sewell, was an awardwinning documentary that spawned a further seven films about grief and dying, and was later used in nurses’ training.
He made these programmes with then TVNZ current affairs director Monique Oomen, whom he would later marry.
The pair went on to make All About Eve, the story of Eve van Grafhorst, the girl who contracted HIV from a blood transfusion, having been born three months premature. She died in 1993.
Burke believed in the power of film and the impact it could have on people, taking them into a world they may not have known about before, says Oomen.
The stories he brought to the screen were born out of his production company Top Shelf, which he founded in 1988. Snuggled into a rabbit warren of an office in Wellington’s Dixon St, Top Shelf was a magnet for fledgling film-makers, writers, directors and producers who got their start in the business under his wing.
Burke, a gentle giant who stood 6ft 4in and looked like a Viking, was known as a great mentor, always happy to guide those wanting to make it in the tough world of film and TV, helping them write proposals and pitch to networks.
He was also known as ``Vincent havea-meal-do-a-deal Burke’’ – a bon vivant who liked a long lunch shooting the breeze and weaving in talk about funding and co-productions and film ideas, recalled Oomen, whose marriage to Burke ended in divorce.
``He used to say it was important that, before you came to someone with a proposal or idea officially, you had done some unofficial canvassing of the subject first.’’ He knew distribution was the key to a successful production company, so frequenting international film festivals like Cannes was essential – and fun.
Burke was a regular at Cannes and cut quite a striking figure in the land of the highfalutin, well-groomed film set in the South of France – that red beard, that long red ponytail, those cowboy boots!
There he amassed a cadre that would gather in the evenings to imbibe and chew the fat well into the night.
He had a wonderful methodology for swimming through something as large and complex and expensive as the Cannes Film Festival with his own uniquely lowbudget style, Hampson recalls.
He always had a cool, inexpensive restaurant he would take people to. The folks at La Brouette de Grand Me`re knew him well. He would organise evenings at backstreet bars – cool but cheap gin joints – rather than hanging with the flash crowd on Cannes’ famous La Croisette, often boosting those places’ clientele during the festival.
``He always had an alternative way through what could be a tremendously expensive exercise,’’ Hampson says.
Born in Waimate, where his parents ran a florist shop and a nursery, Eric Vincent Burke was raised with younger sister Wendy in an Open Brethren family.
They moved to Tokoroa when he was 10, and later to Hamilton, where he would complete his secondary years at Hamilton Boys’ High School.
His empathetic nature was innate. Wendy, whom he named on behalf of his parents after the character in Peter Pan, recalls ``the stare’’ he used when he wanted something.
When the minister at church asked for families to take in orphans for the holidays, Burke turned and gave his parents this stare until they gave in. They had two children from the orphanage that year, and three the following.
Somewhere between school and university he started a commune out the back of Ngāruawāhia, where he lived for about a year. He also spent time in Jerusalem after James K Baxter’s death.
After graduating with a BA (hons) in music from Victoria University, he went to work for Te Tumu Whakaata Taonga – New Zealand Film Commission as a policymaker and researcher before becoming a producer.
Top Shelf projects included Sisters of The River, a film about the 1992 pilgrimage of the Sisters of Compassion in the footsteps of their founder, Mother Mary Joseph Aubert. It was a success, with decent international sales.
He produced the 1995 film Flight of the Albatross, a New Zealand-Germany-UK co-production, winning Best Children’s Feature Film at the Berlin Children’s Film Festival. He was proud of Cinema of Unease, one of 18 films commissioned for the British Film Institute, co-directed by Sam Neill and Judy Rymer.
Target, which ran over 13 years, used hidden cameras to snap unpleasant behaviour (to put it mildly) by tradespeople – cringeworthy viewing, but a cash cow for the production company.
What’s Really in Our Food? and Media Seven, a weekly show looking at events in the media, which ran for six and seven seasons respectively, were part of the many projects Burke produced.
In Top Shelf’s heyday, it was one of the leading production companies in the country, with a steady stream of commissions for programmes.
He spent a lot of time lobbying government through the Screen Production and Development Association (Spada), of which he was a past president. He was also named Spada’s Industry Champion in 2012.
At the end of 2011, Burke and Laurie Clarke set up Choice TV with two other investors. But their timing was off. With streaming channels growing, they struggled, and sold Choice in 2016. They pulled the plug on Top Shelf in 2019.
For his last few years Burke worked as an executive producer out of Avalon. He had a feature film in the making.
There was more to life than work, though. Early on he cast aside religion, but he worshipped music. He had started with the euphonium and the cello, and later played the spoons, the guitar and the bodhra´n, an Irish drum.
He played in a band called Ourselves Alone, or Sinn Fe´in in Irish. His mother’s Irish blood ran strong in his veins, and he was a committed Irish Republican.
Such was his political fervour that he co-edited the New Zealand Irish Post for more than a decade and was chairman of the Wellington H-Block/Armagh Committee, a support group for Irish Republican prisoners in British jails in 1980s Northern Ireland.
His band would play regular gigs in Wellington and occasionally tour universities around the motu, where he would sell his home-brewed poteen, a kind of moonshine. Dangerous stuff. His friends have threatened to serve the last batch of it at Burke’s wake.
Those friends thought he was a sort of eternal character, such was his energy and physical robustness. In the end though, cancer of the oesophagus would rob him of the three great pleasures in his life: food, wine and conversation.
For someone who kept his friends close, it was painful for them that they were kept at bay when he became ill. Burke was unable to communicate, so preferred to be alone. One friend defied this request on Christmas Day, sitting at his hospital bedside as he slept.
On his 70th birthday, three days before he died, his closest mates sent him flowers with the W B Yeats verse: ``Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was, I had such friends.’’
He’d have liked that. – By Bess Manson, who has always appreciated the break Vincent Burke gave her.
Sources: Sue Rogers; Wendy Pringle; Deidre Nuttall; Chris Hampson; Laurie Clarke; Monique Oomen; Chris O’Connor; Janine Faulkner; David Gascoigne; Samson Samasoni; David Gibson; Te Tumu Whakaata Taonga – NZ Film Commission.
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