Herald on Sunday

Interpretation of television ratings to suit one’s own purposes has become something of a PR art form. There’s bound to be a demographic somewhere where your channel is ahead, if only among insomniac devotees of geriatric movies. 

But I suspect Richards is correct. Leaving aside the fact that there is no competing programme on TV3 for viewers to defect to, weekday early morning TV shows are rarely appointment viewing. 

I became particularly aware of this when staying with relatives in Britain. As mum bustled around making breakfast, getting the kids ready for school, finding dad’s cufflinks and generally transforming chaos into some semblance of order, television sets in the living room, kitchen, master and teenagers’ bedrooms sprayed news, weather, traffic information and chat to anyone who cared to listen and watch. 

Breakfast is a chaotic time for most families, making concentrated viewing of anything on TV difficult. So, other than for the unemployed or  retired, breakfast viewing is distracted viewing. Audiences do not so much ‘watch’ the programme, as ‘catch’ snatches of information relevant to their areas of interest or to the forthcoming day. The often complained of cyclical repetition of news headlines, weather forecasts and traffic reports makes absolute sense since it increases the chances that an individual member of the household will get the information they want while commuting from bedroom to bathroom or kitchen to living room. Weather forecasts are worldwide the highest rating programmes on television, a sobering thought perhaps for programme makers and the stars who appear on the programmes. 

All of this may mean that the hosts of breakfast TV programmes play a somewhat less significant role in attracting and retaining viewers than they would in prime time. There is, after all, very little difference between breakfast television formats world wide: attractive female presenter and (at least passable) male presenter chat, make jokes, occasionally flirt, do serious and not-so-serious short interviews on topical issues, read emails and texts, throw to news headlines, weather and traffic reports and cross live to hyperactive field reporters with the latest quirky, offbeat, sad/happy human interest story in town.   

So how do you distinguish your breakfast show from all the other breakfast shows? Even in a small country like New Zealand, intelligent, attractive, bright, breezy television presenters are two a penny. When I was asked by the Herald on Sunday recently to suggest replacements for Paul Henry and Pippa Wetzell, I was able to come up with more than a dozen women and a couple of men. (There’s a message in there somewhere.) The chemistry is important of course. Ideally, the viewer should be wondering whether they’re having an affair. No such suggestion with Paul and Pippa, but the chemistry was undoubtedly perfect.  

But even that is secondary to the essential function of the breakfast programme to provide bite-sized chunks of news and service information to people starting their day. 

So how many people tuned in to Breakfast solely to see Paul Henry? If Megan Richards (and her ratings) are right, relatively few. This would tend to support the thesis that people don’t watch breakfast programmes for the presenters but for information. However,  the absence of a competing breakfast show has to be a relevant factor in the programme retaining its audience,  despite a fairly lacklustre response to the current pairing. There was, in a word, nowhere else for viewers to go. 

Of Rob Muldoon’s encounters with television interviewers, a colleague once said to me that what made them unmissable appointment viewing was the ‘sense of impending debacle’ that you experienced before the first question had even been asked. Something similar may have been true of Henry. Only a small proportion of television viewers, who happened to be passing a television set at the time, would have caught the original live versions of moustache-gate, retard-gate, Dikshit-gate or any of Henry’s other sacrileges. Most of us read about them in the paper, or saw them on YouTube or watched the hundreds of repeat showings that outrages appear to require. What drew viewers to Henry was the same expectation, the same sense of impending debacle, that drew people to Muldoon. He was undoubtedly a drawcard. 

So I’m reluctant to accept that, had Sunrise still been on air, and had TV3 had the good sense and the money to lure Henry to their studios in Flower Street, viewers would not have deserted the state broadcaster in droves, to see what Paul would do next. 

And, just in case you’re interested, here are the names I suggested to the Herald on Sunday as possible replacement for Paul and Pippa: 

Women: Ali Mau, Bernadine Oliver-Kerby, Natasha Utting, Emma Keeling, Heather du Plessis-Alan, Donna Marie-Lever, Melissa Stokes, Vicki Wilkinson-Baker… 

Men: Richard Langston, Jim Mora…. 

Paul Homes would not have been right. Q & A fits him like a glove. 

I also hear TVNZ’s US correspondent Tim Wilson mentioned as a front-runner, but I suspect he’s a better novelist than he is a broadcaster. Next time he’s on, look for the way he delivers his sentences in disjointed chunks (what we call ‘patterned delivery’) and for his preposterously self-conscious head tilt at the end of his reports. What is that saying?

TVNZ

Someone recently accused me of being judgmental and cruel in comments I had made about some of the leading lights in the recent ‘march for democracy’. I took the criticism  to heart. I abhor cruelty to anyone or anything. If I make an exception it is to be strident in my criticism of those whom I see as advocating or practising cruelty themselves. I can appreciate that there’s a contradiction in that, but I’ve not yet reached that Christian or Buddhist state of consciousness where I can readily  extend compassion to those lacking in compassion.

I’m about to criticise Paul Henry whom I defended in the very first blog which I published on this site. My thesis was that, despite his occasional gratuitous, offensive and personally hurtful comments about other people, his exceptional talents as a broadcaster justified his continued employment by Television New Zealand. That is no longer my view. Henry is a bully who is abusing his position as a public broadcaster. He should be sacked.

Reading the report in today’s Sunday Star Times of Henry’s most recent remarks about Susan Boyle, it occurred to me first that the three examples of his obnoxious on air comments, cited in the paper,  all involved abuse of women – Stephanie Mills for her ‘moustache’, a teenage mother for being ‘a slapper’ and Susan Boyle for being ‘retarded’.

One is tempted to conclude that misogyny lies at the core of Mr Henry’s personality. Like most misogynists he appears to like pretty women, but has no time for those who do not conform to his superficial ideals  of beauty and femininity. Ugliness seems  anathema to him. Even the supposed ugliness of obese children who should ‘be taken away from their parents and put in a car compactor’.  The Nazis would have been comfortable with that one. They had their ideals of beauty too.

They would have  been comfortable with his comments about Susan Boyle as well. The singer, he told viewers, was ‘starved of oxygen at birth… If you look at her carefully, you can make it out. Here’s the interesting revelation: she is in fact retarded. And if you look at it carefully, you can make it out, can’t you?’

You might have to wonder at the intellectual or emotional maturity of someone who looks at people ‘carefully’ to determine whether they are retarded. Henry says his remarks about Boyle were ‘light hearted’, which may explain why he laughed when he said she had been ‘starved of oxygen at birth’. But there is absolutely nothing ‘light-hearted’ or funny about a child being ‘starved of oxygen at birth’ or about intellectual disability of any sort. That sort of prejudice has no place in a civilised society.

Hosting a television programme endows the presenter with considerable power. And with that power goes the responsibility not to abuse your position by disparaging those with less power and less opportunity to respond.

 Henry seems unaware of that responsibility. He responds to criticism with the crass bluster, so typical of the bully:

‘To be honest, this is water off a duck’s back to me… There’s a question of free speech here… I’m just saying what’s on my mind, what I think, I’m trying to be entertaining.’

And there you have the real issue: not freedom of speech which can never be unlimited in a civilised society, but the freedom to increase your ratings and advance your career by tapping into the deep-seated prejudices of your audience.  

There’s an element of cowardice here too. I doubt that Henry would have described anyone in New Zealand, anyone he thought  likely to see  his programme,  in the terms in which he described Susan Boyle. What he said was massively defamatory and would almost certainly have attracted a writ and a claim for substantial damages, naming him and Television New Zealand. But Henry doesn’t expect Susan Boyle or her producer, the enormously powerful Simon Cowell, to have heard of some jumped-up breakfast host with a tiny audience in New Zealand.

I think I’ll remedy that. I think I’ll contact Simon Cowell and draw his attention to Henry’s remarks. I’d find the outcome of that very entertaining.