by Paul Henry
I left the interview with the clear impression I had the job. When I was informed that Mark had it, I was told I was a bit ‘off the wall’. I certainly hope I am. That is what audiences want. They want a bit of excitement, something unusual and different. But all was not lost. When Bill rang to give me the news, he asked if I would like to be a permanent fill-in. I am not a thrower out of toys from my cot, so I agreed. At least it kept me near the show should, God forbid, anything happen to Mark. It also gave me the opportunity to continually demonstrate to people how much better I was at it. The fill-in position, of course, now went back to being a part-time role.
This left a little time for other pursuits. While making my Intrepid Journey years earlier I discussed another idea with the director, Petra Brett-Kelly.
‘Isn’t it extraordinary how wherever you go in the world you bump into New Zealanders?’ I said. That led to the idea of tracking down and filming New Zealanders in the remotest parts of the planet. Again it looked like far too much work so we had to refine it to a point where my energy expenditure would be minimal. Petra went away and set it all up. It was really her gig. We planned on four hour-long programmes, each about two countries, and ended up visiting seven — Afghanistan, Sudan, Uganda, the Arctic Circle, Kazakhstan, Cocos Islands and the Amazon.
Despite my best efforts, it was a lot of work. It took a year to film, juggled around Breakfast and other commitments. We never knew until we got to a place just how good the talent would be and how much story they would have to tell.
When we set out, I thought, if these New Zealanders are in these places, how hard can they be to reach? I hadn’t factored in that they had all the time in the world — they weren’t stealing some leave from their early morning TV presenting jobs. We were there with them for a week or two and in that time we had to see and understand their entire world. We were under a lot of pressure to get the right stuff and get it quickly.
Getting to the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan was a good example of the difficulties. We had to fly into Kabul, travel from there on a light plane into the mountains and then trek for three days on horseback over passes that were only just passable. I’m not a horseman and our steeds were mean beasts largely trained for buzkashi, which is like an incredibly violent form of polo using a dead sheep instead of a ball. The trails were so bad even the horses slipped on them. When that happens, you have a good chance of finishing your life underneath a horse so if that looks likely, you get off and walk. I asked Jesus to take me to his bosom several times.
‘Do not make me go through this and then kill me in a week,’ I said. ‘If I haven’t got long to go, just take me now and make this trip worthwhile.’ But he remained as unresponsive as ever.
We got to a village where we had to stay in a house made of dung. It had no windows because it was so bitterly cold in the region, just an opening wide enough for a horse to walk into. That was where the horseman and the horses stayed. The top horseman and I, being the guest, stayed in another room made of dung where a dung fire was emitting a cheerful dungy glow. When I shone my torch I could see dung particles floating in the air. If I put my finger in my nose I found fresh dung inhaled on my last breath.
When it came time to go I insisted on an alternative to life-threatening horses. If that wasn’t possible I would stay on. ‘I’m sure I can afford to buy a bach here,’ I said. ‘I can grow a little opium and have a much better quality of life than if I have to get back on one of those animals.’
For various reasons we ended up chartering a plane to get us out. The air strip was a reasonably flat part of a steep mountain range. We had to pay villagers to shovel the snow off but the plane couldn’t get over the mountains that day. The next day we made another attempt but it snowed overnight so we had to pay the villagers to get out their shovels again. They were very happy about our plans. It was a spectacular location, and the programme shows that, but for us at this stage it was really the world’s most beautiful prison. I have seldom heard as wonderful a sound as the distant drone of our plane as it finally approached on the third day.
In the Amazon we met a New Zealander who was working for Greenpeace. I have quite a low opinion of Greenpeace because I think it has completely lost its way. When I spoke to Dave McTaggart about it, he was entirely disenchanted with the organisation he had helped found and he ended up leaving it in a very famous and public way. So it was interesting to go up the Amazon and meet true fighters.
They knew exactly what they were fighting for. They could see it out the window. Every second night gangs of people would harass them or try to sink their boat. It was very interesting to be there and experience that more raw and genuine side of Greenpeace. These were young, brave people. They were also very attractive and there was major sex happening every night. They’d start by hosing each other down on the deck and then have sex with each other, probably another little hose down and then off to bed with someone else. They were worthy and they were young and they were attractive and this was an exciting adventure. OK, so not all of them.
One of the problems with a show like Ends of the Earth is that I have a horror of selling people short. I don’t want to go somewhere and miss something or not convey to people just what it is like being there. But practicalities and the limits of a commercial half hour or hour work against that. You can’t keep saying it is cold; you have to show people that the hairs in your nostrils froze the moment you put your head outside. When we were in the Amazon, there was a tree completely seething with ants. You couldn’t film it because they were packed together so solidly it just looked like a tree. I really wanted to show the ants to people.
‘I’m going to put my hand on there and you film it as they climb,’ I said. It was like a cloud of brown going right up my arm. I hadn’t thought it through. I didn’t realise I wouldn’t be able to stop these little bastards once they started running up my arm. At least they weren’t biting me. They only started biting me when I tried to get them off. But it was an amazing piece of film which I think we didn’t use in the end.
TVNZ wanted to commission another series. I laughed. I would quite like to spend six months living with Bedouins one day. That would make a good hour of television.
My multi-tasking reached its apogee one nightmarish weekend where I did Breakfast on the Friday, Close Up on the Friday night and then filled in for Simon Dallow doing Agenda on Saturday morning. It was ludicrous. Even I could see that. I reminded myself that I had never wanted to be a fill-in on Close Up and Mark appeared intent on staying so I asked my employers to find someone else to fill in.
One show I was happy to make time for while also doing Breakfast was This Is Your Life, which was an outside production done by the legendary Julie Christie.
‘Paul, it’s Julie Christie here,’ she snapped down the phone. ‘Have you got a minute?’
You always say yes to Julie when she calls you. You stop whatever you’re doing to take the call.
‘Yes, yes, of course, Julie,’ I said, pulling the car over to give her my complete attention.
‘Oh, someone’s come in. I’ll phone back,’ and she hung up.
Eventually we spoke. She was planning to do four episodes of This Is Your Life, the show that profiles a celebrity by surprising him or her and having friends and family from over the years come into a studio to talk about them. She wanted to know if I would be interested in hosting. I had been a fan of the show since I used to watch the English version when I was a little boy. It’s old-fashioned TV, but a flagship show and the chance was too good to pass up. To a certain degree I’m the sort of person who finds it very hard to say no to people, and if it sounds to me like something that will never happen, which this did, I always say yes and then it immediately goes out of mind.
A lot of people think that Julie is officious but it’s simply because she is doing a million things at once. She is always late. She doesn’t walk. She stomps, not just because she is from the West Coast but because she is always late and always
rushing to the next thing. She has made money in an area that is notoriously hard to make money in but she is also a lot of fun.
This Is Your Life is a hard programme to pull off. Your subject is always going to feel off-centre because they have been taken by surprise. They would be nervous about being on a show anyway, but it’s ten times worse when the show starts with them finding out for the first time that it is happening. They are also going to be nervous about who is going to appear from their past. What if they don’t recognise the people? What if the people turn out to include several illegitimate children? What do we know that they would rather we didn’t? This Is Your Life could be The End of Your Life. The reality is that it’s a celebration of a life and everyone wants it to be a joyous occasion.
On the other hand, there are the guests who are in on the secret and feeling very celebratory. They are seeing people they haven’t seen for ages. They are enjoying themselves. Many of them have enjoyed themselves too much with the hospitality afforded them. As a host you can end up trying to walk a line between a shell-shocked subject and a guest who’s so pissed they can barely walk. You are also working with a script that has been finalised just minutes before the programme begins. On my first show, with Jonah Lomu, pages were being slipped into my script during ad breaks. My knowledge of rugby being what it is — none — I was sure I missed little nuances that an expert would have picked up on. I also had grief from guests who would launch into a story that we had someone else lined up to tell three guests later. It’s not a hard show to do averagely but it is a very complicated show to do well. It’s like juggling fish.
After all my years in TV, I still learnt a lot from working with Julie. We walked into the studio the day before the first show, when the set was going up. She stopped in her tracks and she looked up.
‘That is not a star curtain,’ she said and called someone over. ‘Hey! I said star curtains. They’re not star curtains. They are black cloths with twinkling lights hanging down. A star curtain is peppered with lights, just unpredictable patterns of lights. That’s not a star curtain. I don’t want it, take it down.’
A normal producer would have looked at it and thought: ‘That’s not what I asked for. Oh well. Too late to change it.’
On another occasion she came on the set, which was dominated by the biggest plasma screen I had ever seen.
‘That’s too low, have you put that in place yet?’ she said.
‘Yeah, yeah, it has to go there because it’s so heavy,’ said the set designer.
‘It’s too low.’
‘But it’s so heavy it has to go there.’
‘But what’s the point having it, if it’s too low? Why don’t you go up there and sit on the seats, which is where our audience are going to be, and see if you can see the bottom of it. Maybe we only need a plasma half as big because we can’t see the bottom of the plasma from where the seats are.’
Again she insisted on something that other people would have let slide.
‘Are you telling me it is impossible — not hard, not very hard, but are you telling me it is impossible to raise that plasma screen?’
‘It’s not impossible …’ said the designer, a phrase he would live to regret having uttered.
‘Right then, I’ll be back in an hour and it will be where I want it and where I’m paying for it to go.’ And it was.
The logistics of getting your subject in place and keeping the whole project a secret from them when almost every person they have ever met in their life is in on it are enormously complicated.
When we had on Mark Inglis, the double amputee who climbed Everest, we went down to surprise him at home in Hanmer. We didn’t go down the day before. We went down on the day of the show, which meant we had to get him immediately to Auckland in as short a time as possible. A car took us to Mechanics Bay, where a helicopter was waiting to take us to Ardmore where we got on a private jet that flew us to Christchurch where another helicopter was waiting to fly us to a paddock where there was a car that drove us to Mark’s shed where he was tinkering away on a bike. His wife was running out of excuses to keep him in the shed because he had been planning to go for a ride.
I went through the script on the way down, trying to learn it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so surprised. Like most people he knew there was an episode of This Is Your Life on that night and he knew — though it had crossed his mind that it might happen to him one day — that it wouldn’t be him. How could it? He was in his shed in Hanmer and the show was on in Auckland in a few hours.
His wife whipped out the overnight bag she had packed and secretly hidden underneath the bed. Next minute, he was in the car, at the paddock, in the helicopter, at Christchurch, in the private jet, in another helicopter back to Mechanics Bay and then sitting down for half an hour in the green room while I was getting made up.
At every one of those stages — a flat tyre here, some fog there, the whole thing could have fallen to pieces. When I left TVNZ I was due to do another episode of This Is Your Life, with Peter Leitch, the Mad Butcher. We talked about letting me do the one show while suspended but I didn’t think it was a good idea. They considered a few names and in the end got Paul Holmes.
“ACCEPTING THE AWARD I READ OUT A LETTER THAT WAS NOT UNTYPICAL OF THE MAIL I RECEIVED FROM PEOPLE WHO DID NOT SHARE WHAT THEY ASSUMED TO BE MY VIEWS. IT GOT A HUGE LAUGH AND AFTER THE CEREMONY PEOPLE WERE ALMOST QUEUING UP TO SEE IT. IT WAS, BY ANY STANDARDS, A SPECTACULAR PIECE OF MAIL …”
* * *
IN SEPTEMBER 2010 I won the New Idea People’s Choice Award for most popular television personality. Accepting the award I read out a letter that was not untypical of the mail I received from people who did not share what they assumed to be my views. It got a huge laugh and after the ceremony, people were almost queuing up to see it. It was, by any standards, a spectacular piece of mail:
‘You are the most insulting, little self-conceited little mongrel prick on TV. I would love Susan Boyle to shit on your ugly face, Pamela Anderson to give you Aids, David Hasselhoff to punch you on the nose, preferably before Susan shits on you. You fucking poofter pommy mongrel prick. Die you cunt.’
We all had a good laugh on the night. Linda Topp souvenired the original. Despite coming so late in the year, the clip of me reading the letter was the most viewed New Zealand YouTube item of 2010, reaching more than 350,000 hits that year.
I’ve referred previously to how quickly fortunes can change in the media. A spectacular number of things can go wrong during two and a half hours of live television every morning. In my case, many of them have ended up on T-Shirts.
The Susan Boyle incident was typical of how I offend people who live and breathe in order to be offended. People who like to be offended tend to congregate together and multiply. They sit in front of their TVs like little ticking time bombs of potential offence waiting to explode.
When I watched the clip of Susan Boyle singing and being interviewed and then read an article on her and the difficulties she had in a magazine, I said on air it was official she was in fact retarded.
Other members of the media, better informed about today’s acceptable terminology than I, have got away with assessing Boyle’s situation by saying she has a ‘condition’ or faces ‘special challenges’. When I was a boy the word used to describe people in that position was ‘retarded’. Apparently it has since ended up on the banned list and no one had told me. But for people to extrapolate from the use of that word that I in some way had it in for handicapped people, as I was accused of doing, was too bizarre.
I realised the word was slightly old-fashioned but I don’t have time to agonise over such phrasing. I established this policy sometime prior, during a radio interview about kindergartens.
‘What do kindy teachers make of this?’ I asked.
‘Actually,’ said the kindy teacher, ‘if I could correct you, we are early childhood educators.’
‘Are you busy?’ I said.
‘We’re alway
s busy,’ she said.
‘Well, I better let you get on with it then,’ I said and hung up on her. Retarded was obviously on the same list as ‘kindy’.
In the wake of the Susan Boyle remark, the offence time bombs had contacted relevant organisations who worked with disabled people, which had then written pro-forma letters of complaint and distributed these to their members to forward to TVNZ. I was contacted by a couple of people who were members of one of these organisations.
‘We thought you might like to know we’ve been phoned and instructed to be offended,’ they said. ‘We’ve been told that you are against our people and that you’re going around calling people retards.’
Other incidents caused me as much trouble without getting quite as much public exposure. During Helen Clark’s last election campaign as Prime Minister I was talking to our political editor Guyon Espiner about how the ratings had been consistently going down for Labour and all of a sudden there had been a bit of a lift, and rightfully so because National were dropping the ball left, right and centre.
‘Are you telling me that, after all that has happened,’ I said to Guyon, ‘there are people thinking, “I don’t know. I know I was saying last week I wasn’t going to vote for Labour but now I think I might”?’
‘It seems that way,’ said Guyon.
‘Oh God, will this reign of terror never end?’ I said. And Labour was obviously so worried about how badly they were doing that there was a suggestion of a Broadcasting Standards Authority complaint over the comparison to the excesses of the French Revolution.
