Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

Comedy legend Eddie Izzard’s material has taken on a life of its own.
Now going by Suzy Eddie, she doesn’t just tell jokes, she’s rewritten history.
The comedian, actor, and politician has captivated audiences with a career that has constantly pushed forward, and now she’ll be captivating Kiwi audiences, gracing our stages later this year.
She’s bringing two shows to our shores that couldn’t be more different, the Remix Tour in May, and a one-person performance of Hamlet in July.
“Just like Shakespeare went from his comedies to his dramas and tragedies, so am I,” she told Newstalk ZB’s Jack Tame.
The Remix Tour has Izzard performing highlights from her 35 year career in stand up comedy, and with so much material to pick from, every night will be unique.
“It lives – that's the thing,” she said.
“It lives as opposed to, oh it’s old and we pull it out and it’s the old prayer from before – it's got essences of that, but also new stuff as well.”
In contrast, Hamlet is a fair bit more structured – Izzard unable to shift things around from performance to performance, but that doesn’t make it a traditional rendition.
By its nature, theatre requires an audience to buy into the action more than with film or television, having to use their own imagination to fill in the gaps, and Izzard’s is no different.
“You get to concentrate, you get to see very clearly the text, the beauty of the poetry, the characters interplay,” she explained.
“We've worked very hard on moving ... the juxtaposition of me moving between different characters. There’s a subtle change – these are not caricatures, these are characters.”
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Most people are aware that drivers licensing tests have changed over the years, but not everyone is aware of exactly how much.
Kevin Milne first sat his driver's test back in 1964, and in retrospect, the rules back then were much slacker.
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The ninth studio album from Swedish musician Robyn, ‘Sexistential’ is a return to an earlier form.
Unlike the softer sounds of her previous album ‘Honey’, her latest release is reminiscent of her 2010 trilogy ‘Body Talk’ – Robyn working with the same producer, Klas Åhlund, as she did on that project.
In Chris Schulz’s opinion, the album is easily the best pop album of the year so far, and he joined Jack Tame to share his full thoughts.
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"There’s no denying that Fiji Airways is on a roll, busy spreading its wings across the world. Fiji’s plucky and ambitious national carrier is now a serious, highly competitive airline player in the Pacific, directly connecting Nadi with over 25 international destinations in 15 countries and territories. Its international route network is nearly as comprehensive as Air New Zealand’s, who fly to 29 international destinations in 16 countries."
"Fiji Airways has been showered with accolades of late, including being named an APEX World Class Airline for 2026, thrusting it into the world’s top 10 carriers, alongside the likes of Emirates, Qatar Airways and Singapore Airlines."
Read Mike's full article here.
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The Truth About Ruby Cooper by Liz Nugent
If my sister hadn’t been beautiful, none of it would have happened.
Ruby Cooper and her sister, Erin, live an idyllic life in their close-knit church community in Boston. But when Ruby is sixteen, she is involved in an incident that causes her family’s world to implode.
Across decades, the fallout leaves a wake of destruction behind Ruby in Dublin and Erin in Boston.
Not that Ruby wants to think about the past.
But it can’t stay a secret forever.

Battle of the Arctic by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore
Winston Churchill called it 'the worst journey in the world'. But was even this telling quote, describing the nightmarish torment experienced while transporting military aid to northern Russia during World War Two, an understatement?
As this book's title implies, Battle of the Arctic tells a unique story. For much of the conflict was complicated by terrific storms, snow, ice, fog, whales and Arctic mirages, so that what is chronicled at times sounds like a cross between the nightmarish torment experienced by both Shackleton in his ship Endurance and Scott of the Antarctic, and an Arctic version of Robinson Crusoe. The action unfolded as Allied naval and merchant seamen, airmen, submariners, soldiers and intelligence officers delivered on their countries' promise to take arms to Russia notwithstanding the German attempts to hunt them in their aircraft, U-boats and surface fleet spearheaded by Tirpitz and Scharnhorst.
When ships were attacked, and went down in seas so cold that a man could die after five minutes of immersion, it triggered events reminiscent of the do-or-die moments during the sinking of the Titanic. Men perished one by one in lifeboats, and as castaways on deserted Arctic islands where they were stalked by polar bears.
Frostbitten and wounded survivors ended up in primitive Russian hospitals where amputations were carried out without anesthetics. Others, while stranded for months in the communist state they were aiding, experienced the murky worlds of the NKVD, and the gulag, as well as famine and prostitution. Using new material unearthed in American, British, Russian and German archives, as well as Polish, Norwegian, French and Dutch sources, and a remarkable collection of vivid witness accounts brought together at the passing of the last survivors, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore can at last shine a revealing light on this extraordinary tale that oscillates between the sailors' eye view on the front line, and the controversies that infuriated world leaders.

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