In Her Prime

No longer the ‘new girl’ at TVNZ, Hilary Barry has settled into her Seven Sharp role with her warmth and wit still firmly in place. She tells Phoebe Watt what she’s learned about taking a leap of faith

- Phoebe Watt

Hilary Barry is glowing, and it doesn’t take long to find out why. “I’ve just been doing Michael Bublé!” Excuse me? “Well, I did him a while ago, it’s a good story, actually.”

We’re sitting in the ground floor café of TVNZ’s central Auckland offices; I press record on my iPhone and settle in.

“I flew 12 hours to LA, straight from Seven Sharp to the airport. Slept sitting up so I didn’t ruin my hair, and did my makeup on the plane. Got off the plane, changed in the toilets and interviewed him an hour later, then turned around and flew home again.”

She takes a sip of berry smoothie.

“Did my own makeup on the plane!” she repeats. If your days are dedicated to ground-breaking climate change research or performing lifesaving operations on infants, you might not think this sounds all that above-and-beyond. Nevertheless, there are plenty of people on TV with fewer credentials than the woman sitting in front of me, who are, one suspects, a little more high-maintenance. Hilary Barry is no diva, and it’s at once nothing and everything you’d expect from New Zealand’s most experienced female newsreader.

“At 48!” She later exclaims. “The oldest woman on prime-time television at 48. That’s not old!” Indeed, but we’ll get to that.

An industry veteran at 49 (she celebrated her birthday in December, a few weeks after our interview), Hilary’s sharp-tongued, quick-witted yet playful brand of broadcasting is at home on TVNZ 1’s magazine-style show Seven Sharp, where every weeknight she and Jeremy Wells present a mixture of light current affairs and consumer-oriented infotainment – “news you can use,” she says.

A time of upheaval