Kerre, quite contrary

Despite her bubbly public persona, media personality Kerre Woodham has had her brushes with fear and self-loathing.

- MICHELE HEWITSON

If this interview with the journalist and broadcaster Kerre Woodham was destined for a woman’s mag, the headline would surely be: “Dancing with the Stars Saved My Sanity!” She is the queen of the women’s mags, having appeared on more covers than the actual Queen has had corgis. Like the actual Queen, she, too, endures.

She is just back from a holiday in Rarotonga. She went with her Dancing with the Stars dance partner Jared Neame and his partner, Xander Schubert. “Throuples,” she tells me, are the new thing. This is one of her jokes, designed to horrify the long-suffering Neame.

She claims the couple are fleeing Auckland to get away from her. She reckons that if she’d worked on her dance steps as assiduously as she worked on plotting ways to shock Neame, she might have gone further in the competition.

The pair were eliminated in the third week – to her relief – only to be called back after another contestant contracted Covid. She has said the show was harder than either climbing Mt Kilimanjaro or the six marathons she has run.

She does like to put herself through things. She says she gets talked into things, a sign of a weak character. But the marathons “were in gorgeous places and it legitimises trips away. If you say, ‘I’m going to France to drink amazing wine and eat amazing food and see fabulous things,’ people say, ‘What a wanker!’ If you say, ‘I’m going to run the Paris Marathon,’ they say, ‘Wow! Good for you.’”