Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

Dame Lynley Dodd is a staple of Kiwi childhoods.
The beloved children’s author is best known for her Hairy Maclary series, the first of which was released over 40 years ago.
She’s sold millions of books worldwide, and just this week she was honoured at the New Zealander of the Year Awards.
Dodd was granted the Legacy Award for fostering a love of literature in generations of children.
While she admits it sounds a bit silly, Dodd admits to feeling slightly guilty at the level of acclaim and the legacy she’s built.
“Well I obviously, I think, been spending all these years thoroughly enjoying myself producing these books,” she told Jack Tame.
“It sounds a bit, you know, I’ve been indulging myself, and I have, doing these things, but no, it’s been great fun.”
Dodd’s love of wordplay and language stems back to her childhood, as her parents were, in her words, much into words, and there was an “awful lot of fun” with language in her home.
“Both my parents were fond of books, and also fond of fun, and so, you know, obviously there were serious times as well, but there was a lot of fun with words,” she explained.
“My father and I used to make up games, make up sort of imaginary animals and all sorts of silly things and have nonsense conversations about them.”
The language used in her home was also a contrast to the things she was given to read at school, which were “incredibly old-fashioned".
“There were, you know, millions of gnomes and fairies and bits and pieces, and it was talking down kind of language,” Dodd told Tame.
“And I got a bit bored by those books, and it was only much later on, when I met books like Dr Suess’, I suddenly realised you could be mad with language and have a fantastic time.”
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Our parents are some of our biggest influences.
It was Kevin Milne’s birthday last week, and also the anniversary of his father’s death, and it got him thinking about the influence fathers have on their sons.
This is compounded by the release of Louis Theroux’s Manosphere documentary, which reinforced to him the importance of a positive male influence in a child’s life.
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Gorillaz have returned with their ninth studio album.
The Mountain was recorded across a range of locations, primarily India and London, and draws heavily from the Indian classical instrumentation, pairing it with the group’s eclectic electronic and pop influences.
It features performances in multiple different languages, including Arabic, English, Hindi, Spanish, and Yoruba, with themes of death, grief, and the afterlife threading through the album.
Chris Schulz joined Jack Tame to share his thoughts on the release.
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Look What You Made Me Do by John Lanchester
What if the year's most talked about TV show was all about your marriage?

Kate, thirty years into her marriage, has a seemingly idyllic metropolitan, North London life. Phoebe, a young screenwriter, is the creator of the year's hit TV show, Cheating.

When Kate's world takes a darker turn, she thinks she sees details and intimacies in the show that only she and her husband Jack could possibly have known. But who has betrayed who? Who gets to tell whose story?

A black comedy of resentment and entitlement, Look What You Made Me Do is the story of two very different women from two very different generations, heading toward a battle only one of them can win.

A Far-Flung Life by M.L. Steadman
Western Australia, 1958. A truck rumbles along a lonely outback road. A moment’s inattention, and in a few muddled seconds the lives of the MacBride family are shattered.

Instead of leaving them to heal, fate comes back for them in a twist of consequences that will cause one of them to lose their life, and another to sacrifice theirs for the sake of an innocent child.

Set in the expanse of a vast and flat landscape, where the weather is a capricious god and a million-acre sheep station is barely a dot on the map, A Far-flung Life explores the hearts of a handful of isolated souls and the secrets they shield in order to survive.

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"The weather could not have been a more idyllic. I was basking in the brilliance of Lake Taupō aboard the glorious replica steamboat, Ernest Kemp, as were several dozen guests from all over the world. Cruising the great lake for over 40 years, this gorgeous little vessel that accommodates 50 guests, began life in Kerikeri, named in honour of the last member of the Kemp family to live at Kemp House. A massive and damaging flood in the Kerikeri Inlet in 1981 prompted the sale of this shallow draught vessel, and Ernest Kemp began a new life feeling the lake’s freshwater on its hull, a year later.:
"For a complete change of pace, I was itching to rock some of Taupō’s much-vaunted mountain bike trails. And they won’t disappoint."
Read Mike's full article here.
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