AUSXIP Lucy Lawless Files - Flawless Print - Lucy Articles
NZ Listener Magazine
(New Zealand)22-28 April 2006
Lucy excerpt
Later, in his slightly bizarre, pre-recorded, bleep-littered interview with Lucy Lawless, the actress spoke about finding herself pregnant while she was young and on her OE. A fairly significant life event that Holmes didn’t pursue.
Talking about her increasingly gruelling years as Xena, Lawless used words like “rage”. “There were times when I did have to go to a shrink about it,” she said. When she was threatened with a seventh season of the show, she began to have fantasies of driving into oncoming traffic.
Yikes. How did Holmes respond to this alarming confession? With: “Did you always want to be an actress?”
Arrghh. The filming of Lawless in tight close-up didn’t help. Yes, she’s gorgeous. But you don’t normally conduct a conversation an inch away from someone’s face.
Complete article
In a word
by Diana Wichtel
After years of being jammed on transmit, Paul Holmes needs to learn to listen if he wants his new talkshow to succeed.
Another year, another Holmes show. It could just work. Though that first hour of Prime’s new talkshow (Wednesday, 7.30pm) seemed somewhat longer. Good television chat is like a successful dinner party. If it’s working, you don’t need to hurl down an extra glass of chardonnay to relax and enjoy yourself.
Holmes trawling through the life and hard times of Judy Collins didn’t exactly drive me to hard drink, but if the idea is to have a conversation, various forms of awkwardness got in the way. Why sit Holmes behind a desk if intimacy is the aim?
Then there’s the fact that he had already interviewed Collins on his ZB breakfast show. So we got many of the same anecdotes again, word for word, right down to Collins’s clearly not so impromptu eruption into “Sunny Side of the Street”.
Never mind. I still have my battered copy of her Colors of the Day LP, complete with its immortal versions of Lennon and McCartney’s “In My Life”. And nothing brings back the innocent, addled 60s like Collins singing Donovan’s “Sunny Goodge Street”:
_On a firefly platform on sunny Goodge Street
Violent hash smoker shook a chocolate machine
Involved in an eating scene_
Which she didn’t sing, more’s the pity. Michael Parkinson has a proper performance on his show when his guest is an icon (sadly, it’s often Paul McCartney). All we got on Holmes was an a cappella chunk of “Both Sides Now” delivered by Collins from her chair while fellow guest Theresa Gattung nodded her head up and down arhythmically, like one of those little dogs in the back window of cars. This was after Holmes made Collins tell the story that she had already told at the beginning of the hour about how the song’s writer, Joni Mitchell, rang her in the middle of the night and sang it to her.
The rest of the interview involved Holmes working his way, with rather dogged chronology, through Collins’s life: the formative influence of her adored, blind father; her possibly erroneous first impressions that Dylan was crap …
“You go to New York City and the next thing you’re playing folk and you’re touring around the country …” raved Holmes. I think Collins spoke for us all when she cried, “I’m so exhausted, just listening to this!”
Holmes didn’t back off from the heavier stuff – Collins’s days as a hard drinker, the suicide of her son – but then she’s written about all that. It’s not necessarily a bad thing that he refrained from doing a Barbara Walters and going for tears (which, if Collins’s sometimes brimming eyes were any indication, would have been an easy thing to do).
But when Collins admitted, talking about the suicide, that she had been an “attempter” as a teenager, the obvious question, surely, was “Why?” For some reason, Holmes didn’t ask it.
Maybe after years of being jammed on transmit, he’s not the world’s greatest listener. Pity, because his guests were falling over themselves to blurt out personal details for him to ignore. Gattung raised her marriage break-up. Holmes let it drop.
Later, in his slightly bizarre, pre-recorded, bleep-littered interview with Lucy Lawless, the actress spoke about finding herself pregnant while she was young and on her OE. A fairly significant life event that Holmes didn’t pursue.
Talking about her increasingly gruelling years as Xena, Lawless used words like “rage”. “There were times when I did have to go to a shrink about it,” she said. When she was threatened with a seventh season of the show, she began to have fantasies of driving into oncoming traffic.
Yikes. How did Holmes respond to this alarming confession? With: “Did you always want to be an actress?”
Arrghh. The filming of Lawless in tight close-up didn’t help. Yes, she’s gorgeous. But you don’t normally conduct a conversation an inch away from someone’s face.
Chat, like sitcoms, has been a bit of a black hole for local television. Only the late, lamented Sports Cafe has ever really pulled it off. The challenge for Holmes will be to keep the compelling guests coming and to try not to treat them like encyclopedia entries. Still, you feel for him. It can’t be easy with so much at stake.
Once those strange, ovoid shapes resolved themselves into a word, the show’s opening titles were apt. There’s a tiny Holmes, little arms up in a defensive posture, looking as though he’s trying to stave off being run over by his outsized name. Story of his life.
Meanwhile, back at TVNZ, Susan Wood’s Close Up interview with new/old/new CEO Rick Ellis was odder than anything Holmes could manage. No bleeps were required, but Wood seemed dangerously over-animated as she reminded Ellis that he had warned that TVNZ needed to go digital back in 1999. “If it didn’t get with it, it would be a dinosaur!” she raved. “Is it too late for TVNZ to get that platform and get with the 21st century!?”
I think the answer was “No”. When Ellis called TVNZ an icon, Wood corrected him. “It’s a wounded icon, isn’t it?” Anyway, she demanded wildly, why did he want the job? “You read the papers,” she harangued the startled-looking Ellis. “You’re an intelligent man. You would have picked it up last year! It was Judy, it was Susan, it was Fraser, it was the ratings …! This place just took a hammering! Why do you want it?!”
Goodness. Ellis looked as though he’d taken a bit of a hammering himself. Still, Wood’s had a hard year, what with the salary debacle, the yelling at the kids in front of the fiancé … She sounded like Lucy Lawless after one too many seasons of Xena.
Despite Wood’s best efforts, Ellis still somehow seemed to want the job. “One of my key objectives, Susan,” he said pointedly, “is to see TVNZ report the news and not make the news.”
“Good luck,” carolled Susan bitterly. “I think you might need it.”