JEREMY WELLS

‘‘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 high-achieving 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.