What Was I Thinking: A Memoir (9 page)

And always in the back of my mind was the fact that my day of judgement was getting ever closer. I thought the government would advertise that the frequency was being put up for tender. Surely the
Times-Age
would find out about it when it was advertised in their paper. They could hardly overlook that.

I called the staff — who were all on six-month ‘trial’ contracts — and explained everything to them.

‘There’s no obligation on me to keep going beyond the six month period,’ I said, and in fact I could have legally just walked away. ‘But we’re going okay, and I’d like to be sitting down with all of you in a couple of months and negotiating your employment from here on in. We can only do that if we win this tender. So I’m just keeping you in touch so that you will know.’

Then I called a small group of these people to my house with a couple of the others. One was a young salesman whose girlfriend worked at the
Times-Age
.

‘I need you all to help me disseminate misinformation,’ I said. ‘I have just stopped paying all my bills. We need the word to be out there that things are financially shaky for us and we can’t even afford to pay our bills. If that gets out, then people will think either I’m not going to put in a tender or that if I do it’s going to be really low.’

When the tender was advertised I thought there would be quite a juicy front-page story about how the new radio station, which had made such an impact in the area, was on its last legs. But no one rang. The only people who really expressed concern were some of our advertisers because they were getting such good value from advertising with us.

The tendering system had changed so that the highest tender won the contract and paid what they had bid — not the second-highest price. I tendered quite low and Radio New Zealand tender ed lower. I can only assume the misinformation plan worked because I got the frequency for what was in reality quite a reasonable price.

Then, for the first time, the prospect of running myself ragged and operating my own radio station that needed to make $13,000 a week to break even started to hit home.

I had succeeded and the Radio New Zealand station was panicked. They were selling $65 spots for something like $8. I wrote to Jim Bolger complaining that my income tax was
obviously being used to subsidise what was supposed to be a commercial station. I didn’t get a reply. I’m not the first businessman that’s had the government undercut him.

Having secured the station, I wanted to get rid of it. I couldn’t manage the pace. There was a particular time where dollar for dollar we were earning more money than any other radio station in the country, so I was hopeful of selling quickly and for a good price.

Around this time I was in Wellington when I heard an ad for Bernadino sparkling wine. It was a brilliant ad, just a musical 30 seconds, but I wanted it on our station because I liked the sound of it so much. I rang Bernadino with an offer.

‘If you back up a truck to my radio station with a hundred cartons of Bernadino on board,’ I said, ‘I’ll give you a $5000 spend in the month.’ They said yes straight away. The weekend it started playing I had Brent Birchfield from Port FM visiting. He was interested in buying my station. I picked him up with Today FM playing in the car and every second ad was this fantastic Bernadino one.

‘You’ve got some big clients,’ he said.

I was in full-on sales mode. The books were in good shape. It was a good purchase for him, because it would make a key link in a small network. I didn’t downplay how hard I found the work but I thought his structure meant that wouldn’t be such a problem. He met the staff, who all behaved beautifully.

We arranged a meeting with my accountant, Darren Quirk, at the Solway Park Hotel.

‘Darren, what you’ve got to know is this guy is going to walk away owning my radio station lock, stock and barrel,’ I said on the way in. ‘I don’t want an interest left in there. I don’t want to be part of this radio station any more. So if the figures appear to be not quite good enough to you, we’ll settle for not quite good enough. You’ve got to go in there knowing this.’

Brent was of the view that he got a very, very good deal, and so he did, but I don’t think he fully appreciated how much work was involved in making the station money. I also let him have all my debtors, which is not usual with a sale like this. They were worth about $30,000 but I knew they consisted of people who owed small amounts that they were never going to pay. He bought it and walked away thinking, ‘I have stolen this radio station from this person’, but I think a few months later it became obvious to him that he had paid a fair price.

I took the profit from the station sale and immediately reinvested it, which is what I had been doing since I discovered my natural entrepreneurial instincts as a kid. My father used to say to me ‘You have to speculate to accumulate’ and obviously he was right. I would buy a business or property, add value and turn it over at a profit, then borrow more and invest in something else, all the while working in broadcasting as my day job. Anyone can do this and it’s how you make serious money — not by just making money but by making your money make money for you. 

ALL OF A SUDDEN
I was cashed up and out of work. We continued to live in the old presbytery in Carterton and I went straight to Radio New Zealand as a newsreader. I had done them over in the Wairarapa ratings wars, but they were generous enough to welcome me back. They didn’t even complain when I started doing shifts for Radio Pacific as well.

The thought that this was any kind of step back — from owning a successful station to being a fill-in host — never entered my head. If I had been an ambitious person it might have niggled at me, but I am not and never have been ambitious in that way.

I realised having a lot of cash was not a good thing for a person like me. I would just have seen things I wanted and bought them until the money ran out. So I spent most of the funds on a lodge up in the hills.

It wasn’t a goer. It had been half-finished by someone who ran out of money, so I got it for an excellent price. There was a big four-bedroom cedar lodge with a giant fireplace and big deck on it which was designed as accommodation. There were about 500 acres of native bush, a kilometre of roading, a dirt track and waterfalls. There were swimming holes and fantastic walks. It was very beautiful but I could see it still needed a lot of money invested in it to bring things up to standard. I knew that and I knew I was not that person.

I had someone living in a campervan up there who sort of ran it, but really Jesus was in charge and it seemed to bring out the worst in him. He was always slipping rocks onto my road or knocking over trees so cars couldn’t get through. I had fun there and the kids enjoyed it, but when there was heavy rain the road got bogged and access was a nightmare.

It had been built as a hunting lodge, but I know nothing about hunting and I don’t like men with guns. The first thing I did was erect big signs saying ‘No Hunting’ and put big padlocks on the gate, because people would drive in to hunt the wild deer and pigs. So the most obvious way of making money was never going to be open to me because I didn’t want hunters on the property. I did what I usually did: sold it at a profit and put the money into something else.

But that was a sideshow. Radio occupied most of my work hours. A brilliant radio salesman called Errol Wilkinson, who had helped me a lot with Today FM, had started working at Radio Pacific and got me in to fill in on an infomercial hour which played to Wellington. Errol sold me hard to Radio Pacific’s manager Derek Lowe, once I had my foot in the door. With its
racing coverage, Pacific had now been a network for a while, courtesy of the TAB and Derek’s good management.

The infomercial hour was devoted to one person who came in to talk about often very bizarre products. I did so well that they took me up to Auckland to fill in for the guy who did the network infomercials. This was the beginning of what would be a very long relationship with Radio Pacific. I also filled in on the all-nighter, doing talkback from Wellington.

I once spent an hour talking about solar-powered glow-
in-the
-dark crucifixes. You might think it’s easy to spend an hour talking about solar-powered glow-in-the-dark crucifixes. It is not. You bought one of these and cemented it onto your loved one’s gravestone. Ideally, everyone would buy one and our cemeteries would look like Hilda Ogden’s living room. I don’t know exactly how good these things were but I knew they were durable. We threw one around in the studio to prove it. That took care of three minutes. It was tough because it had to be vandal-proof to a degree, though I imagine their appeal to random burglars would be quite low. The crucifix person and in fact, all the people I had in that hour were very sincere. They had to be. Their money was on the line and this was costing them.

Around this time, in furtherance of my dream of sailing around the world on my own boat, I bought an old fishing vessel called the Clio which I kept in Wellington. It was the sort of boat that should only be owned by a diesel mechanic who can keep it seaworthy.

One Saturday morning I set out on a fishing trip with Don Rood, who is now head of news at Radio New Zealand. Conditions were not too bad — a little swell, a cold winter’s day. I had owned the boat long enough by now to recognise the exceptionally odd noises that would sometimes interfere with the usual odd noises its engine made. We were off the Wairarapa coast when
we came upon a huge school of fish I couldn’t identify but that looked well worth catching. Don had his rod over the back and I was in the pilot house preparing to circle when there was an enormous explosion under the floor beneath me. It was evident from the fact that all the hatches had blown off and black smoke was coiling out of every fissure in the boat’s structure that we were in some trouble.

The boat was laden down with out-of-date and malfunctioning safety equipment and attempts to make a mayday call were futile. For some reason the engine kept going, although the electrics had all shut down. However, the thick black smoke made it impossible to control the boat from within the pilot house.

We tried to put out the fire with buckets and seawater, but we couldn’t reach whatever was actually burning because it was under the deck; also, diesel floats, so all we were doing was moving the flames closer to the wood we were standing on. Half an hour had gone by and it seemed inconceivable that we weren’t surrounded by rescue craft. It was obvious that our plight had been radioed in because a spotter plane was flying overhead. At the point where the paint on the deck was bubbling and we were considering leaping into the water, a helicopter appeared in the distance. It was not, alas, the Westpac Rescue Helicopter. It was a
3 News
helicopter, there to record the event. It was a comfort to think that our loved ones would have a visual keepsake of our last moments.

Not long after, the Westpac helicopter did appear and we were winched off just seconds before the boat was engulfed in flames. The helicopter circled a couple of times as we watched it sink beneath the surface, and we were taken back to be paraded before the news cameras.

I was supposed to go and hear my daughter Lucy sing with her school choir that night and still had time to get there. I had spoken to Rachael, who had seen the rescue on the TV news, so
everyone knew I was all right. I picked up my truck which had needed a tyre change, put the new tyre on and headed back over the Rimutakas. As I neared home, wearing some particularly ludicrous garments that had been found to replace my soaking wet ones, the new tyre came off and I saw it rolling ahead of me. Shit, I thought, this is turning into a really crappy day. But I did get to the concert.

When I went up to Auckland for Radio Pacific, I didn’t expect to see Derek Lowe at all. He was a mysterious, legendary figure. His run-ins with Pam Corkery were particularly renowned. But he had a big impact and influence on me. He was a real taskmaster. As far as he was concerned, there was one way to do it and that was his way. Your way might have been better, but it was wrong.

Over the years we eventually grew quite close. He never lost his absolute passion for radio, even when most of his time was focused on the boardroom and operating Radio Pacific as, at the time, the most successful broadcasting entity in the country. He was juggling all sorts of competing requirements. He had a board and shareholders, he was developing an enormous network, buying and selling other interests and making a huge amount of money. His role was more that of businessman than broadcaster, but he still loved radio.

He always had with him a pad of recycled paper — he was stingy, too, though lavish with the people he needed to be lavish with — and even when he was concentrating on a complicated deal, if he got a good idea for a promo, he wrote it down. He wrote all the station promos, which were absolute masterpieces of the genre, on this pad. And once a week he would go into the studio and produce them.

I can’t say he ever showed much passion for the infomercial hour, though I know he was passionate about the truckloads of money it brought in.

Derek realised that encumbered with racing, as Radio Pacific was, it was never going to be the number-one rating station, which would have been the goal of many people doing his job. But that didn’t mean that it couldn’t be the number-one
money-making
station. If you’re never going to get as many listeners as the others, how are you going to create the desire in those listeners you do have to spend, spend and spend? He did it by creating the notion of the Radio Pacific family and producing branded products that you bought to be part of the family.

After a while I got regular overnight shifts on the weekend, so I would commute up to Auckland and stay in a motel. Then I got a daytime show,
Paul’s People
, for which I would commute weekly. It was vaguely infomercial but more newsworthy than straight infomercial programmes. Even though they were huge
money-spinners
, they weren’t great for ratings. Derek had brought Brent Impey in to make some changes, which included my new show.

Talkback was something I wasn’t very enthusiastic about. I have hovered around talkback a lot, but I always loathed it. I loathe how the insatiable need for a caller makes you say things you don’t necessarily believe just to get a reaction.

For Arch Tambakis, an Australian talkback host who was at Pacific for a while, a successful talkback show was a full board of calls, even if every single one of those calls was from a complete moron.

For me, successful talkback is that all-too-rare brilliant caller who says something you haven’t thought of or heard before and who makes everyone listening say to themselves ‘Where the fuck did he come from?’ In those cases, the next thing you think is ‘How can someone like that be listening to this shit?’ I love talk radio when it is done properly, but I don’t think talkback is something you can do properly.

So I tried to fill
Paul’s People
with interviews — I could have the luxury of doing a 20-minute interview if the subject was worth
it — and I tried to keep the talkback component to a minimum.

The BBC did a survey when they first realised that talkback was a force to be reckoned with and was something they were going to have to do. One of the things the report discovered was that people who call up are not representative of the people who are listening. In other words, talkback consists of a large number of quite intelligent people listening to a comparatively small number of absolute fucking cretins. And those people listen to and enjoy talkback, despite the enormous frustration they get at hearing the morons, because it constantly reinforces their prejudices against humankind. Reading this made me realise why it is so stunning when, on those rare occasions, you do hear someone intelligent or interesting call in.

Arch was the quintessential talkback host. On first encounter, he impressed you hugely with this blunt, brass, crass enthusiasm. ‘I could fill a board in a graveyard,’ he said to me early on. The full board of calls is every talkback host’s goal and safety net because it means there will always be someone to talk to and you won’t end up having to fill the empty air with a monologue of your own improvising. I was impressed and wondered how Arch managed always to have a full board.

I soon found out he did it by being truly ignorant and
obnoxious
. He was entirely bulletproof in that regard with no concern about what anyone thought of him. He was short, overweight and virtually blind. Somehow, despite that, he would intimidate you even when he wasn’t trying to. Usually, however, he was trying to. He eyeballed you and, despite his lack of stature, got right up in your face. Part of the motivation may have been that only then was he able to see you. Fortunately his glasses were about six inches thick so he could never get closer than six inches.