Paul Holmes knows the hard questions

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Here's a funny joke to play on Paul Holmes the next time you see him down the dairy.

Say: "What's your name?" He'll say, "Paul."

Point at your nose and say: "What's this?" He'll say, "Nose."

Make an O with your thumb and index finger and say: "What's this?" He'll say, "Nothing."

Then say: "Paul knows nothing."

When you are 7 years old this is hysterically funny. It is especially deliciously funny when you play the joke on a very famous telly personality.

This is what you get when you are Paul Holmes and you decide to take on the role of Fagin playing opposite 225 kids in the Auckland Children's Musical Theatre production of Oliver!

He thought it would be "A Contribution. To a community initiative. But I forgot how hard it is learning four songs."

He also forgot to factor in the joys of working with children. Like that 7-year-old joke teller who "came up to me and felt he wanted me to know that I was doing that particular piece too slow".

"I said: 'Oh well, I'll have to speed up, won't I?' Then he tried to tell me why I was doing it too slow. And that, I have to confess, irritated me ever so slightly."

Holmes is attempting to persuade me that when he agreed to play Fagin he did so in the hope that "nobody would notice".

Now that is a joke. (In case you hadn't noticed, Oliver! is at the Aotea Centre on May 23 and 24.)

Look, he says, "sometimes I don't think things through, all right?"

Mostly he does. He contemplated sitting down and drawing up a list of likely questions for this interview. This is what politicians and CEOs have their people do before interviews. Fair enough too, reckons Holmes.

Nobody much enjoys being interviewed. But "it's very good being interviewed because it reminds you of how hard it is to answer questions".

He complains that I am "a very prolonged experience". He prides himself on getting to the "guts" of an issue. He could have done this interview in about, oh, 10 minutes flat. But he is not really grumping. An hour stretches into two. Which, considering he didn't much want to do this interview - I am "tricky" and "arch" - was gracious.

He calls back to say he has some better answers. But he doesn't want me to say he called back if I'm going to be negative about the fact that he did.

I would have been flabbergasted had he not phoned me back. He always does. It once took a day of phone calls to elicit a "no comment". A delightfully idiosyncratic "no comment". It was, as an editor remarked, a "no comment" delivered as though it was the Sermon on the Mount.

He is down from the mount the day we meet. He is thoughtful and measured. He doesn't play the fool.

When you meet Holmes in serious mode, what strikes you is the skill with which he constructs his sentences. It reminds you that he is so adept at using the language he has created his own short cuts: the trademark staccato delivery; the use of repetition.

L ISTENING to him is like watching silk being woven. Even on topics such as his nose. When he was a boy he thought that the worst thing that could happen in life would be to grow a lump on the end of his nose like Charlie the market gardener. Then he grew up and the worst thing was ... ? "Well, other things. But not the wart on the end of the nose, which, actually, may I say, in profile lends the nose a certain elegance."

Not many people would embark on that sentence with any degree of surety.

Rather ironically, given the reason for coming to see Holmes, he seems suddenly all grown up. This is a strange term to use for a 53-year-old but it seems about right.

I am reliably informed (he picks me for a Morning Report listener; a sort of insult) that it has been ages since he carried out one of his personal vendettas on the radio.

He's able to drink in moderation these days. He reckons he's a "library of faults and contradictions but when all's said and done I'm a nice person. So is everyone, actually".

He is newly married and "yeah, I'm perfectly happy ... the storm has receded".

There is the estate in Hawkes Bay where he likes to garden. He goes out for 10 minutes and comes back hours later, happy and filthy and fulfilled.

"I am very settled, absolutely. And I'm content absolutely. Within that contentment there are always questions about whether you would have done things. There are always regrets, but that's being grown up."

Or human. As is this: "I have a fear of becoming too content because then self-doubt might go and I believe that self-doubt has been very much the irritation in the oyster."

He knows a little about being irritating. He thinks he's as funny as a 7-year-old when you phone him and he shouts "Out of range. Out of range," when, patently, he is not. He took this trick from Pulp Fiction and thinks it a "wonderful way of terminating a call".

Oh all right, it is pretty funny. Anyway, he says, journalists ring him up all the time and, "you come to want space around you before you go into that situation".

FAME is a monster that takes up a lot of space. Fame does not "increasingly make you feel wonderful about yourself. It can make you entirely sick of yourself. It can make you wonder who you are".

Especially when confronted with larger-than-life-sized billboards of your face. We encounter one opposite TVNZ as we wander back to our respective workplaces. He thinks it makes him look as though he's got leprosy. It is recognisably Holmes but somehow not much like him at all. This has the peculiar effect of making the real Holmes seem less real. We are used to him being at a remove.

There is not "a hell of a lot" of difference between the public and private Holmes.

"We are ourselves sometimes, then we are more ourselves, perhaps. And there isn't necessarily a huge gulf between the two."

He guards his vulnerability. He believes you cannot be a good broadcaster without it. We have seen his paraded. His messes seem bigger than ours because they spill out in public. His clouds darker. His linings more silvery.

Still, somehow, and this is quite possibly the reason for his enduring success, he is just like all of us except larger than life. Naughtier, sillier, smarter. But he always was. That's why he's on the telly and the radio.

He has never minded being called a good actor. Or a clown. Clowning is a serious business.

"If you can show that you can make fun of yourself, other people might allow you to show up their foibles more willingly."

A list of things he likes about himself include that he is good at his jobs, that he - my emphasis - is not "tricky".

But also that he is "damaged around the edges". This seems a strange thing to like.

"Well it is fate but there was ... the cancer, there was the helicopter [crash in 1989], there was the bad love. You said to me: do you have to have those things to do what you do? My answer would be: no, but they sure help. They fill your cup."

He hopes he doesn't "sound like a misery guts".

He might if you mentioned his imminent professional demise - it has been imminent since he started out in this game. He's much less defensive about it than he once was.

"If it fell away tomorrow, would I be able to cope? Absolutely."

There is the retirement plan. The 10ha of olives at Mana Lodge in Hawkes Bay. One day the lodge might be a function centre. That'd be nice. You could call to book a wedding and Mr P. Holmes, proprietor, would shout "out of range, out of range" down the telephone.

"That," he says looking rather pleased at the prospect, "is one of the dangers of my being involved, isn't it?"