Celebrating 20 years: A Very Rancho Christmas

In the 20 years that I have been in this rack­et, I have pro­duced two podcasts.

Cinematica was the first and was pro­duced on con­tract to the Light House cinema chain who wanted a loc­al equi­val­ent to Kermode & Mayo. That ran every week from 2011 to 2014 and fea­tured reviews, inter­views and record­ings of Q&A ses­sions from live events in the cinema. We even did a couple of live shows in front of audi­ences at the New Zealand International Film Festival. It was a bunch of fun to do (espe­cially get­ting paid for it each week).

When that came to an end, co-host Kailey C and I went indie and star­ted a sim­il­ar weekly show called Rancho Notorious. That was recor­ded in my spare room in Newtown, Wellington, and fea­tured guest review­ers each week who would be bribed to appear with a slap-up din­ner cooked by the editor-in chief (with sous chef sup­port from Kailey’s part­ner Ian and the EIC’s son Sebastian).

I’ve always been ambi­tious for these things so when December 2014 came around, I sug­ges­ted that we sum up the end of the movie year with a spe­cial edi­tion of the show. Thus was A Very Rancho Christmas was born. Invited guests joined us for a full tur­key Christmas din­ner with crack­ers and bub­bly and we recor­ded the whole thing as we ate. Guests at the first one were Stuff crit­ic Graeme Tuckett, act­or John Leigh, Rancho sci­ence cor­res­pond­ent Mike Dickison, as well as Sebastian, Ian and Kaarin Macaulay¹.

Podcast: Play in new win­dow | Download

It sounds a bit rough because we only had three mics (and I am not an audio engin­eer des­pite what I do for a liv­ing) but it was a lot of fun. So much fun that the next year we did it again. By this time, I was on staff at RNZ and Rancho Notorious had joined the stable of pod­casts pub­lished by the state broad­caster². Again, too ambi­tious for my own good, I wanted to do some­thing new and stream it live to the world. That was­n’t really a thing back then but the RNZ cul­ture at the time was to ask for for­give­ness rather than per­mis­sion so we tried our luck.

At that time RNZ streamed the NZ Parliament on a ded­ic­ated URL, but by December the House was no longer in ses­sion and the stream was silent. So, we found out who could give us access to it and, with the help of RNZ engin­eer Marc Chesterman (who also recor­ded us) we broke new ground once again.

I some­times ima­gine a poor North Korean intel­li­gence offi­cial tasked with mon­it­or­ing the NZ Parliament for glob­al secur­ity reas­ons being shaken from his slum­ber by our rauc­ous yuletide shindig – glasses clink­ing, crack­ers being popped, celebrity imper­son­a­tions, etc. Perhaps there was some secret code embed­ded in the merriment.

By 2016, Kaarin and I were mar­ried and we had moved out here to Silverstream. Marc Chesterman brought a bunch of RNZ gear once more and Sarah McMullan, John Leigh and Mike Dickison told us about their year at the movies. We also had a pre-recorded appear­ance by Australian ABC Radio National crit­ic Jason Di Rosso talk­ing the year in Aussie film.

By this time, RNZ was start­ing to take its pod­cast products more ser­i­ously (and keep­ing a closer eye on the bright ideas that were being had by con­trib­ut­ors) and in a few short months I would be made redund­ant when the bean coun­ters real­ised that hav­ing two salar­ied film crit­ics was some­thing of a lux­ury when they could barely fund their newsroom.

It was also prov­ing chal­len­ging to get guests to travel all the way out to Upper Hutt, no mat­ter what the culin­ary offer­ings were, so Rancho went on hiatus for a while³. There has been talk that the time (and tech­no­logy) is right to bring it back, so watch this space.

1. Before she became Kaarin Slevin in 2016. ↩︎
2. That final sea­son of Rancho can still – amaz­ingly – be found on the RNZ web­site although the feed has been deleted. ↩︎
3. I slipped a couple of extra epis­odes in to the feed when I was offered inter­views that RNZ radio did­n’t have room for. ↩︎