Henry’s TV show a little edgy, creepy
Broadcaster’s brand of craziness just enough to entertain, not offend
It’s that extra ‘hi’ in there which gets you, isn’t it?” Paul Henry was on his best behaviour yesterday morning, as he debuted his new multi-platform morning show, and waited 37 minutes before making fun of a non-European surname.
Warriors second-rower Sebastine Ikahihifo was the lucky winner of Paul’s signature trick, but it was at the benign end of the scale, with no snickering or overt racism.
Instead the debut of Paul Henry, his eponymous morning show, went by both quickly and slowly, three long hours of breakneck-paced TV divided up into a thousand little pieces.
There was a jolly interview with John Key, who calls Paul “Pauly”, and a bizarre one with singer Brooke Fraser — who is pregnant — which was mainly focused on bodily functions.
After a section discussing their mutual “problems in the lower part of the torso”, Henry had another itch that needed scratching.
“All of a sudden I want to know
if you’ve vomited today,” he said, a little furtively. “Have you? Has it been a day of vomiting?”
While Fraser looked uncomfortable, such moments were what made the show worthwhile. Henry’s strength as a broadcaster is his unpredictability, his willingness to venture off script and into other people’s personal spaces in the interests of entertaining himself. It’s mostly endearing, though frequently creepy, too.
“I don’t think you were wearing any undergarments at all,” he said to Maria Tutaia of the last time they’d hung out. She took it in good humour but it seemed rather gross, this old chap spending such a long time discussing Tutaia’s gruts situation on national television. Especially so early.
Mostly it was entertaining, though, and Henry’s bracingly unfiltered consciousness was fun to watch. He started to ask resident social media guru Perlina Lau if Prince Harry had Twitter, but couldn’t even get through the question before giving up. “Oh hang on — all of a sudden I don’t care.”
Previewing his interview with Fraser he admitted to “clutching at straws trying to find something interesting to talk to her about”. At times he seemed to be saying words with his mouth while his brain wandered off, untethered.
“You can lead a horse to water, and you can make it drink sometimes,” he noted to a nonplussed panel (Tutaia and a clearly stoked-to-beasked Shane Cortese), before snapping out of his little funk. “Why did I even say that? And what does it even mean?”
His constant babbling and insane energy were infectious, but wearying. Watching it for three hours is not something I’d recommend, or that anyone outside Media Works production staff and TV critics are likely to do. It was also very clearly a debut episode of a show with a lot of moving parts. The first talkback caller hung up, and the first interview was conducted in what sounded like a pet food factory at full capacity.
Henry remains a figure who delights in his capacity to offend. Those who advertise surcharges at Easter: “Evil swine”. The soon-to-be- executed Australians in Bali? “Loathsome individuals”.
Most places outside Auckland got middling reviews, too: Wellingtonians were likely “miserable as sin”, while Te Awamutu is a place “you drive through as fast as you can”.
For all that, it was impossible to be bored. Thanks to the radio side, everything came at you so fast it was gone before you could properly process it. Henry’s fidgety presence is probably better suited to radio than television, where his constant interrupting and non-existent attention span can tend toward incoherence.
He also glories a little too much in his technological illiteracy, especially for a show that markets itself in such a modern, multi-platform way. He grumbled about v-cards, called it the “interweb” and his first question to his soon-to-be long-suffering Lau was what she thought of the looming executions, when the point of her role is to synthesise the voice of the people.
Likewise his interviews were a mix of the entertainingly bizarre (jetpack inventor Glenn Martin) and the wince-inducing. An expert on Indonesian studies from Auckland Uni was mostly asked if he thought execution was worse than surcharges (Paul thinks not, obviously).
But for all the chaos you have to consider the show’s debut a success. There was just enough edgy Paul Henry stuff to keep fans happy, while not enough offence to worry the sponsors. The set design and on-screen graphics were excellent, a modern mix of primary colours and geometric shapes which felt both spacious and intimate.
I’ll freely admit to counting down the minutes by the end, and Hilary Barry and Jim Kayes looked like they were, too. Three hours beside that madman would drain anyone, and they were thrown to without warning throughout, while mostly handling his merry narcissism well.
The show looks like it’ll be around a while. It’s newsdriven and unpredictable, a caffeinated counterpoint to the sleepier mornings found over on Breakfast.