Simon Dallow and Alison Mau present One Network News in 1995 (Screengrab: YouTube)<\/p>\n
Dallow joined TVNZ in 1993, and the following year presented TV2\u2019s late night news magazine show Newsnight<\/a> alongside Alison Mau (with whom he later shared one of New Zealand\u2019s most high-profile marriages) and Marcus Lush. He went on to present a variety of TVNZ news and current affairs shows during the following years, including One Mid Evening News, One Tonight, Agenda and Q&A. In 2006, he teamed up with Wendy Petrie to become the weeknight co-presenters of 1News at Six (formerly One Network News), and in 2020, Dallow became the sole 6pm news anchor.\u00a0<\/p>\n If longstanding One Network News presenter Judy Bailey<\/a> was the mother of the nation, then what important part of the news family is Dallow? Could he be the country\u2019s reliable uncle, the wise and dependable family member who turns up just when we need him, delivering some important words and then leaving, never outstaying his welcome? Simon Dallow never put a pair of melons to his chest live on the telly like Seven Sharp\u2019s Jeremy Wells<\/a> (the little brother of the nation?), or got the giggles after reading a news story about an emergency defecation situation<\/a>. He\u2019s always just been there, night after night, reading the news with precision and purpose. Ever the professional. Unflappable. Unmelonable.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Whatever he is to us, his departure marks the end of an era. Let\u2019s look back on some of Dallow\u2019s more memorable moments behind the 1News desk.\u00a0<\/p>\n He covered a lot of news<\/p>\n Over the past 20-plus years, Dallow delivered the news during numerous major national and international crises. He steered us through the Canterbury earthquakes, the Pike River mine disaster and the Christchurch mosque attacks<\/a>. He kept us up to date during the Covid-19 pandemic and its many lockdowns<\/a>, as well as events like the Whakaari White Island volcanic eruption and Cyclone Gabrielle<\/a>. If there was a breaking news bulletin, Dallow was all over it. He\u2019s also seen us through several general elections and countless political polls<\/a> and budget lockups<\/a>, reported live from Auckland infernos<\/a> and America\u2019s Cup wins<\/a>, and was even there to help test the nation\u2019s IQ back in 2003<\/a>.<\/p>\n He sat at a lot of different desks If there\u2019s one thing 1News loves more than a breaking story, it\u2019s taking the opportunity to zhuzh up their news studio<\/a>. Dallow has seen it all over the years: the shiny glass table of the 2020s, the sleek mahogany bench of the early 2000s, the giant New Zealand on the world map in the background in the late 90s. He\u2019s been in the eye of the news storm through all of TVNZ\u2019s jazzy studio and technological updates, but nothing says \u201cbreaking news\u201d more than this silky smooth 1999 news desk, which included not one but TWO landline phones. Was this\u2026 the original news notification?<\/p>\n One time he went to Mars\u2026? Who wants to sit down at a desk all day? Not Simon Dallow. Thanks to the TVNZ graphics department, Dallow spent the past few years zipping backwards and forwards in space and time<\/a> every night at 6pm, dodging virtual cars that hoon across the studio and sidestepping wayward planets that suddenly swing into his orbit. He once went to a galaxy far, far away, but he also stopped by the Somme and even popped up at the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Who says the news is boring?\u00a0<\/p>\n His pronunciation was perfect, even when it wasn\u2019t<\/p>\n Not everyone could pronounce the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallaj\u00f6kull mid-sentence live on the 6pm news, but Dallow did it<\/a> with a smoothness rarely seen this side of a hot flow of lava. And amid all the serious news and heavy stories, there were also a few lighter, unexpected moments, like when Dallow randomly tried out an Australian accent<\/a> during the 6pm bulletin, or the time in 2008 when he accidentally called the global credit crunch the \u201cglobal credit cunt<\/a>\u201d. They can\u2019t all be Eyjafjallaj\u00f6kull, I guess.\u00a0<\/p>\n Simon Dallow\u2019s final 1News at Six bulletin is tonight at 6pm on TVNZ1 and TVNZ+.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tara Ward looks back on the TVNZ newsreader\u2019s two decades on our screens.\u00a0 Tonight, Simon Dallow will deliver…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":157417,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[58799,492,42,43,1066,104098,40,38,41,39,6445],"class_list":["post-157416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-1news","tag-comments-enabled","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-pop-culture","tag-simon-dallow","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-tvnz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157416\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
\nSimon Dallow reads the news in different decades (Screengrabs: YouTube)<\/p>\n
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\nThis is the news<\/p>\n