With a voice made for radio, Wendy Herbert talks a rapid-fire mile a minute. Having just landed a job presenting the Metro Plus breakfast show every weekday morning, she's happily resigned to the fact that her daily commute will begin with the 4.20am ferry from Discovery Bay to make the 7am-10am slot. 'I'd been reading the news on breakfast there since November - but it takes too much effort for me to stay serious for five minutes at a time,' says the 34-year-old.
For the New Zealand-born, ex- Sydneysider, it comes at the end of a battling 12 months. The radio personality arrived in Hong Kong with her husband to discover a city that was Sars-struck and virtually shut down. 'Everything just went [throws her hands up in the air] didn't it?
'I'm from a background of commercial radio in Australia, and so coming to Hong Kong was a bit of a shock in that respect. You've got a government-controlled broadcaster and then very little else as far as English-language radio is concerned. When I first arrived here I looked at the radio landscape and realised that I'd need to have something else up my sleeve.'
Luckily she did. Together with her degree in broadcasting from the Australian Television and Radio School, Herbert is a certified theatre sports trainer. She has competed internationally and at the Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney, regarded as Australia's home of improvisational stage capers. 'So I started flogging my wares teaching theatre sports in the local international schools, and then last Christmas I ended up in pantomime.
'At first I thought, here we go - amateur dramatics for my sins - but they painted my teeth black and it was fun,' she says of her role as a broker's assistant in the Hong Kong Players' version of Cinderella. While being busy teaching workshops at various international schools, she will also hold a session on February 15 with the Hong Kong Players at the Singapore Industrial Building, Tai Yip Street, Ngau Tau Kok. For those unfamiliar with theatre sports, think Whose Line Is It Anyway?, where performers make it up on the spot.
'It's taken me a whole year to really get to a place where I'm now happy,' she says with an air of relief. Herbert is also aware, however, that the concept of English-language radio in Hong Kong is quite different to what she is used to. 'There's still a real divide here,' she says. 'I would really like to see an English-based radio programme that isn't afraid of being in Hong Kong. I don't mean a Euro- or Antipodean-centric show - not the sort of thing that pretends we're in a different city. I just want to see something English-language that isn't purely associated with expatriates - have a local show whose only difference is that it's in English. Chinese people speak in English, Indians speak in English, Filipinos speak in English - it doesn't have to be such a narrow kind of market. People say, 'Oh, but there's only so many expatriates'. But what about everyone else?'