Nigel Latta's TV legacy: What the clinical psychologist taught us

The thing with parenting is that you don’t know how to do it. You can take your cues on what to do (and what not to do) from your own parents, but after that, you're largely on your own. For a generation of parents who wanted to do a better job at the hardest task they’d ever taken on, Nigel Latta was a spirit guide through this uncharted and often perilous journey.

As a clinical psychologist, Latta had survived interactions with criminals, murderers and psychopaths, which made him uniquely qualified in dealing with kids. Whether you were toilet training your toddler or stressing about your teen’s shenanigans at school, Latta was on hand to point the way forward with calming and comedic assurance, either on the telly in his excellent shows on the subject or on the page in the accompanying books.

Writer Deborah Hill Cone accurately described Latta as "a local phenomenon among parents who are sick of being bollocked by experts and just want someone to cut through all the psycho-babble", in her Herald on Sunday review of Latta’s 2011 show The Politically Incorrect Guide to Teenagers.

That show was the natural sequel to his earlier series, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Parenting, which helped to steer new parents through those magical, exhausting and utterly bewildering early years.

While the Politically Incorrect part of both titles was eye-roll-inducing and a fairly blatant attention grab, it mainly just allowed Latta to do things like crack jokes while discussing hair-pulling parenting problems or to cheekily use the common parent vernacular of “little shits” when describing misbehaving kids.

“Far from outraging us, however, Latta's main thrust is to advocate a return to good old-fashioned common sense and a policy of non-interference: sit back, take a deep breath,” TV reviewer Frances Grant wrote in a 2009 NZ Herald review of the show. “Stop taking it so seriously and have fun.”

Fun was at the core of both his message and delivery, which is why his style — “a cross between cheesy game show host and stand-up comedian,” noted Grant — resonated with so many. Parents may have wanted answers, but they didn’t want a lecture.

Latta’s pivot from exploring the minds of Aotearoa’s psycho killers in his breakthrough series, 2008’s Beyond the Darklands, to easing the minds of Aotearoa’s worried parents may have been a potentially credibility-destroying one, but with his dad jokes and calming tone, he made the transition not just work, but seem like the most natural career progression. For a few years, he seamlessly juggled both roles.

Perhaps the relaxed parenting attitude he endorsed shouldn’t have been surprising, considering in his student days he toured the South Island as part of the six-piece skiffle outfit, Gavin Thornton’s Steam Injected Band. You simply can’t be an uptight fellow and be in a band where the washboard is a pivotal instrument.

But Latta didn’t want to stop at just helping parents. He wanted to help Aotearoa. He tackled difficult societal issues like child abuse, alcohol, and suicide in 2014’s The Hard Stuff with Nigel Latta. “You can see the way it might change hearts and minds and – I really believe this – save lives,” critic Duncan Grieve wrote in The Spinoff.

In 2023, he warned people about hucksters and their devious and increasingly sophisticated methods in You’ve Been Scammed by Nigel Latta, which Spinoff critic Alex Casey punningly described as, “Entertaining, educational and jam-packed with a Latta scams”.

And, presumably, just for laughs, he blew stuff up in 2015’s Nigel Latta Blows Stuff Up, which Stuff’s Jimmy Ryan labelled “[One of] my highlights on the small screen for the year.”.

Latta went to Antarctica (On Thin Ice), he demystified money matters (Mind Over Money), he took on Big Sugar (Is Sugar the New Fat), and he tried to help you be the best you that you could be (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Grown-Ups).

His shows covered a wildly diverse range of topics — indeed, half the fun of a new series announcement was finding out exactly what had sparked his interest this time — but all were praised for his engaging and relatable manner and their high production values. Even still, it's his work as a guiding light to Aotearoa’s frazzled parents that is most cherished.

“He was good for giving parents confidence and to seek to understand why things were difficult with kids and get to the source of the tension,” wrote one Reddit user in a thread mourning yesterday’s sad news of Latta’s passing. Another simply wrote, “We are all better off for hearing what he had to say.”

What Nigel Latta had to say was incredibly simple. The final words in his last book, Lessons on Living, which was released the day he died, read “There is only one metric that really matters when we measure ourselves against the way we’ve chosen to live our lives,” he wrote: "In the end… there is only love.”

*Karl Puschmann is a freelance journalist who writes about television and film at screencrack.substack.com