Life turned around:
From jail term to TV show presenter.
Nicola ‘Nix’ Adams was in the depths of despair when her 16-month-old son died and her life spiralled rapidly downward into a dark world of drugs, prostitution and crime. But, as Shaun Bamber finds, Adams has turned her life around and is now starring on the M ori TV chat show Terei Tonight.
It’s not often you come across a chat show host who’ll tell you how much they “suck” at their job, how they don’t watch TV at all, and who can take or leave the fact that every week their face is beamed into Kiwi households right around the country.
Then again, it’s not often you come across someone like Nicola ‘Nix’ Adams.
The 34-year-old co-presenter of M ori TV’s Pio Terei Tonight had zero aspirations towards a career in television when the show’s producers first got hold of her to set up a meeting with Pio himself, an entertainment veteran with a TV pedigree stretching back more than a quarter century.
And with 255,000 Facebook followers and counting, who could blame her?
“TV was never something that I was keen on – I’m no aspiring actress or anything like that, so it wasn’t even really a blip on my radar,” says Adams, speaking from her “nice and quiet” home in Huntly. “I took my mate who’s
my agent and we were like, ‘We’re not going to lose anything if this doesn’t work out’,” she says of that first foray into the world of television. “I was thinking I wouldn’t mind just meeting Pio anyway – and they were paying for lunch, so what the hell.” Already a social media star thanks to her quirky makeup tutorials and video skits on ‘Cooked Whanau Korero’, the Facebook page she started up three years ago in an effort to win back her children, Adams is raw, real and hilarious. She also swears like a trooper – so for our family-friendly magazine this story reads just a little differently to how Adams actually speaks in real life.
That said, there is clearly nothing more important to Adams than her own family – specifically her three children, the two youngest of which she recently regained fulltime custody of, after several years of separation.
Seven years ago, while living in Australia, Adams’ 16-month-old son Alaska died suddenly in his sleep, falling victim to a virus that seemingly came out of nowhere. And just like that, her world fell apart.
Turning first to alcohol and then methamphetamine to numb the pain, the previously sober 27 year old spiralled out of control. Taking their children with him, her husband returned to New Zealand.
Left homeless and alone, Adams became a prostitute to support her newfound addiction.
Four years later, after two stints in prison, Adams emerged determined to rebuild her life – and her relationship with her children.
“I started the Facebook stuff to capture the attention of my children’s father,” she explains. “Because I had no contact with my children, couldn’t get through to family or anything, so I thought, ‘Stuff it, I’m going to use Facebook to try to get attention’.
“All that makeup and cooking and stuff was just to make that presence, so that they could see I was sober.”
Fast-forward to 2021, with a full season and then some of Pio Terei Tonight under her belt, her Facebook page – now renamed CWK for Courage, Wisdom, Knowledge – amassing new followers every day, and her work as a motivational speaker taking up most of the rest of her spare time, Adams literally can’t believe where her life has taken her.
But it’s not her near-meteoric rise to fame that blows her mind.
“The biggest thing for me is not even about TV and things like that. It’s about being a fulltime mum,” she says.
“I never thought, after everything I did – turn to drugs, neglect my family, all of that – I never ever thought that I was going to have the opportunity to be a fulltime mother to my children again.
“All this TV and other stuff that I get–bonus.Thatstuff’sabonus.
“Because if someone had said to me – when I was in the pits of my drug addiction and sitting in a jail cell for an armed robbery – if someone had said to me, ‘Just keep pushing, in three years those kids are going to be living with you fulltime, you’re going to be making lunches, dropping them off at school’, I would have said they were full of it right?
“And then not only that, but I’m also going to be on TV, co-hosting a TV show? In three years? Like, whatever. All this is just a bonus.”
“I never ever thought that I was going to have the opportunity to be a fulltime mother to my children again.”
– Nicola ‘Nix’ Adams with Pio Terei