Simon Barnett rejoins More FM: ‘I want to find joy again in my life’
Saturday, 18 January 2025
It’s been just more than a year since Simon Barnett’s wife Jodi died from brain cancer. In the months since, the TV and radio star has been grieving, looking back on their life together. Now though, he tells Bridget Jones, he is ready to start moving forward.
It doesn’t take long for Simon Barnett to tell me how he met his wife. About 90 seconds, give or take, to remember that day, 35 years ago, at Les Mills. A Jazzergetics class. He spotted Jodi across the room. After that, the mood of every workout was dictated by whether he spotted her “ugly orange tracksuit” nearby.
The story of how they fell in love though, is far more cosmic. Long story short, Barnett says (having already confessed he’s not one for getting quickly to the point), he was filming What Now? at Mt Hutt and Jodi was testing her ski legs, which were not great as it turned out. Barnett swooped in when she fell off the ski lift, fibbing a little about his snowy prowess. He’d seen her at the gym, he said, before asking, did she need a hand.
“She said yes, and we literally just fell in love.”
The story is perfect, though perhaps it’s an unusual answer to my first question: how are you feeling about returning to breakfast radio? But, over coffee – two long blacks for him, complemented by the finest manners you might ever witness – it’s a version of a story Barnett tells again and again; his marriage to Jodi a golden thread that has stitched together everything he has done for almost 40 years, and one that will continue to weave through the next chapter, even though Jodi won’t be there to see what comes around each new corner.
Jodi Barnett died in October 2023, almost six years after being diagnosed with brain cancer. Just 61, she had undergone years of gruelling treatment, surgeries, radiation and chemotherapy after suffering a seizure at home in 2018. Eventually, she lost her speech and was unable to move on her own. For all of that time, her husband was her main caregiver, with the support of the couple’s four grown daughters, Samantha, Sophie, Isabella and Lily.
Her death was, in part, the catalyst for this new-old job we’re discussing. On Monday, he returns to More FM where he worked for 20 years, before leaving in 2018 after Jodi became unwell.
Honestly, there is little need to explain who and what Simon Barnett is, but for the sake of it: the former head boy of Ashburton College has been in broadcasting since he was 17. He hosted What Now? – with Cath McPherson – for four years, before leaving at the end of 1992 to focus on his radio career. More TV came, of course: Face the Music, Clash of the Codes, a season on Wheel of Fortune alongside Lana Coc-Kroft. He hosted Mitre 10 Dream Home in a post-earthquake Christchurch. He almost won Celebrity Treasure Island in 2004. He did win Dancing with the Stars almost 10 years later.
He stepped away from the regular TV work in the mid-2000s to focus on his children, but all the while he was a staple on the airwaves, from ZM to More FM with Phil Gifford. Until Jodi got sick. “My life changed so dramatically in the space of one almighty seizure and diagnosis,” he says of those nightmare days in 2018.
Before the cancer, Barnett had already confirmed a new job – afternoon talkback host on Newstalk ZB. He enjoyed it, but after Jodi’s death, needed something talkback wasn’t giving him – or maybe was giving too much of.
“I never saw myself as a particularly good talkback host,” Barnett says. “Thankfully, this sounds really immodest, but the ratings were really good. We got to number one in Auckland for the first time in that show. I think what we were doing was working.”
As he puts it though, to succeed, you need to “breathe the news… but you’re reading it with the idea ‘I’ve got to know this, I’ve got to understand it’.
“I’d built my career on making mistakes – people going, oh no he’s done it again – but on ZB, if you [get] something wrong, if you get the OCR wrong, the phones light up: ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about you drop kick’… it was a lot.”
Then, there were the pressures at home, although Barnett will probably baulk at that description. He hosted the show from a studio in his garage and cared for Jodi, who was becoming more and more unwell. He says he never found it demanding – “I looked at her and thought, how can I moan about anything?” – but admits part of his decision to return to breakfast radio was to reshape some of the memories he formed during that time.
“There was probably a little bit of PTSD,” he says. “There were times I would have to take Jodi to the bathroom. I’d have the news at 2pm, and I’d have until seven [minutes] past where I’d have to talk again. I’d race out – Jodi couldn’t move – I’d put her in the chair, take her down, there were a couple of times she would have had a seizure… and I’d have to race back to the garage, jump back on air. The worst part wasn’t the work, it was seeing Jods.
“I kind of wanted to leave that stage and just laugh again.”
He has a “15-year-old schoolboy” sense of humour, one that can maybe go a bit too far, leaving his wife or kids to rein him back in. He’s looking forward to exploring that part of himself again.
There is a daily grind that comes with breakfast radio – 4.30am alarms, lots of work and preparation – but Barnett calls himself an optimist (and a people-pleaser and an introvert, who suffers terrible stage fright that has limited many decisions around work in the past); he looks at every day and thinks, “what can it bring?”
“The world is very combative at the moment, and there’s a lot of angst and a lot of sadness. And I’ve really walked that journey for six years. But the thing in the sadness, is when you find the moment of joy, you really celebrate that.
“This is a very intentional decision on my part, I want to find joy again in my life… My job is to try and make people’s lives better.”
It’s what he loves about children, he says. His career started on kids’ TV, he and Jodi had babies during his early days on radio, and now he has five grandkids. They call him The Chief.
“I’ve got a little 3-year-old granddaughter, and every day she gets up and comes into the lounge and she’s like, ‘What? I get to play on that slide? I get to go outside?’ She’s done that every day for a week. But [children] are like puppies, and I want to engage in that. I want to be a puppy, I want to get outside and play on the grass.”
Breakfast radio will be that playground, but for Barnett, More FM is also “home”. Retiring – once a longed-for opportunity for him and Jodi to put their feet up and travel the world – is no longer something he’s looking forward to, or wants. At 58, he says he has realised he needs to work, wants to work. His mum had “a 9 to 5 job” until she was 73. His dad, 87, is still farming. Work, these days, is good for Barnett’s mental health, a purpose, when sometimes that feels far away.
And his home must feel a little different now, I venture. “Yes, you’re very astute, because there’s no one there.”
We talk more about Jodi. She was Barnett’s biggest cheerleader, a calming voice when he needed guidance. More than anything, Jodi was his best friend.
He remembers their drives from Christchurch to the family bach in Queenstown. They would start talking the moment they left the driveway, and six hours later would still be “yacking”.
“I would have the thought, even then, how lucky am I? I could talk for another six hours. And there was 35 years of that. I realise what a privilege that is and I’m learning to be incredibly grateful. I’ve lost her far too early. I still see myself as middle-aged and I feel like I’ve almost got another half to go and it feels a bit empty right now.”
We are speaking before Christmas, a few months after the first anniversary of Jodi’s death. “People say the first anniversary is the hardest, but every day is hard,” Barnett says, after describing the past year as “unbridled agony” through tears.
“People say time heals, but I don’t actually know if it does. I think it’s just that the grief comes in waves and it’s not just solid. I read a book that said that when you’ve been through great loss, it’s not that you get over it but you learn to walk with a limp. And I guess that’s how I feel. I’ll forever walk with a slight limp, a pebble in my shoe. And you just learn to adjust.”
Of course he’s had well-meaning people tell him he’ll meet “someone new someday”. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t, he says. But it’s not the company or companionship he misses.
“I’ve got company, I’ve got my kids and my grandkids, but I miss her. Jodi was my home.”
He tells me how each night before bed, he used to spray her perfume on the bedspread. Now, he simply kisses her photo goodnight. “It sounds stupid,” he justifies, shyly.
“That’s a really big adjustment, going to bed on your own, waking up on your own. Again, it’s not that I yearn to have just someone in my bed, I yearn to have her. And I know that can’t happen.”
Barnett is worried this might sound too dark, too sad. He talks about times, both when Jodi was sick and after she was gone, it felt like too much.
“When she passed away, for six months I’d literally pray that God would stop my heart and I would be with her, every night.”
He knows how that sounds, but says he didn’t feel depressed and spoke about it openly with his family. “I’d had a good life, and just wanted to be with her.
“Now, I think there has been a change. I really don’t want to die now, I want to be with my kids.”
He’s seen a counsellor, which has helped him reframe some things, and calls himself “a work in progress”.
He’s a hands-on granddad and dad. He works out in his home gym every day, which helps mentally as well. The world is slowly opening up to him again. The day before we met, Barnett got on a plane for the first time in six years, after choosing not to leave Jodi’s side while she was sick.
“Going to the airport, chatting to the person next to me, all of that is new to me. I don’t really like it!” he says, laughing.
“I never did the parties [when I was young], not that I was judgey; it looked like a lot of fun but I was just happy being at home, putting on my lounge pants with a glass of wine.
“So I didn’t want that before, but if you choose not to do that now, then you really are at home alone – and that’s not good for anybody.”
Any fear of death he might have had is gone now, replaced by a need to live with a lot of purpose, a lot of hope and some joy. He has spoken often of the role Christianity plays in his family’s life, but how does someone’s relationship with faith change after the things he has experienced?
“Faith is not just in good times. You ask me how my faith is, my faith is rock solid. My kids’ faith is rock solid. I believe Jodi is in heaven and I believe I will be with her again and that gives me great hope, peace and comfort,” he says.
“But it doesn’t mean I’m not lonely. It doesn’t mean I haven’t said to God, why of all the people in the world, would you touch that beautiful soul? Why would you allow that to happen? I don’t believe for a second that God did it to her, but I do believe he allowed it. And I can’t work that out. But I have faith.”
He has lost a feeling of protection, what he calls a “childlike faith” nothing bad could happen to his family. And that’s the “hard journey”.
“I’m scared that if something bad happens again, it might tip me over the edge. You can see why I need breakfast radio again – to give me a laugh!”
He tuned in to listen to his new radio home as he drove back to Les Mills early one morning late last year and was filled with excitement and anticipation.
“There’s this lovely sense of a city coming to life with breakfast radio. The city is waking up and you are a part of it… You play a song, you get pumped up, you look out the window and see people smiling because they are listening to whatever radio station, and you think I’m part of their day. I find it a privilege.”
So yes, things with Barnett can feel dark. But there is also a sense of radical optimism that radiates from him.
He seems to find the bright spots in places others choose not to look. Moments of joy, in a recent life that has been overshadowed by loss and pain. And a new-found sense of self-reliance.
“Each day is a new day that holds tremendous possibilities,” he says. “What I do have to find, within myself, is a sense of happiness and fulfilment and joy and – sorry to bang on about my wife, but she was super wise.
“She said we need to really enjoy the extraordinary ordinary life. And I’ve realised that is something really worth celebrating.
“That’s what I’m really learning to do.”
*CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story included radio co-hosts who are no longer part of Barnett’s new show. His co-host is Lana Searle. (Amended Tuesday January 21, 2025 1.29pm)