New Year Honours: Rosemary McLeod celebrated for contribution to TV and journalism

Thursday, 30 December 2021

Rosemary McLeod: “Depp is too knowingly cute to be my fantasy boyfriend. I don’t wish to see him playing Jack Sparrow, a heartthrob pirate.”

Rosemary McLeod’s first job as a journalist came about as quite a surprise.

She was working in the Post Office in 1970 while she finished her studies. “It was a brilliant place in those days, full of eccentrics.”

Her first piece of writing was about a holiday she spent with some friends – extraordinary hippies, she said – and she wrote a short piece about her stay. Her boss, reading over her shoulder while she should have been writing about satellite earth stations, told her to run it down to The Sunday Times and ask for his friend, who turned out to be the editor. And he offered her a job on the spot.

This year, McLeod has been named an officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her contributions to journalism and television.

“I was 20, and very lively,” she said, and those traits seemed to work in her favour. She still has the original story, but is reluctant to blow her own trumpet.

When Rosemary McLeod started writing comedy for television, it was unusual for women.

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She worked for The Sunday Times for the next few years, with her own fashion column and illustration spread, leaving for Eve magazine a couple of years later, and then onto a job at The Dominion, progressing through the ranks fast each time she moved jobs.

At the age of 23 she joined the team at The Listener. “I said I wanted to write about fashion, but not a literal, ‘Here is a frock, it’s pink, pink is big this year.’ I wanted to write a commentary about society and fashion.” She got her wish, and was given a fortnightly column.

The next step was a change of gear – radio news. “I was full of confidence because I was young.”

She’d received voice training at boarding school, but when the time came, she wasn’t cleared for air “because my voice was too deep, and it made men think of sex”. It was different times, she said.

When the new national television channels TV1 and TV2 launched, she was selected to join the team writing comedy sketches, which began a decades-long career and love of situational comedy.

McLeod took joy in “defying the formula”, she said. “It enraged me that in comedy at that time, women were only reactionary. They were completely passive. Men had all the lines. That was boring, and I said ‘We’re not going to do that’.”

“Writing comedy was unusual for women,” she said. Her role models weren’t in the room with her, but on the page.

She perused magazines looking for American journalists Nora Ephron and Joan Didion. “When I first started when I was 20, they pointed me at [British journalist and author] Jilly Cooper … and I looked at her and thought, you can be confident writing in the first person.”

She was the creator and principal writer of the TV soap Gloss, which won the award for best TV drama in 1989, and a feature writer for the magazine North & South.

Somewhere in between the writing and the youthful leaping from job to job, she had a family. It was her three children who she thought would get the biggest kick out of the news of her New Year Honour, which came as a total surprise to her.

Her own mother died when she was very young. “I came from Masterton, from a very average New Zealand family. There wasn’t any money and there had been quite a lot of hardship.”

She kept all her mother’s handworks – craft, and embroidery – which she had been particularly good at. It blossomed into a love of McLeod’s own, and she has published a series of books on the subject.

These days, she pens a column for The Dominion Post, and remains a keen needlewoman and textile collector.