JEREMY WELLS

A sharp tool

Mike Hosking can rest easy. It turns out that Jeremy Wells, the arch nemesis who has mercilessly mimicked and mocked the perfectly groomed, coiffured and controversial broadcaster, has done so not out of enmity or bitterness, but rather love and a deep, heartfelt respect.

And maybe just a touch of professional jealousy.

As Hannibal Lecter tutored an exasperated Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, ‘‘What does he do, this man you seek? He covets . . . and we begin by coveting what we see every day.’’ Wells need not covet any longer. He has Hosking’s old job on Seven Sharp, one of the premier broadcasting gigs in the country.

And that’s not all. ‘‘I’ve inherited his locker,’’ says Wells.

Perhaps a final humiliation? Maybe a last jab to the ribs of puffed-up selfrighteousness? Not at all. Quite the opposite in fact.

‘‘I’ve still got his name tag on my locker,’’ he says, ‘‘which is a nice reminder of where the show started and people gone by.’’

It’s a tribute to a man he respects, who has a mana and kudos he still covets. ‘‘Mike is the best broadcaster in New Zealand, there’s no doubt about it,’’ says Wells. ‘‘You watch him work, watch his interviews: he never makes a mistake, he always seems like he totally understands where he’s going, what he’s doing, his audience.

‘‘No matter what you think about his personal views or his personal life, as a broadcaster I have a huge admiration for what he does, I always have.’’ Wells is a little less certain on just how he himself got the plum role and how long he’ll be there. He’s waiting for the bosses at Seven Sharp to wake up, smell the soy latte and get rid of him.

The 41-year-old breakfast shock jock at Radio Hauraki, who has described the Seven Sharp set as a giant womb, still seems a little bemused to be sitting next to on-screen partner Hilary Barry and getting the handover from more sober news professionals such as Simon Dallow and Wendy Petrie.

‘‘It’s surreal,’’ he says. ‘‘The lunatics have taken over the asylum.’’

There’s plenty of evidence for that assertion. Wells has spent the past 20 years stomping all over the often conservative conventions of mainstream television.

Jeremy ‘Newsboy’ Wells and Mikey Havoc created plenty of the latter during a televised 1990s roadshow that ran roughshod over the regions, with tongue wickedly planted in cheek.

Hawera was written off as the teenpregnancy capital of the country, Gore its gay counterpart. Neither man is welcome in the southern town.

Wells went on to work at TVNZ and quickly set about pricking more egos, including those of his employer, while collecting plenty of complaints along the way.

In Eating Media Lunch he farmed Ma¯ ori and dwarfs in a Country Calendar mockumentary and he explored the cultural and ethnic value of the adult entertainment industry in an infamous episode, which included a simulated orgy on otherwise pristine farmland.

He said in a ScreenTalk interview that he got his own hands dirty when ‘‘borrowing’’ TVNZ current affairs equipment to film himself having sex with a prostitute, with a colleague going on in his ear about what to do next.

His bosses weren’t happy about that one, Wells later said.

‘‘We were kind of the outsiders inside the building,’’ he recalls, ‘‘basically being silly and using TVNZ resources, well, I guess to make fun of them in a way.’’ Nothing was sacred. He and a colleague found the original Play School toys in a back room.

‘‘We thought this was a tragedy – these things are New Zealand icons – so we had them up in our office.’’ Icons they may be, props for mischief they remained. ‘‘[Colleague] Robbo would put a noose around Humpty’s neck and just drop him down into the atrium during massive meetings . . . they were always culling people at TVNZ, always restructuring . . . and you’d see Humpty coming down.’’ He’s laughing as he recalls the memory.

In Wells’ defence, he’s an equal opportunity lampooner. Even the things he holds most dear can be the subject of pratfalls and rib-poking.

The cricket and classical music fan followed our own New Zealand Symphony Orchestra on an historic three-week tour of Europe.

Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony were juxtaposed with stories about the correct protocol for handling severed musicians’ testicles and the possibility of ‘‘happy endings’’ for the orchestra’s masseuse.

He can’t help himself. ‘‘I think I would find it hard to do something in a straight way, completely 100 per cent straight,’’ he says.

But again, much of it is meant as a form of tribute, a homage, rather than disrespect.

‘‘To mimic something you have to love it. You could mimic something from a position of hatred and maybe there’s some people who do that, but in the end most people are mimicking because there’s something in there that they find interesting, something that riles them up and makes them feel something.’’ And Wells loves broadcasting, coveting this ‘‘magical’’ medium since he was a child. ‘‘There was a magic to it,’’ he says. ‘‘Things like Telethon, you’d see all the stars and you’d see the cameras – I remember the first time and I said, oh, there’s a camera, and you’d see the workings and they’d be people with headphones on, pushing buttons and I was like, that looks exciting. It looked like a magic world.’’ A magic world for a ‘‘class clown’’ finding his own way in a highachieving family in the well-to-do Auckland suburb of Remuera and a succession of conservative Christian schools.

‘‘When you’re the youngest, you’ve got to find a way when you’re hanging around older people or people who are a lot more intelligent than you. You’ve got to find a way of getting attention, and probably the easiest way is to try to make them laugh.’’ He hasn’t always got the method right – ‘‘I made some terrible decisions’’ – and he places much of his success on the shoulders of luck and others in his ‘‘teams’’.

But he’s proud of the work he and others have done to bring classical music to a new audience, and other ‘‘reasonably serious documentation of stuff’’.

‘‘If you scratch a little bit below the comedic surface on stuff that we’d done on Eating Media Lunch you find that there’s also some serious stuff in there as well, and that’s what I’ve always liked doing.’’ There’s an irony that a man who failed to complete his journalism degree has developed a knack for giving viewers a glimpse ‘‘behind the veneer’’, of revealing Kiwi characters and telling the kind of unique stories produced by other people he admires, including Gary McCormick, Radar and Marcus Lush.

And that he finds himself in such a powerful position to do so. He has another powerful responsibility that he is taking very seriously – a father to daughter Mishka, 8, and son Hugo, 5.

Wells raised his own hell as a drugtaking teen, before finding his path. How would he help his kids in keeping to theirs?

‘‘It’s something I’ve thought about quite a lot, actually. You can say you can’t do that and you can’t do this, but in the end what control do you really have? In the end they’re going to make decisions as young adults and you’ve got to hope that . . . they are thinking about other people and how those decisions affect other people and not hurting other people.’’

Mike Hosking knows a thing or two about bringing up kids. I’m sure he’d be happy to have a chat and offer some advice. Maybe.

’’I think I would find it hard to do something in a straight way, completely 100 per cent straight.’’