After 40 years in television, the past 27 with Fair Go, one of the most-recognised faces in New Zealand is bowing out. Kevin Milne talks to Alan Perrott about the rights and wrongs of his escapades and TV ratings.
Dear Fair Go.
A long-standing employee whom we've trusted for yonks has not only broken his contract, he's gone and ruined all our plans to cash in on his leaving party as well. Please help.
Yours, TVNZ
And so it was, that at the very last, Kevin Milne NZOM, the man whose television career stretches back to the days of black and white, contrived to stuff up royally.
His final contract clearly stated he couldn't say boo about his impending retirement until a week after it happened so his employer could use the event to its best advantage. Then, there he was on the cover of Woman's Day.
"Yeah, that caused all sorts of problems," laughs Milne. "After 27 years of Fair Go, I didn't read the small print."
Yes, this is the people's hero whose ordinariness has always been central to his appeal. And what is more ordinary than skipping over the legalese and living to regret it?
It's not the first time either.
"To be honest, I don't know a hell of a lot more than anyone else does on how to stay out of trouble. Just because I'm always giving advice, people assume I take it myself. I don't. But I think it helps being someone always getting into difficulties, it gives me a good understanding of people when they're in trouble ... ha."
It's also why he and his wife Linda laughed like drains when Milne finished second behind VC hero Willie Apiata in a Reader's Digest poll on our most trusted people. "According to my family, I'm the last person who should be giving advice to anybody ..."
And you don't need to look too far through his new autobiography, Kevin Milne: The Life and Times of a Brown Paper Bag, to find damning evidence of his cock-ups and scams ...
As a young man he was fired from a mercifully brief stint handling reservations for the National Airways Corporation after he sent an unknown number of passengers to the wrong destination.
He then got a bank job and lost £100 of someone's money on his first day.
Once on the telly he immediately broke union rules while travelling to Australia to cover the Concorde's test flight. And hushed it up.
En route to his OE in Blighty, Milne admits to splurging $1000 on a bottle of wine to impress the ladies and then getting the tourist police involved so he could avoid the bill.
In England, he assisted a shadowy stranger from Iranian Oil to get New Zealand residency, then narrowly avoided a descent into gambling addiction before flogging off enough fake krugerrands to buy his first home.
Back home, one of his early Fair Go efforts saw him painting someone's home to show how far it extended into its neighbours property and, when it couldn't be washed off again, had the entire house repainted at the taxpayer's expense.
He even managed to upset an unknown number of uptight Disneyland visitors by parading around in a hat emblazoned with an "outrageous homoerotic character" and then contrived to have overworked hospital staff needlessly shave both his legs for free.
Some working class hero, eh? The miracle is that his first television appearance wasn't as a police mugshot.
Anyway, we're sitting in the Empire Tavern, just across the road from his former employer, reflecting on the end of the everyman champion he calls "that guy from Fair Go."
After 27 years of dedication to the show, including 16 as host, he is looking forward to trying something different. Milne says his enthusiasm was gradually eroded by the constant back and forth from his Kapiti Coast home to Auckland but the tipping point came in 2005 when a meeting with then head of news Bill Ralston led to his boss storming out and slamming the door so hard he brought down some of the ceiling.
He'd also been dealing with some well-publicised heart and tumour problems, which had forced him to drop the field work and move into the studio as full-time presenter where, let's face it, at 60 his face makes an odd match alongside co-presenter Alison Mau. Anyway, he has little choice. His fourth child, 9-year-old Tommie, needs to see her dad more.
But if there is anything remarkable about Milne's departure, it is the amount of control he has been able to exercise over it. Showbiz isn't known for the sympathy it offers to onscreen employees once the wear and tear starts showing through the makeup - although admittedly, people like Milne don't step away from the public gaze all that often.
After 40 years, his onscreen career is only 10 years shy of New Zealand television's entire lifespan. He tackled all manner of roles before finding his perfect match with Fair Go, even if he was more interested in working with Brian Edwards than serving a greater good. Milne then stuck around so long he became the only link to the celebrated days when it treated glamour like a pox and boasted production values described as having much in common with homemade porn.
So it is appropriate that his departure was self-effacing and low-key - a few tributes, a snappy montage and a brief farewell. Yet he still worries he'll be misunderstood.
"I hope no one thinks I use self-deprecation as a tactic ... if you read my book you might imagine that I didn't have very high self-esteem for a long time and I don't think that at any stage I've over-egged my abilities. I'm just very cautious of sounding arrogant in any way."
Actually you get a sense that no one is more surprised by his success than the man himself. He's even more amazed at how his fortunes recovered from a childhood triple whammy with the death at birth of his twin, followed in quick succession by those of his beloved father and older brother.
"You know, I'm not religious, not in a church-going sense, but I have a fairly strong spiritual side to me and I do think somebody has been at my side. Now it could be my brother who was killed, because somehow everything started to go right from that point on, or, and I may be being overly sentimental, it could be that little twin. Either way, I reckon someone's been sitting there as my guardian angel because from about 18 or 19 I've had a magnificent run. It's been wonderful and I'm hugely grateful."
That gratitude works both ways, says TVNZ chief executive Rick Ellis, who took time out from the Paul Henry saga to pay this tribute: "There has been something reassuring for all of us to see [Kevin Milne] back, year after year, fighting the good fight. He's been a tremendous asset to the company and to the community as a champion for those on the sharp end of injustice. I'd like him to know from all of us how much his work has been admired and appreciated. He's made a unique contribution to New Zealand life."
But it hasn't all been about chasing baddies. There was a time when he was hard on the heels of little green men. In 1978 Milne was on the network's newsdesk when those famous images of a light apparently tracking an aircraft flying over the Kaikoura ranges arrived. Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind had recently been a huge hit and UFO fever was in the air.
"Now I have seen some huge stories in my time, but the only one to top this would be 9/11, that's how big this was. Literally half the bulletin that night was given over to it. It was the first time I'd ever seen [newsreader] Dougal [Stevenson] get off his chair and stand to give the news. We really thought we were really on to something. We had a UFO. It felt amazing, the pictures were amazing and we knew we weren't dealing with nutters - [pilot] Bill Startup was the kind of guy you'd trust with your life. And that was just the first night, it went on and on for a week or so. But what's funny now, is that apart from Quentin Fogarty [the reporter who got the story], it's hard to get anyone - and that includes TV3 news boss Mark Jennings - who was there to talk about how excited they were."
Milne suspects the lesson from that incident about pulling back on the hyperbole until the story becomes clear may have to be re-learned. He says more time is now spent working out how a story should be told rather than on assembling the facts behind it. Ideally, he'd like TVNZ to go fully commercial - "if it isn't already" - allowing the creation of the public service broadcaster he would love to work for.
Until then, ratings rule and while Milne is a believer in them, it's not in the same sense as his bosses. "I've always been a ratings man. They give you an indication of whether people are interested in what you're doing. I'm certain that if we'd had them in the old days, some of the documentaries we used to make would have rated like dogs ... but the thing is, ratings should never be about who has the highest, because we all know that a public hanging would win hands down.
"I look at current affairs programming now and of course you want to get good ratings, but there should be a lot more to news than that. I was watching one story the other day that revolved around how many times a 14-year-old girl had sex ..."
It was ratings paranoia that led to him being called in for a chat about the potential impact of an old photo one newspaper ran of him in an unbuttoned, tight polyester shirt, above a story suggesting he'd had some success with the ladies. He didn't turn up.
So yes, it's time to leave TVNZ behind. "It's a complicated place," he says looking across the road, "and, to be honest [he says that a lot], it seems to make so many difficulties for itself. But one of the things I've promised myself not to do is to now sit back and criticise the place for not being like the old days. Times change and I'm not going to pretend they haven't."
Well, he can't anyway. Not after trying to impress some new Fair Go recruits with the greatness of their predecessors. Clutching a hoary old VHS tape, he gave its contents a grand build-up before pushing it into the player. He was shocked by how slow and staid the old stuff now looks. That isn't necessarily a criticism, says Milne, it's simply a fact.
In similar fashion, Fair Go founder Brian Edwards celebrates his former colleague's career while lamenting the direction his creation is now taking.
"When this series started, I objected to the Americanisation of it, the flash sets, moving background and everyone looking gorgeous and pretty. Then in the middle of it sits Kevin, looking every inch like a man named Kevin, if I can put it that way.
"As a man of the people, he looks the part and is the part ... he lacks any kind of pretence or ego. That's extraordinarily rare in our business - which, when combined with the most extraordinary generosity - also extremely rare in our industry - his personality and his sense of justice makes him the perfect fit for the role of helping people and being an advocate for the underdog. And in all the time I've known him he's shown no sign of changing or a desire to climb further up the pole. It's remarkable really and I'm not saying he lacks ambition, he really shows no sign of ego at all. Kevin may be the most recognised broadcaster on television and he probably doesn't even know it."
Though there are times when Milne knows something is up ...
"Especially with tradesmen, particularly those around the Kapiti Coast. Those guys like nothing more than getting one past me."
Then there are the occasions when groups of young boys decide to have a go at the famous guy. "That really pisses me off," he says.
Otherwise, everything is roses. Tears well up, as he remembers a night earlier in the week when a woman approached him in a restaurant and put her hand on his arm to say how sorry she was to hear he was leaving Fair Go.
"It's times like that when people talk to me like they've known me for ages. There's hardly any downside to that. And you know what? It is a real privilege to be able to have that connection with people. I know some presenters say 'my role on television is only on television, so stay away', but I would like to say to everyone, please don't stop saying hello."
As we're leaving a young man nursing a beer calls him over to do just that. After a brief chat and chuckle, Milne walks away with a beaming smile.
Kevin Milne: The Life and Times of a Brown Paper Bag (Random, $39.99) is out on November 5.
