KEY POINTS:
When Paul Holmes steps down from the Newstalk ZB breakfast programme as announced yesterday, at the end of next year, his work might finally receive wide recognition. It may seem strange to suggest such a celebrated and self-acclaimed broadcaster has not yet received his due, but it is true.
Holmes' radio and television programmes would separately have been enough to earn him a place in the pantheon of New Zealand broadcasting. Together they would be an exceptional career achievement. But to recall that for so many years Holmes did the country's leading early morning radio and evening television programmes on the same day, every day, is quite incomparable.
In some ways his radio programme seems the greater achievement. It was certainly the braver. Holmes was recruited by ZB to launch the newstalk format. It was a radical idea then to do away with music and try to hold an audience with constant news, interviews and patter.
When the station introduced Auckland to its new morning host, it was not love at first sound. Holmes' odd manner and quirky excesses did not endear him to many listeners for quite some months. They were nervous, ominous months when many waited for the axe to fall on the newstalk experiment and its frontman. But Holmes and the station kept faith in himself and the format and they turned the corner. That was 20 years ago. It seems longer. The format has been so widely copied, and Holmes so much part of the morning, that they seem to have been there forever. He has been a phenomenon.
