CathNews New Zealand

Tim Wilson is a changed man.

In the past four years he has converted to Catholicism, met and married singer/songwriter Rachel, and had two “sparkling” children — Roman, 17 months, and Felix, five months — whose existence lights him up from the inside like a sky lantern.

For those readers who might confuse fiction for biography, let it be known: Wilson, 50, is not at all like Tom Milde, the drunken protagonist of his just-published novel The Straight Banana, “a middle-aged loser, ex-failed poet, ex-print journalist, a nocturnal habitue who falls into TV in New York City”.

But he kind of used to be.

For seven years, Wilson, known to many as “the quirky one” on Seven Sharp, was the American correspondent for TVNZ, establishing a New York “bureau” in his apartment. A Metro magazine staffer, he moved to New York with the aim of writing for the New Yorker, but like Milde found himself working in television almost accidentally, certainly with no ambition other than paying his rent.

He covered Hurricane Katrina, the Global Financial Crisis, the Virginia Tech massacre and many other big stories, contextualising them for Kiwi viewers, as well as celebrating red, white and blue oddballs.

“People think I was flown over there in a golden jumbo jet and installed in palatial splendour in Spanish Harlem, but I was a freelancer and I only got paid when I worked,” he says. “My first job for TVNZ, I FTD’d [failed to deliver]. I was at the top of the news doing the second inauguration of George Bush. I did not know what I was doing. I hired friends to help me out, and it was a colossal mess.

“But I had support from Bill Ralston, who was the head of news and current affairs at the time. He was indulgent of me, and I was the only person they knew who had a New Zealand accent who was around. So it’s an economy of scarcity.” Continue reading

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• Stuff article by Eleanor Black

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News category: Features.