Alma Evans-Freke
Alma Johnson (born 30 October 1931) is a New Zealand television personality, actor, producer, teacher and adjudicator of speech and drama and public speaking. She first joined broadcasting in the late 1940s at Dunedin's 4ZB as a trainee copywriter. A few years later she took up a government bursary to study drama in London. This was followed by professional theatre and teaching. In 1960 she rejoined broadcasting and was transferred to Auckland as New Zealand's first female television presenter, then known as a continuity announcer, on Auckland channel AKTV2.
AKTV2 had been launched in June 1960, initially broadcasting for three hours a night, three nights a week. Alma began her appearance from August. She worked alongside fellow presenter, former Royal Air Force pilot Tim Evans-Freke, whom she later married.[1] With her immaculate presentation and chic hairstyle, Alma became an icon of the early days of New Zealand television.
Being the only female presenter for the first nine months of television, Alma fronted a range of shows which included ballroom dancing programmes, children's programmes and The Victorian Music Hall.
In an interview with New Zealand Listener magazine in 2010, marking 50 years of television in New Zealand, Alma recalled those days in typically understated fashion:
Did being on television, in people’s living rooms each night, make you famous? "No, not at all. Television announcing to me was never more than just a job. We were public servants and it never occurred to any of us at the time to think of ourselves as personalities or, heaven forbid, stars.".
Those early television newsreaders sounded as if they had just come out of a BBC finishing school. Was that how you were asked to talk? "Everything was live back then so nothing was recorded. So I am pretty thankful there were no recordings kept because we would have sounded rather too precious. We were told to speak rather nicely. I think probably we were a bit stiff".
And in 2000, in a television special commemorating 40 years of television in New Zealand, Alma had also recalled the first commercial spots from 1961, that went something like "the time is eight o'clock. Time for a banana."
She later appeared on children's television with Chic Littlewood (and a variety of badly behaved puppets).
In addition to her television work, Alma is a highly qualified and highly respected member of New Zealand’s speech and drama community, with an extensive teaching career both in secondary schools and privately. With over 60 years’ teaching experience, she has been for many years an Examiner for the New Zealand Speech Board, and continues to adjudicate at competition festivals throughout the country.