At Large with Toby Manhire
At Large with Toby Manhire brings the insight, wit and energy of The Spinoff to your podcast feed. Each episode dives into a story in the news, drawing on Spinoff talent and newsmakers to cast light on the issues of the moment. The show centres on an illuminating but unstuffy interview that helps the listener get their head around a subject, followed by How Good, a short, unashamedly exuberant celebration of something new.
Episodes
Britain’s great big prime minister problem, continued
Keir Starmer has walked out from Downing Street and said it’s all over, meaning Andy Burnham is almost certain to be the next UK PM, the seventh since 2016. Why did Starmer fail, who is Burnham, and is this all really about Nigel Farage and Reform? Toby talks to UK-based NZ journalist Richard Adams about the latest drama, and asks whether Christopher Luxon could learn anything.Plus: In How Good, L
The strange renaissance of Michael Jackson
Michael just became the highest-grossing music biopic of all time. Gens Z and Alpha have him on high-rotate. And a man who looks just like him is drawing hordes of adoring fans across the streets of Christchurch. Alex Casey, fresh from hanging with the impersonator of the moment, joins Toby to explore the Jackson revival, and ask: how did he shake off the shadows of such serious allegations?
Pl
Behind the Story: Outrageous Fortune: 20 years on
Staff writer Tara Ward has been writing about local TV on The Spinoff for over a decade. Today we published her Cover Story looking back at how Outrageous Fortune came to be, 20 years after the first episode aired on New Zealand TVs. Tara spoke to the creators, writers, directors and stars of one of New Zealand’s most beloved shows, and tells the behind the scenes tales of its journey to our scree
Behind the Story: Is everyone getting Botox without me?
Five years on from the Zoom Boom and in the middle of a cost of living crisis, Alex Casey investigates what is motivating women to get Botox.
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Behind the Story: The rise and rise of Botox in Aotearoa
Senior writer Alex Casey has always been fascinated by the multi-billion-dollar appearance industry, both as a consumer and a journalist. Today The Spinoff published a Cover from Alex, headlined “Is everyone getting Botox without me?” Alex is 33 and looks 23, or so a Botox specialist said. But she’s been thinking about injectables and how they seem to be everywhere she turns. So she spoke to dozen
Behind the Story: The unreported reality for NZ veterans
Ātea editor Liam Rātana has reported two stories recently on the same topic, a topic that is so often ignored by both media and everyday New Zealanders: veterans. Our returned or retired army personnel are at the sticky end of almost every social measure: unemployment, mental health, suicide. But without even a national register of how many veterans we have, it’s even harder to tell the stories of
Behind the Story: Why are big shows shorter in New Zealand?
Alex Casey is a pop culture writer and expert and also an incredible investigative journalist. This week she combined the two to investigate why popular global shows in New Zealand are just a little bit shorter than overseas in ‘Mystery of the missing minutes: Why are TV shows shorter in New Zealand?’ And what happens when the answer to a question is a little bit boring but you still want to write
Behind the Story: The war on woke continues as people march for gender-affirming care
On Sunday 23rd March, hundreds marched to parliament in support of gender-affirming care for youth. Meanwhile, Winston Peters declared a “war on woke” in his state of the nation address. Lyric Waiwiri-Smith wrapped the two together in a story we published earlier this week, calling the dichotomy “two visions of New Zealand”. She joins Gabi Lardies to talk about all the attention on trans healthcar
Behind the Story: The Spinoff Book Club - Live in Wellington!
A five-strong line-up of guests began with avid reader Courtney Johnston who discussed her passion for reading and the books she loves most; writers Carl Shuker and Duncan Sarkies joined to chat about their latest novels and how they came to be; to round off the group Unity Books manager Susanna Andrew and Unity's Aotearoa book buyer Melissa Oliver (Ngāti Porou) joined the stage to give insights o
Behind the Story: When should a journalist tell their own story?
This week we published a deeply researched and reported story by Liam Rātana. It takes an inside look at what many people face when they are considering starting a family – tricky ethical choices and less than ideal medical and legal systems. When Liam pitched the story in our weekly editorial meeting a few weeks ago, it was a personal experience, but he chose to focus the final article on others’
Behind the Story: If you sleuth hard enough, there are new answers to old questions
While many journalists are trawling Reddit, X and TikTok for stories, Joel MacManus is browsing Papers Past, an online archive of digitised historical media. This week he may have solved the murder case of an emu that died at the Wellington Zoo in 1907 and last year he made a near definitive ruling on whether or not Te Rauparaha really did drink at the Thistle Inn. The resulting investigations mak
Behind the Story: Everyone’s got an opinion, here’s mine
This week, everyone and their dog was talking Destiny Church and Man Up punching their way into a an Auckland Pride children’s event, terrifying staff and families alike. Head of audience and senior writer Anna Rawhiti-Connell wrote a column about the prime minister’s, in her view, weak response to the event and what it said about him politically.Anna joined me on Behind the Story to share how she
Behind the Story: Live! Bryn & Ku’s Singles Club
This week The Spinoff hosted a galentines party at Q Theatre in Auckland to celebrate the release of Bryn & Ku’s Singles Club, a six-part video series following two crack up comedians on their quest for love.
Brynley Stent and Kura Forrester are both single and looking to change that. In Singles Club, they travel the country looking for love and speaking to all sorts of people about what it means
Behind the Story: Help Me Hera - Live in Wellington!
After more than 80 columns, Hera’s advice spanned the spectrum of human troubles. For our second live event, we revisited four problems from the archives, talked about Hera’s response, and heard updates from the callers themselves. Note: the callers emailed in their updates so the voices you hear won’t be their actual voices. Instead you’ll hear some of the greatest voice talent that works in the
Behind the Story: Aotearoa and its love of movies
Senior writer Alex Casey has a long history with cinema, both as a reviewer and as a former projectionist. This week she wrote two film-adjacent features.
The first had Alex travel to Akaroa to speak to the people running a bustling local cinema and then go down a rabbit hole of South Island cinemas holding on to the movies as a third space. And the second is just a fun appreciation of our strange
Behind the Story: My near decade of violent harassment by a man I barely know
Zeni Gibson has been stalked and gruesomely harassed for nearly nine years by a man she rejected when she was 17. This is her story.
Content warning: this story contains graphic descriptions of threatened violence, including sexual violence. Please take care.
As told to Madeleine Holden.
Read by Anna Rawhiti-Connell.
Made with support from The Spinoff Members.
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Behind the Story: Inside the urgent race to solve homelessness in Aotearoa
As homelessness hits an all-time high, New Zealand’s frontline organisations are embracing unconventional and innovative strategies. Joel MacManus takes a closer look at the crisis and meets the people who claim to have the cure.
Story by Joel MacManus.
Read by Te Aihe Butler.
Made with support from The Spinoff Members.
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Behind the Story: Homelessness in Aotearoa and how to solve it
Every other week we read reports of the rising rates of homelessness in our major cities. These stories are sometimes about homelessness itself and other times about the siblings of homelessness, like crime and welfare. Wellington editor Joel MacManus spent months speaking to those on the frontline in the fight to solve homelessness once and for all. It’s a long read, so for the first time ever we
Behind the Story: Best TV Show Ever - Live!
Last week, The Spinoff unveiled its top 100 New Zealand TV shows of the 21st century, sparking plenty of debate about what truly deserved the top spot. This week, The Spinoff senior writer and Top 100 listmaster Alex Casey is joined by a panel of TV fanatics – Kura Forrester, Rhiannon McCall, Stewart Sowman-Lund and Lyric Waiwiri-Smith – for a special Behind The Story recorded live event at Q Thea
Behind the Story: The top 100 NZ TV shows of the 21st century
Senior writer Alex Casey spent the past couple of months deep in local television, leading one of our most ambitious projects to date: The Spinoff top 100 NZ TV shows of the 21st century. Every day this week we have counted down 20 shows, each given its time in the sun as a crucial piece in our cultural puzzle. On Friday, we released the final 20, crowning a winner and drawing to a close more than
Behind the Story: When the police call you to say ‘get off your phone’
Bulletin editor Stewart Sowman-Lund has had a few roles in his time at the Spinoff, first as live updates editor, then reporter, and now as bulletin editor. Writing a bulletin every morning takes up plenty of his time, but he also specialises in following those random, one-off tips that every journalist gets. This week’s tip was from a man who had strangely been called by the police while driving,
Behind the Story: Ten years of The Spinoff
This week 10 years ago, a website was launched. It was a TV blog, dedicated to the most prestige and the most comforting of shows, and it had two writers on staff, founder Duncan Greive and film critic Alex Casey. The first article ever published by thespinoff.co.nz was about the return of Full House. Today, that website has an editorial team of 20, with writers and editors in Auckland, Wellington
Behind the Story: Help Me Hera - Live!
After more than 80 columns, Hera’s advice spans the spectrum of human troubles. For our live event, we revisited three problems from the archives, talked about Hera’s response, and heard updates from the callers themselves. Note: the callers emailed in their updates so the voices you hear won’t be their actual voices. Instead you’ll hear some of the greatest voice talent that works in the Spinoff
Behind the Story: Takeout Kids and growing up inside a shop
Documentary maker Julie Zhu is the director of Takeout Kids, an observational series following five children as they work and grow up in their parents’ shops.
The series is beautiful, both in the stories it tells but also literally, with a focus on scene-setting and stunning cinematography. Julie joins Madeleine Chapman this week to talk about how she finds the short stories within hours and hours
Behind the Story: The insidious trend of skincare for kids
Senior writer Alex Casey has this week written an incredible longform feature about the rising trend of young children coveting skincare. Note: this is not about makeup or wearing your mum’s lipstick. It’s about 10 year olds using serums and anti-wrinkle creams.
Alex has been thinking, writing about and living the beauty industry for years, and this is likely just the first in a series of big feat
Behind the Story: The sports that should be culled from the Olympics
Hera Lindsay Bird has been writing the extremely popular Help Me Hera advice column for over a year now, offering incisive, funny and wise guidance to New Zealand’s biggest and smallest problems. And soon, you’ll be able to hear her talk about that advice at some Spinoff live events. Hera joins Madeleine Chapman this week as she’s also an Olympics obsessive and has written about the games, specifi
Behind the Story: The rise of home surveillance cameras
Gabi Lardies wrote this week's Cover Story about the rise of home surveillance cameras.
It’s a big piece of work that started as a simple observation of something she had seen in local Facebook groups. The feature unpicks aspects of human behaviour, crime and mass survellieance and it asks a big question about the trade-offs we make when embracing ubiquitous, convenient and cheap technology soluti
Behind the Story: Remembering Suzanne Paul’s ‘cursed’ Māori Village
Lyric Waiwiri-Smith started at The Spinoff as a staff writer two weeks ago and has three stories under her belt already. Her story this week, "Remembering Suzanne Paul’s ‘cursed’ Māori Village", marked twenty years since Paul closed the doors on her Māori cultural theme park on Auckland’s North Shore. Lyric was three years old when it all went down, so used records of journalism past to piece toge
Behind the Story: Staring down the ‘silent epidemic’ of myopia in children
Spinoff staff writer Shanti Mathias sat down to record a test pilot episode of Behind the Story two months ago, about her recent feature “Staring down the ‘silent epidemic’ of myopia in children”.
Just last week, Shanti was awarded Best Emerging Journalist at the inaugural science journalism awards, for this particular story. The judges were impressed with how ‘on-the-scene’ the reporting was, inc
Behind the Story: A year of My Life in TV
Spinoff staff writer Tara Ward has loved and examined local TV for longer than any other Spinoff writer. As the longest consistent contributor to The Spinoff outside of its founder, Tara has long been the go-to voice for local matters on screen.
A master of the power ranking format, Tara’s ability to both genuinely love and critique New Zealand’s most iconic (and obscure) shows is unique among jou
Behind the Story: A turning point for Māori activism
The Spinoff’s new Ātea editor Liam Rātana started in his role on Monday. On Thursday there were nationwide protests against government policies affecting Māori, as well as the release of the coalition government’s first budget. Rātana jumped straight in, writing a number of stories including a feature on the protests that looked more broadly at Māori activism and asked: Is protesting still the mos
Behind the Story: Inside the Unsilenced anti-trans event
Wellington editor Joel MacManus appreciates that those we might not agree with can still make for an interesting and worthy story. Last weekend, he attended an anti-trans conference to hear speakers like Brian Tamaki, Posie Parker and NZ First MP Tanya Unkovich speak about the “dangers” of gender ideology. Joel’s feature was a chance to report on a culture war, rather than react to it, and prompte
Behind the Story: Where NZ's food comes from... and where it goes
Spinoff staff writer Shanti Mathias loves to go deep on topics, in a way few people would ever consider. This week, we published her data work on food imports and exports in Aotearoa, finding out where exactly we get such everyday items as wheat, rice and bananas. Who knew Australia grew so much of our food? Shanti joins Madeleine Chapman on Behind the Story to talk about the extensive process of
Behind the Story: If you love a dog, you must also love disposing of its shit
On Friday, Bulletin editor Anna Rawhiti-Connell sent her final newsletter, and took the opportunity to share what she’s learned about the news over two years of curating it for thousands of New Zealanders. Earlier in the week, she’d seen reports of Auckland dog owners discarding their pets’ turds on the ground after Auckland Council removed bins across the city.
And so, the column “If you love a
