KEY POINTS:
The woman at the Christmas party said: "Who's the best person you've interviewed this year?"
That's a simple enough question, and an impossible one to answer. Best in which category? Maddest? Funniest? Most charming? Biggest pain? The answer could have come from any one of those categories.
At the party I settled for best looking, because that one is easy. It's a tie: Charlize Theron and Ruben Wiki. Who are both lovely to look at, but might also be contenders for the nicest people I sat in a room with this year.
There was a lot of palaver involved with Charlize - interviews with celebrities are run like military exercises and with a corresponding lack of any sense of humour. They are designed to unnerve you in advance of seeing the celebrity. And the interview is conducted in the presence of minders, and PR chicks, and make-up artists and stylists. This is intended to intimidate, to stop you actually asking anything that might reveal anything of the celebrity. We had 19 minutes to do the interview and one minute for the photograph. The celebrity cannot be photographed while talking. She might look odd. As in doing something oddly normal, like talking.
"What a strange life you have," I said to Theron at the end of our 19 minutes, "sitting in anonymous hotel rooms with strangers asking you questions." She said something so sweet that I didn't put it my piece because it made me blush then - and it would make me blush now to put it in print. And despite this being just what I seem to do for a living - looking like a twit on the page - I'm still not going to tell what it was. Anyway, it was so sweet that I blurted, "Oh. You really are nice."
She had her limits too. When the stylist moved in to replace the earrings which were good enough to be interviewed in but not, apparently, good enough to be photographed in, I said, exasperated: "What's wrong with those earrings?" Theron said: "What is wrong with these earrings?" and waved the no-doubt highly paid stylist away. Nice, and nicely aware of the silliness of this carry-on.
Ruben Wiki wore Jandals to his interview. God love him, to paraphrase a Wiki-ism. The Mad Butcher phoned to say "good story" about one of his boys. "He's not too bad-looking, either, is he?" I said. "I have to say I've never really noticed," said the Mad Butcher. Aren't men funny?
Leading lawyer, as he is invariably described, Gary Gotlieb was funny. He had a picture of himself on his office wall. He had loads of pictures of himself, actually. But the one you couldn't avoid was the one in his Speedos. When I mentioned this, he said: "I don't give a shit." Well, obviously, as I said at the time, but was he vain? "No! No I don't think I'm vain," he protested. He said he wouldn't show me his legs (phew), which he used to shave for bike riding. "But they're pretty good. Ha, ha, ha." He phoned me back after the interview. At 7.36am on Good Friday. This was to tell me, among other things, a story about how he had appeared in a Craccum centrefold under the name Clyde Thrust. He wasn't wearing his Speedos. He was naked, "but you couldn't see my goolies". That put me off my hot cross buns this year. He texted to say that his wife laughed so hard reading about her husband that she cried. That was as good a compliment as anyone could wish for.
Detective Senior Sergeant Neil Grimstone had been up all night when I saw him. He and his team had just made an arrest in the case of the Pukekohe rapist. He was wearing his Scales of Justice cufflinks. I'd arranged to see him before the arrest. I wanted to talk to him about being a good old-fashioned copper. On the phone he was a bit reluctant because, he said, what he did was simple: "I catch crooks." He said it again for me, into the tape recorder because I loved that. He said, "Some say I'm a dinosaur." I'm all for a dinosaur and liked him so much I proposed doing a longer story: To follow him and the team through an investigation. This earned me a snooty rebuke from a woman whose job is communications for the coppers. I was not to go approaching coppers without going through communications. The answer was no. How very communicative.
The Opposition got all the best lines this year. A big thank you, then, to the National politicians who provided the following.
Quote of this page's year has to go to Bob The Builder Clarkson, who was in the news for going on, diplomatically as ever, about gays and burqas. When I saw him he started going on about "that gay parade in Auckland. What was it?" The Hero Parade. "Why do they pinch these words!" he asked, outraged, and then said: "I'm gay. I'm a happy, happy gay guy." He happily, with gay abandon even, posed for a picture with his hands over his mouth.
John Key came a close second one day into his new job as leader of the Nats. "I'm like the Inland Revenue Department," he said, "firm but fair." This is presumably not quite the image the National Party was hoping its young, dynamic leader might project, but I was very grateful to him for it.
And so goodbye Dr Don Brash. I, for one, will miss you. I sat with my jaw dropped for most of an hour while he listed a catalogue of leaks and mishaps he assumed I knew about or remembered. I didn't and wouldn't have. I asked him about the emails Winston Peters said he had, and which he reckoned would ruin Brash's career. Brash said, "I can't for the life of me think of anything I've sent or received."
"Well, knowing you, who knows what you've sent where!" I shrieked. He said, "What do you mean, knowing me?" I wrote, "as though he hasn't just spent 10 minutes talking in such painful detail about his leaky office it is like watching someone stick pins in his eyes." He is a great loss to politics, or at least to interviewers, and he probably provided me with the most rewarding interview of the year.
His dreadful impersonation of Tim Shadbolt is something I'll never forget.
The best or worst pun - depending on your fondness for such things - is uncontested. Dick Hubbard, Auckland City's mayor, has such a fondness. He was coming to the Herald after the interview so I took him up in the lift. He looked with keen interest at a photograph of men driving a 50-tonne machine, boring through rock. "Boy," he said, with boyish enthusiasm, "you'd feel powerful driving that, wouldn't you?" Perhaps he could line up a photo op, I said. "I could," said the mayor, "but that would make me a boring mayor."
Graham Brazier had his feelings hurt by a boring man, NZ Idol judge Iain Stables, who said Brazier was a had-been. Phooey. I had afternoon tea with Brazier: He put on pain au chocolat and cranberry juice for me and beer for him. When I left it was bucketing down and he put his suede waistcoat over my head. Just like Sir Walter Ralegh. He said yes, though he'd draw the line at putting the coat over a puddle. He showed me his biceps and said, "Feel that, my dear." He was a darling, and he said, "I might have been a never-was-er, but I'm not a has-been."
Of course he's not. He's a darling and a gentleman. He phoned and said, "You're a real lady and I'll be your Sir Walter Ralegh any time."
Jordan Luck, another great songwriter, featured on this page. I did my best to salvage his 25 years of rocker status but I couldn't save him from himself. He reclined on his leopardskin couch and talked about how much he loves Coronation Street and Dad's Army and about his cherry tomatoes. His pride is a box set of The Waltons. And did I want to come back and watch an advance recording of the Coro episode where Status Quo play at Cilla and Les' wedding?
John Rowles was fabulous too. His sister, Cheryl (Moana Marie!), told me we nearly didn't have our interview with him. Before we arrived he'd decided to trim a tree with electric hedge trimmers. In the rain. He managed to cut through the cord. Twice. He said, the big old adorable ham, posing with his trimmer, "This would make a good photo op." I asked him what sex appeal was and he said, "I always had a hairy chest - but not too hairy."
An electrocuted John Rowles. Now that would have been a scoop.
This should have been the year - it would have been a first and it will almost definitely be the last - that I could claim a worldwide scoop. Certainly my interview with self-proclaimed misanthrope (the fraud, he's a big softy) Gareth Morgan went around the world. Well, a bit of it did. The bit about how he planned to give to charity the $47 million he'd made from the sale of son Sam's Trade Me site. I mentioned this, in passing, in my penultimate paragraph.
I think it's safe to say I'm not in imminent danger of being moved to the newsroom, who had a few words to say about my news sense. My excuse that I'd been more interested in attempting to extract some of that money to pay off my mortgage didn't seem to impress them out there either.
So it seems likely that I'll be back here on the back page for another year. I hope so, because I reckon it's the best job in journalism. Which is made possible because of everyone who agrees to appear here. The funny, the charming, the lovely to look at. The mad, of whom the maddest had to be the delightful sailor Peter Bethune, who was going to circumnavigate the globe on a boat which runs on vege oil - and a dollop of his own body fat extracted by liposuction. I asked him if he was mad and he said I could call him mad, "but don't set me up as a nutcase".
Annette Presley just about drove me mad. That is what happens when you get two bossy birds in a room together, both determined to do the interviewing.
I think I won, just. Maddening, but a lot of fun. Better a wrangle than an hour with a bore any day.
Thank you to every one who was sporting enough to appear on this page in 2006.
