John Oliver wishes he'd covered the "unruly tourists" story

Last Week Tonight host John Oliver has revealed that he wishes his show hadn't been on a hiatus during the "unruly tourists" saga in New Zealand.

As he prepares to start the sixth season of his HBO show, he admitted the nature of the programme, which airs weekly in the US on Sunday evenings, means he's always "late to everything".

The show has been on a break for four months now and, with so much political news coverage happening in the US, the thing he wishes he'd covered is nothing to do with Donald Trump.

At a breakfast with media in New York on Monday, Oliver was asked about the news that caught his attention during the break.

"The really honest answer to that is, there was a story about a British family terrorising New Zealand, did you hear about that?," he said.

"There was a British family of tourists terrorising New Zealand, and [executive producer] Tim Carvell and I were emailing back and forth, going, 'actually, I wish we were back at work.' But all the other stuff that wasn't that? No, we were more than happy [to skip it].

"We had a couple of weeks off over the holidays, but otherwise, we've been working the whole time, researching stories, so there's been nothing in particular that really felt painful that we weren't on TV for, other than the barbaric British family in New Zealand," he added.

"It's really worth looking up, it's pretty amazing. I genuinely was disappointed that we weren't around to show people what was happening there."

The sixth season of Last Week Tonight premieres on HBO on February 17.

This article was first published on nzherald.co.nz and is republished here with permission.