Passion for life was Peter Sinclair's hallmark

OBITUARY - By DIANA WICHTEL

Broadcaster and writer.

Died aged 62.


Peter wasn't about to take his final months lying down. You'd creep into St Joseph's Hospice - where he would check in from time to time, allegedly for some rest - expecting him to be snoozing. Instead, he'd be sitting by the window in a pool of sun at his computer - not the laptop, the entire set-up, brought in from home by his friend and tech genius, Don - stripped to the waist for action, his morphine pump slung about his hips like a six gun, belting out another column.

Writing was his first love. In his last days, it was his palliative drug of choice. It gave him, he said, a raison d'etre and saw off the 3 am demons. The nearest he came to a complaint about his situation was to say that just when he had finally sorted himself a life where he got to write for a living, this had to happen.

He was diverted from pursuing his passion for the written word only by the sheer force of his brilliance with the spoken word, delivered at dizzying speed.

Peter had precociously dabbled in radio in Sydney, where he hung out with such celebrities du jour as the pneumatic Sabrina and Tab Hunter. Back in Christchurch in 1957, his broadcasting career in New Zealand began up a tree. Peter, a student, was living in one in Hagley Park at the time (until bodgies chopped it down on day three) as a publicity stunt for a student revue.

The reporter sent to interview him recognised an untapped force of nature and organised him a job on the spot.

He found himself at Christchurch's 3YC, making, he would recall, such pronouncements as "We begin the Early Evening Concert with three short works by Ravel, of such mind-numbing boredom that I'm asleep already".

It put the erudition acquired via a fine classical education at Christ's College to use. But radio couldn't contain him for long.

Soon a generation, and their appalled parents, were transfixed by the startling image of Pete in full, fast forward flight on wacky 60s and early 70s television pop shows with urgent names like Let's Go!, C'mon! and Happen Inn.

The camera loved him. For quite a while, he presented everything that moved.

He could keep a nation up all night by sheer force of will, assisted by taking his shirt off and doing a lot of press-ups, through Telethon after Telethon. His lightning reflexes were also deployed in the 70s and 80s on the quiz shows, Mastermind and University Challenge.

If Peter always knew what to do with television, television didn't always know what to do with Peter. He left, in the end, pretty much in disgust.

His excellent and only novel, The Frontman, written while caring for his late, beloved mother, Molly, in Christchurch, is a darkly comic vision of light entertainment as, basically, a descent into hell.

Recognised always and everywhere, being a media icon left Peter cold. His one and only Entertainer of the Year award, he delighted in revealing, ended up at a tip out west when he was having a clear out while living at Muriwai.

But he was genuinely touched, a few months ago, to receive one of the country's new, indigenous honours, which he affectionately referred to as "the Order of the Tuatara". Not bad for an Australian, though, as he always hastened to add, he was brought up in New Zealand from the age of two, and proud of it.

His honour was for his services to broadcasting, but the breadth of his eclectic expertise gives new meaning to words like autodidact and polymath.

He was, at various times, and sometimes simultaneously, a foodie, a cat breeder, a ceramics expert and a grower of strange plants.

For the pottery shops he owned in the 70s and early 80s - one at Muriwai and Alicat Gallery in Jervois Rd - he scoured the country in a battered tank of a station wagon for the best of local pottery. Some of his best stories came from the pottery years.

There was the time a bus excursion from an old folk's home arrived at the Muriwai shop. During the course of the outing, one of the party passed on.

The deceased was covered with a sheet, after which the rest of the group hopped back on the bus and departed, leaving Peter's mother to try to mind the shop with a corpse on the lawn. The takings that day were down.

"Creative drift" is how Peter described the guiding principle of his working life. The clippings file says it all - "Sinclair Moving On", "Frontman Poached", "Sinclair Goes Home". He always gravitated back to radio, most recently as a teasing, ironic "cupid of the airwaves" on Lovesongs 'til Midnight.

In the 90s, he discovered the internet, having sworn not to go near it for fear of becoming addicted.

His witty, wide-ranging computer journalism charts a love affair that ran hot until the end.

Then, when he was diagnosed with leukaemia and anyone else might have switched off the monitor and retired, Peter embarked on Sinclair on Life, a sort of valiant voyage around his illness in weekly instalments.

Writing personally was one of the few things in his career that didn't come naturally to him. "I have," he'd say, with uncharacteristic nervousness, "this sense of walking a tightrope." Only he was surprised at the huge, affectionate reaction he got, e-mails flooding in from all over the country as the Herald hit the breakfast table.

Thanks to this response, he almost allowed himself to believe what those of us who grew up with his image flickering in the corner of our living rooms knew - that all those years in the most ephemeral of media really added up to something.

That voice and that face, beneath that perfectly poised escarpment of blond hair - they changed astonishingly little over the years. Yet Peter remained a determined enigma - a television icon who wouldn't have a set in the house, a pioneering DJ who didn't own a stereo. As a Happen Inn hipster, he would bewilder reporters inquiring about his taste in music by replying briskly "Harpsichord".

His private life, subject of much urban legend over the decades, was kept implacably private to the end.

In his last couple of days, advancing illness and enough medication to fell an ox clouded the sharpest of minds, but Peter had no intention of going gently into his last night. He leapt out of bed, grabbed the arms of those nearest for support and, eyes fixed firmly on what remained of the future, commanded "Let's go!"

This enormous, infectious appetite for life was the most uncomplicated thing about a complicated man. It made him the most entertaining of companions, the most generous of friends. It made every show he did, every column and even his arrival for lunch into an event.

His vitality radiates, in a way we haven't seen on our screens post-Pete, from the old clips they're showing on television as I write this, on the day he died.

Sinclair moves on. In his first personal column for this paper, when he decided to pre-empt the Sunday paper door stoppers and write about his illness, he closed with a gracious "Thanks, life, it's been a pleasure."

No, thank you, Pete. It's been a blast.