Holmes

Many people you write about in television are just passing through on their way to another destination. Then there are the ones you end up writing about for decades. Like Paul Holmes. I hadn’t long been reviewing when, in 1989, he started remaking local television in his own image. He’d come to Auckland from Wellington in 1985 to take over the 1ZB breakfast slot from the legendary Merv Smith and Scottish sidekick McHairy, a spider in a tam-o’-shanter. Big shoes to fill. Ten of them, if you counted McHairy’s.
Holmes was launching a bold breakfast concept: Newstalk ZB. Talk radio. It was an uphill battle to begin with. Ratings plummeted. It must have been disheartening. I would see him at TV previews and events standing quietly in the corner. For probably the last time in his life, ignored. Before long he would be doing breakfast radio at one end of the day, then the startling new Holmes TV current affairs show at the other.
‘Wired to Shock’ was the headline the subs put on my review of the first Holmes show in 1989, in which Holmes earned a place in every account of local television history by hectoring American yachtsman Dennis Conner about some mean things he had said about New Zealand’s team during the 1988 America’s Cup. “Apologise! Apologise!” I may have used the phrase “like a rabid chihuahua”. Conner walked off the set, and the arrival of tabloid television in this country was universally declared.
That year I spent a day shadowing Holmes, starting at 5am. He was already at work. Did he sleep at the lovely modernist Broadcasting House in Durham Street West, soon to be demolished along with His Majesty’s Theatre because those who forget history fuck everything up? His day ended after Holmes went to air at 7pm, when he looked ready to rock ’n’ roll. I was shattered. The story was called ‘The Running Man’.
I’d asked him why he burned the candle at both ends. “I have always known that I have a place in the history of New Zealand broadcasting. I plan to take it,” he said. “That’s why I keep running.”
We argued about television. “I laugh at people who deplore the surrender of television to the ratings,” he said. “The idea that certain highly educated people should feel that they are called upon by some greater power to broadcast educative material to the masses makes me puke.”
His shows came under the banner of news and current affairs. Along with the cap and bells, he was in the business of broadcasting material, some of it educative, to the masses. And he wasn’t under-educated. His presenting style was unusually articulate. He was a gifted broadcaster. In a genre that could be as ritualised as Kabuki Theatre, he was ahead of his generation in being unafraid of dead air, remorselessly, sometimes disastrously, himself. His musings on his goldfish of a morning were some of the best radio I have ever heard. Like other loose cannons of local broadcasting — the brief Radio Pacific pairing of Pam Corkery and Paul Henry; Mikey Havoc on bFM — you would end up trying to drive to work while weeping with laughter.
He once filled five minutes at the end of Holmes, when something went awry, with an impromptu monologue. I all but gave him a standing ovation in my living room. There was some good work. He championed Eve van Grafhorst, the little girl born prematurely in Australia who became infected with HIV from a blood transfusion. In 1985 her mother was told to withdraw Eve from her daycare centre. The story went public, the family’s life in Australia became intolerable and they returned to New Zealand. Holmes covered Eve’s story on Holmes. They became friends. The pieces they did together did a lot to overcome the fear and ignorance of the times — surely core business for current affairs. Journalists should be disinterested reporters, not activists, people say, increasingly these days. Good journalists, when the occasion demands they step up, can be both.
Holmes also liked to lob a cherry bomb into the toilet bowl of his turbulent celebrity. Over the years I would hear from him in no uncertain terms. “Diana. What do you mean a raving egotist!” he wrote in nice, apoplectic cursive. And: “Your eminently put-downable, basketweaving magazine …” And: “It’s very easy isn’t it; you sit there writing hurtful shit into your WP …” Well, it wasn’t ever easy. Writing is essentially hell, at least until you get past the reproachful blank page. I wrote back, pointing out he liked to dish it out himself and could surely take it, and got an amiable reply. I ran into him once outside a journalism awards do. He’d won Columnist of the Year for his Herald columns, I think it was, and kept pulling the cheque he’d won out of his pocket and gazing at it to wind up the disgruntled journalists he’d beaten, some of whom had probably bagged him in print. He never turned down an interview request.
My last profile of him was in 2012. “Paul, Paul, Paul,” I wrote. “And it was all going so smoothly.” He had just published Daughters of Erebus, a vivid account of the Erebus crash and its effect on the family of pilot Jim Collins, when he decided to mark our national day with a furious rant in his Herald column headlined, ‘Waitangi Day a Complete Waste’. Some readers loved the column and said so in the Herald website comments section. Others not so much: “Very thought provoking. The main thought that comes to mind is you’re an idiot.” The Herald got protested.
When we spoke I reminded him of something he once said. That, after surviving the 1989 helicopter crash on the East Coast that killed cameraman Joe Von Dinklage, such was his gratitude for the care he and his fellow survivors received after swimming ashore that night, he would always do right by Māori. “I know what you’re saying,” he said. “I might have been a bit harsh in my column. I forget things,” he sighed, contemplating the headlong rush of being Holmes.
In that 2012 conversation, Holmes, who had been treated for prostate cancer, batted away concerns about his health. At the end of the interview, we went for photographs in the Remuera flat he stayed at when he was in Auckland. He posed in his dressing gown, looking out at a threatening sky. After the shoot he seemed at a loose end and asked us if we’d like to stay for a drink. We had to go. Almost exactly a year later, he died. I wish we had stayed.
Taken with kind permission from the newly published memoir Unreel: A Life in Review by Diana Wichtel (Penguin, $40), one of the best books of the year and definitely the funniest, available as an ideal Xmas gift at bookstores nationwide.