The rise and fall of veteran radio host
She has sold her lavish city apartment, queued up for the Work an Income office and taken a pay cut to stay in the radio industry, but Polly Gillespie says she’s no longer ‘‘hemorrhaging money’’.
The veteran radio host has moved back to her old family home in Island Bay, Wellington, and says she’s learning to be a little more humble.
The Work and Income queue was her Damascus moment. Having lost her longstanding gig with NZME’s The Hits breakfast show, Gillespie realised she could no longer afford the rent on her inner-city Wellington apartment on top of the mortgage on the family home, so she went to pursue an accommodation supplement to cover the rent for her mother’s new granny flat.
Walking into the Newtown Community Link office, Gillespie was surprised to be asked to show ID before she was allowed to enter. It made her realise here was a world she clearly knew little of any more.
‘‘There were all these security guards walking around inside and then I was standing in line and I was thinking, this is all really weird for me, Gillespie says.
‘‘This is quite a humble experience for me. This is not quite normal for me’’
Gillespie needed their help. ‘‘It used to be that I could afford to have my mum living in my family home, and me living in my apartment, and I was haemorrhaging money, really,’’ she says.
Gillespie says her old lifestyle meant never checking the price tag on the David Jones outfits she bought that made her ‘‘look 18’’. If she wanted it, she got it. But the bubble burst. Gillespie lost her job and her apartment, and next week she’ll watch exhusband and radio show partner Grant Kereama walk down the aisle with his new love.
On the other hand she’s smitten with the arrival of her first granddaughter and is back on the airwaves.
And she reveals she sacrificed her career with NZME to help Kereama. Before NZME decided not to renew her Hits show, Gillespie was offered the chance to go solo: The Polly Gillespie Show.
She’d run the show from Wellington and talk about the things she loved (similarly to her sometimes-strange Facebook page postings).
She would be able to make the same ’’ridiculous amounts of money perhaps that I was making before’’.
But NZME was getting rid of Kereama. ’’I did feel a loyalty to Grant,’’ Gillespie says.
And she worried what her listeners would think. ‘‘If Grant had disappeared and I had done The Polly Gillespie Show, I don’t think people would have gone, ‘hey this is really cool’, I think people would have gone, ‘she’s not very fair to him’, [or] ’wow that’s pretty harsh’.’’
More worried about what her listeners would think than her employers, Gillespie revealed clauses that she disagreed with in her not-yet-signed NZME contract via Facebook.
The bizarre selfie video, taken from her bathroom wearing just a towel while dyeing her hair, appeared to be the last straw for the company, which she described as more of ’’a machine’’.
Gillespie and Kereama were replaced by TVNZ weatherman Sam Wallace and Seven Sharp cohost Toni Street.
Gillespie had to serve three months’ gardening leave, so filled the time posting car radio video selfies to her Facebook page.
It was a way to stay relevant, she says. And she had a lot of time on her hands.
‘‘I came up with the idea of doing car radio, which I thought would be fun and continue to talk to our audience somehow,’’ she says.
She did consider leaving what Kereama calls a ’’cut-throat’’ industry but, after 25 years in the game, radio was her life.
Then an offer arrived from rival Mediaworks’ More FM. She says the smaller paycheque wasn’t so much a step backwards but a chance to understand how the average Joe worked.
‘‘I was a bit stupid really,’’ she admits. ‘‘And now I am, through circumstance, forced to think about things more and I think that’s a step forward because I think I was a bit stupid, so maybe I’m learning to be a real person. That’s not a bad thing.’’
While it may seem as if Gillespie was willing to show the world everything in those strange video diaries, she says that behind the big personality there’s a lot she doesn’t share.
‘‘Nobody really knows what’s going on,’’ she says.
‘‘That’s important to me to have that privacy, to have my own little thing. Some of my friends go, ‘you know, you really should share more about what’s really going on inside’, and I’m like, ‘no I’m good thanks’.’’
Is she happy? ‘‘I don’t know about happy,’’ she says. ‘‘Happiness is an interesting state. I think happiness is what you feel every now and then when you feel joy, so I feel more content.
‘‘I’m content with my life and then I feel moments of happiness. I certainly don’t expect every day to be sprinkles and cupcakes and joyful and sparkly. There are moments in my life where I feel complete and utter joy but I’m content. I am content.’’
She’s settling back into the house she once shared with Kereama. She’s away soon to look after her granddaughter, so her daughter can see her father walk down the aisle. And back at home, the garden fence needs mending. The old Gillespie would have forked out for a handyman. The new one is digging out tools and doing it herself.