Born to a Polish Holocaust survivor father and a 1950s Kiwi tradwife too busy to police her viewing, Diana Wichtel cut her teeth on the Golden Age of television.

But in the 1960s, things fell apart. Diana’s fractured family left Canada and blew in to New Zealand, just missing the Beatles, and minus a father.

Diana watched television and was born again half a world away, and 20 years later walked into the smoky, clacking offices of the Listener where she became the country’s foremost television critic — loved and loathed, with the hate mail in seething capital letters to prove it.

Meanwhile, television’s sometimespale imitation — her real life — was beginning to unreel.

The award-winning reviewer and best-selling author of Driving to Treblinka joins Finlay Macdonald to discuss her brilliantly funny and achingly nostalgic Ockham NZ Book Awards longlisted memoir of a life spent watching and writing.