Allison Webber
Allison Webber's work for television — as a staff member at the state broadcaster, then independently — has often involved social issues. Keenly aware of the power of the media, her interest in fair treatment for those being interviewed has been passed on in her work as a journalism teacher and media advisor.
Amongst the TV documentaries Webber has worked on are People Like Us and the ground-breaking Expressions of Sexuality. The latter series faced headlines and extended delays before going to air in the mid 1980s, winning acclaim.
Webber argues that she began her journalism career by default, after strong encouragement from Evelyn Falconer, an influential role model who was the first woman to work in the New Zealand Press Association.
Webber began at Wellington's Dominion newspaper just in time for the Wahine disaster. At that point women numbered only three out of 40 staff. Over the next few years she worked in Hastings (competing against her journalist father), Auckland (editing The Manukau Gazette) and Tauranga, where she ran the branch office of The NZ Herald. She moved briefly sideways into politics after future husband Tony Brunt left the Herald to help launch the Values party.
In 1973 Webber got her first job in television thanks to colleague Jo Lynch, one of many women who entered broadcasting via the research department. Webber assisted on current affairs show Inquiry, and later did interviews for this item on women politicians. She went on to become a senior researcher, and helped establish training courses for researchers; at one point TV One alone had a team of 35.
When the state broadcaster moved to its new Avalon facility in 1975, Webber joined Brian Edwards' high rating Edwards on Saturday. She also began a long working collaboration with presenter Ian Johnstone — a collaboration cemented during a trip to apartheid-era South Africa. In his book Stand and Deliver Johnstone praises the skill and judgement Webber brought to the four person crew. Webber encountered phone taping and Government informers, while securing interviews with Desmond Tutu and journalist Donald Woods. She even snuck off solo for a secret, unbroadcast interview with Steve Biko, then banned from being quoted.
After screening as a three-part special on current affairs slot Seven Days, South Africa - The Black Future won a Feltex award. Johnstone also credits Webber as an important collaborator on his series Johnstone's Journey, in which he fronted up for a more personal view of New Zealand. Afterwards TVNZ producer Richard Thomas split up the Johnstone-Webber partnership so Webber could officially move into producing.
Looking back on the decade, Webber recalls a 70s broadcasting scene where women had little power over content, and only a small number appeared on news, current affairs or local drama. In a memorable chapter of Heading Nowhere in a Navy Blue Suit, she writes that "television seemed to be bursting with talented women in support roles". A handful of these women "virtually trained an entire generation of producers and directors who are now significant players in the film and television industry". Few ever "broke through the barriers" to produce or direct programmes in their own right.
Thankfully the late 70s and early 80s were times of "enormous change, opportunity and expansion". Women moved out from back room roles; more stories aired on subjects like sexual harassment and motherhood. New shows launched, reflecting "the realities of women's lives", including parenting programme You and Your Child, and the wide-ranging People Like Us, which screened in primetime at 6pm.
The latter show marked Webber's first official credit as a producer. She worked with Radio New Zealand on tie-in radio programmes, and co-edited a People Like Us book, celebrating cultural diversity. Webber also has fond memories of 700 people arriving in the Avalon cafeteria, "probably the first powhiri in the building" for one show, during a hui to celebrate a programme on the ordination of Maori Anglican bishop Whakahuihui Vercoe. She also produced this Kaleidoscope episode, on Bruce Mason. By the time the deregulated 90s came along, Webber argues that many of the new wave of female TV producers had resigned, or been made redundant.
In the late 70s Webber had become convenor of organisation Media Women. The organisation campaigned for better coverage of women's stories. In 1986 Webber had a memorable on-screen showdown with Lindsay Perigo about the portrayal of women in the media. In 1989 Media Women successfully argued that programming catering for women become a priority funding category with NZ on Air.
Worried that sexuality had been separated from the context of so many other parts of people's lives, including emotions and social context, Webber began work on seven-part series Expressions of Sexuality in 1982. The show's unadorned, straight-from-the-subject’s mouth approach proved anything but simple to capture. Researchers and reporters were matched to the topic of each episode, and trained in counselling-style interviewing techniques.
Completed by early 1985, the series (and an accompanying book by Alison Gray) sat on a shelf for almost two more years, before launching in a 10pm Christmas holiday slot. Webber thinks the decision not to separate homosexuality into its own episode resulted in hernias for TVNZ execs. At the time the Homosexual Law Reform Bill was going through parliament, and one TV executive told her she'd sabotaged the series by "including homosexuals through it".
Expressions of Sexuality won headlines, plus a memorable Listener quote from Webber: "I'm into making documentaries with butterflies, not chrysalises. I don't think it's good enough to wander about prying into other people's lives unless some insight comes out of them." The Evening Post and the NZ Herald raved, with the latter praising the show's intimacy and the courage of those interviewed. Sexuality was nominated for best documentary programme, and Webber talked of it having met "overwhelming and positive" response, with only two negative letters.
By now Webber had left TVNZ to found Kapiti-based Aries Productions with director John Anderson, followed in the 90s by Ace of Hearts. The companies saw her working on a range of television and video productions, including co-producing wildlife doco A Whale Out My Window with the Natural History Unit, and Polish co-production The Betrayal, about a New Zealander who worked with the Polish underground during WW2. In 1993 she directed Sex, Power and Birth Control, which looked at sexuality and birth control through the eyes of two New Zealand families — one Pākehā and one Māori. Prison doco When Women Kill followed in 1999.
Following stints teaching journalism at Wellington Polytechnic (now Massey University), Webber ran the journalism course from 1989 to 1991. She has also trained Māori journalists for Rotorua's Māori journalism school at Waiariki Institute of Technology, and TVNZ's Kimihi scheme. Since the 90s over 7000 people have taken her various media training seminars, and she has provided media advice to clients ranging from MPs, CEOs, and Olympic medal winning athletes, to nuns and the prostitute's collective.
Allison Webber is author of the book Advanced Interviewing Skills. These days she lives on the Kapiti Coast with her husband Don Polly.
Updated on 17 September 2018
Sources include
Allison Webber
Allison Webber, 'All the Prejudice That's Fit to Print' in Heading Nowhere in a Navy Blue Suit, editors Sue Kedgley and Mary Varnham (Wellington: Daphne Brasell Associates, 1993)
Sally Duggan, 'Extraordinarily Ordinary' (Review of Expressions of Sexuality) — The NZ Herald, 5 January 1987
Ian Johnstone, Stand and Deliver (Whatamango Bay: Cape Catley, 1998)
Alastair Morrison, 'Don't look now, they're showing it' (Interview with Allison Webber and Alison Gray) — The Dominion, 8 November 1986, page 13
Helen Paske, 'Sex and life' (Interview) — The Listener, 20 December 1986, page 26
Victor Van Wetering, 'Prime time slot for sexuality show'(Review of Expressions of Sexuality) — The Evening Post, 5 February 1987, page 14
'GOFTA AWARDS — Sexuality series one of NZ's best' — The Waikato Times, 29 June 1987