What Was I Thinking: A Memoir

by Paul Henry

  All my co-hosts used to read at night to work out what was likely to be on the show the next morning. As soon as a programme was finished, it was dead to me. And until the next programme had started, it was dead to me too. That’s the only way I could survive with that much television, really.

  ‘Oh, you’re lucky you’ve got the rest of the day to yourself,’ people said when they saw me in the lift at 9.30.

  ‘Yes, I’m going to go home, where I’m going to curl up in the foetal position and bang my head against a wall until it’s time for me to watch the news and go to bed.’ That was a slight exaggeration.

  It helped my attitude that I am blessed with a good understanding of my place in the great scheme of things and understand much better than most people how insignificant I am. I wasn’t going on television to try and change people’s minds. I’ve travelled a lot and seen an awful lot. I know that we’re all breathing the same oxygen but that if any one person stops breathing it’s not going to make a huge difference at all. If you can make someone laugh, now that’s an achievement. If you can make a thousand people laugh, that’s brilliant. But if you go on breakfast, on radio or television, with the hope of changing the world not only are you not going to make anyone laugh, but you’re wasting your time.

  I was a breakfast television host. I wasn’t there to negotiate a free-trade agreement or indeed stand in the way of a free-trade agreement, which was one of the more hysterical allegations thrown around at the time I resigned.

  People are busy at the time Breakfast goes to air, rushing around getting ready for their days. I had ways of making them watch. ‘God, this is interesting,’ I said sometimes, knowing they were in the kitchen and I had to get them into the lounge where I was. ‘Hey, that was cool, can we play that again?’ was another line I used to wrangle the little rascals.

  The show was designed for busy people who gave it a moment of their time. I wanted to let them have a bit of a laugh, make them see another side of an argument or at least broaden their vision a bit and challenge their prejudices. Sometimes I pushed very hard for us to make great television. Other times I thought: ‘Too hard. Let’s just do our best.’

  When I was fired up, at our post-show meeting, I would hit the ground ranting. It was 9.15am and I would pour some cheap wine — making people drink early in the morning is a good way of cutting through the lethargy — and get stuck into what was wrong with the show. I got especially infuriated if there was a big overseas story and we only covered it if we could find the New Zealand angle. America was full of Americans who knew all about American stories, but we had to find the New Zealander on holiday who had been caught up in whatever it was before a story was allowed on our programme. Then we had four minutes with someone who knew nothing when we could have had an expert who would have been a lot cheaper to find and told us something we didn’t already know. Having a New Zealand angle does not necessarily make something a story.

  Also, when something really big happened, I thought we should go to blanket coverage instead of sticking to our rundown because it was there and merely interrupting with all the updates. There is nothing more compelling to watch than a story unfolding before your eyes.

  As important as going that extra mile to get something good is making the most of what you’ve got sitting next to you. A bad interview with good talent is so much better than a good interview with bad talent. I have seen interviews that qualify as tragedies because a ham-fisted interviewer is not getting the best out of a wonderful subject. Often people are brought on not because they will get a chance to shine, but because the network wants a chance to shine. They congratulate themselves on getting someone ahead of their competition and then fail to get anything out of that person. They often misuse their own people, too. A link and satellites are organised. The reporter is flown over, someone finds a flak jacket in his size for him to wear. And he stands in front of the camera and doesn’t tell you much more than that it is Wednesday.

  I was accused often of having a National Party agenda because I had stood for the party and said I voted for them. Both those things are true but I never wanted to sway anyone to vote the way I do, although in a perfect world no one would vote for the Alliance or the Greens. If you’re not going to challenge people then your political beliefs aren’t an issue. You’re just asking a series of questions for which there is no pressure on anyone to tell the truth or even answer. They get to say as much or as little as they want. Nothing is expressed in those interviews. They are just propaganda.

  A lot of people didn’t understand all this, but enough did and the show’s ratings went up over time. The ratings were also boosted by those people who watched to have their prejudices about me confirmed. Hopefully they will be reading this book now and tasting blood in their mouths as they realise they are the stupid people I am talking about in words they can barely understand.

  Not only did Breakfast become a programme that people enjoyed watching, it became a programme that showed the opposition there was money to be made by doing so. TV3 launched Sunrise and gave it a damn good go. It wasn’t amateurish — I thought their set was better than ours. In a cheap way they spent a lot of money on it and they failed. It’s an achievement to see off the opposition in any market, especially when the opposition are putting up a good fight, which they did.

  For the most part, people watching TV will see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear. I had a wonderful example of this once when I was driving home after Breakfast and had Leighton Smith’s show on. There must have been something wrong with the car radio.

  ‘Did you hear Paul Henry this morning?’ asked a caller. ‘Did you hear the interview with John Key? He is in Labour’s pocket, that Paul Henry.’

  That was a refreshing change in some ways but mind-numbingly illogical to anyone who knew anything about me. I had given the Prime Minister a tough time that morning, which I did whenever the topic required me to, so I thought perhaps this caller had not seen Breakfast before. Deep down I knew, of course, he watched every day with his extreme personal political prejudice prickling, waiting for someone to jiggle one of the little antennae. But Leighton Smith managed to surpass him in absurdity.

  ‘Like all broadcasters,’ said Leighton, ‘he’s a socialist. They’re all socialists.’

  Given my aim has always been to make sure listeners and viewers know where I stand so they can make up their own minds about what I say, these assessments suggested I had failed dismally.

  People asked me frequently who I voted for.

  ‘I vote National.’

  ‘Ah ha, ah, I thought so. Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it?’

  Not really, if you needed to ask.

  The other thing about having a tendency to support one party is that, in my case at least, I am more likely to have a go at them because they are in a better position to let me down.

  People asked me if I was the same in real life as on television. Obviously not — television is not real life. You sit in a studio in front of cameras under lights with make-up and a suit on. But in all of my dealings with people I come as close to being me as I possibly can. On the other hand, I know people who have well-honed senses of humour but appear to be totally devoid of personality when they appear on television. There are too many people on TV without personality, and there are too many people watching who want that.

  Why would you want someone in your living room whose views you don’t know or understand because they keep them to themselves, or who is so stoic in demeanour as to be comatose. They are just telling you the time. ‘This is the Prime Minister and I’m going to ask him a question and when that’s finished I’ll tell you the time again.’ What a load of bollocks. I would never want to do that.

  If your primary concern as a broadcaster is to produce something safe, then you’re not broadcasting, you’re running through the motions. The best TV is what happens when everyone — audience, host, viewer — has the feeling things could get out of control. My
co-hosts would frequently be keen to get out of that interesting zone of tension, but I used to fight to keep us there just a little bit longer.

  I wouldn’t have been the easiest person to work with because I’m quite full-on and I do command my space. But all my co-hosts were talented professionals — Alison, Kay Gregory and Pippa Wetzell.

  I worked with Pippa more than either of the others as a co-host and fell in love with her, as anyone would. I adore her. Her edge as a broadcaster is that she is the girl next door, and you can’t manufacture that. You can learn polish and other aspects of your craft, but the only way you can be the girl next door is if you’re the girl next door.

  When we weren’t planning to sabotage free-trade agreements or install a National Party government for life, we mainly talked about our children. With her family being much younger than mine, I had the opportunity to tell her about all the mistakes I had made and what she should avoid doing. We couldn’t wait for an interview to finish and an ad break to come on so we could pore over the latest photos of her girls, Brodie and Cameron.

  When I started receiving a lot of very enthusiastic mail, I thought it was extraordinary that so many people loved me so much. Then I discovered someone was opening my mail and filtering out the negative letters. ‘I would really rather not get any mail at all,’ I explained, ‘because I don’t want to have to be answering it, but if you’re going to be sending me good letters, send me the bad letters too. Nice ones are no use to me whatsoever.’

  Friends

  The following is a list of well-known New Zealanders who I absolutely trust would instantly drop everything and come to my aid in this, and almost all emergency situations: For some extraordinary reason I find myself handcuffed to a table in the kitchen at a bar mitzvah. I need a distraction, a hacksaw and a discreet ride home.

  The list

  Annabelle White, cook

  Darren Hughes, ex public servant

  Peter Williams, Queen’s Counsel

  Pam Corkery, madam

  John Banks, Honourable

  Pippa Wetzell, mother

  Diane Forman, ice-cream maker

  These people I know for a fact I can count on. I would have liked to have named the Topp Twins — I count them among my very best friends; however, as I have met them only three times, I’m not sure it is reciprocated. Shane Cortese — he’s the loveliest man but would probably be on stage at the bar mitzvah anyway, and Bill Ralston, not only a great guy but as he wouldn’t remember anything the next day I wouldn’t owe him back. Bonus!

  I’m tempted to add Phil Goff’s name to the list. He seems like the sort of person who would attempt to help anyone in a crisis, unlike Bill English who, I suspect, would immediately alert the media.

  I was used to hostile audience reactions — I got bullets in the mail when I was doing radio. I got those reactions because when I thought something I said it, although I always slightly tempered what I was saying based on the company I was in.

  In broadcasting, once something has gone out, it’s out there and you live with it. If there’s something you can learn from it, do that; if there’s nothing then just forget it straight away. When people would feast over some comment I made, it seemed extraordinary to me. As far as I was concerned it was electronic fish and chip paper. Sometimes when I was ploughing through another mountain of complaints, I found myself wondering if the complainants were amputees who had been strapped to their chairs and couldn’t reach the off button. Either that or they were so poisoned by their own prejudices that they couldn’t recognise a joke when they saw one.

  It’s such a contrast with the US where some of the most highly paid broadcasters are people hardly anyone agrees with — in fact you would hope no one at all agreed with many of them.

  I knew I could be what the critics were saying they wanted. I could come in every morning and read the autocue — barely — and go home. Then in the evening I could accept all the invitations to functions and enjoy the free food and drink. But I couldn’t take money to do those things.

  Big international stories were still close to my heart and among the highlights of my time at Breakfast. We were on air when Michael Jackson’s death was announced and we extended our coverage. That was one of those rare occasions, like the Twin Towers, when you feel the whole world is looking in the same direction. But those days were the exception because of where we came in the daily news cycle. Not much happened in New Zealand between the late news the previous night and us going to air in the morning. A lot happened overseas, though, and we got to bring those stories to people first, which was a challenge.

  Most days our job was to make shit shine. Television is different from radio for obvious reasons, but one of the biggest is that there are so many components that can bring it down — the sets, the lighting, your clothes. And with a big machine it’s hard to change direction at short notice. On radio we could decide to drop someone and replace them with someone more interesting at the last minute because they only had to be on the phone. There is a big difference between ringing someone up in the morning and saying, ‘Can we talk to you for five minutes?’ and ringing them up and saying, ‘Can we send a taxi around? Can you get dressed? We’ll have make-up for you at this time and put you on TV’.

  I was allowed to travel occasionally for Breakfast if the story seemed to warrant it. Like a lot of people I was fascinated by the rise of Sarah Palin. I was in the US to cover the Obama election and thought it would be fun to go to Alaska and look at her house. I was treating her rather like I did Pol Pot — I wanted to see how close we could get before someone tried to shoot us. I had a cameraman and a producer with me, and we had rented a big black vehicle which looked to me like it could have belonged to the Secret Service. We drove up to her neighbour’s house, where I thought security would not be quite so tight.

  ‘I’ll go up and knock on the neighbour’s door,’ I told the cameraman. ‘You follow me with the camera, and we’ll be able to see over the fence.’ But it was a very high fence and we couldn’t see anything. We also learnt later that the Secret Service had rented the neighbour’s house.

  I wasn’t satisfied. ‘Let’s drive up to Sarah Palin’s house and see how far we can get,’ I said. ‘If anyone stops us we’ll plead ignorance.’

  We took the disc with what we had shot so far out of the camera and put it away because we knew it would be confiscated when we got into trouble. I did a commentary as we drove up. There was a Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted sign, which was fine — once someone told us to leave, we would leave. There was thick bush on either side of the driveway and we suddenly felt very remote. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to back out of here at any speed once the Secret Service started firing.

  But suddenly the driveway opened out into a large area that was full of big black official police vehicles. And there was Sarah Palin’s house — quite an ordinary dwelling, festooned with US flags. We had got a lot further than I expected. Suddenly all the doors on the vehicles opened and armed troopers poured out. ‘What are you doing? Can I help you? You’ve got to go’, they variously barked. Talk about mixed messages.

  ‘Oh, we’ve just come to see if Sarah Palin is in. We’re from New Zealand,’ I said as our cameraman continued to shoot. ‘We’re from New Zealand’ is another way of saying ‘We are too stupid to kill’. For some reason the trooper in charge didn’t ask for our camera or footage.

  ‘We’ll go now, then,’ I said. And rather than back up I did a laborious 19-point turn in the driveway, during which the cameraman held his camera so it looked like he wasn’t shooting but moved it around so he got every angle possible. And as soon as we had finished the turn, we drove out and kept going. We fully expected someone to come after us, but they probably realised we were harmless. Also it didn’t look good for them that we had got that far. Why weren’t they at the other end of the driveway?

  I also went to New York and spent a couple of days with Helen Clark, for a story. We have had some real humdinger
s over the years and this meeting was facilitated by Darren Hughes, who is a good friend to both of us. She gave me great access. We didn’t just sit in her office. We went to her local breakfast place and interviewed her while she ate, then we did go to her office and I inspected her knick-knacks closely. She came out with me for the day and I took her to some New York sites that she hadn’t had time to see. We went to the Statue of Liberty and wore the funny hats.

  She recommended a play to me. She knew I was interested in Africa and there was a play off Broadway called Ruined which was about Congolese prostitutes. She had seen it before but wanted to go again and organised tickets. I had to pay for mine; she’s still a socialist. Darren Hughes came too and it was a great play. We couldn’t get three seats together so she had me sit next to her — probably because she’s sat next to Darren lots of times. She has fantastic interval technique. Just before interval, which she must have remembered from last time, she said, ‘Just follow me, it’s almost intermission, we’ve got to go and get a drink.’ The moment the lights went up she charged out dragging me behind, and we were first at the bar. Then we went out and had a pizza and a Chianti. She was brilliant company and it was illuminating to see her world through her eyes.

  I asked her which politician she considered to be the nastiest she had ever encountered. After some negotiation we agreed we would both write the name of the person we thought met that description on a piece of paper and then exchange them. Which we did and, indeed, we had both written the same name. We had a wonderful conversation about the way I had treated her and other politicians. There was one she felt I had always treated unfairly and she made me promise to have a wine with that person and bury the hatchet and I really must get around to that one day.