What Was I Thinking: A Memoir

by Paul Henry

  Within seconds the mood on the boat changed. The children wanted to stop and have a swim in the channel so of course I said yes.

  ‘I’m going to make you all certificates, because you survived this amazing journey,’ I told them. And when I got home, I did. When it was time to turn around and head back, I made the journey while they were asleep, and they woke up as we were going into Wellington Heads.

  Today, Lucy is a nurse. That was something she found for herself and she is spectacular at it. Sophie is having her gap years and deciding what she wants to do. And Bella is spending an exchange year in America.

  Ultimately, of course, the marriage didn’t last. Rachael changed a little bit and I changed a lot. Her changes were consistent with the family staying together, mine were not.

  I regret a lot of what happened then, but you can’t go back and change it. People say you can’t live with regret. Actually, you do, every day. But there’s nothing to be gained from immersing yourself in it.

  At the time it’s going bad, you don’t imagine there are alternatives to ending a relationship, when, of course, there are. You also don’t imagine that it’s damaging, when, of course, it is. You kid yourself into believing that leaving is going to be okay and the family will be different but not worse. That’s bullshit. History will tell you, if you look at people you know who have done it, that it’s always a disaster, but you still think you can manage it.

  When it became obvious that it was broken down completely and I wasn’t living there and was probably not going to live there, there was a time when the children distanced themselves from me, and that was really, really hard. I sometimes wonder, even though I consider I have brilliant relationships with them all now, if they’ve entirely come back. Is my relationship with them now as good as it would have been if things were different?

  I like to think I handled the separation, as far as the girls were concerned, better than my parents did with me. Rachael and I both wanted the best for the children, but it’s easy to say that when you are the person who has wronged someone else. For the person who has been wronged, it’s a lot harder to put on a brave face for the sake of the children. Rachael was extraordinarily mature about it.

  When it came time to make a settlement, we didn’t surround ourselves with lawyers and make them rich. We were both very clear that essentially what we were doing was juggling the children’s money. We didn’t throw their money away.

  The split up was almost entirely my fault. I could have done a million things differently but whether or not that would have kept the family together I don’t know.

  When it happened, it was hard knowing that I had taken something away from all of us — that dream that so many people have of the perfect family unit, which had been our reality for a while. You console yourself with the idea that it’s better to split up than stay in a bad marriage, but I wasn’t in a bad marriage.

  So I am left with regrets that I handled things the way I handled them. My family deserved better; I can console myself by thinking it could have been worse, but they did deserve better. I was capable of giving them better, but I didn’t.

  I’ve never lived with anyone else before or after my marriage. I’ve always been a loner. I don’t know what is satisfying about coming home to a big house and sitting down and looking at furniture, but I find it satisfying. When I buy a house, I need to get one that is good for entertaining, knowing that, quite possibly, not a soul will ever come through its doors.

  It’s possible I don’t belong in a normal relationship. My father’s mother had said to my mother, ‘Brian isn’t the marrying kind.’ Maybe there’s quite a bit of that about me, but I need to be careful that I’m not saying that to excuse where I’ve ended up.

  I am where I am because that’s where I want to be. Sometimes I step back and notice what a pathetic spectacle I make sitting in my mansion, flicking through a magazine and half-watching the Living Channel. Then I might flick over to CNN for a bit. But I always end up back on the Living Channel. I wish I knew what it is that’s so fascinating about watching morons deciding whether or not to buy a castle in Spain.

  “THE IDEA WAS THAT I WOULD BE THE RIGHT-WING CURMUDGEON AND PAM, THE FORMER ALLIANCE MP, WOULD BE THE LIBERAL LOON. I THOUGHT IT WAS A BRILLIANT IDEA BECAUSE I WAS ALWAYS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING NEW TO TRY, SO IT WAS THE NEXT CHALLENGE. PEOPLE DIDN’T REALLY UNDERSTAND IT. IN FACT THEY OFTEN COULDN’T UNDERSTAND IT BECAUSE PAM AND I ENTERTAINED EACH OTHER SO MUCH WE SPENT A LOT OF OUR TIME LAUGHING.”

  * * *

  FOR ABOUT TWO YEARS I was a guinea pig in a broadcasting experiment on Radio Pacific’s breakfast slot called The Morning Grill. That slot seldom stayed the same for long, as various hosts and combinations were tried.

  I had been doing nine till noon at Pacific in Auckland when Pam Corkery was doing breakfast on her own, and I used to come into the studio near the end of her show and we had reasonably amusing on-air conversations. This gave someone the idea that perhaps this could be stretched out for a whole show. The idea was that I would be the right-wing curmudgeon and Pam, the former Alliance MP, would be the liberal loon. I thought it was a brilliant idea because I was always looking for something new to try, so it was the next challenge.

  People didn’t really understand it. In fact they often couldn’t understand it because Pam and I entertained each other so much we spent a lot of our time laughing. One of our priorities for a news story was whether or not it made us laugh. For some reason we found anything to do with kiwifruit hilarious.

  She said things that made me laugh, I said things that made her laugh and her laughing made me laugh more. Sometimes it was uncontrollable, and we knew it was uncontrollable and that it had got to the point where it couldn’t possibly be entertaining. But we couldn’t stop and tears were pouring from our eyes.

  Often people tuned in to the sound of our laughing, listened briefly to our laughter and then, probably in pursuit of something that came closer to a traditional definition of news, tuned out again.

  Occasionally we behaved like the mature broadcasters we weren’t, but a fundamental problem was that the show was ahead of its time. No one had experimented with two hosts in this way, unless you count National Radio’s Morning Report, which of course, I don’t. It was also stressful because we are quite inconsistent in our views. She never knew exactly which way I would go on something and I never knew exactly which way she would go on something. The only real difference in our political beliefs on social issues was how you funded it. We basically wanted the same things, we just disagreed on how you achieved the funding for them.

  She was very liberal until she lost patience with someone and I just automatically lost patience with people. It was the intolerant meeting the intolerant.

  Some of the things I hate

  1. Other drivers.

  2. Subtitled movies. Just get a book.

  3. Op shops. I find clothes impregnated with the skin of dead people very unappealing. Op shops smell like morgues.

  4. Plumbing that doesn’t work (prevalent in many European and African countries). If you’re going to the trouble of piping it in, make sure its functioning. It’s better to live in a dung hut than a palace with overflowing toilets.

  5. Public holiday surcharges. If you can’t afford to pay your staff, don’t have any.

  6. Pious businesses that have decided you can carry a handful of tiny little items home without the convenience of a plastic bag. Why don’t you just shut your businesses down and become environmental campaigners?

  7. Forced donations. If it’s forced it’s not a donation, it’s a tax.

  8. Councils. They’re just arse.

  These are a few of my favourite things

  1. My Napier bach. After a lifetime of trying to surround myself with opulence and wealth, I love this hokey sixties bach next to the ocean just north of Napier. It’s in a street that time forgot, Colleen on one side, Paul on the other and the Hopkinses down the road are the best people, and bei
ng there brings me perilously close to relaxing.

  2. Concrete. Prepared properly it will seldom, if ever, let you down.

  3. Candles. In a male, a possible homosexual flag.

  4. Furniture. I love thinking about, talking about and buying furniture. I know, another warning flag.

  5. Flags/flagpoles.

  6. Gardens. Jesus is my gardener, he selects the plants that will flourish in my garden and cares for them; the rest, I cover in concrete.

  7. Boats. The constant threat of death appeals to me. I could talk about boats until you slip into a coma.

  8. Plinths. If it’s worth buying, it’s worth displaying. This book is a sort of plinth to my memories.

  9. Low-wattage light bulbs and lots of them. If you can read this with ease, your wattage could well be too high.

  We were seriously under-resourced. For some time we didn’t even have a producer and had to set up all our own interviews, which is a time-and energy-consuming process that means you have to work intensively at both ends of the day, which affects your performance.

  Management thinking was that with two hosts we only had to work half as hard. But look who the hosts were! In reality we had to work twice as hard.

  They did find money to put pictures of us on the backs of buses. I was entranced by this. I had never experienced anything like it. Whenever I saw myself on the back of a bus I stopped and stared. My father made one of his spontaneous visits while these were around.

  ‘I was driving down Khyber Pass behind a bus with an enormous picture of you on it,’ he said. ‘I’ve done a lot of things in my life but I’ve never been plastered on a bus.’ That acknowledgement was as close as he ever got to showing me he might be proud. He died not long after, at the end of 2001.

  Our ratings weren’t great but they weren’t falling and we hadn’t taken over from a ratings winner. We were always going to be lagging behind the news monolith that is Newstalk ZB, with whom we were in direct competition. In radio, when you do something different, it can take years for the audience to get it and come along with you. When folksy old 1ZB became Newstalk it was an abysmal failure to start with and it took enormous courage for them to persist with the change of format. Now it has been at the top of the Auckland radio market for years.

  In our case it was obviously going to be some time before the nation took a pair as raucous and contentious as we were to their hearts, lovable though we thought we were. And even longer before our remuneration became commensurate with our talents.

  Pam is one of the kindest people I know. In fact she is almost as nice as Arch Tambakis was vile. She is an absolute perfectionist up to the point where she says, ‘Fuck it. I don’t want to do it anymore.’ She was operating at a much higher level than anyone else at Radio Pacific. She is a world-class broadcaster but she didn’t have world-class support. In the States she would have been paid an absolute fortune and have a cult following. She would have been picked up for work every day in a chauffeur-driven limousine.

  It was hard for us because we weren’t really that different under the skin. In the end we did a lot of things simultaneously. We were complementary when it came to knowledge — each of us knew lots about things that the other one didn’t. We’re both intelligent and capable people with short attention spans.

  To start with, I thought she was magnificently informed on everything but I soon realised she was magnificently informed on something if she was interested in it. I envy people who can read the way she read. She was amazed that I knew nothing at all about certain things. If we were doing something on international affairs, which I was interested in, I knew all about it and found it inconceivable that Pam didn’t. Equally, it was inconceivable to her that I wasn’t interested in reading the new book by someone we had coming in on Wednesday.

  The amount we were paid was a constant source of irritation to Pam. I was quite happy to ride along on her coat tails when she went in to fight for more money. This was usually after a show, so we would both be dead tired. It was worse on those mornings when we had been annoying each other, which we did from time to time. Pam once discovered that some much younger hosts were getting paid more than we were. She did her best to whip me up into a frenzy of indignation about these whippersnappers and I managed to get mildly agitated, which was quite good for me. Whatever we were on, she was determined to get double and considered that would still be meagre recompense.

  We walked into our meeting and it went spectacularly badly. It needed to be put out of its misery. Pam had worked herself into a lather and my attempts to calm things down were too little too late. Suddenly she leapt from her seat and slammed her hands down on the table.

  ‘You are fucking killing us,’ she bellowed. ‘You are sucking the fucking lifeblood out of us. It’s a well-known fact that people who work shift hours are dying.’

  I knew our conditions weren’t stellar, but I had no idea they were life-threatening. The meeting finished soon after that and we left together.

  ‘How do you think that went?’ asked Pam.

  ‘I don’t think it went well, Pam.’

  ‘I think they know how we feel.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s true.’

  The overwhelming feeling we had from them was that they weren’t at all sold on the idea of the programme continuing, let alone doubling our pay.

  Also we didn’t have a good reputation with interview subjects from among the small pool you have to work with in New Zealand. Being on the receiving end of an interview — if you could call it that — with the pair of us was seldom pleasant and rarely illuminating. A lot of people refused to come on the show. ‘Well the last time I was interviewed on that programme I couldn’t get a word in,’ they frequently complained.

  We survived the usual barrage of complaints. Cabinet minister George Hawkins was an interesting case because I always used to refer to him as Minister Stupid. At one point there was a suggestion from his office that there would be a Broadcasting Standards Authority (BSA) complaint laid unless an apology was given. I was very keen for that to happen. I would have preferred a defamation action because I would have relished the sight of George Hawkins turning up at court in an attempt to prove he wasn’t stupid. He’d prove the opposite merely by bringing the complaint.

  The man from Puppetry of the Penis probably had the worst of it. He came in and demonstrated how he could manipulate his penis, which is not great radio to start with.

  Pam began determined to be unimpressed with his penis, and to be honest I was unimpressed with his penis too because, perhaps as a result of the act, it was moderately deformed.

  It was an ugly penis.

  And as he contorted it beyond reason, it became uglier. It wasn’t funny and it wasn’t entertaining. I had a slight out-of-body experience when I realised I was in a radio studio with a man who had his pants down and his penis in his hand while I sat next to Pam Corkery, who was determined to tear him apart.

  The only thing that made Pam more irate than the amount we were paid was having to listen to consultants, who are the bane of every media worker’s life. This was an attitude I shared. People who know next to nothing about media and much less about New Zealand and our audiences were regularly shipped over, usually from America, and paid the sort of money we weren’t to tell us how to do our jobs.

  ‘What does he know?’ Pam said once. ‘He is an American, he is some carpetbagger, come from another country to try and tell us how to do what we know how to do better than the rest of the world.’ When she said ‘we’ she meant her and me but mainly her. She treated the consultants like they were trying to impress her with penis tricks. We could have used some guidance on a few things but there was no one there capable of guiding us.

  For the time we did that show I spent the larger part of the day sleeping and panicking. Pam and I lived in hope that we would be funded properly and get an extra producer. But it just went on and on and on, and got harder and harder. When it ended, the most common reaction from
those concerned was relief.

  Pam left first, to a TV job, and I carried on doing breakfast on my own for a while. One of the things that takes on a strange level of importance when you’re working early in the morning is the smell of co-workers. Pam, I remember, always smelt nice in the morning, but there was one particular morning where she smelt exceptionally good. So good in fact that we talked about it before going on air. I sniffed her up and down and discovered that the strikingly pleasing aroma was coming from her head. She felt her hair and it dawned on her that she had doused herself in air freshener.

  If only our producer Kate McCallum had made the same mistake on another occasion. She was a nuggety young lady with a single-minded doggedness on the job. If you had asked her to get a pen at the moment when someone flew a plane into the Twin Towers and you said, perhaps we should do something about that, she would keep walking and say, ‘Not now. I’m getting a pen.’

  She was always in before me and one morning when I arrived I instantly noticed an appalling stench.

  ‘Can you smell that?’ I said to Kate.

  ‘Can’t smell anything,’ she said.

  It was clear to me that Kate’s sensory perception was at a low ebb. I base this not only on her olfactory deficiency but also on the fact that she was still wearing a ballgown from the night before, her make-up was iffy and she had twigs in her hair.

  After half an hour it became apparent that the stench came and went every time Kate went in and out of the office. Finally I pinned her to a chair and sniffed her up and down.

  ‘Kate, this stench that I’ve been referring to all morning is coming from you,’ I said. ‘What the hell happened to you last night?’