What Was I Thinking: A Memoir (24 page)

We were constantly chasing time. We were also worried
about not filling the time. I thought we should have a two-minute timeless piece of story we could keep to play if we did ever go short, but that never happened.

Some people on the show needed one event to follow another exactly as planned. Sometimes things collapsed hopelessly. I could feel it happen. I would launch a story and the autocue operator would stop and look for it because he didn’t realise it was an ad lib. And by the time he worked that out he had forgotten at which point I had left the script so couldn’t find the right place for me to get back on track. Those were golden mornings.

Meanwhile, the producer was wondering how we were going to get the ad break in and what we would do with the guest who was sitting in the green room when he finally got on for the 12 seconds that would be left for him.

The day before, I never wanted to know what was on the next morning’s show. I didn’t turn on the computer to check the programme before going to bed. I followed the news in detail and thought that was enough for me to be familiar with anything that came up. And if not, I had the producers’ notes and my own brain to get my head around a story in time to be on air. Otherwise the job could take up 24 hours a day. Also we reacted to things, so something could easily happen to throw away all our best-laid plans.

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.’

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.