MIRIAM MARGOLYES IN NEW ZEALAND
New miniseries
Sunday, 7.30pm, ABC
There is a moment in Miriam Margolyes’ two-part tour of New Zealand, on which the British-born Australian actress embarked to understand more about the country where she is filming Holy Days – a movie about three road-tripping nuns co-starring Judy Davis and Jacki Weaver – that she found “heart stopping”.
It wasn’t while meeting a member of the Mongrel Mob bikie gang in a Wellington cafe. Nor while watching rugby, an “ugly, violent” sport she has long loathed. It was the students at a Maori-language high school in Panguru, where the Treaty of Waitangi was signed, performing the haka at morning assembly, that so affected her.
Miriam Margolyes in New Zealand meeting a patriotic pavlova queen.Credit: ABC
“I’d seen the haka on television, but when it actually happens in front of you, to you, and you are the focus of that, that was very moving,” Margolyes says. “I didn’t know anything about Maori people, but I do now, and I felt so honoured. I felt ashamed, also, when they did me that honour. It was really something.”
The famously outspoken, and by her own admission “potty-mouthed”, 83-year-old is furious about New Zealand MP David Seymour’s proposed changes to the Treaty bill: “What an arsehole!” While she believes “the Commonwealth has, on the whole, been a force for good”, she is a Republican, something she would have no issue telling King Charles III, whom she knows and believes is “a wonderful man”.
“I feel that it’s time for Australia and New Zealand to be independent countries,” says Margolyes. “[The King] would listen. He is an immensely driven servant for the future and for the wellbeing of his nations around the world, just as his mother was – but I think he has more heart than she did.”
As with her three series about Australia (the most recent, Impossibly Australian, is nominated for an AACTA award), her mode of transport in the ABC’s Miriam Margolyes in New Zealand is a campervan, despite her aversion to “van life”. Traversing both islands – visiting protesting cattle farmers; a refugee centre; the scene of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings; the birthplace of the nation’s union movement in Blackball; a patriotic pavlova queen; and the Hobbiton village – Margolyes, whose mobility issues require a walker, walking poles and a scooter, is seen cheerfully at the wheel, her feet barely reaching the pedals.
“That is really a kind of a fiction because I don’t live in the van,” she says. “I would live in it if I could reach the beds, but they’re up ladders. I don’t drive more than two hours a day. One of the things that really pisses me off is that they never acknowledge that there is a camera crew with me. There are six people with me and I get help, so it’s slightly unreal, that part of it … But I think it’s good for other disabled people to see that you can climb up into the car if you’ve got your stool and your sticks.”
