Mark Sainsbury: 'My great ambition was to make the first Phantom movie'
A huge vintage comic collection, homemade apricot danishes and listening to Bloodhound Gang are some of the broadcaster's favourite things.
On weekends, Mark Sainsbury is kept busy playing the card game 500 with his nephew, hanging out with his two dogs and baking date scones or apricot danishes.
Every June, the 69-year-old fronts the annual Men's Health Week campaign, encouraging Kiwi men to take better care of their health. On this subject, he recommends the "fascinating" Netflix series Adolescence.
"It's really disturbing but almost compulsory viewing," he tells Culture 101.
Owen Cooper stars as Jaime in the Netflix show Adolescence.
Netflix
'My great ambition was to make the first Phantom movie'
The Phantom was the first fictional hero to wear a skintight costume.
The Phantom Gold Key Years: Vol. 1 / Hermes Press
New Zealand was "a bit of a cultural wasteland" when Sainsbury was growing up in the 1950s.
As a kid, he started collecting comics, especially The Phantom - a comic about the adventures of a costumed crime-fighter in the fictional African country that was first published in 1936 and ran as a newspaper comic strip for years in hundreds of international papers, including The Dominion.
At home, Sainsbury has a "library" of hundreds and hundreds of The Phantom comics - "One whole wall is just about full up.”
Although he got into The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Dope Comix in the 1970s, for Sainsbury, no other comic had the same appeal as his fearless purple-suited hero.
"Phantom doesn't have any superpowers. He hasn't got X-ray vision or can melt things. It's just the strength of 10 tigers.
"It's a little bit colonial. The Great White Protector is there looking over the poor, simple folk in the jungle. It was more the fact that [Phantom] was a real person [that I liked].
"My great ambition was to make the first Phantom movie. Someone else beat me to it, and it wasn't that good."
The Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan by William Dalrymple - 'He's a bit of a legend'
All of Scottish historian William Dalrymple's books are fantastic, Sainsbury says, but this one is relevant to our present-day geopolitical landscape in showing how a British invasion of Afghanistan went down almost two centuries ago.
"Did no one ever read this stuff? Does no one read history before they do things - like the Russians, the Americans, the British? No one looks at history. They go and make the same mistake.
"Everyone tried to invade Afghanistan. Go back and read about what happened in 1839 when the British sent thousands of troops into Afghanistan."
'Bad Touch' by Bloodhound Gang - 'It's got such a driving beat'
Recently, Sainsbury has been rediscovering some '90s bangers like this one by the Pennsylvania band Bloodhound Gang.
"It's got such a driving beat... I love playing in the car. It's simply pop, right? They were a comedy group, in some ways, Bloodhound Gang. We had twins, I think they were about 10 then, and they loved it."
Return of a King: Britain’s Imperial Disaster in Afghanistan was shortlisted for the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize.
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
