Trials of shock a jock
At 40, DJ Dom Harvey is still causing offence with his on-air banter and pranks. Steve Kilgallon asks, is he still happy to play the idiot?
‘‘IF I didn’t listen [to the radio], and I had just read about me, I would think I am a complete tool as well,’’ says Dom Harvey, laughing.
If you’ve never listened to Harvey’s long-running breakfast radio show you’d know him only from the incidents, the ‘‘mistakes’’. In the past three years, Harvey has contrived to offend the following: Sally Ridge, Jaime Ridge, Ali Mau, gay people in general, female rappers, Pua Magasiva, Teuila Blakely, Grace Ikenasio, Rose Matafeo. You may not have heard of all these people, but no matter.
In May, when Harvey took to Twitter to make coarse comparison between Ikenasio, a contestant on the X-Factor, and a character of the same name in the film Once Were Warriors, the
Sunday Star-Times asked him for an interview. He was keen, but his employers’ PR people wanted to let the furore die down. This always seemed a hopelessly optimistic approach, given the metronomic regularity of his mistakes.
So after the most recent, where he sent a picture of his penis to the Paralympic swimmer Sophie Pascoe, Harvey got in touch, and gracefully offered himself up.
‘‘The stuff that gets reported about – if you didn’t listen to the show and that was all you knew about it, it must sound like an appalling mess of a radio station that we are running,’’ he says.
For 12 years, Harvey has presented Morning Madhouse on The Edge. The morning we meet, he had mused on marathon running and the enjoyment, possibly sexual, he gets from driving his car over rumble strips.
‘‘I don’t think you would meet too many people who know me personally who would say ‘that guy is a real dick, that guy’s an arsehole’,’’ he says. ‘‘I am just a guy who wants to take the piss. I don’t intentionally hurt anyone.’’
The circumstances of the penis picture, once explained, are less racy than first imagined. During an on-air discussion, prompted by US politician Anthony Weiner’s odd hobby of sending photos of genitalia, Harvey’s co-host and wife, Jay-Jay Feeney, opined such pictures should never be sent. Their producer, Sophie Hallwright, said she’d never seen one. Harvey, figuring it might make for on-air merriment if he sent her one, clicked on the wrong Sophie in his mobile phone address book. Pascoe, in return, sent him back a picture of a penis scrawled on her amputated leg.
‘‘People would think ‘what are you doing sending it to your producer’,’’ he says. ‘‘But working in a radio station, it is an unorthodox environment. It is a different workplace. There are a lot of details to explain . . . but even with those facts, I don’t know if it makes it any better.’’
Harvey’s considered position is that there’s this radio bloke who says and does stupid stuff, which occasionally crosses the invisible line, and the boring, middle-aged, happily married father who watches Grand Designs. ‘‘It’s like an actor playing a villain in
Shortland St – I can distinguish the difference. In some ways, it is playing the role of a goofball. But in some ways it is still me. I’ve got to own that.’’
He denies he acts up purely to produce radio ratings (which he says are ‘‘solid’’), because how can you tell what will produce publicity and what won’t. But in his book,
Bucket List of an Idiot, he admitted: ‘‘We push the boundaries a fair bit. You have to, in commercial radio, to stand out a bit.’’
The book is illuminating. His publishers, Allen & Unwin, say it’s been one of their bestsellers, that Harvey required very little editing and was a natural comic writer. It’s entertaining, sharply written, and ends with the line: ‘‘I am still an idiot.’’ And why not – it has served him well. As we talk, he says: ‘‘I think I am a reasonably astute businessman actually.’’
HE SHOULD certainly know what makes good radio. He got his start at the age of 17, earning $12,000 a year as the midnight-to-six DJ on Palmerston North’s 2XS, where he was expected to complete light cleaning duties as part of his shift.
His predecessor was sacked after being caught, mid-shift, breaking into the prize cupboard through the ceiling panels.
He loved it. ‘‘But I was absolutely terrible. This was the job I wanted to do. I was mad at myself for being shit and I didn’t know how I could make myself better. This isn’t false modesty either; if I was awesome, I would tell you I was awesome.’’
His saviour was breakfast DJ Mike West, who turned ‘‘Mark’’ Harvey (his radio name) into his sidekick, Baldrick (named for the
Blackadder character).
‘‘I was a reasonable deal in Palmerston North,’’ says Harvey, self-mocking. ‘‘It was a huge amount of fun. Incredible. It was really hard, bloody scary to leave, because it was so comfortable.’’
He left because of Feeney. She was presenting on the Edge in Hamilton, and for two years they conducted a long(ish)-distance relationship but were reaching breaking point. So he moved up, and within six months the station had transferred to Auckland, and Feeney and Harvey with them. He says they decided that career was important, so if their relationship failed, ‘‘we would be as pro- fessional as we can and keep working together’’. But they’ve been together, on and off air, ever since, rising daily at four, out the door by five, on air at six. They’ve just signed new contracts.
Having once aspired to be a police youth aid officer, he genuinely appears to have no idea what he would do next, beyond moving on to a more middle-aged station. At 40, he’s aware of the risk of becoming inauthentic to an 18-24 audience. ‘‘That’s a huge fear,’’ he says. ‘‘Fortunately, I am quite an immature guy, so I am not like your regular 40-year-old. But there has got to come a point where you reach your limit of talking about the Kardashians.’’
And thus the two Dominic Harveys. There’s the impeccably polite, charming bloke you would struggle to dislike, who’s lived with the same woman for 14 years, is raising a child, and spending his leisure time in daily meditation and running, with an iPod shuffle featuring both Bruce Springsteen and the Spice Girls to be ‘‘away from the noise’’. And the other bloke: ‘‘A completely exaggerated version of me. Because the real me is too boring for radio.’’
He credits Feeney’s nephew, Seven, for slowing him down. Feeney and Harvey have raised the 10-year-old for nearly six years, becoming his legal guardians (Seven’s father has spent time in prison and his mother cannot care for him). At first, says Harvey, they were ‘‘completely lost’’; they had no idea how to parent, had no friends with kids, and Seven was a difficult preschooler. ‘‘It was absolutely life-changing but we wouldn’t have it any other way. He’s a great kid.’’
Feeney and Harvey have long, and publicly, wanted a child of their own. Theirs has been a life lived through the pages of
Woman’s Day, from their 2004 wedding, to the 2005 ‘‘New Year’s Resolution’’ to try for a baby, then a procession of painful stories explaining the failure of IVF, Harvey’s collapse four kilometres into the Auckland marathon, resulting in the discovery of a tumour in his stomach, then of a medical condition (retrograde ejaculate, which means his sperm travels backwards) which would make pregnancy so hard.
He says the exposure ‘‘seemed a good idea at the time’’ but he’s comfortable with it. Tomorrow, Feeney releases a semiautobiographical book on IVF. ‘‘She’s still talking about it, but I am over it,’’ says Harvey. ‘‘I am sick of talking about it.’’
For some time, he would be regularly approached by blokes in pubs to talk infertility but he felt uncomfortable playing this unofficial ambassador for IVF, not least because, in their case, it ‘‘failed miserably’’.
Feeney is dieting for one final attempt at IVF, this time using donor sperm from a friend. ‘‘But this is it, the line in the sand. If it doesn’t work, that’s that chapter finished.’’
THERE’S SOME dismay from colleagues when I say how much I liked Dom Harvey. One had said she dislikes him because he’s such a bloody awful sexist. This is the only time he looks thrown. ‘‘Just ’cos you say someone is a sexist, doesn’t mean they are,’’ he begins. Then he rallies: ‘‘I love chicks, does that make me a sexist? If you spoke to my mum or my nana, or wife, or sister, or nieces, they would laugh and that’s what matters. What they think matters.’’
Yes, mum listens to the show. ‘‘She tells me off, every now and again, but she’s good. I think she knows that if I screw up, I beat myself up enough about it.’’
It may be where Harvey differs from someone like Paul Henry, who clearly doesn’t give a toss. Despite all he says, Harvey doesn’t like the idea it upsets people.
He says Sally Ridge is ‘‘fine’’ after the endless mocking he calls ‘‘harmless banter’’. He knows Mau was angry at a song he wrote and sang about her gay relationship, which he says time has led him to regret (though the lyrics are reproduced in his book).
‘‘I suppose I am a kinda clumsy person,’’ he says. ‘‘They are mistakes to a point. But I do lots of good things as well, and it never gets reported on.’’
I’ve heard him say this before, and ask for an example. ‘‘Well, a small thing,’’ he says. ‘‘Whenever I go to a car park, where you have to pay-and-display, I always hand my ticket to a person coming in as I leave. It’s only a small gesture, but I do it every single time. But do you think the papers want to report that?’’