KEY POINTS:
An auntie, says Ella Henry, is "the woman in your life who isn't your mother, that you can have a different kind of relationship with than the one you have with your mother. You can let your guard down around your auntie because you don't have that mother/child dynamic."
She should know. She is the big boss aunty of Maori Television's agony aunt show, Ask Your Auntie, which on Wednesday celebrated its 500th episode and which somehow works where other attempts at this sort of thing have amounted to drivel.
It's no use asking her why it works because she doesn't know. It shouldn't really because, "a bunch of chicks sitting around talking about chick-lit stuff, you know, supposedly not very interesting."
A big part of that success has to be down to Henry, who is a short, round button of a woman with a face that has mischief and empathy etched in every attractive crinkly line. She has an effusive charm which is captured perfectly in her telly role although, unlike many television people, she is an even bigger personality in the flesh.
She used to be really quite naughty indeed, but now she's very grown up and responsible at the age of either 52 or 53, "something like that", she can't remember which and this isn't being coy. She says, after 50 who can remember? She doesn't do coy. She does straightforward talking punctuated by a big, throaty smoker's laugh.
She's old enough, anyway, to be the big boss auntie which means that she controls, or attempts to control, the panel of other aunties who answer a range of questions sent in by viewers. These range from the barking, "how do I tell my girlfriend her tan looks fake?", which is, presumably, not a question from a bloke with a Maori girlfriend. To the awful, from a young boy: "What do you do if you're being raped?"
Such is the schizophrenic nature of agony aunt shows. You have to be able to skip seamlessly from the silly to the serious. You have to know stuff. You have to have life experience. You have to be able to talk.
These would be some of the qualifications for being a telly auntie. Henry has all of them. Especially the being able to talk part. As the boss auntie she is the only one with a script. She says this is just a production strategy which gives the cameras the cue on who to focus on but, hmm. I think it is also a very wise strategy, because here is a sample of what happens when she is unscripted: on the topic of how amazed she is by how many men watch the aunties
"Two weeks ago, I was judging the Maori Women's League Waikato Dancing with the Stars, it was actually really good, the ex-New Zealand champ taught me how to do the fox trot and I realised, 'God, this is so much fun', I'm going to join and do it for aerobic exercise ... but it was this place called the Greenview Hotel which has got a place at the front, the hotel is at the back but at the front is a place called the G Bar and it was Saturday night so we thought we'd see if they had a big Sky screen to watch the rugby on, which of course they did, because it's the G Bar and it was full of ...
"It's, you know, a sort of slightly scary place to turn up and I had a ball gown on for God's sake! It was just a pretty, lacy, full-length thingy and high heels, which I usually don't wear and I walked in and - I'm finally getting to my punch line! - and I go to the bar and one of the blokes comes up to me and goes 'kia ora, Auntie!' and that's their way of saying they know who I am. And another one comes up and says, "I love your show Auntie. I watched it when I was inside.' And I go, 'wow!"
And I, having just minutes ago met her, can only go 'wow!' too. She has that effect.
She thinks all of this being recognised in pubs and at the supermarket is very funny and nice. She loves it, really. She's a natural performer but honed this, she says, teaching management studies at the University of Auckland.
"If you've got a class of 300 people, half of whom don't want to be there, you've got to dress up like a banana and sing and dance to hold their attention. So I learned to use humour to help students engage with what is usually boring, complex theories of management. And so that kind of experience has given me the confidence to talk and feel comfortable talking."
I would have queried "dress up like a banana" but, whoosh, the moment had gone and she was off, very comfortably talking about how bossy she is. No kidding.
I can, actually, imagine her dressed up as a banana. She tells me she was the first person in Wellington to have green hair, and I believe her. That came after her "channelling Yoko Ono" period which lasted for two years in the early 70s and involved black lipstick and lashings of black velvet.
She is still fond of the theatrical gesture, at whatever age she is, despite having left her activist past in student politics, Greenpeace (she was executive director in 1994), and New Labour behind (although she says she was never very activist). She used to be "ha, ha, a lean fighting machine and now I'm a stodgy, grey, fat, old auntie."
I had been attempting to ask about where she fitted in now, and whether she thought she'd become mainstream, but she hijacked that for the sake of the joke which involved pretending I was implying that she was now "I know! Fat and grey."
She knows very well I meant no such thing, and, anyway, she's protesting too much and to little effect. She is perfectly comfortable with herself and radiates it.
Part of what she loves about being an Auntie is having the stylist come and dress her up. "She puts me in these outfits and she says, 'oh! You look beautiful!' I feel beautiful because she's put these gorgeous things on me and she puts jewellery on and she sees us as these gorgeous creatures. And underneath we've got our trackies and I've got my fluffy slippers. Well, in winter that concrete floor is cold!"
How did we get on to this? Don't ask me. You try interviewing the bossy auntie.
You don't have to, actually. She just tells you things before you can even ask. She did "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll" in the early 70s and was found on the street by James K. Baxter when she was 16. "This old bloke came up scratching his beard and I found out later why." What, lice?
"The works. But I never got the vibe off him that he was pervy or anything. He was just a really gentle soul." She went to live with him and a lot of other restless young people first in Grafton, then at Jerusalem. Now she runs a permeable paving business with her "significant other", Hone Pene. She went on Dragon's Den to pitch her pavers and came away with a marriage proposal from Bob Jones. Her CV must make for interesting reading.
I was going to ask about her brief time as a human rights commissioner in 2001 when she wrote a letter accusing the police of racism after her partner had been pulled over for a driving offence. She resigned but I wanted to know whether she subconsciously sabotaged her career in the public service - because when you read about it, it seems that she might have.
She gets there before me. She's talking about being young in the early 70s and how her view is that "if you remember the 70s you missed the point" and how she's glad she was "young and foolish and made crazy choices and did stupid things because now I'm more circumspect about what I do." Really? Always? "Well, you know, there's been the odd year, here and there. Ha, ha, ha. I should probably not have posted letters I wrote."
She thinks now she probably did cock it up deliberately, although it was "mindlessly stupid. Absolutely. I've done some really dumb things in my life." Dumber than sending that letter? "Oh, I don't know. That was professionally dumb. You know, you make personally dumb decisions. You know you shouldn't have gone out with that bloke. It was only one, but it was enough to teach me that no matter how pretty they are you should not put up with being thrown through plate-glass windows."
She would never have lasted as a commissioner, in any case. "Because I'm not really part of the cocktail circuit and I've got a shocking mouth. I abuse people when I don't respect them and when they do stupid things, which is why I run for Parliament every now and again."
Yes, there is the little matter of her shocking mouth. She tells me about how her mother had been encouraged by her mother to marry "a white man. And my mother - I think there was a little bit of the activist in her - came home with the blackest hori from Ahipara." That was her father, who was very handsome and "quite cool, my dad, and very black! He used to turn purple after a day in the sun."
It is much safer for the Human Rights Commission, and much more fun for everyone, having her as an Auntie. It is her natural role, really.
I can see why people would confide in her - although good luck to anyone attempting to get a word in to do so.
