Michele Hewitson Interview: David McPhail

David McPhail's portrayal of Sir Robert Muldoon is unequalled. Photo / Steven McNicholl

David McPhail walked into the hotel lobby in Hamilton wearing a black felt hat looking like a mildly eccentric version of David McPhail.

The photographer - who might just about have started secondary school when McPhail was really famous - said he hoped he'd be nice. He always seemed nice on the TV, he said.

Did he really? He was a satirist. He's not a satirist now, although he said, "Well, that's what I'm called these days".

The very thought seemed to make him a bit tired. He sighed and said, "But that's hardly apt because I don't do satire any more".

In his mind, he must, surely, I hoped. "Oh, in my mind. I probably do."

He has written his memoir: The Years Before My Death: Memories of a Comic Life (in bookstores from Wednesday). And no, it's not "laugh aloud funny". This might be an insight into the mind of the erstwhile satirist.

He's 65 and, perhaps to test his niceness, because he's supposed to be a bit snippy about how he's regarded, I asked how he felt about once being described, a few years ago now, as antique.

"Ha, ha. That's fair enough. You come to accept terms. Take veteran ..." He is in a play, with Dame Kate Harcourt, called Auntie and Me, and in the advertising blurb they are both described as "theatrical veterans".

"Oh? I always think that sounds like walking wounded." The audience for this play, "is older. And, of course, the play is about death and dying which, ha, is probably a subject of interest to some of them."

He has the professional's habit of not giving so much as a hint that he has made a joke, which works well on the stage or screen but is disconcerting across a table. He has, in conversation, what is called tinder dry wit.

He said, sotto voce, of the vast, ghastly hotel, "it's like a mausoleum", which was the most savage thing I managed to elicit from him.

He said, "I hope I'm good company. People have well got past the business of always expecting me to be funny."

That must be a considerable relief. "You could always see the disappointment in people's faces, in the past, when they first met me at a party. I talk about things in a very normal manner." And then, no doubt, go off and say: 'I met that David McPhail and he's not a bit funny.'

They'd go off, he said, and report that, 'He's bloody boring,' He appeared quite taken with the idea. He told me a good story, from years ago, when he was walking along Manchester St in Christchurch and a bloke stopped him and said, 'I've seen you on television.' "I thought, 'Oh! Fantastic!'. 'You think you're pretty funny, don't you?' And I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'You're not.' And walked on."

He couldn't think of a thing to say in return, which may not have been his good nature. He has a good-natured face so you can see why people might have thought he looked rather sweet on the TV. He has a nice face.

He wears his glasses on the tip of his nose, which he peers at you over, benignly, in a kindly grandfatherly sort of way. I didn't know he was so little. He's 165cm and tiny, with pea stick legs.

He's thin, but no longer anorexic which he did, truly, become when he was in his late 20s and through his 30s, he thinks.

He used to be, when he was at school, enormously fat because his mother spoiled him and fed him whatever he wanted, mostly chocolate cakes.

It is from the memoir that I know about the being very fat and then being very thin. There is no picture of a fat McPhail in his book. This isn't vanity.

He said, "I tried to find one. There was a picture of me when I was at Cathedral Grammar School [in Christchurch] and all the boys are lined up on the banks of the Avon river and right in the middle is a figure that looks as though it is two boys in one uniform and that's me."

I still don't know why he became anorexic, and he doesn't have the foggiest either. He was up for a role in a film which required him to lose some weight, but that is no sort of explanation at all. "I suppose I liked not being fat. I liked being thin. Oh, it's a weird thing."

I asked, because of the anorexia, not because he seemed at all weird, whether he'd seen a shrink. He has, although he "forgot" to put it in the book, which shows you how interested in self-revelation he is.

He thought, when he got to 50, that how he was feeling - "I didn't feel all that connected to things" - was simply what getting older felt like. But it turned out he had clinical depression and he still takes a mild anti-depressant. He's not a depressive person.

"I certainly wasn't going around thinking I'd jump in a bath and throw an electric heater in after me."

He is not a particularly theatrical character. He says he has a temper and has "a conniption" about once every nine months, but is otherwise amiable and even-tempered.

He was hopeless at talking up his book. He says he told his publisher, "Well, all right but if you expect revelations, scandals, covers being opened and skeletons being shaken around, please don't. Because in all honesty, it's not there." About half way through the writing, he thought, "Why are they asking me to write a book? Because my life seems to be somewhat pedestrian ..."

Is he? There was the hat which he was wearing because he likes hats. His hat is a bit, but not terribly, eccentric.

He is also "Very fond of a very long black leather overcoat and when I've got that on, and my black hat, I'm sure I look peculiar to some people. But I don't think 'I'll put my hat on now and scare the seven bells out of everyone.' I think, 'It's cold outside. I'll put my hat on'."

He says he doesn't think he's eccentric, "But of course a person who is eccentric doesn't think they are. They think what they're doing is normal, but they accept that other people wouldn't want to do what they do. I know that I dress in what other people might consider to be rather curious clothes."

That might or might not reveal something about him. As might his memoir. I asked him whether he thought it did. Also, I wasn't at all sure what we did know about him.

He was at the height of his television career at a time when there was no such thing as a New Zealand celebrity, so when he was written about it was in the context of his day job.

And because he was always playing other, real, people - his Muldoon is almost certainly what he is still best known for - it was hard to figure out much about the person playing them. He was, in other words, well disguised.

He is a slightly remote character, then. He says he long ago, as he suspects many other people who are "public property" do, perfected the middle-distance stare, which is useful in supermarkets. He does have a natural reserve, "that I sometimes put up. Well, not even put up, it's there naturally and that could be regarded as being aloof."

Still, he likes being recognised and says that when people stop recognising you, it's time to start "applying for caretaking jobs".

But he is not particularly given to either actorly angst or self analysis. So his response to my asking what his book reveals about him was: "That's a very interesting question." All that meant was that he didn't have a clue, because he hadn't thought much about it.

He gave it some thought now. "Well, the first thing is that I had a very unusual childhood and that might account for a lot of the things that happened in my life. But I'm not a psychologist and I don't know about that."

He was the only child of his father's second wife, who was much younger than his father, who married her with what was deemed indecent haste after the death of his first wife. His half-siblings were old enough to be his parents so he inhabited a strange, "out of focus" place in the family.

Then after his father died, his mother married again, very quickly, and there was a feud and he lost touch with those half-siblings.

His step-father spent all the money, of which there was a considerable amount, and when his mother died his inheritance amounted to two clothes brushes: "One of which I'd never seen before."

He doesn't make too much of any of this. Just as, later in the memoir, he doesn't make too much of his grizzles about the hierarchy of television and what he plainly regards as daft decisions.

He is not beyond settling a couple of old scores, although he does so pretty mildly. He writes of a producer, Kevin Moore, "I came to dislike him." That must be an understatement. "Yes. That is, actually."

He writes about winning a best actor award, for A Week of It.

After the ceremony the late actress Dame Pat Evison came up to him and "in a deep, furry voice said, 'I congratulate you. But I regret a real actor didn't get the award."' A deep, furry voice? Perhaps he can still be cutting. I tried to get him to say something really rude about her, but he wouldn't play along beyond, "Oh, dear" and "tee, hee."

I said, "You're not a grudge bearer, are you?"

"No, no, no. You can't afford to be." Now that was funny. That event happened in 1978.

There is an idea about him that he's thin-skinned, which mainly arose from silly, pompous letters he used to send to the critic, Colin Hogg.

He said, when I asked, that he'd never been hurt by bad reviews. Ahem. I reminded him of those letters. "Oh, God. Well, that was a game that backfired. I thought, 'I'll amuse myself by writing these pompous letters." The paper published one of his silly letters.

It made him look like ... "An absolute jerk."

He groaned, but that was acting. He wasn't at all abashed. And quite right too. You wouldn't want the great satirist to be too nice, now would you?