Michele Hewitson Interview: John Campbell

John Campbell's still fresh-faced and wide-eyed, but he's no pushover. Photo / Richard Robinson

This is a story about fame and ephemerality in the promised land, a story that starts with an airbrush.

That's not a bad introduction, in a purplish, possibly a bit gushy sort of way. So I pinched it to introduce a story about the famous bloke who wrote it.

Does he think it's any good? He, being John Campbell, wrote that bit of prose in a 1999 Metro magazine essay about fame, and big billboards and being on the telly, says, "wow! That's quite good. It's really good! I was still in the thrall of bewilderment. I remember the first time I had my photo taken with the 20/20 women - Anita McNaught, Louise Wallace, Melanie Reid, Genevieve Westcott - and they were all changing costumes and, magnificently, absurdly, because I am the most repressed man in the English-speaking world ... They were changing in front of me! They were in this incredibly expensive lingerie ... But I remember thinking: 'This is utterly bizarre and I hope I never lose the sense of how bizarre it is'."

He was such a baby, that fresh-faced boy in his nice telly suits. He still is, or can be - should you be trying to get him to agree to an interview. He's still fresh-faced, wide-eyed, bouncy, un-airbrushed. But not a pushover.

He will remind me, twice, that I have got him here under false pretences. The ostensible reason for an interview was that TV3 is now 20. He said, on the phone, during our second, interminable conversation about whether he would or wouldn't talk to me, that no doubt I thought I was being very clever coming up with a spurious peg. It was desperation, not cleverness. And then I forgot all about my spurious peg. He didn't.

"Can I have my question about 20 years of TV3 now? Ha, ha, ha. That's why I'm here and under the Consumer Guarantees Act ..." Now who was being clever? He knew very well I had no such question.

He's the man who asks the hard questions. And who has written about him, ad nauseam, surely, variations on this: "Being such a nice guy doesn't stop him asking the hard questions."

A back-handed compliment? "I'm not being disingenuous here, but that's not really my issue ... how people see me in that respect."

I wanted to see him in this respect: off the television. And that is exactly why he didn't want to see me. He hates being gawked at when he's not doing what he does for a job. Although that's too simplistic a way of expressing a complicated relationship.

He says he "wants to get it right", by which he means it is lovely when people say hello, and "you can't help but be grateful for it and delighted by it ... But there's another part of this job, and in part television is to blame for it, and it's the concentration on the private lives of people who have public jobs. Most of us aren't adopting African babies or having 29 marriages or taking A-class drugs".

What a funny life he's having, then, because it's a conflict in which he is, to some degree, complicit. "Absolutely. I'm completely bewildered by it."

He once said, oddly, that he became an "entirely different person" once he put his nice work suit on. "[It's like] if you arrive late at a dinner party ... one feels awkward and one feels apologetic and one hopes that no one thinks you're a wanker. And that's how most of us live our lives, desperately hoping that we're not offending people and hoping that when we leave the room people think well of us ... But you can't be like that on television. Some of the emails we get are staggeringly rude."

If, he said, he "took that guy into the room", the sensitive one who wants the other dinner guests to like him, "I'd be Sylvia Plath. I'd be wondering if I'd paid the gas bill!"

He can be horribly earnest, but obviously not, given the gas bill gag, all the time. Still, "mmm, I am". What does that mean? "I don't know. It seems to me that what people will try and do is get a fixed position on me, like mounting a butterfly ... Some days I'm tremendously confident and not at all earnest. Some days I'm earnest and some days I'm not. There's a lovely poem, I think it's by Walt Whitman. 'Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am whole. I contain multitudes.' In other words, I'm just human, Michele."

That was his second recitation. I said, not nicely at all, that I did Sam Hunt last week. "I know. I read it." He emailed saying he'd been researching me. No surprise there: he's a journalist. But why would he tell me? "I wear my heart on my sleeve. I often don't have an off button."

Oh, I don't know. He's rather good at pushing it when he's supposed to be talking about himself. He spent much of our time attempting to talk about me, or journalism in general. He is a shameless flatterer. He would no doubt say he's simply wearing his heart on his sleeve. I rolled my eyes at one particularly embarrassing offering. He shouted, "you're such a Kiwi bloke! You're like Ewen Chatfield!" Who? He called out to the drinkers further down the table. "Lads! Who's Ewen Chatfield?" A lad said: "Cricketer."

"Cricketer!" he shouted again, "and he couldn't take a compliment, could he? If he got nine wickets, he'd be going, 'oh yeah, but the rest of the team were better than me.' He did what you just did!"

A lad said, "that's humility."

He took this mad scenario backfiring on him well. He said: "Bloody wankers!"

He wrote, in that essay, about being gawked at, that he was "cultivating a wry detachment". I wondered how that was going. "Ha, ha. Badly. I don't do wry and I don't do detachment. No, what I'm able to do now is, intellectually set all that aside. In order to do my job, you have to be remarkably thick-skinned."

I thought, thinking about the John Campbell I spoke to on the phone, that he was the opposite: painfully self-conscious. "Oh, all of that. But none of that serves me well professionally."

His famous niceness has come to be used as a complaint against him. "I believe the least we should do is leave people as well as we found them."

He isn't about to tell me the worst thing he's ever done. "I don't know." No, because there's nothing, is there? "Oh, I'm sure I have. But I subscribe strongly to the adage: To thine own self be true."

To which self, because there's two of him? "Yeah, that's right! God, that was good. I would have been proud of that. That was quick!"

It was, but it wasn't me being quick, or tricky. I've been trying to talk to him for some years. I asked after the medal thief fiasco and he wouldn't then because he was feeling very vulnerable. Does he think now that his credibility, over the use of an unacknowledged actor to read the thief's lines, has been damaged? "I don't know. I honestly don't know the answer to that question ... You try your hardest and, if you're a cricketer and you go out first ball but you've had a long career, does that destroy the entirety of your career? That was one of my shitty innings."

So it is very nice of him to have turned up, especially as I resorted to bullying, mercilessly, by phone and email. He didn't want to, he hated it, why did he have to?

I don't know what he was worried about. I felt like an exhausted and cross teacher in charge of a boy who has had too many lollies. I wanted to tell him to stop wriggling, to behave like a good interviewee. He said, "can I ask myself a question?" I pushed the recorder over and told him not to touch it. Of course he picked it up. "It's not even f***ing working!" Of course it was working. And I'd told him not to touch it.

He prodded it again. He asked himself the question: "Who would I most like to interview?" I said: "I told you not to touch that."

"Oh. Sorry. Okay, I'd like to interview Philip Roth and Joan Didion. And George Bush."

Of course he'd want to interview two writers - only very brainy people read. I'd like to interview the Queen. "Yeah! What's she like with Philip? Does she call him Phil? What happens when they watch the telly together on a Tuesday night?" Then, like a kid who has spotted another kid's toy, and decides it's better than his toy: "I want to interview her now!"

I said, possibly sarcastically, that what I'd ask would be: "Why do you gush so?"

"The Queen doesn't gush. She should gush more."

I said, "another criticism of you is that you might be a bit gushy at times." A long pause. "You!" He can be, can't he? "Yeah, I can be. There's a great poem, by Frank O'Hara, called Having a Coke With You ..." I'd told him not to do poems. Anyway, it's a poem about somebody walking past statues and noticing that nobody else is appreciating them and "something along the lines of: 'It seems they were all cheated of some wonderful experience, which is not going to go wasted on me, which is why I'm telling you about it.' And I think, 'what a great attitude that is.' Tell people about it."

We were sitting outside, at a pub, drinking beer. He said it was the sugar in the beer that was making him hyperactive. He had two. "I never have two beers in a row! I'm going to be trolleyed." He's such a goody-goody. He never gets drunk. "Aah, my threshold is pretty low. No, not really. On occasions, when I'm at my happiest, I really feel like I'm flying when I'm involved in a really wonderful conversation with people ..." I have deleted the eye-roll causing reference here. That's humility, John.

He had another question: "Who do you like on the telly?"

I said, "You're all right. When you're not gushing."

That'll do as a bookend to his rather flashier introduction. It may be a bit Kiwi blokeish, but I mean it in the nicest possible way.