HOORAY HENRY?
Return of a TV terrorist
PAUL HENRY has no intention of tempering his always strong, often unpopular, opinions for his new late-night television slot. The long-time broadcaster has confirmed that The Paul Henry Show, will replace news show Nightline in the 10.30pm weekday slot in TV3’s 2014 line-up.
Although production is in the early stages, Henry has a clear idea of what his show should and shouldn’t be.
‘‘It’s been put together in my mind for years. It’s a new show. I want it to be very honest and full of my opinions, but I will never allow my opinions to get in the way of the range of opinions that might be viable around a certain topic.
‘‘So perhaps it will be people trying to convince me that I’m wrong about certain things.’’
Henry says TVNZ ripped up and threw away a prime time news slot when it canned Close Up for Seven Sharp, and he had no intention of being part of similar moves at TV3.
‘‘It’s very important to me that this is a news programme. This is not Seven Sharp. This is news being picked up. They’re not just getting the news read at them. We’re talking about the news. And we’re going to have fun, there’s no law against having fun with the news.’’
In the past five years Henry has poked fun at women with facial hair, gay men, suggested singer Susan Boyle was ‘‘retarded’’, questioned whether former governor-general Sir Anand Satyanand was Kiwi enough for the job, and giggled at the name of Indian politician Sheila Dikshit.
He knows there will be a critical eye on his new show, but is hoping the audience and production team can grow together.
Henry returned from Australia late last year after the Channel Ten Breakfast show he was hired to front was pulled following dismal ratings – though he denies it had anything to do with the show’s personalities.
‘‘It didn’t work because the tide goes out . . . and when the tide goes out, it’s very hard to swim against it. You could put your best swimmer in the ocean and they are rendered down to that of a hopeless fool if the tide’s going against them.’’
Henry says that Channel Ten was undergoing changes in management, Breakfast was illthought-out, the competition was heating up and by the time the show started to find its feet all its resources were pulled.
BUT despite the way New Zealand media portrayed it, he says, his shock-jock style and controversial opinions were not the issue.
Henry made some remarks about the divisive issue of asylum seekers, and both he and Channel Ten apologised for a suggestion he made that they be left to starve to death.
He says his comments are often taken out of context – and in one instance had been part of a reasonable line of questioning about what a tough-talking minister would do to address the problem. ‘‘The comments were made to the minister in charge of being tough and all I was trying to do was to get him to admit that they weren’t going to act tough.
‘‘So you say, if every asylum seeker knew they were going to be shot the instant they arrived in Australia they wouldn’t come, that’s at one extreme. At the other extreme, you give every asylum seeker a 10-acre block, a house and an income for life and they will all come.
‘‘So somewhere in the middle is a workable solution . . . it’s a perfectly logical line of questioning with the aim of finding out what they’re actually going to do.’’
Henry has just released a second book, Outraged, in which he covers everything from immigration to Baz Luhrmann’s version of The Great Gatsby.
It’s buyer beware, he says – he doesn’t mind offending people, but he doesn’t want people to buy the book and then be surprised by the offence caused.
‘‘The number of complaints that have come in have not been desperately high but some good ones are coming in.’’
Although some of the more strongly worded stuff had to be removed for legal reasons, Henry is clearly not holding much back.
‘‘This wasn’t like utu or
I don’t want people to think ‘oh yeah, Paul Henry, that name rings a bell’. I would rather someone say ‘oh, Paul Henry, that arsehole, what a prick’ or he’s so snobby, or so stuck up. However wrong they are, that’s still better than them not having made up an opinion.
Paul Henry
anything like that for me, this was just saying how I feel.
‘‘So when I have a go it’s normally at something, rather than somebody – I’ve always felt that playing the ball and not the person is the thing.’’
Henry says his opinions are genuine (except when they’re not) and for him it’s about freedom of speech rather than his personal brand.
‘‘The sickest countries are not the countries which are drawing guns on themselves, it’s the countries where people are not allowed to say what they think.’’
He sees it as his duty as a broadcaster to push people into thinking about where they stand on an issue, and sometimes that means telling them what he thinks.
‘‘I don’t want people to think, ‘oh yeah, Paul Henry, that name rings a bell’. I would rather someone say, ‘oh, Paul Henry, that arsehole, what a prick’ or he’s so snobby, or so stuck up, or he’s such a Right winger, or he hates whatever.
‘‘However wrong they are, that’s still better than them not having made up an opinion.’’