Saturday Morning With Jack Tame

Relationship expert Steven Dromgool's been giving Jack Tame some tips for helping a partner with anxiety. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fruit tree maintenance Here are a few quick-fire ideas to get the best out of your fruit trees in the future… and it all starts by planting (and some pruning) in the winter!  1) Do your home work – select tree varieties you actually like to eat! (or like the look of – blossom?)  2) Buy good stock from good nurseries and check if they need specific pollinators (ie Plums!!)  3) Dig your holes in the garden and prepare the soil with organic material (compost). If your soil is sometimes too wet, perhaps think about raising the planting area a bit.  4) No need to fertilise until spring truly starts (23 Sept) when the soils warm up and trees start to “function” again.  5) When you plant your trees, either from potted specimens or “bare-rooted” trees, a light prune will help the tree survive the planting shock. Think about the fact that the amount of root mass should be more-or-less the same as the branch mass above the ground. 6) If you plant a new tree, think about how you want that tree to grow in a three-dimensi

Lawmakers want to take away the surprises from subscriptions Everything is a subscription these days and companies have made it very easy (and appealing!) to sign up for a trial, only to then sign you up at full price without a reminder. A group of bi-oartisian US lawmakers want to change that. The Unsubscribe Act does it in a couple of ways: + it would require sellers to allow customers to cancel a subscription in the same way they signed up.. no more phoning a busy call center to cancel if you signed up online. + it would require the company to notify the user the trial or intro price is ending + it would ban automatically moving people from a trial to a contract with a term of more than a month.  The Tamagotchi is making a return  This time, your digital pet will live on your wrist as a smart watch! You'll never need to leave it behind! It's getting some other improvements since it was released 25 years ago - like a colour screen, a touch screen so you can pet it, voice recognition so you can interact and

A whole generation of parents have turned to Steve Biddulph for parenting advice.  The author of classic books Raising Boys and Raising girls as well as around a dozen other parenting titles. He’s described as one of the world’s best-known parent educators.   After a career of helping us raise kids, Steve’s turned his hand to helping the rest of us, with a new book “Fully Human”. It's billed as ‘a new way of using your mind’.  Steve has been talking to Jack Tame.LISTEN ABOVE      See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pear, blue cheese & walnut tart  Pears pair with tangy blue cheese and honeyed walnuts in this gorgeous tart. Makes 26cm tart  Pastry  200g wholemeal flour  100g chilled butter ½ teaspoon salt  6 tablespoons ice cold  water  2-3 pears  2 tablespoons butter  ½ cup brown sugar  3 heaped tablespoons cream cheese  75g crumbled blue cheese (I used Kapiti creamy blue) 3 tbsp walnuts, roughly chopped Make the pastry by combining flour, chilled butter and salt in a food processor until it resembles coarse breadcrumbs. Don’t over work it – lumps of butter are ok. Drizzle in the ice cold water and pulse a few times until it starts to come together in a ball. Turn out and with a light hand press it together into a flat disc, wrap and chill it for 15 minutes.  Preheat oven to 180 C and place a tray in to heat up. Line a 26cm tart tin with baking paper. Roll out pastry and line tin with it. Try to get a thin pastry shell and just patch any holes or tears, it’s very forgiving. Prick all over with a fork and return to t

New figures around rental costs released were released this week - and its bad news for renters. Kevin Milne's been talking to Jack Tame about where they leave those who can't afford a house.LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Winston Peters has ended his long-running media hiatus by appearing on Australian morning TV and giving the vaccine rollout in New Zealand a bit of a kicking. It’s been too slow, he says.Easy to criticise when you’re out of government of course, but is that fair? I think it’s worth considering a really basic question: What was the primary aim for New Zealand’s vaccine rollout?Was the aim to safely vaccinate New Zealanders as quickly as possible? As a developed country heavily reliant on open borders, it was in the best interests of our collective health and economy to get us all vaccinated as soon as possible. The virus is mutating fast. It’s becoming more infectious. As lucky as we are to be living life free of community transmission, you need only look at Melbourne or Sydney or Taiwan, to know how quickly that can change. With those kinds of risks, there’s a good argument to be made that New Zealand should have done whatever it took to get as high up the vaccine list as possible, even without community tran

Travel writer Mike Yardley has been checking out three great Wellington neighbourhoods; Thorndon, Newtown and Lyall Bay. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Music reviewer Estelle Clifford has been listen to new music from twin-sister pop group The Veronincas. Their new album is Godzilla, and it's their first since 2014 and follows a whole lot of personal drama.LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Catherie Raynes has been reading Australian thriller Still by Matt Nable; and a true-life account of the rise and fall of media mogul Robert Maxwell, Fall by John Preston.  LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Busting supermarket myths   Most of us believe certain things about the cleaning products we buy, but they’ve actually been planted in our heads by years of advertising.   So let’s bust some of those myths.   Myth 1: The best shampoos, toothpastes and dish liquids foam well. In many cases scientists figure out how to do something, then make a feature out of it. Lots of research has gone into foam, and making it last as long as possible. It doesn’t make things any cleaner, we have just been taught to think so.Myth 2: My clothes need to smell clean to actually BE clean: No, you are just smelling the persistent synthetic perfume added to the laundry product. And for people with allergies perfumes are one of the worst offenders. Then, these chemicals in your laundry products don’t all rinse out and are up against your skin 24/7. Even if you sleep naked, they are in your sheets and pillow slips.  Myth 3: Whiter than white. For many generations there was a competition about who had the whitest clothes. Early twenti

Bob Campbell's wine pick for this week is the Church Road 2020 Chardonnay, Hawke’s Bay $14.99 (on special).LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Apple's new features for 2021 have been announced at their developer conference.Apple is coming after ZoomLots of big changes to the Facetime app, including the ability to schedule FaceTime for meetings. You can share the link with folks using Windows PCs and Android devices too and they can join through their browser - which is a big deal for Apple. They're leaning into make FaceTime more friendly and more personal than Zoom with the ability to watch videos and listen to music with your friends and even text chat along at the same time.  Apple is up-ending the Ad Tech industry  Emails will no longer tell the sender if they've been read by blocking tracking pixels.  The Safari internet browser will block trackers and make your browsing anonymous by running data through two proxy servers.  They're also offering burner email addresses so you can keep your real email address private. Ad tech companies are going to find it harder to tie your different data together.  You'll be able to add an ID to your digital wa

Time: Sean Bean and Stephen Graham star in this gritty British drama by Jimmy McGovern about a husband, teacher and father who is sentenced to four years in prison after accidentally killing a man. Consumed by guilt, Mark openly accepts his sentence but is quickly confronted with the harsh realities of life inside (Prime, Saturdays at 9.30pm).  Domina: a new historical drama. In the wake of Julius Caesar's assassination, Livia Drusilla - the golden girl of the prominent Claudii family - is forced into exile. Ten years later, Livia returns, determined to avenge her father, secure power for her sons, and regain everything that was stolen from her (Neon).  The Brokenwood Mysteries: New Zealands’s most successful international series, watched by millions of people around the world, has found a new home on TVNZ 1 (Sunday, TVNZ 1, 8.30pm).  LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The latest Marvel installment isn't a mega-budget movie - this time it's a miniseries.   If Marvel is your thing, this is charismatic villain Loki played by Tom Hiddleston, getting his very own series, and it's streaming on Disney Plus.   The series is being directed by Kate Herron, who’s been one of Forbes’ 30 under 30, and described as a huge comedy voice in the years to come". She describes herself as ‘Your friendly neighbourhood dork’.  She’s a relative newcomer to the diecting scene, breaking through for her directing in the first season of Sex Education, and Kate's been speaking to Jack Tame. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kevin Milne's been pondering what the best fit for Air New Zealand's in-flight snacks might be.LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I’m not a fortune teller. I don’t have a five-year plan. I can’t tell you what I’ll eat for dinner tonight, let alone anything I’ll be doing in two years’ time.  But I can tell you right now with a very strong degree of confidence I will not be paying $21 to go to They Are Us, the film that apparently focuses on Jacinda Ardern’s response to the Christchurch massacre.    I have nothing personal against the filmmaker. Andrew Niccol has actually written or directed two of my all-time favourite films. I think The Truman Show is genius. I love Gattaca.  They Are Us, on the other hand, makes me squirm.  It’s not that I’m fundamentally opposed to a film about the events in Christchurch. I actually saw it as an inevitability. After all, we have a film about Aramoana. There’s a Hollywood film about the Anders Breivik massacre in Norway.  But if the production of this film had actually considered the meaning behind its title, They Are Us, we wouldn’t have seen so many people affected by the massacre respond in disgust.

This is new music from Crowded House, from their seventh studio album Dreamers are Waiting. It sees them reuniting with producer Mitchell Froom for the first time since 1991.  Estelle Clifford has been taking a listen and have Jack Tame her thoughts on the album.LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline BublitzThis is not just another novel about a dead girl.  When she arrived in New York on her 18th birthday carrying nothing but $600 cash and a stolen camera, Alice Lee was looking for a fresh start. Now, just one month later, she is the city's latest Jane Doe, an unidentified murder victim.  Ruby Jones is also trying to start over; she travelled halfway around the world only to find herself lonelier than ever. Until she finds Alice's body by the Hudson River.  From this first, devastating encounter, the two women form an unbreakable bond. Alice is sure that Ruby is the key to solving the mystery of her life - and death. And Ruby - struggling to forget what she saw that morning - finds herself unable to let Alice go. Not until she is given the ending she deserves.  Before You Knew My Name doesn't ask whodunnit. Instead, this powerful, hopeful novel asks: Who was she? And what did she leave behind? The answers might surprise you. The Missing Sister by Lucinda Riley  The s

Steven Dromgool offers some advice for women on what to look out for when dating men.LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.