I read that Mike Hosking and Toni Street are leaving TV1’s prime-time show Seven Sharp.

I’ve never been a fan of the somewhat brittle and abrasive Mr Hosking but I acknowledge his intelligence, interviewing skill and often caustic wit.

As for Toni Street, no-one could fail to be charmed by the warmth and generosity of her personality, her skill both as interviewer and occasional peacemaker and her good-humoured tolerance of her co-host. She came through the lens. And that is the highest compliment you can pay to any television broadcaster.

So we are losing a great and, I suspect, irreplaceable team. I doff my hat to them both. You will be missed. I will miss you.

Hi, my name is Brian. Edwards to be precise. You may remember me. I used to be on television. Started in Christchurch on a magazine show called Town and Around. Went North to Wellington to audition for a current affairs show called Gallery. Knew bugger all about politics and stuff and was even less interested. Bluffed my way through the audition.

Cut a long story short, got the job, got famous and thought I was the bee’s knees. (Hazard of the job really – being up yourself.) Fast forward: Left TV, did this and that. In no particular order: unsuccessful Labour candidate for Parliament, trade union worker, school teacher, TV game show host, polytechnic lecturer, Saturday morning radio host, media advisor and media trainer with wife Judy Callingham. Clients included PM Helen Clark and Labour Party ministers. Today semi-retired media consultant and occasional broadcaster.

Where is this going, Brian? Well, it’s this chap Hosking. People complaining that he’s patently politically biased to the Right and shouldn’t be chairing political debates before next month’s election.

Here’s my take on it. His personal politics are Right Wing. So far as I know, he doesn’t deny it. My personal politics, when I was a radio and television interviewer, were Left Wing. When a national newspaper accused me of allowing my personal political views to affect my interviewing, of being ‘politically biased’, I sued the paper for defamation. And won.

You see, there’s nothing wrong with current affairs broadcasters having personal political opinions, however strongly held, providing they don’t allow those opinions to undermine or infect their on-air work. Indeed, it’s doubtful whether a political eunuch, if such a current affairs broadcaster exists, could do the job at all.

I don’t much care for Mike Hosking myself. He comes across to me as an arrogant prick, more interested in his own opinions than anyone else’s. But that doesn’t amount to a political bias. And if you want to publicly accuse him of having such a bias and allowing it to infect his work as a professional current affairs broadcaster, you better come up with some pretty solid evidence. Or risk finding yourself in court.

Don’t say I never warned you.

Stuff

I find myself in the improbable position of coming to the defence of broadcaster Mike Hosking.

Winston Peters has called Hosking “a National Party stooge whose jowls are up the Prime Minister’s cheeks”. I take this as some bizarre rephrasing of the common term “cheek by jowl” intended, I presume, to mean that the broadcaster and the PM are close buddies. Winnie will no doubt correct me if I’m wrong.

Meanwhile the Leader of the Opposition, Andrew Little, has accused Hosking of “making no attempt at objectivity”.  One might have expected a more robust critique. I’m told the words “right wing little prick” have been simply flying down the corridors of the Opposition Wing to describe Mr Hosking.

I think this critique rather misses the point. While I’d be surprised to discover that Hosking is a closet member of the Parnell, Remuera or Epsom branches of the Labour Party  – total membership five! – I’d also risk my bottom dollar that he isn’t a member of any political party. This is, or should be the default position for any broadcaster working in the field of news or current affairs.

What Hosking betrays on Seven Sharp, on commercial radio and in his writing is not political bias but social conservatism. The two may overlap from time to time, but are inherently different. It’s entirely possible and even commonplace to be left wing and socially conservative.

Another way of putting it might be to say that Hosking is somewhat “old fashioned” or “old world” in his approach to many issues. This is reflected in his relationship to Toni Street whom, his manner suggests, he respects as a woman (meaning because she is a woman), but less, it seems to me, as a broadcaster of equal ability and status. He “talks down” to her in a somewhat paternal manner.

So I entirely disagree that Hosking is “a National Party stooge” or that he makes “no attempt at objectivity”. I’m sure he does his very best. But two things make objectivity a challenge for him. The first I’ve referred to before – Hosking is perhaps the most personally opinionated broadcaster I’ve come across in half a century in the business. The second is the social conservatism I’ve described above. Hosking’s values are “old school”.

Sometimes being “old school”  can be really good. Sometimes it can be really, really bad.

You pays your money and …

 Mike Hosking is an opinionated chap. He’s paid an enormous sum of money to be opinionated, not only as a breakfast talk-back host on the ZB network, but as a Herald columnist and the co-host of TVNZ’s Seven Sharp. So you can’t really blame him for being opinionated. It’s his job after all.

It was only after the sacking of John Campbell as host of the programme named after him that I took a look at Seven Sharp, the shape-shifter of prime-time current-affairs programmes.

After watching the programme for a couple of weeks and reading his columns I’d had enough of Mike’s opinions and had reached that critical mass of the emotions where I was in danger of putting my foot through the screen and cancelling our subscription to the paper.

I was suffering from what I suspect may be a common complaint in this country: front-person-overload, the medical term for which is Hosking’s Disease. [Note: This can sometimes be confused with Pitt-Hopkins disease, a genetic disorder whose symptoms include developmental delay, a wide mouth, distinctive facial features and intermittent hyperventilation.]

It’s a real disease. Trust me, I’m a Doctor.

Mr Hosking’s role on Seven Sharp appears to be that of lecturer. His class currently comprises only one student, a bubbly and attractive young woman who hangs on his every word. The lectures are, however, telecast to a much larger group of students. The TVNZ calendar lists the lecture series as “Seven Sharp or Everything I Know About Everything – an enthralling series of 2,000 half-hour lectures by one of New Zealand’s most admired long-form interviewers and commentators.”

Having now watched Seven Sharp for two weeks and read several of Prof Hosking’s treatises in the Herald, I am now the trivia king at our local pub quiz. But Judy says I’ve changed – I’m arrogant, up-myself, a bad listener and a pretentious bore! And I speak warmly of John Key.

She’ll get over it!

Hey, by the way, did you know that the latest research on women’s menstrual cycles shows that the commonly held view that wome… CLICK!

In the 30-odd years that Judy and I have been providing media advice and training to prime ministers, prostitutes and pretty well every profession in-between, our teaching mantra has remained the same: “Be straightforward, tell the truth, admit your mistakes”. It’s a practical rather than a necessarily moral slogan. Being straightforward with the media, telling the truth and admitting your mistakes is quite simply the only strategy that works. Everything else will get you into trouble or more trouble than you’re already in.

Our experience of our elected representatives – left, right and centre – has led us to the conclusion that most are reasonably honest and that the lying politician is a much rarer creature than the general population appears to think. Persuading MPs, Cabinet Ministers and the men and women who held the top job to be straightforward and tell the truth has not been a difficult or even a necessary task.

But will the buggers admit their mistakes? No way. To avoid the usual accusations of left-wing bias on my part, I’ll cite two examples from my side of the house. Helen Clark and the painting which she signed but didn’t paint; Helen Clark and the police car speeding her to Eden Park to watch the rugby.

Neither of these were hanging offences and reasonable explanations (or excuses if you prefer) could have been offered for both: PMs put their moniker on all sorts of things with charitable intent; the New Zealand Prime Minister arriving late for an international footie match isn’t a good look. And anyway, these cops are brilliant and safe drivers.

But Helen, who had been brought up in a family where lying was just about a capital offence, was unwilling to own responsibility for either of these relatively minor transgressions. She was reluctant to admit that she’d made a mistake or even that she’d failed to prevent others making mistakes on her behalf.

The outcome in terms of public and press reaction was extremely negative in both cases. Simple concessions, perhaps with a touch of humour, could have avoided all the fuss: “Well, I sign a lot of things for charity; but maybe I didn’t make it clear that I hadn’t actually painted the picture. I couldn’t paint like that to save my life; Yes, not a good look, I’ll admit, and not a good example to other drivers. Guilty as charged, I’m afraid.”

The problem with denial when you’ve done something wrong is that far from making the issue go away, it amplifies and protracts it. Admitting your mistakes tends to have the opposite effect. Your opponents may have a field day of self congratulation, but it will at least be brief.   

This is the advice that John Key’s advisors should have been giving him ever since the publication of Nicky Hager’s book. Had he been given that advice he would not have found himself in the position he found himself in on television last night: being called severely to account by both right-leaning Mike Hosking on TV1 and liberal/left leaning John Campbell on TV3. The Prime Minister sounded increasingly like Sergeant Schultz, his repeated “I know NOTHING” denials  less and less credible or convincing as the interviews proceeded. He looked irritated and out of sorts, frustrated by the inability of these idiots to see his point of view that, though he was Minister for the SIS, he could not be held responsible for the actions of people in his department that impinged on the impartiality of the Service. It had nothing to do with him.

This morning’s papers would have brought him no relief. No-one had a good word to say about John Key. John Armstrong, the Herald’s traditionally considered political correspondent, opined that Key “would do himself and National a power of good if he dropped the feeble charade  which sees him in denial of the dirty tricks operation that was run out of his office.”

Armstrong was no less condemning of the Prime Minister’s performance during question time in Parliament which he dubbed “breathtakingly silly”:

“It involved either not answering the questions raining down on him from the Opposition or flinging red herring after red herring at his inquisitors in a vain attempt to divert debate away from what had been going on in his office. It was a display unworthy of the Prime Minister.”

“An apology for the whole episode,” Armstrong suggested, “would, in contrast, make up for the absence of heads rolling. It would show Key took ministerial responsibility seriously.”

Amen to that!

But it’s too late now. Key’s credibility is shot. His defence of the indefensible began with the preposterous distinction he attempted to draw between when he was speaking as the PM and when he was speaking as the Leader of the National Party.

Inspector General of Security Intelligence  Cheryl Gwyn’s report, which upholds many of Hager’s claims of “dirty politics” during the Key administration, has drawn the Prime Minister into ever more fanciful and unconvincing denials. Calm, quiet, trust-me, no-worries John has gone. He looks and sounds uncomfortable. He looks and sounds like a man in trouble. He looks and sounds desperate and dishonest. Perhaps for the first time in his term as Prime Minister, John Key is sweating it.

And as if that weren’t enough there’s this fellow on the other side of the room who has a reputation as a straight shooter and an honest broker.

And it was all going so well.

I’m wary of predictions. I’ve got a few wrong. But I think we’re at the start of a political sea change. I think National and its motley bedfellows are going to lose the 2017 election to a revitalised Labour/Green coalition.

I may be proven wrong of course. But, if I am,  I’ll take my own advice and admit it.

If David Cunliffe were an actor, his preferred acting style might best be described as Shakespearean – declamatory, expansive, grand in tone and gesture, rich in soliloquy.

It is a style suited to the stage but unfortunately totally unsuited to the more intimate vehicle of television and in particular to the television interview or debate in which small groups of people in their living rooms at home eavesdrop on an equally small group of people in a studio talking and debating.

Cunliffe’s failure, and the failure of his advisors to draw this distinction between what is appropriate to the stage and what is appropriate to television was in my view a significant factor in Labour’s defeat. He was too big, too loud, too OTT. You could see that he was acting.   

The best and worst example of this was the final television debate chaired by Mike Hosking. One ought not to dignify the 22 programme minutes which TVNZ devoted to this last opportunity for viewers to judge who should run the country for the next three years by calling it ‘a debate’ at all, but it did serve to illustrate the Cunliffe team’s lack of understanding of what will appeal to the television viewer. The Labour leader was aggressive, loud, interruptive and constantly talked over the Prime Minister. Then, to add insult to injury, he repeatedly told the much quieter and considerably less interruptive Key, ‘You’ve had your go, John. It’s my turn now!’ Hosking, no slouch in the interviewer’s chair, could not control him. ‘David, you’re interrupting too much,’ he observed on one occasion. And on another, ‘You’re shouting at me.’

I can imagine that the Cunliffe camp – along with several political commentators –  scored the debate a raging success for the Leader of the Opposition. ‘Great stuff, David. You really stuck it to him!’ Voters clearly thought otherwise.

Perhaps the most widespread criticism you hear of David Cunliffe is that he doesn’t seem sincere, that the things he says seem to lack spontaneity, to sound rehearsed, scripted, to be part of a performance. It’s not just that the Labour Leader’s acting is over the top; it’s that he should be acting at all.

I think there’s some truth to this, to the ‘but’ that lies at the back of so many people’s minds, the ill-defined but nagging doubt as to whether this is a man you can trust or someone you can afford to like. I hear this all the time. On the street. At parties. In discussion with friends. Ask them for the evidence to support their conclusion and you rarely get a clear answer. It’s just an impression, a perception, a feeling. But it may account in part for Labour’s dismal showing in the election. And it may be enough to prevent David Cunliffe ever becoming Prime Minister.

I saw a different David Cunliffe late on the night before the election. He was on The Paul Henry Show. It was apparently ‘Talk like a Pirate Day’ and Henry said Cunliffe  had to talk like a pirate during the interview. What followed was not just funny but delightful – two silly kids having a lovely time being pretend pirates talking about politics.

What had made the difference? Well, Cunliffe was exhausted and I suspect  the  actor in him had gone to bed. His guard was down. And I thought this out-of-control, giggling man, talking like Long John Silver and collapsing in gales of laughter, was the nicest and least disingenuous person you could imagine.

Will we see that Cunliffe again? I doubt it. When he’s making a speech or when the red light is on, the actor will return. It’s a reflex and reflexes are the hardest thing to shift. Pity! I really liked the pirate.

And everything that Cunliffe appears not to be, Key appears to be: affable, at ease, comfortable in his own skin, unpretentious, straightforward, straight. And yes, ‘the sort of guy you’d be happy to have a beer with’.

There’s an irony here of course. It’s got to do with ‘the common touch’. Former Wall Street forex dealer, multi-millionaire businessman and leader of the right-wing New Zealand National Party, John Key, has it. David Cunliffe, far-left Leader of the New Zealand Labour Party, doesn’t. Go figure.

Figuring on Q & A yesterday morning just what accounted for Saturday’s rout of the Labour Party, a high-powered panel of political commentators debated whether David Cunliffe was personally responsible for that rout. Most thought not. Right-wing commentator Matthew Hooton was the dissenting voice. David Cunliffe, he said, was the prime, if not the sole cause of Labour’s defeat.

It occurred to me that this eminent Q & A panel was sorely out of touch with the fact that we live in the age of presidential-style election campaigns. If the voters like one leader and do not like his or her opponent, the liked leader’s party will benefit and the disliked leader’s party will do less well. If the difference in perceived likeability is significant or extreme, that may itself be a significant and perhaps the most significant factor in the result. More significant certainly than the objective merits of the candidates or their parties’ platforms. That’s showbiz folks! Hooton was right.

It may also be the case that the Labour Party is in dire need of reform, but if that reform does not include the selection of a charismatic, popular and widely admired Leader, John Key can look forward to a fourth term as Prime Minister.

Some acting experience an advantage, but not required.

I’m somewhat embarrassed today by those earlier comments. My embarrassment has in part been occasioned by getting to know Garner better over the last year or so, when we have both been appearing on TV3’s The Nation. Not only did he seem to hold no malice against me for my earlier disparaging comments, he was positively welcoming of his new colleague.

More importantly, I was drawn to the conclusion that, far from being unable to interview, Garner had become the best political interviewer in New Zealand by a country mile. I’ve found no reason to change that view.    

There is no shortage in New Zealand of interviewers who approach their subjects as though they were mass murderers who had somehow managed to  get away with it, but are now finally about to be exposed by the force of personality, intelligence  and dialectical skill of the questioner – Guyon Espiner, Sean Plunkett, Mary Wilson, Mike Hosking to name but four. Their bags of tricks include aggression, interruption and the immovable presumption of guilt.

Garner is different. You can see it in his posture. He sits forward or leans across the desk, conveying a sense of intimacy  bordering on warmth towards his interviewee. There is the air of the confessional about his questioning as if he were inviting his guest to ‘come clean, get it off your chest’. He never raises his voice, is rarely unpleasant, rarely interrupts other than to insist on a ‘yes or no’ answer. Softly softly catchee monkey.

So it’s unfortunate – far too weak a term – that Garner, declaring himself ‘exhausted’  (in no small part, it must be said,  a self-inflicted condition) will no longer be appearing on The Nation and, from the end of this year, will no longer be TV3’s political editor. In both roles he is irreplaceable, not for any lack of competent alternatives, but because he has set the bar too high.

Garner is to join Radio Live in the New Year as its drive-time host. He will, I suspect, come to regret that move. Though it appears to make more news than any other radio station, Radio Live is a broadcasters’ graveyard.

Meanwhile, The Nation’s Sunday morning competitor, Q & A, offers the increasingly eccentric interviewing of the great Paul Holmes, whose panel chairing invites entertaining bedlam – and Shane Taurima. Mr Taurima has received plaudits for his interviews on the programme. I’m bewildered. So wedded is he to his written questions that he barely has time to form eye-contact with his guest, let alone listen carefully enough to their answer to pose a follow-up question. This, I’m afraid, is Interviewing 101.

Question: How did Shane Taurima get this job? Answer: God knows.

My bias, as a contributor to The Nation, should of course be obvious. But Rachel Smalley leaves Taurima for dead. One can only hope that hosting Firstline and The Nation will not leave her ‘exhausted’ as well.

scoop.co.nz

Mike Hosking was standing in for Mark Sainsbury on last night’s Close Up. I haven’t always been a fan of Mr Hosking’s interviewing style, but each time he appears on Close Up my respect for him grows.

A useful litmus test for judging a television host or interviewer is how comfortable they make you feel watching them. If their presentation or questioning make you feel as though you’re watching an amateur high-wire walker making his debut between two New York skyscrapers in a high wind, you can be reasonably certain that the interviewer really isn’t very good and his career may  fall to earth sooner rather than later.

If, on the other hand, your sense of being in safe hands allows you to concentrate fully on the subject of the debate or interview, rather than on how the host is doing, you can be reasonably certain that you’re watching a skilled professional. This is the feeling I get with Mike Hosking – nothing is going to go wrong. 

Hosking was at his professional best last night. Not because he was grilling some hapless wrongdoer, but because of his consummate skill in handling something far more difficult, an interview with the parents of a murdered son. The potential for embarrassment in this sort of interview is considerable. A fine line has to be trod between expressing sympathy for the parents’ unthinkable loss and the journalistic imperative to seek information on behalf of the viewer. The parents must not merely be questioned, they must be emotionally supported as well, a task made all the more difficult when interviewer and interviewees are not in the same studio. Yet the interview must never become mawkish, must never exploit the parents’ grief, their tears.

Hosking treads this fine line perfectly. At every moment in the interview he is making decisions: which parent  to go to next, when to move from issues of fact to issues of feeling, whether to personally  identify with the parents’ loss (I can imagine it must be terrible… ), when to draw back, when enough is enough. He will not be making these decisions consciously. They will be the product of experience and instinct and they will not be apparent to the viewer.

If this seems like a somewhat clinical analysis of an interview that will have brought most viewers to tears, it serves to highlight the fact that great interviewing has less to do with questions than it has to do with the interviewer’s ability, often in a very short period of time, to form a relationship with his subjects that allows them and us to feel comfortable, in safe hands. And that, believe it or not, is as true of the cross-examination style of interview as it is in exploring personal tragedy.

And Jo  and Bryan Guy, whose son Scott was murdered seemingly without reason, must not go unmentioned. What a lovely couple they are. How fortunate any man would be to have such people as parents. Of them Hosking concluded, ‘Well, I don’t know where you’re getting the strength from, but I appreciate your time tonight very much.’ And they thanked him.  And he said, ‘Very brave, aren’t they, ‘Jo and Bryan Guy’. And that was right.

And, on a lighter note, have a look at Hosking interviewing  weight loss supremo, bus driver Bevan Winter, and his dietician Lea Stening. They’re not in the studio either and it’s another interviewing challenge because Bevan is more or less monosyllabic and Lea is wonderfully high-verbal. So what do you do? Well, you direct most of your questions to the high-verbal Lea of course.

Overall this was a delightful programme. As Hosking himself observed, ‘Tell you what, what a night of inspiration it’s been, eh? That’s current affairs for you.’

And I’m sorry to end on a contentious note, but shouldn’t this fellow – confident, intelligent, dryly humorous, articulate  –  really be hosting Close Up every night?