Photography: Petra mingneau.
Broadcaster Mark Leishman has graced the airwaves since the 1970s, when he landed his first radio gig with Radio Avon. Since then, Mark has hosted 50 television and radio shows, including Top Town, Sunday Grandstand, The Young Farmer Contest and Tux Wonder Dogs. The proud father of three now enjoys several roles at RNZ National, his latest as a reporter on Country Life.
I was born in Timaru. My father was a grocer and very proud his shop was a superette, not a dairy.
There wasn’t much product branding back then and my parents would sit in the storeroom, packing loose tea leaves from big tea chests into individual brown paper bags. I was the youngest of four and on the rare occasion our parents went out, as soon their car left the driveway, we’d be in the shop and into the ice cream.
Mum and Dad were open all hours, and they were a great team.
My mother Noeline also had a great fondness for speech and drama. While my oldest brother David wouldn’t have a bar of it, my brother Phillip, sister Gillian and I all took lessons which gave me the confidence to speak in public. Growing up Catholic, I sometimes read the lesson at Sunday morning Mass. I’d still be nervous, but I liked the theatre of it and although that nervous feeling has never left me, I’ve learned to control it.
Our family had a big wooden radio set with a record player and tape recorder, and Phillip and I would tape ourselves pretending to be radio DJs.
He’d do the fun stuff, like introducing records, and I’d read the news or weather forecasts. The irony is that’s what I do now on RNZ.
I enjoyed going to our local radio station 3ZC to watch the announcers through the glass.
To hear the person’s voice come through the radio at home, then see them in real life actually speaking on the radio, it was magical. One day, James Daniels invited me into the studio and the die was cast.
When my brother Phillip started working for the NZBC in Wellington, he encouraged me to follow in his footsteps.
He even had me to stay in the school holidays when I was 15. I loved seeing his life and at 18, I did Wellington Polytech’s news journalism course. After graduating, I did a stint at The Timaru Herald, but I was keen to get into radio and I went to Christchurch’s Radio Avon as a junior reporter, chasing fire engines and ambulances.
I always imagined it’d be fun to work in a British pub, so after a year in Christchurch, I headed to the UK and got a job at The Greyhound in Surrey.
Of course, it wasn’t romantic at all. Long hours, awful pay, stacking empties and emptying ashtrays, but it did teach me to have great respect for people who work in hospitality.
After two years, I returned to Timaru and worked for Wattie’s sorting peas, before applying to be a trainee announcer with RNZ’s commercial network.
I felt completely at home in Wellington surrounded by other aspiring DJs. Then Radio Lakeland in Taupō beckoned and I loved every minute.
My wife Jo was also from Timaru, but she’s six years younger than me, so our paths didn’t cross.
Although, I do remember seeing two little girls at speech and drama class, who turned out to be Kate and Jo Raymond. Fast- forward to the mid-1980s, Jo was also working in radio and we were both based in Wellington. We’d occasionally bump into each other at Broadcasting House and chat about Timaru. A few years later, Jo moved to TVNZ in Auckland and we both worked on Top Town. We even flatted together for a year – but it wasn’t until we were overseas at the same time and we met up in Germany that something finally clicked. We’ve been married for 35 years.
My mother wasn’t a dog person, so we never had them growing up, but I was visiting Auckland when I saw a guy playing with his dog at Kohimarama Beach.
I watched as he dipped under the water, his dog swimming around, trying to find him and I thought, “How cool to have a mate like that.” I was on air the next day and said I’d love a dog, ideally a beagle. Within days, I had a beagle puppy called Albert.
After two beagles, I switched to Labradors.
We’re now onto our sixth. Our last two were brothers Buddy and Mickey. We had planned on just one puppy, but somehow we came home from the breeder with two. Known as “The Boys”, both dogs made it to 15, and losing them and their unconditional love was very sad. As any dog person knows, something is missing when there’s no dog looking pleased to see you, wagging its tail.
When Jo and I moved home to Canterbury earlier this year, I called Lynne, the breeder, to see if she was still producing Labradors 15 years on.
Not knowing we’d moved south, Lynne, who’s in Taupō, said a litter was due, but her breeding bitch Candy was having her babies in a little place called Tuahiwi in the South Island. Which just happens to be just 20 minutes from our new place in North Canterbury. To top it all off, the litter was born on Jo’s birthday!
Winnie is now three months old and she’s a sweetheart who seldom barks.
Named after Jo’s father Wynne – he loved all our Labs – and while Wynne is no longer with us, his spirit lives on through Winnie as he was such a character – and Winnie is too!
I’ll have been in broadcasting 50 years this year, and I appreciate my long and varied career.
But there have been sad and difficult times too. Being made redundant from MediaWorks after 16 years was really tough. I lost another job soon after, one I’d had on Sky’s farming channel for 15 years. Then TV3 hit hard times and the television project Jo had developed was off the table. In a relatively short time, we lost virtually all our work.
In the past, when I’d hear people talk about mental health issues, I didn’t fully comprehend it until those job losses took their toll and depression seeped its way into my world.
So I was immensely grateful when RNZ offered me some casual news reading shifts. I was also amazed that while I was not functioning well at home, as soon as I entered the studio and flicked on the microphone, I immediately felt like my normal self again. I’m told no one could guess there was anything wrong. All those years of being on my own in that little room, on air with just a microphone, I found it very comforting.
I’m now doing well, thanks to my loving family, friends and great medical support.
Our new life in Christchurch has opened doors, like becoming the South Island reporter on RNZ’s Country Life and I love reconnecting with Te Wahipounamu. I was in Burkes Pass for a story recently, where my grandparents used to run the hotel. But back in 1932, my grandfather drowned in Lake Alexandrina. My father was only nine at the time and he was sent to boarding school in Timaru, while his mother Myrtle ran the pub for another 30 years. A ritual for all the Leishman whānau when they’re there is to visit the local cemetery, where my grandfather is buried. It’s a small country churchyard with a number of international climbers who’ve fallen from Mt Cook and never made it home. It’s a very spiritual place for us.
I’m very proud of our three children. During the 25 years Jo and I worked together producing TV shows from home, they were always there, on set and on location as we filmed around the country.
Today, our youngest Rosie is a journalist at Newstalk ZB in Christchurch – in direct opposition to me at RNZ National! Molly is a creative producer in LA, with a company called Human Person. She works in the “live concert space”, producing for some of the world’s biggest artists. Paddy is a musician, songwriter, editor and designer living in London. Our kids learned first-hand the ups and downs of our volatile industry from watching their parents. I believe we gave them the resilience they need to be successful in their careers.
