The broadcaster and presenter looks back on her life in television, including Coro’s teen pregnancy scandal, being a ‘5.30pm telly girl’ and meeting her future husband on camera.
As broadcaster and presenter for Sky Sport, Laura McGoldrick regularly finds herself on the sidelines of some of the most exciting and dramatic moments in sporting history. Whether it’s commentating the White Ferns through a cricket T20 world cup win or a nailbiting Warriors victory, McGoldrick adores the unpredictable theatre of a high-stakes sporting event. “You turn up to work and you genuinely have no idea what’s going to happen, which is so exciting,” McGoldrick tells The Spinoff. “I love any great story that gets told within a sporting game.”
McGoldrick’s latest role on ACC Does Game of 2 Halves is the perfect combination of her two loves of sports and entertainment. The fast-paced, high energy quiz show sees teams of sports stars compete against each other to answer a series of sports related questions, with quizmaster McGoldrick ready to use the buzzer to keep the contestants in check. “I’m competitive by nature, so I enjoy others going at it and it’s good fun,” she says. ”Sport gives us so much in terms of entertainment, and it’s cool to put the ultimate sports fans and athletes to the test.”
As a new season of Game of 2 Halves kicks off, we did our warm-up stretches and put McGoldrick through several rounds of similarly intense quiz questions, all relating to her first TV crush, her favourite TV guilty pleasure and her most watched TV show of all time.
My earliest TV memory is… Coronation Street, because my mum loved it. There was a period of time where I really hit my straps with it, because Sarah Louise was pregnant and she was the same age as me at the time, and it was a bit catastrophic. I was a huge Blossom fan, with her friend Six, which I just thought was the weirdest name going. I was a big 5.30pm telly girl – so the Friends reruns, a bit of The Nanny, Home and Away – I used to hit that omnibus like nobody’s business.
The show I refused to miss when I was younger was… Shortland Street. I loved Minnie and Marj. I loved it because they were New Zealanders, they sounded like me.
My earliest TV crush was… Jonathan Taylor Thomas from Home Improvement. Just magnificent. Oh, I loved him. He was my big crush.
The live TV moment that haunts me is… Oh, there’s plenty. My husband [cricketer Martin Guptill] and I met in the Sky green room, and I’ve never, ever gone back and watched that interview, and I never will, because I think it would be horrific. It gives me secondhand ick thinking about that, because it must have been a bit flirty, and you just don’t want to see that play out.
Also, I was only 20 when I got my first job for Sky, and I’d never used an earpiece or had an autocue before. So the second show I ever did, I was still becoming accustomed to having people talk in my ear. We were on air, and someone made a joke on set and it landed very well, and everyone was laughing. Then somebody – and I believed at the time that it was somebody on the set – said “just like Glee”. At the time, I loved Glee, so I went “I love Glee!” Everybody stopped talking and looked at me, like “what?” and I realised it had come from someone in my ear. That does still keep me up at night, that I was talking to somebody that wasn’t there.
The TV ad I can’t stop thinking about is… Those NZ Post ones with the Opshop song. They used to get me every time, absolute floods of tears. I used to love the scorched almond one at Christmas time, where the wee girl would wrap up the scorched almonds.
My TV guilty pleasure is… There was a period in my life where I watched quite a lot of Geordie Shore and my father actually said to me that he was really disappointed in me, and then I stopped watching it. I don’t mind popping into the Kardashians every now and again, and just checking to see that we’ve all lost touch with reality there. I also cannot cope with going to bed and not knowing the outcome of what we’ve just watched, so I’ll binge and stay up late and then pay the price for staying up late.
The most memorable live sporting event that I’ve been part of is… The sense of sheer pride when I worked on the finals of the men’s and women’s T20 World Cups. It was appreciating the magnitude of what I was working on because we don’t always appreciate how huge cricket is globally. Getting to go down on the field and be some of the first people to talk to the World Cup winners was a great privilege. I just love it all. I’m very lucky.
The TV show I loved and wished I’d been involved with is… Will and Grace. It just looked like great fun. I’ve really enjoyed watching all the snippets from the Saturday Night Live 50 year anniversary, and I enjoy watching some of the American late night talk shows, like Stephen Colbert, and their interview techniques.
My most watched show of all time is… Friends. It’s my safe place. I’m not going to be upset by anything that happens on it, I know that everything’s going to work out OK, and that’s a nice place to be. It still makes me laugh. I went through a whole series of just really watching Ross and his physical comedy, and I was like, “this guy is a genius”. Each time I watch it back, I appreciate something different.
The TV show I recommend to everyone is… Shrinking on Apple TV+. It’s got Harrison Ford and Jason Segel in it. Harrison Ford is so funny, I enjoy it so much.
My controversial TV opinion is… I’ve never watched Breaking Bad, and I’ve never watched Game of Thrones. I have no intention of ever watching them. They just don’t take my fancy.
The last thing I watched on television was… Last night, I watched the Black Caps beat Pakistan in the opening game of the Champions Trophy.
The ACC Does Game of 2 Halves screens on Thursdays on Sky Sport at 8pm and Sky Open at 8.30pm, and is available on demand on Sky Go and Sky Sport Now.