Kerre Woodham: I feel that I know them

What I love about ZB is that when you turn up for work, you know you’re part of a continuum of broadcasters who were there before you, who have helped shape the station into what it is today. I love that she is for the listeners and by the listeners.

I am a real-life version of the Human League song: “I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, when he found me. He picked me out, he shook me up, he turned me around, he turned me into someone new.”

Yes, I was working at a restaurant in Hamilton when Bill Francis rang me and asked me if I’d like to do nights on 1ZB. I said no twice – I was hip! I was cool! Talkback was for old people! But after the troubled chef had a meltdown and a water rat came up from the river and into the kitchen, a nice quiet studio seemed like a dream, so when he rang a third time, I said yes.

Some moments will always stick in my mind. One was the dreadful night in the middle of April when word started coming through that a group of school kids and their teachers were in trouble on the Tongariro River.

It was nigh impossible to get any information quickly – we were being drip-fed the news as it came through. And it was the worst possible news. By the end of the evening, we knew that six young people and a teacher from Elim Christian School had drowned in the raging Mangatepopo Canyon. I’ll never forget that night.

And I remember the night of the Canterbury February quake – it was just awful. For many people in Canterbury, their only access to the outside world was through their radio. So, they rang in, desperate for information about family members and friends. There was a mum who desperately needed goat milk powder for her baby – a listener was able to fix her up. That baby will be 15 now.

After nearly 30 years on 1ZB, there are so many moments and callers and letters from listeners that stick in my mind. Nights are special. It’s the time when people are at their most vulnerable and if they’re going through difficult times, there’s nothing to distract you in the dark of night.

I remember receiving a beautiful bone china cup in the mail from a woman whose dad had just died. She would call in to see him every night as he got more frail and ask him if he wanted her to stay.  

“You go, love”, he’d say to her. “I’ll make a cup of tea and Kerre will see me through.” When he died, she sent me a bone china cup just like his.

About six months after I’d started on 1ZB, I received a letter from a young widow who told me her husband had drowned at sea. He was a fisherman, she said, and she always knew the sea would get him, but she thought she’d have longer with him.

She had young children but she missed him so much, she didn’t know whether she had the strength to carry on.

She wrote to me to tell me she was fine now and to thank me for helping her get through. She never rang, she said, but she always knew she could, and that helped her through the nights.

I cried; my producer, Jimmy, cried, and she and her family have stayed with me forever. I hope they’re doing well. Sometimes it’s the people who don’t call who stay with you.

Then there was Lewis, the 12-year-old who schooled me for thinking there were tigers in Africa. And Brucey from Little Wanganui, Vivienne and her Christmas cake, Mikey who now works here - and the man who rang me during the global financial crisis to tell me in hushed tones that he was ruined.

He was using credit cards to pay the mortgages on rental properties he had bought and was in dreadful financial trouble. He hadn’t told his wife, because he handled the money and he couldn’t bear to let her down. I was talking to him, and I heard her in the background. He said he had to go and he hung up. That call has haunted me. I never heard back from him.

The truckie whose marriage had broken up because he was working every hour God sent and he was now living in a crappy rental with another bloke. He didn’t want his kids to see him in the place and every spare cent he had went to his ex-wife and kids, so he couldn’t ever imagine starting over again. His wife had hooked up with his best friend.

The listeners have been with me from the time I was a 32-year-old single mother, newly arrived in Auckland, to becoming a 61-year-old grandmother and through all the highs and lows that come with living a full life.

I feel like I know some of them, and I know some of them feel like they know me. They have taught me so much and they have shown me different ways of viewing the world.

I will always carry them and their stories in my heart.

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