“I can’t like olives,” Kim Hill once said, emphatically, enigmatically, and somehow weirdly memorably. That utterance summed up her idiosyncratic appeal. The horrid olives made their appearance on her first Saturday morning show in 2002. In a review of that first show, I wrote that she talks about food the way a visitor from another galaxy might. “I would have thought mint and basil would argue with each other,” she went on to proclaim. Presumably, her observations of olives and those battling herbs were apropos of … something. But perhaps not. She is the queen of the non sequitur.
Her last show will be on November 25. “Bit of a day, yesterday,” she said of her departure announcement. It was like attending her own funeral “while still alive”. There was more collective wailing than when the All Blacks failed to win the World Cup. She said she would have said that the messages have been humbling – except that she has never known what “humbling” meant. Instead, they were “prouding”. Part of the delight that is Kim Hill is her propensity for making up words.
It is very rude of her to retire. She’s only 68. What is she going to do all day, anyway? As she has pointed out, you can only do Wordle once a day. She can cut her own hair only so many times. And in any case, she stopped cutting it herself after her daughter told her she looked like “a muppet”. She might learn to play the cello. She has grandkids. She could re-read Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady for, oh, the 100th time. She likes semi-colons. She has a garden that she appears to regard as a slightly tricky interviewee. She’s rather good at killing things. Pity the bugs. You can see her going about her garden squashing pests the way she has squashed pesky guests.
Some of her guests were treated like bugs. Or those olives. If she couldn’t like them, if they were horrible and rude or merely a bit thick, she would roll the sour thing about in her mouth and with elegant distaste, spit the pip, with exquisite precision, into the rubbish bin she discarded nasty things into.
It must be a pain, and a bore, that listeners remember the interviews that were fiascos far longer than they remember the clever ones – she makes baffling science and boffins understandable and interesting – or the sweet and funny ones: Dolly Parton, a very young Lorde (who was wriggling with excitement at being interviewed by her hero, Hill). She was often ticked off by listeners for being bitchy or opinionated.
People have long complained that she interrupts too much. Of course she interrupts. It’s what good interviewers do. Otherwise, people will just waffle on along a road of their own agenda. You’ve got to lasso ‘em. If listeners thought they could offend her by sending a message objecting to her interrupting, you’d think they’d have learnt they could not. She has long relished reading rude messages. She has long relished exposing morons as morons.
She may be the only person who has ever received an apology from the frequently fierce CK Stead, who, in the introduction to his 2002 collection of essays, Kin of Place, added a footnote: “… is it ego, or Radio NZ policy, which dictates that she must pretend to have read books discussed on her programme which clearly at times she has only skimmed or glanced at?” Was he going to be in for it the next time he appeared on her show? Was he ever. She may also have been the only person in the country to have given CK a public tongue lashing. That’s a pretty good definition of bravery – on both of their parts. A fierce Hill is even scarier than a fierce Stead.
In the early days, that pompous Max Cryer had a slot on language. He made the mistake of saying: “Have you ever noticed how listeners don’t always hear things accurately?” It’s always a fabulous idea to insult the listeners. “Nooo. Not my listeners, Max,” Hill said. “Heavens. In fact, far too many of them heard CK Stead last week and wrote me emails calling me unprofessional and nasty. Bitchy, one called me, bitchy.” One! Amazingly, those people who write in to complain about her still listen to her. Why, she would ask, didn’t they just find the off knob? Why, indeed.
Jeffrey Archer thought her rude, cruel and unkind. The scandal-prone then-Tory peer and author objected when Hill asked whether he was driven by ego. Things went rapidly downhill. Her reputation for being cruel and unkind had preceded her, he said. When he came down from his soapbox, she asked whether it was his encounters with the UK press that had made him “so defensive”. She was never intimidated.
The British journalist and writer Tony Parsons told her she had her head up her arse. He later said he wouldn’t have said it “if I’d known she was so old”. He was a prick.
Hill did a shortish stint on the telly with Face to Face with Kim Hill. John Pilger came on the show and was a prick. Well, she kind of suspected that he would be, as did we. Spit, spit, spit. Into that wastepaper bin went pips Pilger, Parsons and Archer. It must be quite a large rubbish bin.
Being on the telly requires a stillness she has never possessed. Her hands, like her brain, are in constant motion. You found yourself hypnotised by the hands, the pointing of pens, the face twisting, which made it nigh impossible to concentrate on the interview.
Is she terrifying, I once asked fellow broadcaster Susie Ferguson. “Of course,” she said. She’s so brainy. Brainy people are scary. She’s been called the biggest brain in radio. She told the Post: “That’s because I’m so old that I know stuff people don’t really care about any more. They think it’s clever, but it’s not, it’s just being overeducated.”
Unlike the late Sir Paul Holmes – the only other broadcaster of her generation who was in her league – she has never given a toss about being populist. Big-brained as she is, she probably doesn’t know how to spell it. Unlike Holmes, she doesn’t do folksy or gushy. She is fine, though, with a bit of whimsy. She is fond of going off on a flight of fancy – those olives …
It is tempting to imagine she’ll go on existing somewhere within the workings of all our wirelesses. It is comforting to think her catchy bark of a cackle, sometimes benevolent, sometimes not, will, at unexpected moments, emanate from them.
She’s like a sometimes benevolent, sometimes malevolent imp, and is impishly capable of either. She has always been New Zealand broadcasting’s Puck. As the sprite says in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound / A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire / And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn/ Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn.”
Click here for Russell Baillie’s interview with Kim Hill.
