Paul Holmes flies by seat of his pants

Paul Holmes hates rows but loves debate. Picture / Brett Phibbs

I'm actually not a mad conceited prick. I actually know my limitations. I just enjoy what I do. And, I quite like being in a bit of trouble. From time to time. Goodbye Phil.

Such is the footnote left on my tape recorder by Paul Holmes while I settle up after our breakfast interview.

Gosh. What did I say to prompt this? I whiz back through the tape to check whether I'd made some egregious slight. And, no, not really.

I take his message as a bit of fun and that's how he seems; playful, relaxed but always keen for a bit of living dangerously.

I asked whether he was a lousy pilot, as he seemed to crash so often, though I took the coward's route and reversed into the subject. "Are you a good pilot?"

And Paul says "good question. No one's asked that before, thanks for doing so." There's a long pause while he puffs on a cigarette - "my little indulgences". He may be gathering thoughts. I suspect he's collecting ammunition. He does mention how he's grown to enjoy a good stoush.

And, I did inquire whether he'd had to pull his head in after the, um, failure of Paul Holmes on Prime. I was tactful, skirting the "f" word until he slapped it down on the table between us like a long-dead fish.

Well then, as he's mentioned it, had he misjudged his pulling power? After all, the mountain didn't follow Muhammad.

He chatted happily enough about such things. So, no, I don't think it was something I said. But it may have been lots of things that have been said.

"Like watching a balloon slowly leaking air," columnist Rosemary McLeod wrote of his fall. There was a time when he'd pick up the phone and give critics a spray. No more, he says. He's Mr Mellow these days. Besides, that would result in another story about a media personality who couldn't cop criticism. "You learn to live with that stuff," says he.

I remind him of an incident during his spraying days, a favourite story of mine. Back when he'd sold media rights to a women's mag to his (first) wedding. Back when that was unusual.

I'd called with a request for the paper I then worked for to send photographers and mentioned something about the law requiring weddings to be held "with doors open".

Holmes had, shall we say, not appreciated the call and hung up abruptly. But the line stayed open and I could hear him venting rather spectacularly. As I tell this story I'm laughing much more heartily than he is.

"I swore and cussed?" he says.

Oh, yes.

"The f word?"

And the c one.

"My callow period," says Holmes.

He points out such magazine deals are a way of controlling public access to a private do, and adds, with that familiar Holmes glint, that there are other advantages.

"Weddings are very expensive," he says, "and the more you are rumoured to make, the better the party your guests expect. That is another truth of public life. I can't throw a mean do, know what I mean?

"Not that it would occur to me to throw a mean party. It behoves me to throw a good one."

Behoves! Holmes loves words, mixing them, dicing them, spicing his stories with them.

How about this, on Kingsford Smith, his favourite flyer? First to fly west, against the wind, over the Atlantic, flew Hawaii to Auckland when it was thought impossible, no radio, a basic compass and a crude altimeter. Thirty-five hours in clag and fog, peering down, wondering where the hell Fiji might be.

"And out of the dawn, he finds Fiji," says Holmes in documentary tone. "He had about an hour's fuel left. Charles Kingsford Smith. One of us."

Flight by the seat of one's pants. Maybe that's what appeals about biplanes? And, I guess live broadcasting?

I mention the "cheeky darkie" thing and ask whether he has advice for young Tony Veitch, he who got in a spot of bother over a recent Serena Williams comment on radio in which he mentioned the tennis player's powerful physique in the context of Darwin's theory of evolution.

Holmes doesn't offer advice but is damn glad it was Veitch, not him. I tell him his Kofi Annan apology was as close as I'd seen him to tears. He says it was genuine but then goes on about PC madness, and notes that Mr Annan is currently having a lot of bother with his United Nations. Which makes you wonder.

He loves the early era of aviation because then you really did have to fly the plane. Which brings us back to whether he's a good pilot.

The answer is roundabout, but of course he believes he is. Some young commercial pilots, he thinks, "disdain me" but older ones understand about Boeing Steermans such as his. He goes on about such things as tail-draggers (apparently planes that have a tiny wheel under the tail), which I gather means they can be buggers.

Especially when there are deer fences around.

And when calamity strikes him, television crews arrive with the ambulances.

Yes, it is embarrassing, he says. But the aviation authorities have been "very nice", sympathising that his mishaps always make news but also inquiring tactfully after his last prang about his plans regarding flying.

That accident was December and he's not flown since.

He's been grounded by the "governing authorities", by which he says he means his employers but mostly his wife, Deborah.

Deborah didn't waste words. He rang her when he got back to the hangar. She asked if he was all right. He said he was. And she said "good". That was about it, he says, except that the good had a line drawn under it which meant your flying days are over, buddy.

You can tell he misses it. He's looking very aviatory, in his brown leather flying jacket which matches his trousers and a pair of terrific leather and suede winkle-pickers. Not to mention his Dior sunglasses.

He's got a similar fleece-lined jacket for winter flying, replicas of those of the era. "I've got the helmet, I've got the full kit but no bloody aeroplane. All talk and no trousers."

But there will be no talk from Holmes on television tonight, the first election night since the 1980s he has been absent from our screens.

It will be strange not being there, he says. He likes watching at home with his family for a change, flicking between Close Up and Campbell, but admits he gets performers' itch. "[But] I'm not remotely neurotic about it."

He'll likely watch it unfold. Then again, he may visit the various party headquarters to collect material because the election will still be news for weeks.

His new, weekly, hour-long programme - "it will be about people" - starts Thursday, and another, a current affairs version of Game of Two Halves, starring him and Mike Hosking, is planned.

So, it's not as though there's no place for him any more on the box, I think. Or that "our people today" have lost interest in him.

He thinks so too. "Despite the fact that the programme folded," he says, "I have one social contact with [TVNZ boss] Bill Ralston and its front page of the papers and here you are interviewing me for your very nice back page."

I say he's looking well. And he is. He tells me he's lost weight, been doing a bit of walking and watching what he eats. He puffs on a cigarette and we joke about what "Dr Benji", the lovely doctor who treated him during his battle with prostate cancer, would say.

"I know I shouldn't," says Holmes.

His theory on health is that it's attitude - regrets and bitterness and grudges are what gets you, rather than an indulgence or two.

He doesn't do those corrosive things, he says. Hence, at his lunch with Bill, they hardly mentioned the war of words when he went to Prime. Bill didn't mention Paul's comment that management at TVNZ was "headlessly bechooked". And Paul didn't raise Bill's having said the former king of current affairs telly was "near the end of his useful life".

No? "At one point I think Bill mentioned that ... all that stuff 'you know it was just business'. I said 'course it was business, I always knew it was just business'."

The lunch wasn't contrived, he says. Ralston phoned after Prime cut Paul Holmes and said they should do lunch. Having worked for TVNZ so long, having let go as abruptly as he did, the lunch was like closure.

We cross to the Parnell rose gardens which photographer Brett Phibbs reckons will make a good backdrop after Holmes told us how, as a kid, his Aunt Dora called him Ferdinand, after the bull in the children's book who preferred flowers to fighting.

He's learned to fight with words, still hates real "private" rows but enjoys a rigorous public "debate".

I think it odd, then, that when the photographer gets to work, Paul Holmes is suddenly self-conscious, asking whether he looks slimmer with the jacket open or zipped, whether the low angle shot catches his double chin.

We tell him he's fine just as he is.