Marcus Lush: Voices in the night

Opinion

Author: Marcus Lush,
Publish Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2026, 5:30am

Calls from the weird and the wonderful have kept Marcus Lush entertained.

It was 1990, and I was about to move to Melbourne when I saw an advertisement for a part-time radio announcer for Radio 1ZB.

Intrigued, I went for an interview and got the job. I started out doing three nights a week at the old Broadcasting House in Durham Street, then I was promoted to doing five nights a week. All these years later, I’m still the ZB Night Announcer.

We all soon moved to a studio at the corner of Nelson and Cook streets. Of course, at that stage it was only an Auckland station, and it had only been in the talkback format for a couple of years, so it was still a new concept for us all.

Working the night shift, I got to talk to some really interesting callers. One I recall with amazement was a man who told me the Soviet Union was disintegrating.

I asked him how he knew this quite surprising information. It turns out he was a ham radio operator and had been talking to the Russian cosmonauts in the Soviet Space Station. They told him that their re-entry plans had changed because of the impending collapse of the Union. Of course, he was totally right.

The mid-dawn callers were always the most interesting. Often, they would ring from gas stations because they were the only places where someone would lend them a phone. It seems weird these days, but there was a time when a lot of people didn’t have access to phones.

I talked to some of the listeners so many times they became friends – and I even met some of them. I ended up doing the Round the Bays run with a listener who lived rough under a ramp in Mayoral Drive. He must have been in his 70s, but I have to say he was remarkably fit.

Another listener who intrigued me was a guy called Mike the Pirate. I got to know him quite well because he has called me many times over the years.

Years later, I got a call from a psychiatrist asking me if I knew what was wrong with Mike the Pirate. I said: “I thought that was your department!” He seemed quite well to me, but he did remind me a bit of the character who dressed like a pirate from the movie Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.

It’s amazing what you hear in this job.