The comedian, broadcaster and host of Queer Aotearoa: We’ve Always Been Here takes us through his life in television.
Eli Matthewson first appeared on our screens on the legendary but short-lived youth channel TVNZ U in 2013, and has since gone on to be a mainstay in the local comedy and television scene. Not only has he written for shows like Have You Been Paying Attention and Golden Boy, but he’s also performed in everything from Jono and Ben and Funny Girls to Celebrity Treasure Island and Dancing with the Stars NZ. As well as being a regular on 7 Days, Matthewson has also been a breakfast radio host on The Edge, hosts The Male Gayz podcast with friend and comedian Chris Parker, and was most recently a presenter on Paddy Gower’s Got Issues.
His latest project is Queer Aotearoa: We’ve Always Been Here, a groundbreaking new documentary series about Aotearoa’s queer history. Matthewson is the presenter of the six-part series, which uses extensive archival footage and personal stories to show how the New Zealand LGTBQIA+ community has fought for equality and against discrimination over the past 75 years. As he says in the trailer: “our queer history is filled with incredible stories of courage, resilience and love – stories that deserve to be told.”
It’s an insightful and thoughtful series, and Matthewson was thrilled to be involved with a show that makes an active effort to preserve the queer history of Aotearoa. He also believes the series is both a testament to how far New Zealand has come, and a warning around how much more work there is to do. “I hope this documentary reminds people that it’s not like, ‘oh, things were hard and now, isn’t it amazing?’ Because that’s not what it is,” he says. “Things are incredibly hard, maybe harder than they’ve ever been, for certain parts of the queer population.”
As Queer Aotearoa: We’ve Always Been Here drops on TVNZ+, we chatted with Eli about his life in television, including the chaos of U Live, the thrill of Dancing with the Stars NZ, and his enduring love for quiz shows.
My earliest TV memory is… When I was five or six my bedtime was extended from 8pm to 8.30pm on Monday nights, because Lois and Clark was on TV2. That show was so beloved by my whole family. My other TV memory is of the 1992 Olympics. I must have been three or four, and apparently I got obsessed with one gymnast. Every time she was competing, I would walk towards the TV and call her “my little girl”.
The TV show I used to rush home from school to watch was… WNTV, What Now in the afternoons. I was a huge fan of Carolyn Taylor, and the cartoon that I loved the most was Fairly Odd Parents. It used to crack me up.
My earliest TV crush was… Jesse Metcalfe in Desperate Housewives. He was Eva Longoria’s character’s gardener who she had an affair with. I used to watch that with my sisters and my father and be like “I love this show”. He wasn’t really in season two and I also dropped off, because the shirtless gardener was no longer doing the gardening.
The TV moment that haunts me is… On the last ever episode of U Late, which we used to record in the foyer of TVNZ, everyone was drinking and I went on TV drunk. I used to do a segment called “That’s So Gay” and I would do five minutes about big news in the gay world. I remember I said something so obscene about a conservative politician. Ruth Wynn Williams was there, and as soon as it was over she was like, “you are so lucky that no one watches this.”
The TV ad I can’t stop thinking about is… The Mentos ad with the nipples. He eats the gum and then his nipples grow really long. I’m pretty sure there was a 3D billboard that went along with it as well. It was so fresh, I guess, that his nipples got so pointy.
My TV guilty pleasure is… I love all the quiz shows. I feel guilty if I do the double and see both episodes of The Chase in one day, which happened a lot during Covid-19. It’s two hours of your day, which is such a high percentage. I also watch Tipping Point and over New Years I got into Tenable as well. I can sit down and watch quiz shows until the cows come home.
My favourite TV moment from my own career is… Definitely my first episode of Dancing with the Stars NZ. I have never felt such fear and joy. My heart was racing before we did it, because I knew that was going to be the most-viewed thing I’d ever done. In the seconds beforehand, you go over this 90 second routine so many times, but you still know that you could fluff it up. To then finish it and not have fluffed it, I was so emotional. I was also trying to crack as many jokes as I could every time the microphone was on me. I think I got a really good joke about being a top or a bottom, right on this family show. So I was like, “OK, good dance, emotional dance, gossip, people crying, made a funny joke. This is it.”
My favourite TV character of all time is… Jenna Moroney from 30 Rock. Exactly the kind of comedy that I like and endlessly, endlessly funny. I like a person with a huge ego, constantly saying the worst things.
The most stylish person on television is… Abbey Howells. Especially picking her Taskmaster NZ outfit, you’ve got to wear it for 10 episodes and she nailed it. She dresses well on TV, but she dresses just as well every time I see her [in real life]. She’s always got incredible fits.
The favourite TV project I’ve ever been involved with is… U Late. I wasn’t even an actual host. I was a host on the afternoon show, but we were all in our early 20s, mucking about and hanging around at TVNZ, and I was like, “oh sure, I’ll stick around till 10pm and then come on”. We were allowed to do whatever we wanted. The freedom was amazing, and we were earning almost no money. It was all the excitement of TV without any of the pressure, because people weren’t really checking up on us. All sorts of things would happen. I remember once a band showing up for an interview, and we’d got the day wrong and we hadn’t done any prep. I didn’t know what their names were. There were all sorts of chaotic, incredible moments.
The TV show I wished I was involved with is… Living the Dream. It was an incredible show. It was so funny, so camp, the way they would eliminate people by smashing the plates. Years later I met some of the actors who was on it – who obviously have all these credits they’re so proud of – but the only thing I could ever talk about was “you were on Living the Dream! I loved that show!”
My most watched TV show of all time is… Ru Paul’s Drag Race. If me and my partner are doing something and we need TV on in the background, we’ll just pick a random episode. Since 2016, I’ve been watching all the seasons as they come out, and the language that has infused in me from that show is pretty crazy.
The TV show I will recommend to anyone is… I’m really pushing The Traitors UK to everyone I meet. It’s unreal. Like every other reality show, the bit I enjoy the most is the social gameplay. I love to watch people lie. I would go on it in a heartbeat. But I’d be bad, I get too excited by it. There’s a clip of me and Rose [Matafeo] in Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee where I betray her, and you can see it on my face, I’m so excited. I don’t think I could hold it for a while. I would only want to be a traitor – I’d be so instantly bored if I was a faithful.
My most controversial TV opinion is… We need more reality TV. The way that it reflects our society back to us, especially in New Zealand, is crucial. It’s understandable that it doesn’t get government funding, but the significance of these shows is that they’re one of the few things that really holds us together, that we have a national conversation about. When Dancing with the Stars is on, when Celebrity Treasure Island is on, it’s water cooler conversation. It makes me sad to think about viewers finding all these small things that they’re all watching separately. It’s nice to have a collective thing that we all hone in on, and that’s usually a reality television show.
The show I’ll never watch, no matter how many people tell me to is… The Wire. I don’t really know what it’s about, but I know by reputation that it’s one of the best shows of all time. I am watching Game of Thrones, which I didn’t watch at the time. I’m watching it one episode a week, but I feel like the distance between me and The Wire is too great to ever go back.
The last thing I watched on TV was… Every Monday morning, I watch the latest Saturday Night Live episode on YouTube. I have a lot of feelings about Dave Chappelle, but I actually thought his monologue was really good, even though it was 17 minutes, the longest monologue in SNL history. And then Sarah Sherman played Nosferatu, which was exceptional.
Queer Aotearoa: We’ve Always Been Here streams on TVNZ+ from February 1.