I asked him at his apartment why he had agreed to present such rubbish. He said, ‘I was desperate for money. It was after my divorce. I had given my house to my family in Wellington. I had committed to pay a level of maintenance to my ex-wife and my children that was vastly in excess of what I had to pay. I sold my iron and my ironing-board, which were the last two really nice things that I had left, for $50. I was down. I was flatting in Auckland. I had an old beat-up car. Then the job came along.
‘Drinking? No. I was completely focussed on trying to grow up. Earlier on, I was a bit of a party boy. I might do a TV show one night, then head down to a bar and drink with a few mates down there, then head off to a restaurant, and drink and drink and drink till the early hours of the morning. Having a great deal of fun. But I remember driving home and looking up at the lights on the side of the hill, and thinking, ‘Why can’t I just be really happy like those people up there?’
‘I’d got married at twenty-one. Well, before that I had a child with Anne, so I was a dad at twenty. So, straight into a marriage, straight into a mortgage. Moved back down here, bought my first house. I was wallpapering, fixing things up, working really hard. Got up to Wellington, built a house once again, worked really hard, painted it myself … And I came up against that point in your life when you say, “Am I going to stay a boy, or am I going to become a man? Am I going to embrace the fact that my dreams, hopes and aspirations will never come true?”
‘I don’t want to create the impression I was a deep dark wreck. I was having a great life. I was starting to earn some really good money, I had a stunningly wonderful group of sons, my three sons, magic young guys, I’m so proud of each of them today, and I get on really well with my ex-wife Anne. I love Anne and she loves me, and we actually have a better relationship now.
‘But I had a restlessness in my soul. Life is all about the search for love. I wanted to see myself on the cover of the Woman’s Weekly. That way I knew I was alive. I was proving to other people that I was okay, but the person I needed to prove that I was okay to was me.
‘So I went up to Auckland, attempted a couple of rather desperate and sad relationships, did that show. It was a pretty bad time.’
Which is when I would have phoned, mockingly, and heard him say, plaintively, ‘I feel good about me.’
He was a bored pharmacy student driving along the Hutt motorway when he decided to enter broadcasting. He saw presenter Brian Edwards driving the other way. Edwards, he figured, was doing something he enjoyed. ‘I thought, “I can’t just settle for this. I’m sure there’s a good buck in being a pharmacist, but I’ll be stuck behind a counter, counting out pills.”’
That restlessness again. He got into television. Was that satisfying? ‘I realised very quickly within TVNZ you would be treated like garbage as long as you had no power over the system.’ A chance meeting led him to Hollywood, where he bought the rights to This Is Your Life. He co-produced, wrote and hosted thirty-six episodes, until TV1 programmer Andrew Shaw phoned.
‘I was living in Akaroa,’ Parker said. I got a call one day from Shaw. He said, “Oh, hi Bob, how are you doing, and hey listen, who owns the rights in the States to This Is Your Life?” Well, a few weeks later I get another call saying, “Hey, TVNZ don’t want you to front the show anymore, and we’ve spoken to the production people in Hollywood and told them you won’t be able to make this programme with anybody else.” I’d tried to go to TV3, but they closed that door. So, without a broadcaster, whatever you’ve got is worth nothing … I extracted a little bit of dosh out of them for the rights. But I had the show ripped out from under me. It was a pretty scummy thing.’
He loved working on that show, even compared its biographies to Shakespeare. He told a story. ‘One of my sons reminded me recently that I used to get frustrated by the bad speech habits they’d bring home, so in the mornings I would make them do speech exercises, and make them read Shakespeare. It was one thing I learned from my grandfather. He’d read all of Shakespeare, and he took me aside one day and said to me, “Robert, everything you ever need to know is written inside Shakespeare, and everything you ever needed to understand people is written in Dickens.”
‘Later on I read Shakespeare, and it was the ability of Shakespeare to allow people to transform that I absolutely loved. Shakespeare understood that people change and are affected by life, and in a way that was what used to fascinate me about This Is Your Life. I always loved that transition where you would bring somebody on stage and you’d show a photograph of them when they were present in the story you were retelling, maybe they were twenty, and
