Julia Zemiro's Home Delivery

Oh, hello, I'm Julia.

I'm your driver.

It was the Jesuits that famously said,

'Give me that child until he is seven and I will give you the man.'

Over the next five weeks, I'll be hitting the road...

Does this car now look like a meat-filled jaffa?

..taking some of my favourite funny people back to their childhoods...

Should we go and have a look in the classroom? Yes. Scary, scary!

So many of my memories were made here.

..to uncover the forces that shaped them.

I was away from home and I hated it.

This is so beautiful!

We're here on the West Coast of the North Island of New Zealand.

Now, like Neil Finn, Rebecca Gibney and Tony Martin,

he's a New Zealander we like so much,

we pretend he's one of ours.

He's an actor and a comedian, but he's best known

as one third of the on screen love triangle of Spicks and Specks.

He's braved his fear of flying and taken us over the waters

to his childhood home of Hawera.

And he hasn't actually been here in eight years,

so I'm looking forward to seeing if we can find the boy inside the man,

with Alan Brough.

Hello, Alan Brough!

Hello, Julia, how are you?

Oh, is this little coffee for me?

Ah, yes. Look at this!

I know. What're we looking at, the mountain or the cow?

Well, the... If you're looking at the cow,

then there's something wrong with you.

You've done something wrong. Yeah.

That's, that's Mount Taranaki,

under the shadow of which I was born and raised.

Now, look, I'm going to take you to your home, your childhood home

and your primary school and your high school. Are you ready?

Mmm, yes, at the moment,

but who knows what will happen when we get there?

I may just burst into floods of tears.

I love it. Oh, I'll join. Oh, OK.

Oh, don't you worry, I'm a joiner.

You happy if I drive? Yeah, 'cause I don't drive.

Oh!

If I drove, we'd just stay here and talk for half an hour.

Alan moved across the ditch to Melbourne in the mid-'90s

and has since appeared on film, television, radio and stage.

He's become one of the most familiar faces on Australian screens,

but is he really one of us?

I'll tell you a bit about myself. I've broken my fibia five times,

I'm prone to hives and I'm a bit desperately lonely.

You can take the boy out of New Zealand,

but can you really take New Zealand out of the boy?

That's what I've come to find out.

I've only been to New Zealand a couple of times,

and I'm just overwhelmed by the beauty.

Not sure the best way to describe it is,

I was gonna say it's genuinely scenic,

but scenic is way too small a word

in all regards. Mmm.

Big, plump sheep, lambs, sort of rolling hills,

occasionally interrupted by sort of jagged volcanic hills.

A smattering of boulders here and there,

just to remind everyone not to take the mountain

entirely for granted.

Now, it's Harewa? Hawera.

Hawera. Hawera.

It's a small country town, a town of 2,000 people.

So that was the shops, wasn't it?

That was... Oh, yeah, that was the shops, yeah.

That was the shops.

Now we're in Albion Street now. We are in Albion Street.

Which one's your house?

It's this one up here.

Alan, that's a really big, beautiful house.

It is!

That is the house in which I grew up.

Should we go out and have a little look?

Yeah, OK. When was the last time you were here?

20 years ago. Great!

Now, has it changed much since you lived here?

No. No, not really at all.

And what does it feel like to see it? It is sort of... Is it odd?

Is it happy? Is it...?

Yeah, no, it's very happy. A lot of good things happened here.

But there was your mum, your dad...

And me and my brother Jonathan. Yes.

And that was, that was it.

And this was our, this was our world.

The lovely people that live here, they've just moved in

so there could be a few boxes around.

Maybe you should take us on a tour? OK.

Wow. (Rings doorbell)

Oh, that's good.

Oh, my God! This is so weird 'cause it's so much the same.

This was Mum and Dad's bedroom here.

A lot of very milky tea

and badly burnt toast was taken in there.

So my brother and I, um, slept in there.

I slept on that side and Jonathan slept on that side.

They'll probably want to get that seen to,

'cause that's been there since I was born.

Wow. Oh, now, here's the kitchen.

So... Is this the same?

Yeah, this is pretty much the same.

What was a family dinner like in the Brough household?

Would it be... Was it always at the same time? Yeah.

Around the table? Yeah, around the table.

So breakfast and dinner were always around the table.

That was very, very important. Mmm.

I can just imagine your mum here doing a bit of the washing up.

Washing up is fine if you can look out a window,

that's what I always say. Yeah, well we had a dish...

Oh, there's the dishwasher, yeah.

Same one?

Ah, no, I don't think so, 'cause I think it was over there.

When we got the dishwasher, only my father was allowed to load it.

Yes. That's a man's thing to do!

Well, yeah, but, yeah, isn't that interesting?

Because that's genuinely the sense that I got,

that loading the dishwasher was a man's job.

He had a system. Oh, he had a system?

As all dads do about almost all things.

It's an incredibly sunny house.

Isn't it, though? Yeah.

In another nod to my, you know,

rural, bucolic, idyllic upbringing,

we used to toast crumpets on the open fire.

I know!

This is beautiful, that bay window.

Yeah, and also it was a really good one for...

It was a really good one for peering out at who was going past.

Yeah!

So if someone was going past, we'd all be able to.

And I'm... I still do it. Yeah, I do it too.

Like, I'm a total looker and go, 'Who's that in my neighbourhood?'

Yes.

Let's go have a little sit down?

Gee, we're lucky to have gotten in.

Oh, man! I'm... Yeah, it's... it's...

It's absolutely marvellous.

I genuinely don't know what to say about being in here.

It...

Yeah, I don't know what to say.

Let's just have a little sit and listen to this house.

The impermanence of it is...

..arresting

in the fact that you think...

you think everything about you is so important.

And it's not that it isn't,

it's just that...

..things just keep on going.

I think that happens,

you start thinking those things, too, as you get older.

There is now a limited time left, but all of a sudden you think,

'Yeah, I think I have a special place in the world.'

And then you go, 'Oh, well, actually, other people live here now,

things do move on.

It just keeps going.'

Yeah, yeah, and it's really important to move on.

When my father was dying - he had cancer for a long time -

and when he was really obviously going to die,

someone came round to visit him.

And after the person had left he said to Mum,

'I've never liked him.'

And Mum said, 'How long have you known him?'

And he said, 'Oh, 65 years.'

And I remember thinking, 'Oh, you've kept that to yourself, haven't you?'

I can't believe how beautiful this day is as well.

Shall we go for a walk to your primary school?

Yeah, yeah, we can definitely go.

Your brother and you would walk to primary school every day?

Yeah, we would walk to primary school every day.

We'd just stroll along here and we knew everybody.

It's only... There are only 2,000 people here.

Did everybody know each other's business?

And would that drive you crazy?

I remember going to the dentist - Terry Leiland, his name was.

Terry!

And I'd started smoking.

And, he said to me, 'Smoking, hey?' No!

And I said, I said, 'Yeah, I am smoking a bit.'

And he said, 'OK.'

And so I went home and Mum said to me,

'I've been talking to Terry Leiland.'

And I said, 'Yeah, OK, I smoke!'

And she said, 'You what? That wasn't what we were talking about.'

Sprung!

And I totally dobbed myself in,

'cause I just immediately assumed

that everybody knew everything about everybody else's business.

Let's go this way. This way? Yeah, great.

There's the Hawera Brass Band building.

Does this place look familiar, Alan? Yes, very familiar.

Where are we? We're at St Joseph's convent school.

And that's St Joseph's Catholic Church over there.

Yes.

And this is where I went... To primary school.

Primary and intermediate school, as it was called then.

And, ah, what kind of student were you?

Average to very, very below average.

The only thing I was remarkable at was not being good at things.