Te Radar: Opinionist

Te Radar (Andrew J Lumsden) is an award winning satirist, documentary maker, writer, stage and screen director, and amateur historian.

He can currently be seen on TVNZ’s Radars’ Patch, screening on TV1, 7.00pm Sunday nights.

For those that wish to see him live he is currently touring a Eating the Dog, which celebrates his favorite people in New Zealand’s past; the misfits, the failures, and those who died trying. This show won the New Zealand Comedy Guild Award for Best Show in 2009, and also won Best Local Show at the 2009 NZ International Comedy Festival, and Best Comedy at the Dunedin Fringe Festival in April 2009.

At the 2009 New Zealand Comedy Festival he won the  FRED AWARD for Comedy Achievement.

At the end of 2008 he was awarded the New Zealand Comedy Guild’s prestigious “Kevin Smith Memorial Cup for Artistic Achievement“.

In 2008 he also starred in two top rating programmes screening on TV 1, Off the Radar, and Homegrown.

Off the Radar, which reached No 1 in the ratings, was a 13 part television series about sustainable living, for which he spent 10 months attempting to subsist off a small allocation of land. He has also published a book about the series, helpfully entitled Off the Radar.

Homegrown was a 7 part light-hearted documentary series investigating how produce has shaped New Zealand both culturally and economically.

He also returned to the US to film the second half of his yet to be completed film The Battle for Pahrump, the story of a small town in Nevada as it wrestles with the 2004 and 2008 US presidential campaigns.

The same year saw him appear in an episode of TVNZ’s Intrepid Journeys, where he traveled through Mali, surviving both a scorpion attack, and the dust of Timbuktu.

Over the past decade he has traveled extensively throughout New Zealand, Russia, Scandinavia, UK, and Canada, and he has filmed documentaries locally and in Australia, East Timor, Israel, Africa and The United States.

As well as performing comedy both locally and internationally he has worked for Radio New Zealand, The New Zealand Herald, TVNZ, Maori TV, TV3, Alt TV, Kiwi FM, and various other publications.

He is often asked to speak to Multinational Corporations, Local Businesses, Arts Organisations, Charities, Government Departments, and the New Zealand Military, and the All Blacks.

He has a passion for New Zealand history, and in 2005 was commissioned by the Christchurch Arts Festival, in conjunction with Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu, to write and perform Hitori, a history of the South Island. He also collaborated with Mike King on Welcome to King Country, a show about New Zealand’s history.

In 2006 he completed his 3rd series of the comedy B and B for Maori Television, and fronted the acclaimed series Hidden in the Numbers, 3 one-hour documentaries examining New Zealand through statistics, for TVNZ.

For several years he has been combining comedy with documentary making. For National Radio he created 2003’s Dispatches from the Provinces, followed in 2004 by Dispatches from the Holy Lands, a four part series about his travels through the Arab-Israeli conflict, where he became the last New Zealand journalist to interview Yassar Arafat.

A TV version of this, entitled War Tourist; Christmas in Bethlehem was screened on TV2 in December 2005.

He has twice won the Qantas Media Award (2005 and 2007) for Best Humour Column for his New Zealand Herald columns.

He was the 1998 recipient of the “Billy T” Award For Comedy Excellence.

His show Timor ODDyssey, which tells of his first attempts at pursuing a career as a war correspondent, was judged “Best Local Show” at the 2005 New Zealand International Comedy Festival. He was in fact nominated for that award twice that year, as the show From India with Love, which he co-wrote and directed was also one of the other 3 nominees. He had previously won the award in 2004 for Indian Invaders.

He has been a regular fixture on National Radio’s Nine to Noon each Friday for 3 1/2 years, providing a satirical review of the week that was, and was a regular for all 12 series of National Radio’s satirical quiz show Off The Wire.

His other Television credits include: Eating Media Lunch, At Least You Are Havin’ A Go, Pulp Comedy, Gather Round, Newsflash, Max TV’s The Sunday Night Guy, and the Fair Go “Millennium Special”.

He has directed a number of theatre shows including Whore to Culture, Welcome to King Country, and Dog.

He was the director and writer of The Journey, 2004’s 48 Hour Film Festival’s “Best Film”. In November 2004 he traveled to Nevada to film The Battle for Pahrump a look at one town’s struggle to help decide the next President of the United States.

He has traveled and performed comedy extensively throughout New Zealand and internationally, including the Edinburgh Fringe, where he was described by the influential Scotsman newspaper as “…the Bastard son of Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten and J.R.R.Tolkien…”

FOR THOSE WHO ARE INTERESTED THERE’S AN AWARDS LIST HERE…