Meet Holmes' new boss

By MICHELE HEWITSON

The young woman who sits at the reception desk at Prime television's headquarters in Albany is, for obvious reasons, not allowed to change the channel on any of the four screens behind her.

While we wait for Chris Taylor, Prime's CEO, we watch an advertorial for some mini-camera. This ad went on for about a week, which seemed a particularly ingenious form of work place torture.

Later I said as much to Taylor: how awful to have to listen to those terrible advertorials all day. He retorted: "I think it's unfair to suggest they go on all day."

I said: "Just one of them seems to go on all day."

"Right. Look, advertorials are part of our business. Off-peak television is an increasing pressure on costs. We've got a few of them in there. They suit us at the moment." And, "no, she's not" allowed to change channels.

He is very good at ignoring silliness - in this case, my exaggerating for the purpose of being rude about his advertorials.

He is quite a serious fellow. We were shown into the boardroom, where we were to do the interview, by his PA. When Taylor appeared, 20 minutes later, from his office, I said that I thought this might be a bit formal and did he want that? Not at all, he said. Look, he wasn't going to put on a jacket.

He was perfectly amenable to moving to his office (in the end we didn't) where, on a shelf, was a file with a cover sheet outlining the process for what will, in the new year, become the new Paul Holmes show. He might like to let me have a look, I suggested. "No, I'd prefer not to, if that's all right," he said.

I thought he might also like to tell me who else he had an interest in poaching. He disagreed: "Whoo. I'm not going to tell you that, am I?" Really?

"Yeah, of course. Look, I'm not. We're talking to lots of people all the time. I think that there are a lot of unique and talented people in this country that I'd love to be working with us and I'd be foolish to tell you who they were."

At 32, he is ridiculously young to be running a telly network - even if it happens to be a minor player sort of telly network - and to be running around poaching people like the illustrious Mr Paul Holmes.

Goodness, he's just a baby. "Yes, some say I am." The running joke around Prime when Taylor, an Australian, turned up last November was: "Here comes the new sales assistant."

He says age is not an issue and it's about earning respect and that this has nothing to do with age.

He is, he thinks - and he has to think for a long time about this - quite a firm sort of boss. I think he might be.

He is certainly quite strict with me. I said: if Holmes gets a million a year, what do you get? "Ha," he said, "No one's said Holmes does get a million a year."

Oh yes they have, everyone's said it. "Well, no one knows it." It is wrong, then? "I'm not confirming or denying ... any reference to his salary is pure speculation. I think it was the Herald that decided he was earning a million a year, so that's what he's earning."

What Taylor earns is, quite right too, his own business and "I'm not prepared to discuss that". Anyway it is not, he will concede, a million but I bet it's a lot and that he is very responsible about looking after it. He is a responsible sort and has to be because he has a wife and two young children. He is the sort who makes lists of his five and 10-year plans, something I admire in others.

He has always been competitive, he says. He is good at working hard at things he might not enjoy very much, or things that are hard for him. At school he wasn't very good academically because he has dyslexia, which was wasn't diagnosed until, he thinks, "about first or second form. And then I got these funny blue glasses and it turned things around for me academically. When I say turned around, I went from being a bottom of the year student to, you know, above average." But he had to work at it and "it was very difficult and I didn't like it very much".

He hates exercising because "you're not working to get supremely fit so you can win something. You're actually just doing it to stop yourself looking like a disaster and [so that you can go on] living longer."

Which is a bit odd when you consider that when he left school it was to become a professional tennis player. Taylor spent a year at the Florida tennis academy of coaching guru to the stars Nick Bollettieri. It turned out, Taylor says, that he "played tennis professionally very badly".

"I wasn't going to be happy with being 200th in the world; I would have wanted to be in the top 10. And I guess that speaks for everything I take on. That comes across, probably, as a little bit egotistical, but you know, I think that if you're going to strive to be good at something, then you want to be really good."

He enjoyed the tennis, a form of exercise, "because I was working towards something".

He learned quite a bit about working towards things and about telly, and about being ambitious, from his father, Lynton, a top Kerry Packer executive. So you'd imagine that when Taylor turned up in the sales department of Packer-owned Channel 9 that his father's reputation went before him. It did but "at the time it was probably a bit of a hindrance. He left the Packer organisation. I guess you could say he was moved along."

Does he mean he got the boot? "Yeah, I think you could probably say that. It happens to all television executives eventually."

And if Holmes on Prime doesn't work, if it doesn't pull the audience and the advertisers, Taylor is aware that it could happen to him. "Fortune favours the brave. But I'll go off and take up gardening or something if it doesn't work, I guess."

This is difficult to picture but then you recall that, actually, there is such a thing as competitive gardening.