Take me home

We ask New Zealand’s quirkiest TV reporter Tim Wilson to ‘take us home’. And we discovered he is not only the likeable guy on the telly, but a best-selling novelist who found love later in life. Most of all, he’s a man transformed by faith.

Journalist Tim Wilson has been an interviewer to the stars, and covered world events such as Hurricane Katrina, but he is probably best known for a quirky little segment on TVNZ's Seven Sharp called ‘Take Me Home’. In it, Tim accosts strangers on the street with the lines, ‘I believe everyone has a story, I’d like to hear your story, will you take me home?’

‘I knew it would work the first time we did it, when we found a woman at a bus stop. She told me about her life, and wept as she was recounting it, and I felt like I was invited into a very special place. And as we were packing up the cameras, she said, “By the way, I didn’t tell you about the time I fought a bull in Spain,” ’ laughs Tim.

‘I really do believe people are unique because we’re made by God, the ultimate creator, the ultimate artist and craftsman, who also loves us.’

On the telly

Although Tim has made a name for himself as a television reporter, that was never the plan. He began as a print journalist who dreamed of writing ‘long, venerable pieces’. He still considers a think piece he wrote in the ’90s, challenging the media narrative about serial rapist Joseph Stephenson Thompson, a career highlight. ‘In the media you hear the same stories, but if you can bring a slightly different perspective, I think that’s valuable,’ Tim says.

By anyone else’s standards, it’s been a glittering career—he spent 10 years as the US correspondent for TVNZ, where he interviewed cultural icons like Taylor Swift, the newly-de-monikered Brangelina, and spent a raucous afternoon with Donald Trump.

‘People say, “Oh, what an exciting job”, and that’s true, but you are just part of a machine,’ Tim reflects. ‘You have four minutes with the celebs [on their publicity circuit]. You’re really just two seals throwing mackerels at each other. It’s such an artificial situation.’

Instead, a career highlight was having lunch cooked for him by one of his heroes, Christopher Hitchens—the famed wit, intellectual, essayist and atheist. It’s apparent that Tim, himself, is no slouch on the brainiac front. He likes to defy the status quo—or as he says, ‘I like a fight.’ When I ask Tim about Trump, he refuses to condescend to the usual ‘Trump’s an idiot’ rhetoric. ‘I do feel there’s a very unpleasant tone about the self-righteousness regarding Trump supporters, because we assume they’re all racist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic ... There are crazy Trump supporters, but there are also crazy Clinton supporters,’ he argues. ‘Although there probably are a few more crazy Trump supporters.’

And by the way, Tim writes novels

If over-achieving on the career front is not enough, Tim is also a novelist. And not the media-personality-who-tries-to-writea- book type; he’s a highly regarded author. His first book, Their Faces Were Shining, a sci-fi inspired tale about a middle-aged Christian woman who is left behind after the Rapture, was a finalist in the New Zealand Book Awards. He’s also the author of the best-selling News Pigs, and has just released a sequel called The Straight Banana. It’s a vibrant, chaotic, wild-eyed satire about the intersect between paranoia (the ever present threat of terrorism in New York) and the ridiculous (straight bananas).

‘When I was in New York there were terror plots being uncovered all the time, so I wanted to convey the sense of what it was like. Once you start to go down the track of paranoia, you find more and more reason for paranoia, and you find more and more evidence for it,’ he explains.

In The Straight Banana, Tim ‘absolutely deliberately’ breaks every literary rule—with an abundance of exclamation marks, two-word sentences, the odd pie graph and a reader’s quiz. ‘For a while, I was writing a very acceptable version of literature, and I wanted to write an unacceptable version,’ he laughs.

Tim is quietly proud of his alternative career as an author, saying, ‘I love writing. That’s what I always wanted to do, so I’m really pleased that I’ve been able to publish a few books. I really enjoy it.’

But he adds, ‘I think the novels and fiction is really a hobby, because you don’t make money on books. You lose money on books. But I made a decision when I came back from the States not to spend so much time working.’

Today, Tim spends a day a week at home writing, and four days at his other job with TVNZ. It’s a hint at a much deeper change of life that has taken place within him.

A heart of flesh

Surprisingly, when Tim penned Their Faces Were Shining, he ‘didn’t love the Lord. But the Lord works in mysterious ways and it started me on a journey’.

Although his dad was a Presbyterian minister—and it shows in the extensive Bible knowledge Tim brings to that novel—he became an avowed atheist in his twenties. Yet, when his novel was finally published, Tim found that having it all was, actually, nothing at all.

‘I thought, “When I have my first book published, that will be it. That’s what I want,” ’ he recalls. ‘But it came out and was very well received, and it just didn’t feel like it was that much at all. So, here I was living in New York City. I had a job that seemed like the best job in the world, and people interviewing me and asking for my opinions. But I felt very small and meagre inside. I had everything I wanted—and it left me hungry and thirsty.’

In August 2010, Tim snuck into a church around the corner from his apartment. ‘The priest gave a homily and his accent was so thick I didn’t have a clue what he said. But I felt my heart was touched, and for the first time in a long time I felt I wanted to cry,’ he remembers. ‘I had created this journalist persona of being a “hard-bitten, no-surprises” guy. This one mass broke through that. I felt like that line in Ezekiel [36:26], “I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” ’

Tim describes his faith as an ‘Emmaus experience’—a slow, pondering journey that slowly but surely revealed the truth about Jesus. ‘I started off saying, “I’m just a bit Catholicy at the moment”, but you can’t let a little bit of the Lord in and expect yourself not to change.’

Several members of the lively Spanish Harlem congregation he attended had re-discovered their faith after being in the Twin Towers on 9/11. ‘These people had no idea how they got out [of the Twin Towers], so they came back to the church, and they had this love for the Lord. I saw this mystical body of Christ and it energised me, it irrigated me, and I just woke up.’ A changed man, Tim found himself tiring of the New York lifestyle—with live shots at 2 am, packing bags at a moment’s notice, and the roundabout of dinner parties. ‘It got to the point where someone asked me if I wanted to go to dinner, and I asked, “Who’s going to be there?’, and they said, “Salman Rushdie”, and I said “Oh, I can’t be bothered.” ’

That was the moment he knew it was time to come home.

A changed life

When Tim returned to New Zealand, it was as something of a prodigal son. ‘I was bored of news, so I went into sales, and I grew a beard. I went along to mass as this bearded, hunched figure, and I was wondering what the Lord had next for me.’

He even considered becoming a priest. ‘I thought I would be one of those red-nosed priests who gives really good confessions because of his own fallibility,’ he laughs.

But priests-to-be should probably not be eyeing up the pretty girl at church. And Tim couldn’t help noticing his now wife Rachel. ‘I thought she was far too beautiful to be there seriously,’ says Tim. ‘And she chatted all the way through mass.’

His fate was sealed when they were both rostered to do a Bible reading at the same service. ‘I said something like, “Oh, I find I get quite nervous before I do this, how about you?” And she looked at me deadpan and said, “It’s like walking to the slaughter.” And I thought, “Wait a minute, pretty girls don’t talk that way!” ’

Nine months later, Tim proposed to Rachel outside the church where they first met. ‘She’s the love of my life,’ he says.’ I still can’t believe that she’s married to me.’

They now have two children—Roman who is 18 months, and Felix who is six months—so the Wilson household is a busy one. ‘Having kids is so fantastic. I love being a father, I love being a husband. They’re just amazing, fascinating, infuriating, lively little people,’ says Tim. He says his dream for his children is only that they ‘love the Lord’.

And now, living a life of family and faith, Tim knows he’s found his place. ‘I left New Zealand thinking that it was too small for me,’ he recalls. ‘And it took me 10 years to realise that it is just the right size’.

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by Ingrid Barratt (c) 'War Cry' magazine, 12 November 2016, pp 6-9
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