Paul Henry is back on our screens - it's reinvigorated some job offers. Photo / Three
Over lunch, Paul Henry talks TV, battles with the Herald and how he and John Key once almost died.
Paul Henry devoted a chapter to the Herald in one of his books a decade ago. It was not complimentary. Not about the newspaper, nor a couple of writers, nor the editor at the time, who happened to be me.
He wrote that a phrase often used by one of his former radio colleagues, Pam Corkery, came to mind when he thought of Shayne Currie: “I wouldn’t give him the steam off my piss.”
Which, I have to say, was so wonderfully shocking and funny that it has stayed with me for a long time.
The backdrop to the comment was Henry’s regular insistence that the Herald was a “shabby little tabloid”. And the context to that was his feelings about his treatment at the hands of the Herald through various incidents, in particular some of his on-air utterances over the years.
He hit the roof on one infamous occasion when a reporter and photographer camped out on his street – he maintains on land owned by him – to speak to him following his TVNZ suspension for comments he made about the Governor General.
I still remember the call he made to the newsroom. He was steaming down the line, accusing us of trespass and threatening legal action.
The next day we published what we considered a legitimate and newsworthy front-page image. Henry thought otherwise but reserved further wrath and payback with the book.
The publisher was very iffy about it, he said. Currie might sue.
“Let him f***ing try!” Henry told them.
A decade on, we’re at a lunch – what turns out to be a very long, convivial lunch – and, before we get too far into a second bottle of red, I say I have one thing to raise with him.
I recite the line that he would not give me the steam from his urine.
Henry doesn’t miss a beat.
“Whereas clearly, I already have!
“I love you dearly, you know it. The fact is you were employed to be an arsehole and you were spectacularly good at it!
“Just after that, I was very impressed by you when we were at the music awards. You were there and I thought, ‘f*** here we go’. I walked up to shake your hand and you greeted me like I was your brother.”
My recollection is the other way around – that I approached Henry, and he made a comment to my wife and me that the swipe in the book was all part and parcel of the media fun and games.
Nonetheless, the point remains. Time passes; energy, like steam, dissipates.
We hugged today before lunch. We hugged the previous day, too, when I bumped into him in the NZME foyer.
But more importantly, Henry has written occasional pieces for the website and newspaper he once lambasted.
His nzherald.co.nz piece raising doubts over Scott Watson’s conviction for the murders of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope, published on New Year’s Eve last year, was one of the biggest and most engaging pieces in the Herald of the past 12 months.
Paul Henry still draws a big audience.
Henry, 63, doesn’t have much time any more for breakfast television, the format that helped make him a household name.
“What is it? It doesn’t have a heart. You can put too many people in a room and just because you put them in a room with cameras doesn’t make them stars.”
He’s famously said the TVNZ Breakfast studio set looks like Changi Airport or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It’s certainly not the vibe or design he thinks is right for a host-to-viewer connection first thing in the morning.
“There isn’t that bond and if there isn’t chemistry between them [the hosts], then there won’t be chemistry between them and the one viewer that you have always got to be talking with.
“I always used to get great joy, when I was doing it, in the little calls to action. I would quite often say, ‘oh, can we see that again’, ostensibly to the director.
“But what I was really doing was a call to action to the people in their houses who weren’t watching me, but they had me on [listening].
“All of a sudden if Paul Henry on TV has said, can we see that again? ‘Oh, s***, we need to look at this’.”
Aside from the controversies, which have been well-traversed, Henry’s laughter was a hallmark of the show, especially when he was alongside Pippa Wetzell.
While Henry did not always have a great rapport with some of his co-hosts, he and Wetzell enjoyed extraordinary chemistry, highlighted on numerous occasions, but none more so than the day a guest with rats came on air, and during the segment, Henry made the passing comment that rats were quite clean animals.
He then erupted into uncontrollable laughter: “Unfortunately they clean themselves with urine!”
It took Henry several minutes to calm down, but not before he had spat water over Wetzell in one of several outbursts of laughter.
There was a moment in time when that chemistry with Wetzell was “perfect”, he says. No, he has not really stayed in touch with her. “I am not a staying-in-touch kind of person.”
Paul Henry is, however, very close to Sir John Key. “Ballpark, my closest male friend now.”
“There’s quite a rivalry between us,” he says, before regaling a story of how he and Key almost died during a trip to the Caribbean with their wives – Henry is married to businesswoman Diane Foreman.
“We’d been ashore with our wives at St Lucia.
“We’d had a reasonably big lunch and, I’ll be honest, we’d had something to drink.
“Olive [Henry’s 24m launch] was anchored out and there was a very clear way [back] – walk to the wharf, the crew would come in in the tender, pick us up and take us back to the boat.
“The women – they are, generally speaking, more intelligent than men – obviously knew that the way you went back was to walk to the wharf and get on the tender.
“But John said he could swim back to the boat.
“Now, it was not a calm day and it was not close.
“I said to John, ‘that’s a lot further than it looks’.
“Sitting here on the beach where things really aren’t in perspective properly, it looks like you could almost touch it, but it’s actually a lot further.
“You get in the water when your head’s down ... it’s a long way.
“So then I flip on a coin and say: ‘Great idea John!’ And then it becomes a race.
“It’s not, can we get to the boat? It’s who can get to the boat first?”
After half an hour of battling unpredictable waves, one of New Zealand’s most pre-eminent Prime Ministers and one of New Zealand’s most pre-eminent broadcasters grasped the stern of Olive, gasping.
“Honestly, we both almost died. And that’s before you even talk about the sharks ... ”
Lunch today is at Andiamo, next to the fireplace. “I get the vibe you’re kind of cruising,” says the waiter at one point early on.
Henry doesn’t normally like fish; we both order steak.
The waiter returns eventually to say the last remaining steak dishes have gone to another table. Henry wants to be convinced the gurnard is okay; the waiter obliges.
Henry spends about half his year in New Zealand. He’ll be back in October, from Fiji, where he’s been based for a decent chunk of the New Zealand winter. Friends have been coming and going, spending time onboard Olive.
The repositioning trip to Fiji from Auckland on Olive was atrocious – 46-knot winds, 6m seas.
“It was so awful, really diabolical,” says Henry. “You thought you were timing it so that you had the best run ... but apparently the best weather forecasters are 50 per cent accurate, 50 per cent of the time.”
Henry erupts into laughter at that last line. “It turns out we were part of that 75 per cent where they weren’t accurate.”
“Even though I have been in worse weather and worse sea conditions on Olive, I haven’t been in as bad [conditions] for as long. It was day after day.”
Henry doesn’t get approached in New Zealand as much as he does when he’s overseas.
“When I’m out of New Zealand, New Zealanders will often come up to me because I think there’s that licence to bond. Particularly in Fiji.
“I’ve been there a while and so many people come up to me and say, ‘oh my God, it’s so good to have you back on TV. We need you back on TV’, but they don’t realise that this is not Paul Henry back on. I’m acting as Paul Henry in this.”
If you don’t know by now, Henry is hosting The Traitors NZ, the twice-weekly show on Three (and Three Now) pitting 19 people against each other in a kill-or-be-killed psychological challenge.
We’re almost halfway through the season – the number of contestants has whittled down to less than a dozen.
The Traitors NZ does not, says Henry, signal his return to full-time television, although it has sparked renewed interest in his talent. It has reinvigorated job offers, but not his interest.
“If a great project comes along that I think can fit in, I would do it. There were a whole range of reasons why this was the right project.
“I loved the fact that it was new, and it sort of plays into my vibe as well. It’s vaguely hostile, it’s definitely threatening.”
And the difference with this one, compared to his previous television roles is that while he’s host and running the game, “I’m not the star of it.”
Henry hopes to enjoy New Zealand’s “bi-annual summer” when he returns in October.
New Zealand is a “sad little country” right now, says Henry, “but it’s still a beautiful country”.
“One of the issues with New Zealand is we pivot on a very, very tiny axis but we pivot so easily.
“Take a country like Australia with all the same problems New Zealand has; well, even go further, America with all the same problems New Zealand has ...”
America, he says, is a big ship to turn. “As soon as she starts to creak in another direction, there are a lot of people who question the direction.
“New Zealand’s a tiny little boat and she just swings like that and so before people even question it, and the majority of New Zealanders now who are intelligent enough to question it, don’t. They just keep quiet.
“Because what’s the point? That’s what people say. People say it to me. They’re worried about being chopped down, even by their nearest and dearest.
“You know, the number of people that you can speak your mind to in this country, these people around you, is shrinking, shrinking, shrinking.
“Because that person who I’ve known for 30 years, who I see once a month ... can I really trust them? Do I really know how they’re thinking?
“How have they been influenced by the way the country is going by the sort of social oppression that we suffer?
“It’s worse here than other countries because of the way we pivot.”
He’s not optimistic it’s salvageable. He’s seen no evidence, for example, that if a new government is elected in October, things will “dramatically” change.
“They [National] too are paralysed with the fear of dramatically committing themselves to anything.
“So they will dramatically commit themselves to subtle nuances of change. But, you know, is anyone really brave enough to get up and say this is bulls***?”
He cites cases of state housing tenants causing havoc in their neighbourhoods.
Homeowners “who have purchased that property and are doing all the right thing as citizens in the country, paying their mortgage and struggling to survive” are being “victimised and hounded out of their home by people that the Government are handing a life to on a plate”.
“They are social abusers and the people who live next to them, whose lives are being destroyed, whose tax money is going just over the fence to support these evil bastards. What do we do about that?
“We just sit there and we, and we go ‘tch, tch, tch, oh God, look at that’ and then we watch The Traitors for entertainment.
“Why didn’t the Opposition at that time say this is absolutely bloody outrageous?”
He says he doesn’t care about what happens to people who terrorise neighbours.
“If those people can’t support their children, then we will take the children off them. They [the perpetrators] can live under a bridge or something like that.
“And the people that are currently living under the bridge, we will put them in their house. But instead we all stay so bloody quiet.”
Henry will arrive back in New Zealand the same month that we go to the polls.
He says National – Henry was a candidate for the party in Wairarapa in 1999 – should be polling far higher than it is.
“I think that’s largely down to the fact [Christopher] Luxon is an untrusted source just because he is so very new.”
We draw parallels between Henry’s good friend Sir John Key and Luxon.
“They’re very different people even though in many ways, Luxon is trying to emulate Key.
“It’s a dangerous thing to do on many fronts but particularly if that’s actually not your natural way. People, even stupid, stupid people – and there are a lot of those – can usually sniff out insincerity. I’m not saying he’s insincere ... he’s new at the game and he is trying very hard to appear sincere.
“If we saw his real character, maybe people would like him more.”
People like authenticity, says Henry, more than a manufactured persona.
“If I was advising him, which I would never do, I would say to him, before you give a speech or before you’re interviewed, ask yourself [this] question.
“If one person who’s watching it – not the interviewer because the interviewer doesn’t matter – if one person says to another person who watched the interview, ‘what did he say?’
“Make sure that that person is going to be able to answer that with something you want to be remembered, rather than ‘I’m not sure’ or ‘nothing’ which is the normal takeaway.
“At the moment it seems like success is not f***ing it up. Well, that’s not success. That’s just not f***ing it up.”
Henry loves the US. He has a home in Palm Springs and wrote his third and most recent book about the country’s impact on him. America is, he says, the storybook of our lives.
Earlier this year, he and his youngest daughter, Bella, packed the Mustang – Henry owns one there and one in New Zealand – for a two-week road trip, from Palm Springs to Chicago and back again.
“It was a lot of motoring,” he says.
“Towards the end, we were desperate for food, and there was a sign for a Denny’s in Winslow. And I said to Bella, oh we could stand on the corner in Winslow.
“And she said, as you can imagine, ‘what corner?’
“I said, ‘you know, the corner, the most famous corner in the world! In Winslow, Arizona, we could stand on it!’
“She said, ‘Oh, I bet it’s not famous’, because it was me talking about it and I’d led her down some garden paths in her life.”
During their meal at the Denny’s, Henry asked for directions to the corner.
“This guy, who looked like he didn’t know what decade it was let alone what day it was, came over to take our order. And I said to him, ‘are we close to the corner?’
“There was this long pause, and I could see Bella, her eyes starting to roll. He leaned over and he said, ‘so, you go down there, you turn right ... ’
“We follow his instructions and come round a corner and there’s a park bench under a tiny bit of shade. It was as hot as hell.
“I pull over and stop by the park bench.
“You don’t miss a bit of shade if there’s a parking spot next to it. So we get out.
“Bella’s already got a camera out and she’s taking a photograph of the cafe across the road from where we are.
“The cafe was, the Flatbed cafe, and I said to her, ‘the Flatbed cafe!’ She said, ‘yeah’; I said: ‘the Flatbed cafe!’
“The park bench that we were parked next to was made of the tailgate of a flatbed Ford.
“In the background, you could hear the Eagles playing; they had speakers.
“We walked down and here was a real Flatbed Ford parked [on the road], there was a huge wall, brick wall next to it with a mural painted on it ... reflected in the painted window on the mural was the Flatbed Ford that was really parked on the street with the woman sitting in it.
“There’s a statue there in the middle of the cross junction.
“There’s a huge Route 66 painting and there would have been, no word of a lie, 50 people there, just tourists getting photos taken, asking people if they can have their photos taken next to the statue ... standing on the corner of Winslow, Arizona.
“I think even Bella was quite impressed with my knowledge.”
We started lunch at 12.30pm; I turned the interview recording off after a couple of hours; we were still going at 5pm.
We talked media, a lot.
Before I turned off the recording, I told Henry I was intrigued about the relationship between him, Paul Holmes and Mike Hosking, three of the biggest broadcasting names in New Zealand history. There was a short period there when they were all on air.
Holmes disliked me, says Henry. Possibly because he saw him as an up-and-comer. Henry has nothing but huge respect for Holmes.
“You know, the thing that made Holmes so great was the fact that there was something intrinsically Holmes about every single thing he did. There was no moment in time that you thought he was trying to be someone else.”
He doesn’t think Leighton Smith likes him either. I said I’d have thought Leighton would really like him – aside from their politics, they also love Sails restaurant, which is a curious factoid.
He doesn’t know Hosking, listens to him occasionally, and admires his approach to the job. He likes Heather du Plessis Allan.
The Herald always pitted Hosking versus Henry, he says, so there was always a rivalry.
He says there was a brief moment, when he was hosting the Paul Henry breakfast show on Three and across radio, where his ratings were starting to rise, starting to chip away at Hosking.
“It’s never happened since, never happened before.”
Henry’s wife Diane Foreman spoke last year of the star’s “relentless positivity”. The pair married in 2020.
“People think Paul would be a bit grumpy, but he is the most positive person I have ever met,” Foreman told the Woman’s Weekly.
“Obviously, I knew him incredibly well before we got married, but since we’ve been living together, it astounds me that he’s never negative and is always up. The other day, I had a fender bender and I was upset about it. All he said was, “It’s only one side of the car, what are you worried about?”
During lunch, Henry texted Foreman – plans for the evening had changed, so he sounded her out for a dinner date at Sails.
Henry’s positivity certainly came through strongly during our own conversations. Despite his concerns for the country’s direction, and some of his comments, his mood is upbeat, positive.
He’s fun to be around. We let off a lot of steam over lunch – thankfully, only of the verbal kind.
READ MORE IN SHAYNE CURRIE’S LUNCH WITH ... SERIES:
Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie is one of New Zealand’s most experienced senior journalists and media leaders. He has held executive and senior editorial roles at NZME including Managing Editor, NZ Herald Editor and Herald on Sunday Editor.
Every week we ask a well known Aucklander for their favourite spots in the city.