1988: Richard and Judy
May 11, 2025
By AHNZ
Worship the anthropocentric hardware of the teleprompter…
“Much of the attention focused on newsreaders, their jobs being about as simple as any known to mankind. A stop-go sign holder at roadworks literally has more intellectual demands placed on him or her than someone robotically reading the lines from a screen. This celebrity treatment of newsreaders reading off a screen reached its most embarrassing point last century when the likes of women’s magazine branded TV One’s then screen reader Judy Bailey as “the Mother of the Nation”.” – Bob Jones (2024)
“We had the best time working on the show. It wasn’t like going to work at all.” – Judy Bailey re news reading for Top Half (1980)
My guess is that some PR person for TVNZ news was trying to lift their show by lifting their star’s profile. They called Judy “Mother of the Nation” and we let them.
How much integrity and intelligence could someone have to become a Ron Burgundy? Not much to begin with. Reading someone else’s scripts for decades just to have absurd amounts of money and social prestige! Where do they find these people.
—
Image ref. unknown source supplied to NZ Herald (2019)
Ref. Bailey interview, ScreenTalk (2014,) NZ on Screen
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