Sport can be a pursuit, a pastime or a welcome distraction. But for Dan Nicholl, writer, commentator, MC, and anchor of his own Supersport show, sport is a way of life.
From breaking windows with cricket balls in his childhood home of Zimbabwe, to playing golf with his Springbok rugby heroes, Dan is the ultimate fan, and his career has taken him around the world and into the homes of millions.
Looking back on the first season of his show, brought to you by BrightRock, Dan chats with Ruda about his love of the game, his never-ending quest for a real job, and the power of sport as a national unifier and a force for social change.
Transcript
R: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Change Exchange, and we have someone here that you may know the voice more than you do the face … I don’t know, I’m not sure. But there’s a new show in town, The Dan Nicholl Show on Supersport. How did that happen?
D: With a lot of effort and a lot of persistence, I think.
R: Where did the idea come from?
D: I think it came from two shows in Australia and New Zealand – I was a Rotary Youth Exchange Student in 1995 … It seems like a million years ago … as a 16 year old leaving rural Zimbabwe and heading off to Australia and I learned many, many things in that year. One of the things I experienced was a show in Australia called The Footy Show – it was an Australian Rules football show … the game where they wear very tight shorts and run around. It’s completely incomprehensible if you’re not living in Australia, but I got to learn. I actually ended up playing a bit of Australian rules football, because they didn’t have rugby, which I played growing up in Zimbabwe … and I watched the show and what for me was just so appealing was that it was a show where they didn’t have the rights to show any footage, and so it was all about the personalities and the exchanges and creating a show where it was the conversation and the humour which was the key. And that sort of simmered with me and I went down to university, I’d gone back to finish school in Zimbabwe and went down to university to Cape Town and was working there on the UCT radio station and starting to find my feet a bit in the media space, and after the Absa Curry Cup final of 2001 I got talking to Bob Skinstad, Province had just won that competition and he was talking about a show called Lion Red Sports Cafe, which was a very irreverent, very fun show in New Zealand, probably most famous for creating National Nude Day in New Zealand, which I guess gives you a feel for the kind of show it was and we were talking about how there just wasn’t anything in that space in South Africa and so we set out to try and make it happen, we brought the guy from New Zealand out to South Africa, we filmed some stuff with him, filmed the pilot and we had a lot of fun with the guy, but I think it was just too soon for South African television, which was still a fairly conservative space then. And also nobody had a clue who I was! So my vision of myself as superstar presenter and director wasn’t really shared with anyone else!
R: Didn’t yet happen!
D: But it sat and it sat and it simmered and we had one or two cracks at it along the way, and I did some other work on television. I hosted Champions League Football, I did some ad-hoc work here and there, lots of work in radio … And then last year I sat down with a friend of mine, Kelvin Watt, he also came out of Zimbabwe, although a long time before me and we talked about this and we agreed that there was this space, he has seen me working a lot as an MC and he liked the work that I’d done and we thought let’s give it a go, so we put some money into it and made a pilot and then a lady called Suzanne at BrightRock was daft enough to think it was a good idea to get behind the project, and low and behold just under a month ago now the first episode of The Dan Nicholl Show took flight.
R: And what did you feel like when you watched it?
D: It was a surreal experience. The actual filming – you’ll know this better than most – when you’re in studio, we’ve got a small studio audience, but it’s a fairly intimate space. We’re talking to 50, 60 people. It’s not as overwhelming as people might think if you’ve been on camera before, you get used to it. It was more the build-up and … “Is this really going to happen” and “Are we actually going to the studio” … “Is the Dan Nicholl Show…” especially since it started on the 1st of April … “really just Suzanne and Kelvin playing this enormous joke on me” And what was going to eventuate? We record on a Tuesday night, the show goes out on a Wednesday night, and on the Wednesday night I had some of my closest friends and my family around and a dozen or so of us watching … and extraordinarily large bottle of Champagne and we watched the show and it was just an enormous sense of satisfaction. I thought the show went very well, lots of things that we can improve and I tend to look at these things with a very critical eye, but just watch and see it play out and thinking: “You know what, that’s kind of what I was thinking 13 years ago.”
R: Amazing. But it’s quite a weird experience to see yourself on air, doing things. It feels like a kind of weird double of yourself.
D: That sort of out of body experience. “Oooh, that’s me! And why on earth aren’t you tucking in your tummy and pushing your shoulders back when you’re on TV?” I think … Yeah … I’ve spent the better part of the last 15 years working a lot on a stage and did a lot of work around the world as an MC and as a presenter, and so I’m kind-of used to seeing myself in that space. I think it was more that for once I didn’t tally to find that space, so I wasn’t working for another brand or working for another event … This was me and this was my passion and this was what I really wanted to do. And to see that eventually coming to fruition and to see the response … Social media went bananas, I had messages from people I hadn’t heard from in ages and it just … all of a sudden it didn’t change life entirely, but it certainly put a new spin on it and it was just a real sense of this is something I’ve been working to for so long…
R: A really important step … A change?
D: It was a benchmark in the life of Dan Nicholl.
R: Okay. Let’s go right back to the beginning. Your whole life was changed by a decision your parents made when you were 6?
D: Yeah, 4, actually. I was born in Belfast in Northern Ireland in 1978, and Belfast in 1978 was a very troubled place – the trouble was what it defined it, what it was known as. The gap between the Catholic and the Protestant groups were so entrenched … the kind of differences. It’s almost like when people support football clubs – you support the club because your dad did and your granddad did and your great granddad and you don’t really know why, but that’s what you do, and that’s kind of the sense, looking back now that I got from Northern Ireland, And I had parents who were very liberal, they didn’t want to lean on one side or the other – my father is from Northern Ireland and my mother is South African, she’d been born in Johannesburg and brought up in Cape Town, also a very liberal family and her mother was one of the founders of the Black Sash and they were members of the Liberal Party and they used to knock on doors and get very abrupt responses, so I had a very liberal background and when I got to the age of 4 in 1982, I needed to go to school and it was either a Protestant government school or a Catholic private school and my parents thought that at the age of 4 I wouldn’t really be ready to make that decision myself. So I had a look at some options – my father a teacher and my mother a librarian by trade, and they looked around and they had two options. They’d actually move to London in the interim, living with friends, waiting to decide where to go, and there were two decisions they were playing on and they then actually decided what they wanted to do, but they had an offer from the other choice, and they waited and they waited and they waited and eventually it was D day for the second choice, and they said, “Right, we’re going to Zimbabwe” in 1982. The next day a letter came through offering a job in the Seychelles, so you could have been interviewing me as a bronzed lifeguard, but instead they went to Zimbabwe and there’s no small degree of retrospect and irony there in that they went out in a UK project to help the Zimbabwean government, relationships now a little more frigid between those two, but they took me out to a beautiful country and I really got the best of Zimbabwe and I had an amazing upbringing there.
R: And then you studied at UCT and did honours in English … I mean, where were you going? Not where you are now, I’m sure?
D: English literature is something that leaves you very well-read and completely unemployable in a South African context…
R: I also have one.
D: It was an interesting time, when I’d left … I was very lucky when I was 16, I got a scholarship to go on Rotary Youth Exchange to Australia, I went over, had an incredible year that opened my eyes and it told me I need to back and do my A-levels and work incredibly hard, because I knew that my school offered a single scholarship to university, and that was my only opportunity of getting to university – my parents as teachers didn’t have the means otherwise. And so I went back and I was incredibly boring for two years – I played cricket, played hockey and studied and I just knew that I needed to get to university and I was able to and I managed to get that scholarship and UCT was where I wanted to go. My uncle was the deputy Vice-Chancellor at the university, my mum had grown up there, we had holidays in Cape Town, my best friend was going there … And I went down initially wanting to do a drama degree, and I went down and they have what’s called a Performing Arts course, and I wanted to do English and performing arts and I discovered that when I got down there that you would have had to gone down six months earlier for an audition. So I did drama for Year 1 and I’m very glad it worked out that way, because after six months of learning how to play a depressed rabbit or a tree in a state of emotional flux I realised this probably wasn’t for me.
R: And you would be even less employable.
D: Indeed. Completely. I’d be selling magazines at traffic lights by now. I had a look at my options and I always loved writing. My mum, for as long as I can remember, used to read to us the Narnia books, the Tolkien books – she just instilled a real love of books.
R: And of audio, of the spoken voice? So that’s where you went?
D: Yes. Well our family has a collective history of a chronic inability to shut up, and it manifested itself in finding my way into radio. UCT has got a very strong radio station and I’ve done some work in Zimbabwe on radio as a student, and I did a lot of public speaking as an exchange student and I discovered it was something I enjoyed and UCT radio gave me a platform.
R: What’s the best thing about radio? It’s so different from television?
D: For me one of the really cool things about radio is that you don’t have the visual element. I remember listening to a lot of the Goon Show and the things that they do, because it was just audio and they can say things that visually make absolutely no sense, but in an audio sense really funny or really cool or really different, and it’s also a medium that offers you an enormous amount of freedom, because although visual gives you that image, it also restricts you that image. And with radio you can just run wild and I had an enormous amount of fun on UCT radio and…
R: And your first real job, what was that?
D: There are many who would argue that I haven’t found that yet – my mother probably being amongst them. When I was coming to the end of my second year of … third year … third year of UCT … by that stage I was hosting the Drive Show and having a lot of fun, managed to talk some reasonably famous people into coming on to the show and I was really just loving it. And I had a phone call from Cape Talk, asking me to come in for an audition, which I thought was really cool and I went in and I did the audition and was kind of hoping that they might say: “This time next year we’ve got a slot at 4am on a Thursday and we’d like you to try out for it.” The next morning I was running sport for the Breakfast Show, so it was a fairly rapid transition.
R: And the sports interest? You said that you studied and played hockey and played rugby at school, so you were interested from knee-high…
D: One of my earliest memories is breaking French windows in our house in Kwekwe in Zimbabwe, having played the most magnificent cover drive or whipped a short delivery off my hips to midwicket, and instead of an adoring mother saying: “Your timing was superb and you really are looking good at the front foot.” She’d yell at me for breaking yet another window. And in my childhood cricket was always the sport.
R: You know, mothers are a bit strange in that way.
D: I know, my mother really needed work there. Childhood was peppered with playing cricket in the garden and playing cricket in the nets and I had a cricket ball and a sock, and I must have racked up thousands of hours just playing that cover drive and imagining who I was playing against and which test match I was involved in …
R: So once you started working in that field, you could really … you understood what it meant. It wasn’t just from the outside? You had really lived it?
D: To a degree. I mean, I never played sport at a level high enough to be able to identify with a Protea or a Springbok or a Bafana Bafana player, but I was at the Zimbabwe cricket academy and I played a reasonable level, certainly enough to enjoy it to a degree of proficiency, but also just to understand the passion and to understand what sport does and how it – the emotions of it. I often look at South Africa, which is a completely bipolar country and Bafana wins and the Stock Exchange is up and we’re floating on air and the country is lovely and we all love each other, and the Proteas lose and we’re depressed and we start fighting with each other and want to throw coaches out the windows and we were exactly like that, and that is the power of sport, that is what appealed so much.
R: And the life of a sport commentator? You couldn’t have been home much?
D: So when I started out, there was a degree of travel. I used to do rugby commentary for Cape Talk, which was incredibly partisan commentary for a Cape Town audience – there was not a shred of neutrality in sight and I look back in great pride at some of the comments about referees that I might have made on radio once or twice, but it wasn’t an enormous amount. I was working as well as for Cape Talk at iAfrica.com – it was mostly based in Cape Town. It was when I decided – to my mum’s horror – that I was going to give both those jobs up and try to make it as an MC, something that she just didn’t understand at all …
R: How did that happen? Why?
D: So when I was at university, there were a lot of things that happened on campus. The Rag Olympics being a great example – lots of students – you usually drink too much beer, doing crazy things like pushing shopping trolleys around campus and just having fun, it’s a great bonding experience for part of your discovery of university life. And by second year when I was looking after radio’s drive show at UCT, I was invited to start hosting and companies would come along and they would want someone to start promoting their product at university and I would often be the person asked, and I got asked by Ajax Cape Town – a newly formed football club in Cape Town – if I could do their stadium announcing – and so I ended up doing that for four or five years, which was a tough job because quite frequently there would be teams who would come down to play in Cape Town from the Eastern Cape, for instance, who had reams of players with not a vowel to be seen, and just a range of clicks that I was completely incapable of mastering.
R: Did you ever learn it?
D: I did my best. There were some of them … I remember there was a guy called … His surname was spelled N C A C A , which to the anglophile is simply Nkaka, and the third and the second clicks were completely different – one was the roof of the mouth and one with the side of the mouth. And after five years, if there was one name I still struggled with it was Gareth Ncaca.
R: But so? You got drawn into that world, and how did you figure out that this could actually be a viable career choice?
D: I remember going to a launch for Vodacom sponsoring the Stormers – they took over the sponsorship and were launching a new jersey and it was a very upmarket affair at an art gallery, which is completely absurd for a rugby event, but that’s where they had it. There was a guy by the name of Thomas Abbot, and I’d met Thomas once or twice – he was always quite quiet, looked very cool and I knew he was very important … He looked after Vodacom’s sponsorships. I didn’t know he didn’t actually work for Vodacom – he worked for an agency, I didn’t know how any of that worked, I just knew he was the person I needed to get to know and I started to MC a few little charity Golf Days, they’d gone very well, people chuckled and it looked like it was something I kind-of had the hang of. And emboldened by one or two or three beers at the event, I cornered Thomas and insisted that he employ me to host Vodacom Origins of Golf Series. Now, this was the definitive and I think still is the definitive amateur golf experience in South Africa. You get to go to a great resort, play with professionals and here was this kid that’s still at university, that nobody had ever heard of, who was trying to tell them that he was the person who should be at the helm. I don’t to this day know what Thomas was thinking when he gave me that job, but he gave me a crack at it and I remember standing up on the stage for the first time … I think it was Somerset West, it was the first event, and suddenly thinking: “These are some of the biggest business people in South Africa. These are South Africa’s top golfers, it’s one of the strongest brands in the country and they’ve got me looking after all of it!”
R: “What was I thinking!”
D: But you know, it just turned out to be a fairly natural space and it turned out if you make people laugh, if you take the Micky out of yourself before you take the Micky out of anybody else, if you don’t take people too seriously … If you understand what a brand is about and what it is you’re trying to get and if you get that combination, then it’s actually something you can turn into earning a living. And a couple of years after that, more and more events started piling up and people wanted me to do stuff and it was getting increasingly difficult to be on radio a couple of hours a day and to be running an editor’s job at a big website for 10 hours a day, plus weekends and then get away to different parts of the country. So it was a big leap of faith …
R: So this was completely freelance? The phone must ring, otherwise it doesn’t happen?
D: And you can’t always call back because you’ve run out of money and airtime. There were a few months after that where it was a bit touch-and-go. I bought myself a little apartment and had a second-hand car and was paying for both of those myself. There were a few months where it was a bit nerve-wrecking and it certainly wasn’t French restaurants for dinner. But it was something that I always believed I could do and it worked. It was a lot of hard work and you ended up doing a lot of events for no or little money because you felt it was going to help you in the long run, but it did help in the long run. Now I get to do events around the world, I get to meet some incredibly cool people and I have a great deal of fun.
R: Tell me about the Laureus ambassadorship?
D: That’s a really proud moment. I’ve been fortunate enough over the years to develop a friendship with Johann Rupert, who is a man who has done extraordinary amount for South Africa. I don’t always think he gets the credit he deserves. Often very quiet behind the scenes. And I’d been invited up to host his Alfred Dunhill Championship at Leopard Creek as the MC, and a few years later I was MC-ing the wedding of a friend of mine, Richard Sterne, the professional golfer, and we were having a couple of drinks with Richard and with Johann and one or two others and again – there seems to be something of a trend – rather boldly, I told him he should take me to Scotland to MC his Dunhill event, a big A-list, Hollywood Star Event and he picked up the phone and three minutes later I was confirmed to be at the event.
R: The dog had caught the bus?
D: Correct. So that kind-of really entrenched relationship and Johann started Laureus about 15, 16 years ago as a space where sport could be used for the power of good. And I’ve done a bit of work with Laureus, I’ve visited their events and visited the work that they do, the projects they support, and last year I was invited to become an ambassador. And Laureus has two spaces – it has the academies of great sports starts of the world from Boris Becker to Sean Fitzpatrick and Morne du Plessis to Sachen Tendulkar – just an extraordinary array of people, and they’re also ambassadors around the world. They support the Laureus World Sports Awards – basically the Oscars of sport, but then they also support 160 odd projects around the world – 16 of them being here in South Africa. And throughout my life sport changed my life, essentially. It gave me a career path and although I don’t exclusively work in sports events, that was certainly the impetus that got me into the area of what I do now. And Laureus just does such great work with kids, with projects … To quote Madiba when he was at the first Laureus awards: “Harnessing the power of sport to change the world.” Well don’t we know it from the 1995 World Cup, among other things?
D: And 1996, 2007 and 2010 and every time South Africa does well, and so for me to be able to take something I love – which is sport – and then to take the ability to contribute a little but to positive change, and to go and meet these kids in these projects and not just in South Africa, but in my travels I’ve also visited projects in the Favelas in Rio, in the Bronx in New York, in Belfast in Northern Ireland and I’ve seen that although the problems are often different, the solution remains the same. It’s getting sport to break down a barrier, to distract, to channel energy into the right space and to give kids who in so many places around the world don’t have this ability to play or to have a familial support structure, to have safeguards against the ever-increasing social ills – here is sport giving them an opportunity to escape, to divert, to see a better and brighter future. Laureus is something I believe in enormously and I’m proud to be a part of the organisation, and every day it’s just great to see how it’s making such a difference.
R: And in the process you got tutored by a 9 year old to surf?
D: Yeah, I visited the Waves for Change Project with Stuart Taylor, another good friend of BrightRock – Stuart is a very old friend of mine and he’s an incredibly funny man, one of South Africa’s best comedians. He’s got a very wry outlook on life and Stuart grew up in the Cape Flats as he said in a number of his shows … “I couldn’t swim because I wasn’t allowed on the beaches.” I grew up in Zimbabwe and we certainly did swim, but I’m by no means naturally proficient. And then we went and neither of us had ever surfed before and we went down with these kids, with Roxy Louw – the model and surfer who is a very good friend of mine. And together with the kids Roxy gave us this lesson and you have these little children who are sort of 9 year old gangsters – they come from broken homes and they’ve seen an enormous amount of violence and they’ve seen things which at that age they never should see, should never have to experience. And one very sobering moment – I had this little 9 year old saying to me one of the great things about surfing – and he was very earnest as he said it – he said: “Now that I’m surfing, I’m not doing drugs anymore.” When a 9 year old kid says that to you, it really gives you a sobering dose of perspective. And that kind-of framed what we did and the piece that we put together for TV was quite light hearted with me falling repeatedly off my surfboard and Stuart falling almost as often and just having some fun, but inside that there was a message that here are some kids who are just really having fun. The project, Waves for Change, describes the project as surf therapy, and what it does is just easing some of the stress and trying to give these kids an outlet and see the work and to be part of a very special day.
R: Tell me about your family? Where did you meet your wife?
D: This is a pretty cool story and it sounds as though it’s made up, and although a lot of what I say is, this is not.
R: And we can ask her?
D: You can. Well, she’s a lawyer so I have to make sure I’m honest when I’m talking about her. I … Actually, let me go back to her side of it. She went to university in Durban. One of her very good friends, Cindy, had moved to London and met a South African there, Richard. They got married, they’re living happy in four square ft. in Wimbledon as so many South Africans in London do and they’re dreaming of moving back to South Africa one day. And they would go on holiday quite often, trying to take some time to explore Europe and they put together a group holiday in Portugal in the Algarve coast. They booked a villa and off they go, Portugal being a very reasonable place to go to – even by South African standards and their economy makes ours look quite robust. So they’ve booked this place to go to and with about two months to go, Richard, big Natalian, drinks beer and plays rugby and plays golf, boys boy, discovers to his absolute horror that with ten people going so far and two left, there was only one other guy for his golf and beer-drinking holiday – his brother-in-law, who was bringing his 18 month-old daughter who didn’t drink and who didn’t play golf – so it was the worst possible companion. And he said to his wife: “You speak to your friends who are coming on the trip, find a couple of guys and come and play golf with me and give me a slightly more entertaining holiday. And one of the women in question was my now-wife, and she got hold of one of my best mates in Cape Town, they’ve been to school together in the Free State and he ran his own business and he was newly single, looking for a holiday, and she said: “Fantastic, come along. Anybody else you know?” “Well,” said Grant. “I’ve got this mate who doesn’t really have a proper job but he always seems quite happy to go anywhere. So he phoned me up, I checked my diary and I had to be hosting an event in Scotland the week after, changed my flights and went to see some clients in London and then flew in to Barcelona to meet Grant and Dimitra, his school friend, who were all going on to Portugal. And Grant had sent me the e-mail saying she’s really beautiful and she’s this incredible Greek beauty, and if your mate says someone is really beautiful, they’re normally around 300kg with a beard and it’s your mate trying to wind you up. So I said ja, whatever. So I was sending back e-mails: “Awww, she’s going to fall in love with me. She’s got no chance.” Dan on fire. And he sent me an e-mail back telling me that if I so much as looked at her he’d break my legs. He was very protective – she was kind of like a little sister to him, so we’d go across and I arrive in Barcelona and they’ve been there a couple of days and Grant gets off the bus where I’m meeting him at a point, and then this vision of Greek beauty walks off the bus, and … it … Yeah … She took my breath away … Give me a sec … Sjoe.
R: How long ago was that?
D: That was … That was 2009. If I had to remember … She walked off the bus and I remember the perfect moment as I gave her a hug. “How are you?” And she looked at me and smiled and she said: “Do you know where the nearest toilet is? I’m absolutely desperate.” And those were her very first words. And we spent the afternoon on a tourist bus going through Barcelona and just having an amazing time, and that night we went to a restaurant in Barcelona. If you’re ever in Barcelona, Passadis del Pep – Spanish seafood restaurant, it’s one of the best restaurants in Barcelona. A food critic in South Africa had recommended it and I managed to find it in my very broken Spanish, somehow booked a table and we got there ten o’clock at night and we had an incredible night out and something just sparked that day, and exactly one year later to the day in the very same restaurant, in Barcelona, I dropped down to one knee and she thought I’d dropped the camera, and very clearly she didn’t say yes, she said: “Have you asked my father?” Being a good Greek, and I said yes. And I said: “I haven’t asked your father – I’ve asked your parents and they both said yes and they’re very excited.” And so she said …
R: Quite old-fashioned? To approach the parents first?
D: I don’t know that it is – I think it’s a really important thing to do and it’s really important to family, because when you marry somebody …
R: And you knew them by then? And you knew that they would welcome you?
D: Yeah, they’ve been amazing. My mother-in-law, she’s homicidal and she’s Greek and she’s trying to feed me every time I move. She’s the only person on earth who thinks that I’m chronically underweight, but I love her dearly and they’re an amazing story themselves – they’re an arranged marriage from a village in Greece and they have been married now for over 40 years and are as close and loving and devoted as any couple I know. So they were a great example to me and I knew that they would be happy, it was quite a nerve-wrecking experience – more so than I thought it would be to ask, but yeah. She said yes and we then spent a week on a cruise in the Mediterranean and thankfully she did say yes or it would have been the most awkward cruise in history! But yeah … that was … it seems like yesterday and a lifetime ago.
R: And you have a new baby daughter? Erin?
D: I do. And in the objective opinion of her father she is the single most beautiful little girl in the history of the world. She is now nine-and-a-half-months, getting full of character, crawling around everywhere. She’s an incredibly good little girl – from six weeks she’s gone to sleep at 20:00 and woke up at 8:00 the next morning and she just slept through the night.
R: You are blessed!
D: We are indeed! And yeah … everybody tells you … it’s a cliché … your life is going to change … and it’s normally said as a harbouring of doom – your life is going to end and you won’t see a restaurant for a decade and you won’t sleep for longer than that. It certainly does change, but it changes in the most wonderful way. You’ve got absolutely no idea of where it’s going to lead to.
R: So are you a hands-on dad?
D: As much as I can be. One of the challenges of what I do is that I’m frequently travelling and I’m away a lot. I remember when Erin was … I think she was a month, month-and-a-half old … one of my very close friends from school was getting married in Zimbabwe was getting married in Grenada in the West-Indies and it just wasn’t feasible for Dee and Erin to come along, but I was … he asked me to be MC at his wedding and we’ve known each other since junior school so I went over for the wedding, but it was a two week roundtrip getting through America, over the Caribbean, all the way back and I realised that I was going to be away for 25% of my daughter’s life to date, which was a mortifying statistic. And since then, it’s a balance you try and strike and I’d like to think I get it reasonably right – I’m getting more requests to do things internationally, which is fantastic, but it does mean you’re away from home, but when I am at home … it’s odd that too often changing that nappy in the morning and there’s that hands-on and seeing your daughter smile when you are waking up in the morning and often we just play together. A number of meetings that I’ve been late for, because I’ve picked up Erin to say goodbye and 15 minutes later we’re still wrestling on the couch or playing with the dog or just having some fun together.
R: Touch is so important. I think for both – for you and for her.
D: She’s a very animated little girl, she talks a lot like her mum and dad and she loves being with, and she’s great with people and my family are all overseas, but my wife’s family, her brother, and his wife and her sister are in Johannesburg and we are very close and Erin is very lucky in having those aunts and uncles around who are playing with her and looking after her.
R: You know, the other thing that people tell you, that you cannot understand before it happens is that adults don’t create children – children create adults. You grow up – you have to! You have to suddenly become responsible.
D: I think that’s entirely true, but it also brings out that incredibly youthful side in you and I now find myself dancing in the living room, trying to entertain my daughter. Singing off key with great enthusiasm and it rejuvenates you. My wife, in particular, is a director in a law firm and she’s a very successful lawyer – I’ve never won an argument with her … She’ll come home after a long day and she’s been fighting with somebody or been in court and everything’s stressful, and five minutes later she’s just laughing because Erin has wiped away that day and given her a clean slate.
R: But what I also found in my personal experience is that if you’re both very busy and often away, you have to make a conscious effort to connect, to spend time to really be there when you’re home?
D: I don’t know if it’s been that conscious – when I get home it’s just the first thing that I want to do. We live in an age where your instincts are so often to check your phone and to check your laptop and I know I’m guilty of that regularly, but when I come home … “Where’s Erin?” And we’ve got … and my wife believes we’ve got a second child – a year-old Bull Mastiff puppy called Stavros, who is Erin’s best friend and he guards her if she’s sleeping and he sleeps next to her cot, so when I get home Stavros wants attention because he misses me desperately and I want to see Erin and so we have a little family get-together and it’s … I haven’t felt that it’s something I needed to prioritise or something I always wanted to do … I was in Shanghai last week and I had a terrific time and it’s a great city and I had lots of fun, but as I was getting on the plane I couldn’t wait to see my wife and my daughter and that horse that lives in my back garden, masquerading as a puppy.
R: Where’s your home and how did you come across it?
D: We live in Parkhurst in Johannesburg. When I moved to Cape Town I lived there for a long time, but when I met my wife, between her and my agent who had been trying to move me to Johannesburg for some time – I moved up here in 2010 and we’d looked for a house for a long time and we liked Parkhurst, it had a village feel to it and it had shades and echoes of Cape Town and we probably spent eight, nine months looking for just the house that we wanted…
R: What were you looking for? What’s the most important thing?
D: Somewhere that didn’t have Roman Marble pillars in the bedroom – people’s taste is completely beyond my comprehension sometimes. You’d arrive at my house and outside it looks fantastic, it’s kind of what we want, the right sort of space and the right area and you walk inside and you discover that they turned their spare bedroom into a feng shui garden with a little waterfall and there really was some ghastly stuff out there, and we needed somewhere that just felt right, and you can’t really – you want a certain amount of bedrooms and you want a bit of space, but you walk in and you think: “This could be our home.” And obviously one that fell within the price range that we felt we could work with and we’re very lucky we both work, so it did give us a little bit of scope and leeway. And we found a place and we put in a bid and we were very excited and they phoned us and told us that somebody had put in a higher bid and it’s sold. And we were pretty upset because we’d spent a lot of time … and we really liked it and we sold it on and we looked at other places and then about six weeks later an incredibly shy and slightly embarrassed estate agent phoned us up – the same agent that told us with a certain degree of pomp and ceremony that our bid had not been high enough, and it turned out that the other person hadn’t been able to get the finance, would be still be interested? And I said: “Yes, but we’ll be offering less.” So we sent in a lower bid and the people needed to sell the house so that we were able to make that offer and they took it and we moved in and …
R: And what’s the nicest part of your house? Where do you spend time?
D: My wife probably suggests the couch. There are a couple of areas. I’ve got an outside study at the back that is part study, party wine cellar. I’m a very keen wine collector, and I’ve got a fairly large collection, but it seems to diminish when I’m away from home and my wife has a key to it. So it’s a working area, but we’ve got a very open-flow home. We loving having people around, we love having friends around and often it has to be kind of on our terms, because I’ll look at my diary and I’ve only got four, three nights this month. “This Thursday, let’s see which of our friends are available to come round.” And I love cooking – a very good friend of mine, Pete Goffe-Wood, the MasterChef judge, taught me to cook – introduced me to cooking – and I have a lot of fun, so my kitchen is somewhere I like to spend time. Out on the deck and the patio, around the braai – it’s more with the people, you know, whether it’s my wife, my daughter, my dog or close friends – it’s a very homely home and it’s a home that people feel comfortable and relaxed in and for me that’s really important.
R: Dan, thank you so much! I enjoyed it enormously and I hope you did.
D: I did and I hope I didn’t come across as too star struck, because I always watched Carte Blanche growing up and it’s really special to spend some time with you.
R: Thank you and good luck for your show – I hope it goes well.
D: I appreciate it – thank you Ruda.
R: Till next time – bye bye.
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