What Was I Thinking: A Memoir (27 page)

IN SEPTEMBER 2010 I
won the
New Idea
People’s Choice Award for most popular television personality. Accepting the award I read out a letter that was not untypical of the mail I received from people who did not share what they assumed to be my views. It got a huge laugh and after the ceremony, people were almost queuing up to see it. It was, by any standards, a spectacular piece of mail:

‘You are the most insulting, little self-conceited little mongrel prick on TV. I would love Susan Boyle to shit on your ugly face, Pamela Anderson to give you Aids, David Hasselhoff to punch you on the nose, preferably before Susan shits on you. You
fucking poofter pommy mongrel prick. Die you cunt.’

We all had a good laugh on the night. Linda Topp souvenired the original. Despite coming so late in the year, the clip of me reading the letter was the most viewed New Zealand YouTube item of 2010, reaching more than 350,000 hits that year.

I’ve referred previously to how quickly fortunes can change in the media. A spectacular number of things can go wrong during two and a half hours of live television every morning. In my case, many of them have ended up on T-Shirts.

The Susan Boyle incident was typical of how I offend people who live and breathe in order to be offended. People who like to be offended tend to congregate together and multiply. They sit in front of their TVs like little ticking time bombs of potential offence waiting to explode.

When I watched the clip of Susan Boyle singing and being interviewed and then read an article on her and the difficulties she had in a magazine, I said on air it was official she was in fact retarded.

Other members of the media, better informed about today’s acceptable terminology than I, have got away with assessing Boyle’s situation by saying she has a ‘condition’ or faces ‘special challenges’. When I was a boy the word used to describe people in that position was ‘retarded’. Apparently it has since ended up on the banned list and no one had told me. But for people to extrapolate from the use of that word that I in some way had it in for handicapped people, as I was accused of doing, was too bizarre.

I realised the word was slightly old-fashioned but I don’t have time to agonise over such phrasing. I established this policy sometime prior, during a radio interview about kindergartens.

‘What do kindy teachers make of this?’ I asked.

‘Actually,’ said the kindy teacher, ‘if I could correct you, we are early childhood educators.’

‘Are you busy?’ I said.

‘We’re always busy,’ she said.

‘Well, I better let you get on with it then,’ I said and hung up on her. Retarded was obviously on the same list as ‘kindy’.

In the wake of the Susan Boyle remark, the offence time bombs had contacted relevant organisations who worked with disabled people, which had then written pro-forma letters of complaint and distributed these to their members to forward to TVNZ. I was contacted by a couple of people who were members of one of these organisations.

‘We thought you might like to know we’ve been phoned and instructed to be offended,’ they said. ‘We’ve been told that you are against our people and that you’re going around calling people retards.’

Other incidents caused me as much trouble without getting quite as much public exposure. During Helen Clark’s last election campaign as Prime Minister I was talking to our political editor Guyon Espiner about how the ratings had been consistently going down for Labour and all of a sudden there had been a bit of a lift, and rightfully so because National were dropping the ball left, right and centre.

‘Are you telling me that, after all that has happened,’ I said to Guyon, ‘there are people thinking, “I don’t know. I know I was saying last week I wasn’t going to vote for Labour but now I think I might”?’

‘It seems that way,’ said Guyon.

‘Oh God, will this reign of terror never end?’ I said. And Labour was obviously so worried about how badly they were doing that there was a suggestion of a Broadcasting Standards Authority complaint over the comparison to the excesses of the French Revolution.

At the same time, I was told by a couple of Labour MPs that they almost pissed themselves laughing when they heard it.
And when they found out there was talk of a complaint they put the kibosh on it very quickly. It would have made them look ridiculous. It’s called humour!

Another political complaint that never made it all the way involved Murray McCully as Foreign Minister. Because the political talent pool is so small and the expectations are so low he a) has the job, and b) is seen to be doing it adequately. If Winston Peters and Murray McCully can do a good job as Foreign Minister, who couldn’t? Why don’t they get Susan Boyle? To me Murray represented everything that was wrong with National being in government. Here he was again, back at the top after all these years, shuffling around in those suits. I always used to refer to him as silly old Murray McCully, even when I was interviewing John Key.

‘Are you going to get Winston back or will silly old Murray McCully be Minister of Foreign Affairs?’ I asked, and he didn’t pull me up on it, which was to become something of a habit with him.

Murray McCully wasn’t happy, however. He is also much smarter than George Hawkins. He recognised it was going to be hard having a go at me over the use of ‘silly’, but he complained about the use of ‘old’, based on the fact that he was only marginally older than me. He was able to get some mileage out of the complaint but it didn’t go to the Broadcasting Standards Authority. He did have a point re our similar age.

I think I have the record for generating more BSA complaints than anyone, but I don’t have the record for complaints being upheld, because I knew where the lines were drawn. You can cross a line in good taste or good judgement, and I frequently did, long before you cross a line that will get you into legal trouble. The best broadcasting takes place on the line.

I hope that anyone who has bought — or probably borrowed — this book hoping to read what I have to say about things
like the Greenpeace spokeswoman Stephanie Mills’ moustache ‘affair’ and then scorn my ‘attempts to justify’ such incidents will be disappointed. I don’t need to justify anything. If any of those people has a genuine interest in being informed, I would encourage them to go online and look for the original broadcasts where they will invariably find that what happened differed considerably from what was reported.

The occasion on which I upset some homosexuals by saying that it was ‘not natural’ for gays to adopt children is typical. Most reports ended there. They did not add that I backed it up. I said same sex adoption is not natural because it does not occur in the animal kingdom. I went on to say that homosexuality itself is perfectly natural, and I know that because it is displayed widely in other species. I talked about animals that I know for a fact have been caught in homosexual acts. My point was that you can’t argue with the way nature organises things.

The people who complained did not want me to be reasonable. They wanted to have their own prejudices reinforced.

I must, however, since they were front-page news for months — not days or weeks, but months — and led to my resignation, discuss my on-air comments about Sheila Dikshit and Anand Satyanand.

Sheila Dikshit is the chief minister of Delhi and has a funny name. No one can deny it is a funny name. Attempts at such denial are futile. Nor will I attempt to deny that I made fun of it on air. Many of the people who purported to be incensed by what I said, I know, had themselves made fun of it privately. How could you resist? I made fun of it because it made me laugh and because it wound up our
Breakfast
newsreader Peter Williams. The humour inherent in the name was magnified for me because at the time she was having to front up to defend Delhi’s preparedness for
the Commonwealth Games, when there were reports that the plumbing facilities were less than ideal.

There were murmurings of complaint after my comments and members of the BSA had to wake up and take a call or two, but that was it.

Many people, including Peter Williams, claimed that the name was pronounced Dicks-it. It is not. In any news video from India that involves her, the name is clearly pronounced Dick-shit. Australia’s
Sunrise
programme had noticed what an interesting name Ms Dikshit had some time earlier. They interviewed her and at the end of the interview, the journalist said, ‘Can you just tell me how you pronounce your name?’

‘Sheila,’ she says, ‘as in Sheila, dick shit.’

‘Can you say that again?’

‘Dick shit.’

I did not — never have and never would — deliberately mispronounce her name for comic effect. I didn’t need to.

Timid non-Indian news organisations, among them TVNZ, insist on mispronouncing her name to avoid the comedy inherent in it. I think that’s hugely insulting. One of the basics of journalism is to get people’s names right. To deliberately mispro nounce a person’s name because it is unpalatable is offensive.

I got a lot of feedback about this and a surprising amount of it was from Indian people telling me that they had been laughing at her name for years.

It would almost certainly have been tossed on the pile with my other alleged misdemeanours from over the years had I not asked the Prime Minister, John Key, some days later about selecting a new Governor-General when Sir Anand Satyanand’s term came to an end.

‘Is he even a New Zealander?’ I asked. ‘Are you going to choose a New Zealander who looks and sounds like a New Zealander this
time?’ It was a cheeky way of asking what sort of person he was looking for.

When TVNZ PR person Andi Brotherston said in the following days, unhelpfully as it turned out, ‘Paul says what a lot of people think but don’t say’, she was actually close to the mark. A lot of people don’t register that someone of Indian descent and with an Indian name is a New Zealander. I am not one of those people but I wanted in my roundabout way to point out that this was a point of view that existed in the community.

Of course I know that Governors-General now have to be born in New Zealand. I wasn’t saying that Sir Anand wasn’t a New Zealander or that he wasn’t fit to be Governor-General.

I thought no more about it until I heard some talk on the radio about the fact that I was a racist because I had said that unless someone looked and sounded exactly like me they weren’t a New Zealander. This person claimed I wouldn’t countenance a woman as Governor-General, which was doubly ironic because had we not run out of time I was going to give the PM my short list for the position, at the top of which was the Auckland City Missioner Dianne Robertson, for whom I have an enormous amount of respect and admiration. I assume she is a New Zealander. I think someone who gives their life to helping the destitute and homeless, and has smarts, is just what we need as Governor-General.

As usual most of the people who expressed strong opinions about what I had said hadn’t seen the broadcast. As far as TVNZ was concerned, in the early stages of reaction there was not a lot to worry about. I had never been sat down at any time and asked to tone things down. The only feedback I ever had from management was that things were going well, thank you very much. I was never encouraged to be more outrageous, but I was trusted and left to perform.

I know people at management level came under pressure
at times to rein me in. They had a right to do so because they were paying me, but if they had I would have left long before because that was not how I worked. So they let me carry on. But in a quiet news week the
New Zealand Herald
made a big story out of the Satyanand interview and resurrected the Sheila Dikshit comments. And when a massive public outcry arose, calling for my dismissal, all of a sudden, management were very quick to advise me and counsel me, but it was too late. I have no ill feeling towards TVNZ nor to those mindless individuals who got worked up into such a lather. Not the least of the ironies in the whole affair was that I was able to entertain even them. I’m glad I subjected them to me for as long as I did.

The
Herald’
s coverage created the perfect storm from which it was very hard to see an easy way out, especially when the Dikshit story was picked up around the world. That was awkward. Suddenly there was a feeding frenzy with me at the centre. It was talkback catnip — hosts didn’t need to come up with a topic of their own for days.

I spoke to TVNZ. We agreed that an official apology was needed to put the lid on the whole thing, and that was planned for the next morning. I had no qualms about apologising for hurting anyone’s feelings. I never intend to hurt people, so I’m always happy to apologise on the odd chance that I have genuinely hurt someone. But I will never apologise for outraging anyone.