KEY POINTS:
It's an astonishingly tidy office. On one side of its wooden coffee table - framed by two spongy couches - is a small bowl of mints and on the other a selection of magazines, arranged just so. Next to windows overlooking Auckland's Victoria St West, a desk is almost free of papers, as is the rest of this office.
Apart from an Obama T-shirt hanging inelegantly from the large shelves where five televisions flicker, this office, where charcoal carpet clashes with mid-brown soft furnishings, is ruled by order.
The man who works here is tidy too, though this morning Anthony Flannery, TVNZ's head of news and current affairs, is running unusually, untidily, late. He likes to start his sometimes 12-hour days at 7.30am. It's now past 8.30. He is surprisingly well-turned out for a newsman, and an Aussie newsman at that. His smartly trimmed hair is curled and steel grey with pointed L-shaped sideburns which hint at his love of punk and new wave. His dark grey suit is smart, and is Hugo Boss. It says something about him that he freely admits it's a hand-me-down. While working at Australia's Channel Nine he'd had to attend a state parliamentary Budget reading, and had no suit. He was given this one. It's wearing well. All this fastidiousness suggests a number of possibilities.
A neatnik's liking for control maybe, or possibly a preference for being in his newsroom - thereby not spending enough time here to mess with the order - or perhaps it could be that his loyal, charming PA Beth takes good care of his digs as well as him.
In all likelihood it's a combination of all three. But he and his office neatly reflect the focus he's had for some 17 months: restoring order after the chaos that's reigned in TVNZ news and current affairs. It's certainly fair to say that Anthony Flannery is in possession of the poisoned chalice of New Zealand journalism. It's a fair bet, too, you know little of him.
Here's a sketch: he's 46 and has handsome, boyish features. He's a family man with a son and a daughter. His wife, Cath, is a psychologist of Croatian stock who he met at college. He lives in the Eastern Bays. He likes his beer. He likes his rugby and barracks for Canterbury. He has a gym bag in the corner of his office but it hardly ever moves. He calls himself a "music tragic". But more than anything else, Flannery is the most low-profile head of news TVNZ has had in years.
Since replacing Mad Dog Bill Ralston in the job in May 2007, Flannery has given no major interviews and has barely featured at all in the media. Neither has he been heard making Ralston-esque suggestions about competitors leaping off tall buildings.
No, he has been keeping his head down in his terribly neat office. And if the swag of gongs TVNZ staffers netted at the Qantas Film and Television Awards in September - as well as the modest recovery in One News' ratings - suggest anything, they suggest he's been working.
Stretching his legs out and leaning back into one his office's spongy couches, his reading glasses on his forehead and his hands behind his head, Flannery gives the appearance of being relaxed. But he's not enjoying this. He doesn't much like being on the other end of the questions, and says so. He's agreed to talk to me because he believes he's been in the job long enough now to talk about what it is he's up to. But first, the unhappy history.
Flannery is the fourth TVNZ news head in a decade. Paul Cutler (1997-2001) was the man in charge during the Hawkesby fiasco. Heaton Dyer (2001-03) left after two years, saying "I don't have the stamina to lead this team for another year".
Bill Ralston (2003-07) promised kick-ass journalism but delivered a revolution which played out like a three-ringed circus. His tenure saw a purge of presenters, including Paul Holmes and Judy Bailey, endless dramas involving presenter pay-packets and a major slide in the ratings of the flagship 6pm bulletin, One News.
Indeed, one survey reportedly suggested One News shed 40 per cent of its audience between July 2004 and January 2007. Since Flannery took over it's been quiet, in comparison. There were 47 redundancies across news and currents affairs last year, though the restructuring was signalled and in train before Flannery arrived.
Even the Tony Veitch affair - despite the hysterical reporting - hardly touched Flannery and comment on the more recent Hannah Hodson brouhaha with Pink was left to a TVNZ flak.
Still, the history suggests calm rarely reigns at TVNZ, so you'd wonder why anyone would want the job. Flannery says he was well aware of what he was getting himself into. "But I'd also come from a very tough environment [in Australia] so that part didn't bother me much. What I saw was the opportunity of TVNZ."
As we shall see, Flannery, who's been a journalist for 25 years and in television for 20 (mostly producing and managing rather than reporting), had held no equivalent position in Australia. However, TVNZ's head of television, Jeff Latch, was impressed by Flannery's depth of experience. "He certainly had experiences in all the individual news sub-genres. I guess what also came across was that he was very experienced in operating in a competitive environment ... I remember it was a remarkable interview in Australia, we were on the same page."
Which is cosy. But what page? What does Flannery actually do? First, he manages almost 300 people, all news and current affairs (including that on the digital channel TVNZ7) and has a multimillion-dollar budget. After that it gets a little fruity. "I manage the expectations of our staff and executives. I think I've managed the expectations of the people of New Zealand and our viewers. "I wasn't here previously but I'm told we had major morale issues. My big thing as a journalist and someone who's worked in TV for so long, I always thought we were pretty much the luckiest people in the world to work in what we do. I've done a lot of different jobs. I've dug holes and poured beers and I've had a guy pull a gun on me [in bar job in Britain] - and I'd much rather be working in TV."
A boy from the bush. The phrase sits deep in the Australian psyche, and suggests humble beginnings, hard work and a success reflected in making it to the Big Smoke. Flannery's bush was Parkes, population 9000.
The railway town in the western New South Wales is named for premier Sir Henry Parkes, the "father" of Australian federation, and is probably best known for its observatory, which, as mythologised in the Sam Neill film The Dish, played a part in tracking the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing.
The Flannerys, predictably, are of Irish Catholic stock, and lived in Parkes for a couple of generations. On his father's side a grandfather worked the Kalgoorlie gold fields in Western Australia before moving east. The family lived there until Flannery's father died in 1979, aged 62, and his mother later moved to Sydney. Flannery was 17 and had just started his final year at school. "It was very tough - not a good time to lose a father who I idolised. My great regret is that he never got to meet Cath and the kids."
Flannery's was a modest, working-class upbringing. His parents ran a corner store, selling groceries, fruit and veges, milkshakes. The three-bedroom timber house out back was home to nine; Flannery is the youngest of seven brothers - the eldest is 62; all now work in the humanities - and his parents were staunch Catholics. "But not wowsers," he adds hastily. Michael Peterson, a Parkes mate who was born within a couple of months of Flannery, says the family's home was like a drop-in centre.
"All his brothers would be coming back from university so it was a pretty hip sort of place. There was a lot of pretty cool music happening. We looked up to his older brothers." Peterson says Flannery was a bit mischievous but popular at school, becoming school captain and representing the state as junior hockey player. Another mate, Vincent Kelly, says he liked being around the Flannerys.
"I was brought up as an only child and to be included in their family clan was a bit of an honour." There are no airs and graces in the bush, according to Flannery. You're planted firmly in the dusty, red ground. "My home town was a very egalitarian place, there was no great wealth. It wasn't a real wealthy farming community, there were a lot of marginal farms."
The kid who played hockey for his state was a leaguey too, and a book worm. It was expected he'd follow his brothers to university. He fancied being an English history teacher or a physio and spent three weeks working in a bank at Bondi Beach before heading to Bathurst to do a three-year communications degree at Mitchell College of Advanced Education, a place which produced something called the "Mitchell Mob" in Australian journalism.
Flannery got into the trade because he loved to have a chat. That and "as an idealistic young bloke you feel like you can actually make an impression somewhere. It might have been battered after years in the trade but [the idealism's] still there". His first job as a journo, in 1984, was back in Parkes, working for the local paper. His first story was about an unusually large sunflower.
"It brought me down to earth again." He was there six months, was headhunted (he laughs at the word) by the Daily Liberal in Dubbo, then nine months later arrived in Canberra to be a press secretary for a Labour MP - "I think I was pretty ambitious and adventurous ... I wasn't a party member" - a stint which ended 18 months later when he landed a role as Dubbo bureau chief for the regional channel, Mid-State TV. "I wasn't a natural TV journalist. I hated being in front of a camera and I hated hearing myself on air. But I got bitten by the TV bug then, though I always thought I'd never be a big person in front in the camera."
Mad, bad Hunter S. Thompson reckoned the TV business a cruel, shallow money trench through journalism's heart , "a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs for no good reason."
Flannery didn't die like a dog at the Nine Network, where he started in the mid-1990s and where he stayed until last year, though he became pretty disillusioned, according to mates. Channel Nine is one of Australia's big three free-to-air channels. Its slogan used to be "Still the One", a boast it ended when its place at the top of national ratings became less certain at the turn of the century. Its news service has suffered the same fate, losing top-dog status to Seven.
Flannery, after a year's OE, made it to big-time TV via a regional station in Canberra, where he became head of news. This led to a stint as news director at a Nine affiliate in Darwin. "They flew Cath and me up there and we had a look. They got us drunk, well and truly, at the pub and I loved the place." He did three years in the north in what appears a stepping stone to a gig in Sydney, Nine's base.
In 1995, the offer came. He was working for the big boys, and Flannery began working his way through much of Nine's news rosters. They're a dry bunch of roosters, Aussie newsmen. When I asked one if he had anything further he wanted to add about Flannery he said "yes", paused, then declared "he's a cross-dresser". How we laughed. Just such a dry bugger is Peter Meakin, Nine's long-time, larger-than-life, Ralston-like news and current affairs head (until 2003, when he moved to the same role at Seven).
Meakin recalls Flannery's rise to prominence at Nine happened after he left. "When I knew him he was basically a producer in the newsroom," Meakin growls. "He had a reputation as a very competent producer. I can't say when I was there - and maybe this was my mistake rather than his failing - but I didn't spot him as a potential executive producer (EP) or anything. So maybe I'm losing my touch. "He was reliable, stable but not the sort of guy you'd say 'jeez, this guy's a whiz kid, amazing'. He needed to be appreciated and maybe I didn't appreciate his talents enough." But appreciated Flannery was, eventually being promoted to EP of Nine's 6pm news before 18 months as EP of the breakfast programme, Today. It's around this time that the dysfunction at Nine seems to have reached fever pitch.
One senses Flannery's disillusionment begins here too, but was he shafted from Today? "Well you know it was the period of the great shafting at Channel Nine," says Mark Llewellyn, EP of news and public affairs at Seven and formerly, briefly, Nine director of news and current affairs and Flannery's boss. "It was like the Cultural Revolution - but more brutal. He was just one of the many minions that faced the ideologues and wound up in a re-education camp. In that sense he was unfortunate but in no sense unique."
The re-education camp turned out to be Nine's most tabloid news show, A Current Affair, Flannery's last job before coming here. "If you're thrown off one lifeboat and the choice is between swimming with the sharks or getting into another lifeboat I think you'll understand why he took the job he took," Llewellyn says. He was liked at Nine, Llewellyn says, and had an "ethical" approach to stories.
Nine's stalwart 60 Minutes anchor Peter Harvey, a mate of 20 years, says Flannery's "no backbiter, no liar, and his word is rolled gold". However, his eight months on A Current Affair led - after he was appointed to TVNZ - to accusations on this side of the ditch of Flannery being a tabloid hack, but Llewellyn says that's inaccurate. "It's a cheap shot." Flannery's mates at Nine thought so too. Their parting gift was a Wallabies jersey with "Tabloid Tony" on the back.
Given half a chance, I believe Flannery could talk non-stop all day and night about television generally and TVNZ specifically. He is a passionate fellow. Earnest too. When I ask him what gets his goat, he offers people who refuse to vote "when people are prepared to put their very lives on the line in other parts of the world for this very opportunity". He's also calm and easy company.
Mate Vincent Kelly reckons Flannery's "like an old dragster, he's got about three gears. He trundles out there. He's never changed". However, the head of Christchurch Polytech's broadcasting school, Paul Norris, surmises the news boss is "a pretty shrewd operator ... and I think he's done pretty well and I think he's got the ability to do that job pretty well."
Colin Peacock, presenter of Radio New Zealand's Mediawatch, is more circumspect about Flannery's influence. The digital TVNZ7 is doing okay and the 6pm bulletin is less "hysterical" but if you looked at a bulletin from the Ralston period and one from Flannery's, Peacock says, "I don't think you'd see much difference, substantially".
TVNZ earned eight of the 11 news and current affairs gongs at September's Qantas Film and Television awards, including best news award for the second year running. Flannery announced he was "over the moon". More partisan observers suggest it was just TVNZ's year. Two possibly firmer measures of his first 18 months are staff morale and ratings. The former, by all accounts, is good.
The latter, as always, is problematic and, frankly, tedious. TVNZ and TV3 news have different ratings demographics and constantly squabble over who's doing what, where. In October, for example, TV3 claimed it was just ahead in its share of One News' 25-to-54 age group in September.
Meanwhile, Flannery points to 13 successive months of year-on-year growth in the number of 25-to-54 age group viewers. Clear as mud then. But it's always best to keep in mind that demographic groupings are for advertisers. And that each night the flagship One News routinely has around 200,000 more viewers aged 5 and over than 3 News - as it did well before Flannery.
The man himself is happy with his progress, however. As far as he's concerned he's getting the numbers up, the shows are sharper and staff happier. And Kelly reckons he's never heard Flannery so happy as since he's been here. But one can't help wondering whether this is just another stop on the rise of Anthony Flannery, that Auckland is just a stepping stone like Darwin was and, once the numbers are where they should be, he'll be off.
"Auckland isn't Darwin, it isn't a frontier town," he says, and laughs.
"And I'm not 30 anymore. I'm a boy from the bush who likes a little bit slower pace. So Auckland and New Zealand suit me right down to the ground.
"There is an expectation that I would be here at least three years. And I'm hoping I'll be here a lot longer. It's a long way to swim back to Sydney if I don't achieve some results."
