Holmes to revisit his old TV stamping ground

Hold the front page, Paul Holmes is returning to TV One.

Yes, it's true. Holmes will return to the mother node to be one of the first guests on Mark Sainsbury's new interview show, About Now.

The show will feature a confession booth and a live audience of nine.

Its full title is actually About Now with Mark Sainsbury, says Sainsbury. "But the last bit is in a whisper, because we're not into the cult of personalities at TVNZ any more."

Holmesy, the trailblazer of the cult of personality, is returning for just the one night before heading back to Prime where his own interview show is called Holmes, without any whispers at all thank you very much.

Due to start on June 26, Sainsbury's show was conceived after he decided he wanted to leave his job as TVNZ's political editor to try another path.

The half-hour show will be interview-based, "but not blood on the studio floor ... " "It's more adult chat. Because it's after 10pm, we can make it a little bit more grown up, so it's having a yarn with people who are interesting and have stories to tell."

One example is the flying Botox doctor - a doctor who fitted out his own plane as a Botox clinic to relax foreheads nationwide.

The TVNZ charter demands a public service, so Sainsbury's show will deliver by allowing people to purge their guilty consciences on a segment called Dollar a Confession. He says the idea was adapted from a "dollar an interview" show in the US.

"It could be anything.

"We trialled it when we were up north at the Snapper Classic.

"There was a guy who stole a roll of sticky tape from a stationery shop in 1978, when he was just a kid.

"It had tormented him ever since. He still remembered the shop owner's name, and never stole anything again."