Former P-popping gay newsreader Darren McDonald has swapped his anchoring skills for what sounds like the lead role in a bizarre real-life 70's-tinged sitcom. Following a four-month home detention sentence for drugs charges, McDonald is putting his life back together in what is described in the Sunday Star-Times as a humble, pink, $180-a-week house in the sleepy south Auckland beach town of Clark's Beach, near Papakura, where he lives with pet parrot Digger, where he returns after a hard day's work at a local fish farm. All the locals know him and he's helping host the Waiau Pa Hockey Club quiz this weekend. But what good is any 70's-style sitcom without a moral to every story? Pukekohe constable Glynn Yern, whom McDonald met after a comical misunderstanding involving missing yucca trees, has asked McDonald to lecture the community on the perils of P. "I will tell kids, just don't do it (drugs)," McDonald says. "It's more than life destroying - it's soul destroying. You lose who you really are." McDonald is also working on a film script for children involving intelligent dinosaurs, one of whom has a stutter. Perhaps McDonald doesn't realise he has more than enough material already in his own life to fill any American network's fall line-up?