What Was I Thinking: A Memoir (5 page)

Bill Salisbury was always to the point. One afternoon on a music show we had a guest coming in. Nothing unusual about that. Not long before we went to air, the presenter came to me. ‘This next guy’s here,’ he said. ‘I just went to say hello to him in the green room and he’s wearing a fucking pixie outfit.’ So this guest was welcomed into the studio in his full pixie glory and the interview took place. I thought it was a good,
straightforward
interview about a show he had coming up in town.

Afterwards I was walking out with the presenter and we bumped into Bill Salisbury, who stopped to talk to us on the grand BBC stairway.

‘Did you hear any of the show today?’ asked the host.

‘Yes, I did. Yes.’

‘Did you hear our guest? My God! You should have seen him. He was wearing a pixie outfit. It was extraordinary.’

‘I did see him, I watched from reception. I saw him wearing a pixie outfit and I was quite interested to listen to him. However, not one of your fucking listeners would have known he was wearing a green pixie outfit, which would have been a much more interesting topic than any of the fucking questions you asked him.’ By now he was warmed up. ‘What you did is you let every single listener down and you let, potentially, the
most interesting interview of your life slip out the door in his green fucking pixie outfit. How could you sit there and not ask the most obvious question? You will die an old man doing this shift if you don’t get your act together.’

And I’ve kept that idea with me throughout my career: when you go into an interview with a list of questions, you’ve probably got a list of answers as well. As a result, you can overlook the obvious. You should never go into an interview with more than three questions, which are just guidelines. On the other hand, you don’t want to become so interested in the conversation you’re having that you start to exclude the listeners. At any stage you should be prepared to go in a different direction if a more interesting direction becomes obvious, such as, why are you wearing a pixie outfit? To this day, I still wonder why that man was wearing that outfit. And he probably walked away very disappointed: ‘Well, that pixie fucking outfit worked well.’

I was working every hour I could find to fill in at the BBC but eventually I realised that there wasn’t a permanent job for me. I would have to change direction again. Somewhat to my surprise, I realised my best option was to go back to New Zealand.

NATURALLY, WITH THE WEALTH
of knowledge I had acquired from my vast experience at the BBC I was able to put together a magnificent CV — such as I was sure no one in New Zealand had seen before — that would propel me straight into the director-general of broadcasting’s job at the age of 18.

I stayed with some friends of the family in Auckland, and given there seemed to be some problem persuading the incumbent DG to step down, I applied for a cadetship at the NZBC to get my foot in the door. While waiting for that to come through I got a job selling Lexington encyclopaedias door to door. Many people haven’t heard of Lexington encyclopaedias — then or
now — but they were much better than Britannica, especially when I was trying to sell a set.

I knew then that selling anything meant selling a dream. I had a little zip-up satchel with sections from the encyclopaedia and I talked my way into the potential customer’s house, sat in the middle of the living room floor with my kit, opened out the posters and let the dreams float off the pages and fill the room. The script was outrageous.

‘I’ll show you something now,’ I said and opened the book to the see-through pages with the cross-sections of the human body.

‘Hold the book up by that page,’ I said to the husband. ‘Now shake it around. Lift it up and shake it around. Now, that is a well-bound book.’

‘God, that’s amazing.’

‘Yes it is,’ I said, ‘and every page is like that.’ They weren’t; only the one I showed them was.

‘It’s only 80 cents a day for the world on a bookshelf in your living room, and you get the bookshelf for free. Eighty cents a day. Look, it’s just small change in a money box.’ I had a money box with me. It was a thing of wonder with a date display. ‘Look at this money box here. When you put the money in, it changes the date, so you get the date as well. For 80 cents you’re not only paying for the world but you’re getting the current date.’

‘Oh, could I have that?’ they inevitably said.

‘No, not this money box, but I tell you what, I could probably get you one of these. In fact, if I was to write this order down now, I could probably get you one of these for free.’

‘Oh, and will it tell the date like that?’

‘Yes, it’s just like this one.’

Often, I didn’t even need to talk about future-proofing their investment by signing up for the yearbooks.

I was not a perfect salesperson by any means. Once I called
at a house where the owners had friends around and I found this off-putting. The perfect salesperson would think, ‘It doesn’t matter, I’ll make the best of it’, but I needed to hold court without any distractions. The family insisted I stay, however, so I began my presentation and I still regard what happened as a career highlight. I sold the homeowners a set, I sold their friends a set, and if I had driven myself there, instead of being dropped off outside by my manager, I could probably have sold them my car as well.

Finally my cadetship came through. It was based in Wellington, so I bought a car on hire purchase to get me down there. It didn’t sound very good when I set off and the noises it made grew progressively worse until it finally shat itself and broke down at Pokeno. I hadn’t had a lot of experience with cars up to that point and didn’t know you needed to put oil in them. I hitchhiked to Hamilton and got a bus to Wellington. I was put up in a hotel where everyone in my position stayed and was given exposure to various aspects of radio. Of course, there was nothing anyone needed to teach me, but I humoured the likes of Dick Weir, who was given the superfluous task of mentoring me for a while.

One problem that was immediately clear was that the cadet’s remuneration was slightly less than the hotel’s tariff. I had a shortfall every week of about $10. I couldn’t afford much in the way of food or transport. I was walking everywhere on an empty stomach. So I went to see Human Resources.

‘Look, I’m just in shitter’s ditch here,’ I said — or words to that effect. ‘You’re not paying me enough to cover my hotel.’

‘We never said that your hotel was covered.’

‘I know that,’ I said, ‘but what was I going to say? “I can’t come and do your job because I can’t afford the hotel?” It wasn’t like I was going to say that, was I? Now I’ve got a broken-down car in Pokeno. God knows how much that’s going to cost to fix, and I can’t even go and pick it up.’ 

In the meantime, people in Pokeno were trying to contact me about the car. There was a person at National Radio who I had never met but who had a name similar to mine. They were dealing with him despite his insistence that he didn’t have a car at all, let alone one in Pokeno. In the end the powers that be decided to bond me in return for paying the hotel bill.

It became apparent very soon that I should work for the National Programme, as it was called then, because that was the sort of radio I was used to. I got a job working with Relda Familton, compiling the all-night programme, which she presented on alternate weeks. She was impossible to contact in her weeks off although I sometimes had to call her. I knew to wait until the afternoon at least.

‘What time is it, Paul?’

‘It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.’

‘Two o’clock? Why am I not up?’

‘I’m not sure. Do you want me to phone you back later?’

‘No, try not to.’

I was always trying to persuade her to do extra things I thought would be good for the show. And she was always reluctant. When Peter Ustinov came to town, to promote his autobiography,
Dear Me
, I got very excited. ‘He’s perfect for us,’ I told her, ‘because we’ve got the luxury of time. We could do half an hour with Peter Ustinov. We can cut in clips from albums where he’s telling stories.’

I had to up-sell it hugely, and may have given the impression my family had been friends of the Ustinovs for ages. On the odd occasion, Relda reluctantly agreed to my plans, and this was one of them. So now I had this huge task ahead of me because the chance of getting an exclusive interview with Peter Ustinov for a programme that aired after midnight was quite slight.

He was staying at the James Cook Hotel and I knew he was giving a press conference one morning at ten o’clock. I also knew
there was no way we would get anything decent for our show in a crowd like that. Relda would probably still be in her pyjamas.

‘We’ve got a pre-press conference one on one at nine,’ I lied to her. My plan was to turn up, pretend the nine o’clock was arranged and just see where we went from there.

‘It’s pretty amazing you getting this one on one,’ Relda said to me on the way there, ‘because I found out there’s a press conference at 10.’

‘I know,’ I agreed. ‘We’ve got a whole hour, I suppose. I mean, he might want a few minutes to prepare for the press conference, but that leaves us at least 45 minutes.’

We managed to get up to his floor and, as luck would have it, his breakfast was being delivered at precisely the time we got there. When the door opened for his breakfast, we shuffled in behind the room service. A woman, presumably his manager, looked us up and down without saying anything.

‘Oh, is it inconvenient now?’ I said. ‘We’re here for the nine o’clock one on one with Mr Ustinov. Is it appropriate?’

‘The nine o’clock?’ she said.

‘Yes. Pre-arranged.’

‘There is a press conference at ten o’clock,’ she said. ‘That is when Mr Ustinov will be appearing, long after his breakfast is finished.’

‘Is the nine o’clock off, then?’

Suddenly, we heard a familiar voice booming from the bathroom.

‘Who is it? What conversation are you having out there? Should I be a part of it?’

‘Oh, Mr Ustinov, it’s Paul Henry,’ I called out. ‘I’m here for the nine o’clock with Relda Familton, a very famous New Zealand broadcaster, as arranged by one of your staff members earlier.’

He came out wearing a bathrobe, still dripping wet, saw his breakfast and without even looking at us walked over to the table and started lifting the covers off the plates.