HAPPILY HENRY
Rash, brash and in pursuit of perfection
HE IS horribly rude, Paul Henry, in a wonderfully entertaining way. He didn’t want to do this interview, he hates them. He doesn’t care about radio ratings, even though his breakfast show is one of the few positive stories coming out of MediaWorks these days.
Nor does he give a toss what people think of him, as he has proven time and again.
Tell you what he does care about – the very expensive screen in his studio which appears behind his head while he is on air. As we sit at his sparkly white command-centre desk, the screen is emitting an urban scene with little cars passing over a bridge and the occasional airplane passing through the sky. And it is bugging the hell out of him.
‘‘There are 756 billion other things that screen could do, if only we could get people in the control room to push enough buttons, and it pisses me off every single show that they can’t push more buttons to fully utilise the brilliance of that screen.’’
What else can it do? ‘‘I’m not going to tell you because I’d be too embarrassed!’’
Henry is a micro manager, a self-confessed obsessive compulsive in pursuit of perfection.
He wants Paul Henry, his eponymous multi-platform programme, to be as good as it can possibly be. Six months after launch, he is pleased to have won over a bigger audience in the latest radio survey – although not chipping away at the juggernaut that is Mike Hosking Breakfast – and to be proving the model for his programme.
‘‘I’m not making just radio, I’m making a programme across three platforms – and one of those platforms is all over the place like a mad woman’s piss,’’ he says, referring to online.
‘‘What we’re doing is a sort of compromise television/ compromise radio programme, and no-one has ever done that before.’’
The thing that really pleases him about the radio survey – which found his programme had risen from 4.5 to 5 per cent of audience share in Auckland and from 1.8 to 6.8 per cent in Wellington – is that he is changing morning routines around the country.
‘‘You are in involved in the patterns of people’s lives,’’ he says.
‘‘It’s not like saying, ‘Here’s a hit series of six programmes, we’ll publicise the bejesus out of it and get you to watch’. It’s like saying, we want you to change the way you lead your life, and it takes a long time to do that.’’
The trick, according to Henry, is to keep people entertained. Keep the show moving, have a giggle.
‘‘I mean, The TPPA is deadly f...ing dull. John Key is, as we speak, giving a speech at the United Nations that next to no-one who understands English is listening to. Yah for him and it’s an important thing to do, but at the end of the day where does it sit in the priority of things? Pretty bloody low.
‘‘There are two things we are here to do, have fun and procreate, and hopefully procreation is fun. And that’s it. If you’re sitting there having maudlin bloody conversations cranking on about things that people have well and truly passed on then really you’re not doing people justice.
‘‘So I am just here doing my stuff and people should love it, because it’s honest, and if they don’t love it then more fool them.’’
Radio is the real money-maker for broadcasters and it is Henry’s passion, although he’d always prefer to be out on his boat, or playing with his new ‘‘folly’’, a couple of farms in Kaipara that he just bought on a whim.
‘‘Here’s the thing,’’ he says, leaning in conspiratorially, as if his every word weren’t being recorded.
‘‘I’m paid a fabulous amount of money, and that money has to come from somewhere, but I never consider where that place is, because that’s not my job. I just try to do my job, but having said that I have always preferred doing radio. You know that song, Video Killed the Radio Star? That is so inaccurate. For a while radio was challenged by video but as it turns out radio has the longer tenure. Radio is still as relevant as it always was.’’
And so is Paul Henry, in case the sub-text eluded you. He is relevant, happy and a completely charming wanker.
‘‘I love being a wanker. At the end of the day I don’t give a shit, I am who I am.’’
THE DETAILS
Paul Henry 6am to 9am, weekdays, TV3, RadioLive and online.