1992: 91ZM Morning Crew

April 15, 2023

By AHNZ

Phil Gifford, Susi Allison, and Simon Barnett hosted a government breakfast radio show in the early 90s out of Christchurch. ‘The Morning Crew’ pulled all sorts of stunts, created songs, and invented stereotypical characters to perform skits on air. After Allison departed the men kept up the work, eventually defecting to a rival station for a large pay-out much to the upset of 91ZM who tried to gag them with lawyers.

Simon Barnett was moving into this job from the government TV show he hosted for kids, What Now? and for a while there the two overlapped. I distinctly remember his retirement show series finale where everyone stood with Simon on the sound stage as if it were the album cover of Sgt. Peppers. Allison and Gifford flanked Barnett in their black radio station jackets like a couple of pachyderms! Not great visuals but they were there for radio not pictures. Susi Allison was dropped from the ZM Morning Crew after the early days and her name isn’t even recorded on the Wikipedia entry. Ref. ZM Christchurch, Wiki

In one part of the show Barnett pretended to be a stereotypical dope-smoking reggae music-loving Jamaican. Singing along to the tune of ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’ he would make poor rhymes and bad jokes about current affairs.

[15 April 1994 excerpts from 91ZM Christchuch posted below]

Christchurch’s local 91ZM endured for another 2 or 3 years before being centralised as a national network. Local media was continuing the process of being homogenised into ever growing centralisation a bit at a time.

In about 1997 I visited the station at the time night host Christian Boston was having his final week. I dropped back to have a private talk with him in the studio during his show to ask why he was shifting to another slot? Why give up his very popular show when he was doing so well? He gave a dispassionate explanation about feeling like a change or something which puzzled me. But I was naive back then and thought that decisions like these were up to the hosts and they had the power and authority they appeared to have over the airwaves. Since becoming an Anarchist it fell into place and I now understand that performers are not at all the powerful ones but are pushed around a game board by producers and managers like toys. It’s very seldom up to the ‘talent’ as to what they do once they’re under contract.

Gifford and Barnett’s contract was lost by the station to the rival Christchurch music station  92 More FM. As a listener I never made the switch due to my preference toward high brand loyalty and the fact that More played different music that I didn’t like. It confused me that Gifford and Barnett could so easily switch to a different kind of music and affect to like that just as well! But that was another lesson in naivety for the Anarchist: It’s all about sales. The talent’s main ability is to appear to like and enjoy and support whatever their producer puts in front of them.

Seeking to re-capture the old chemistry and perhaps the old audience the two men were re-united on Newstalk ZB talkback (July 2019-July 2021.) The chemistry was still there but the pair had disowned their former personalities and sense of humor in order to be digestible in the new Politically Correct era. They had become the puritanical establishment they once sought to disrupt. They may have been able to forget who they were at their best but my tape recorder still remembers!

I assume Gifford didn’t really want the ZB job but Barnett talked him into doing it for 1 season to help establish the gig and in exchange for a truckload of money. The show is still active as of 2023 but with James Daniels as part of the duo.

As I write this Newshub’s Mike McRoberts and  Samantha Hayes lead the news with the headline “Kiwis get ‘screwed‘ buying groceries.” Whereas, hours before, I’d turned in to The Radio Vault’s The Worst Of Si & Phil On More FM (2000.) Not only would 90s Simon and Phil not say ‘screwed’ on the air but they thought they were being slightly indecent skirting saying the word “arse.” Whereas, on the other hand, they were happily singing and talking about Gifford being fat, Barnett being a poof, and the Auckland rugby team being “gay.” How times have changed!

Playing back that old material also highlighted to me the way 90s mainstream Kiwis made fun of each other. Gifford and Barnett jumped on mistakes each other had made and the fun was the character test of how well someone could take a triggering event and stay in Self. Likewise, their candid calls were made without consent under the pretense of something publicly humiliating but in most every case the victim recovered and even laughed at themselves!

Today such candid calls never happen. It would be considered Politically Incorrect, Triggering, and probably ‘Rape Culture’. To put a date on it, 2 December 2012 is probably the date that radio prank calling died. A Sydney radio station pretended to be the Queen of England when calling a British nurse who was so humiliated she killed herself. Ref. Suicide of Jacintha Saldanha, Wiki

I remember The Rock making prank calls leading up to this but something had changed. Whereas Si and Phil put on fake voices and left breadcrumbs for their prank the Rock lacked that humanity and talent. Their prank calls were cruel and exploitative. Times had changed and it all led to the end of the institution. The joker had become pathological.

One final point, being a Christchurch radio show provided a lightning rod to unify Canterbury and re-inforce localism. Hence, Si and Phil singing a song about how the Auckland rugby team are “poofs” and “gay.” Now that radio is mostly run in a national network and just about everyone listens to the same thing there is no more air time to galvanise local spirit or pride. Such a radio show today cannot offer a full-throated support of a given city or their team because they’re trying to please everyone in their audience. It is in such ways that New Zealand is assimilated into one homogeneous blob of same-same.

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