Swipe at NZSO is a cheap jibe

Paul Henry's opinions are often half-baked. Photo / Martin Sykes

There is a certain lurid fascination watching Paul Henry in full flight on TV One's Breakfast show. No subject or individual is immune from the man's often ill-considered and half-baked opinions. His targets are predictable and Henry hands out judgments that would make Caligula seem like a positive sweetie.

On Friday just over a week ago, he went too far when he set his sights on the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Rescuing an NZSO brochure from the rubbish bin, stifling a stage yawn that would register across the footlights to the back row of a theatre, he applied himself to the delights within.

Early on, Wendy Petrie was protesting, "Some people like the orchestra."

But not Paul Henry, it seems. He brandished the brochure's back cover, with a photograph of the brass section that included trombonist David Bremner, whose new album Gung-Ho had just been judged Best Classical Recording at the Vodafone New Zealand Music Awards. The men were described as "probably tortured at school" when they were young, accompanied by a malicious chortle.

He signed off his 75-second diatribe by gleefully ripping up the brochure in full camera and announcing, with a toothy grin, that it was time to move on.

Not since that cringe-making newsclip in 1995 where Dame Kiri Te Kanawa winced that New Zealand music was limited to a little Maori song or two, have our arts been so roundly insulted.

Henry, who is happy to pay homage to the cant of excellence, achievement and international connectedness that permeates current thinking, should realise the NZSO is a splendid and genuine example of all three. These musicians, along with the many who receive cultural and spiritual sustenance from the music they give us - and, indeed, the thousands who cherish the arts of this country - do not deserve Henry's cheap shock-jock jibes. William Dart