Remembering the great Sir Paul Holmes

The man who revolutionised broadcasting lived a life of controversy – 
and survival, says Bill Francis.  

When Paul Holmes arrived at Newstalk 1ZB he was an upstart from Wellington, broadcasting under a new format which was completely divorced from the traditionally safe, comfortable, warm style beloved by Aucklanders for generations.   

Paul’s early months on Newstalk 1ZB were racked by controversy, anger, frustration and catastrophic ratings, but the broadcaster’s previous life was strewn with enough evidence to show a fortitude capable of withstanding not only personal drama, but of riding out controversy and being a survivor.   

After a car crash in 1973, where he was thrown out of a vehicle down the side of a South Island mountain, he lost the sight in his right eye. This was merely the first in a list of escapades.   

In 1986, while flying in deteriorating weather conditions in a helicopter on assignment for the Holmes television programme, the chopper dropped into the sea at Anaura Bay on the East Coast. The pilot, Paul and two others survived, but cameraman Joe von Dinklage died.   

Still later, with many years’ flying as a pilot under his belt, he crashed his vintage Boeing Stearman biplane alongside Hastings Airport, walking away with a bent finger and some bruised ribs. And then there was the prostate cancer. Add alcoholism and an astoundingly public marriage break-up, and you had sufficient personal dramas to last not one, but several lifetimes.   

These events, like the controversies in his broadcasting life, eventually shaped his persona as the people’s advocate, both on Newstalk ZB and on his television show.   

The controversies grew out of pushing boundaries. In his first stint in radio, on Radio New Zealand’s ‘Go Cola Show’, he was broadcasting through the night over New Year’s Eve, 1975–76. He rang the Archbishop of Canterbury and made a hoax call to the British MP John Stonehouse (who had mysteriously disappeared). A complaint was sent to the Broadcasting Council.   

Director-General James Hartstonge was outraged by the broadcasts and the “unauthorised expenditure of corporation money” [toll calls]. Hartstonge said Holmes “would not be employed for on-air work for Radio New Zealand” and his behaviour had “put an end to his usefulness to Radio New Zealand”.   

But Sir Paul was the same man who some years later, after an interview on his Newstalk ZB breakfast show, talked for over an hour to a distraught man on the run from the police, and persuaded him that neither flight nor suicide were the answers.   

The hoax call drama stopped his New Zealand broadcasting career temporarily, but the years in the radio wilderness led him to work in radio in Britain and Europe – experiences that created a confidence to perform later, back home, at a staggering level of success.  

This confidence came from his personal development as a combination of actor, performer, student of history, and lover of news and current affairs. This was seen more clearly when he started working, on his return in 1985, at 2ZB in Wellington, and through until early 1987 on the ‘Nine to Noon’ show. Here he started to hone the interviewing skills used to such telling effect in later years on Newstalk ZB and the Holmes television show.   

Sir Paul’s interviewing style revolutionised radio news and current affairs in this country, both public and private.   

He became a people’s advocate on radio, although he would never describe himself in those terms. He firmly believed that the community had the right to know what was happening within and around it, and that people had a right to information. First, he introduced editorial comment to radio. He would tell people what he thought of an issue. He would call a spade a spade, and issue challenges.   

Somehow, he had the ability to express his views one moment and still do an impartial interview on the same subject minutes later. As he grew in the job, he was able to display a multi-dimensional approach to the interview, firing questions at a prime minister one minute, talking easily and comfortably with a sufferer the next, or being uproarious with an entertainer soon after.   

One of his finest accolades was that people undergoing a hard interview could talk to him in a casual and friendly fashion seconds later.  

The characteristic that allowed so much of this quick-change temperament is best recognised as empathy. He was determined to find out what the audience wanted to know. And he demanded his subjects speak to the audience in words people could understand.   

He was frequently impatient with politicians and bureaucrats who talked in double-speak or gobbledygook, interrupting them to tell them to say what they meant. Words and their use were vital to his broadcasting armoury.   

On Newstalk ZB he started addressing all his interviewees, from the Prime Minister down, by their Christian names, not through familiarity or trying to establish some sort of closeness by association but attempting again to make the subject accessible to the audience.   

As he took hold on the breakfast ratings at Newstalk ZB, the most intriguing aspect of his ratings success was that the audience was shown to either love him or hate him – there were few in-
betweens. While naturally empathetic, Paul also pointedly refused to jump on public bandwagons against people or issues. His most likely course of action was to take the opposite view – stances that could upset some of the audience.   

Over the course of his 21 years on ‘The Paul Holmes Breakfast’, he copped flak of all sorts, and people swore they would never listen again – but next morning, there they were, back listening to him. This was the secret of Paul’s ratings success, 57 successive number ones in the overcrowded and competitive Auckland market.   

Often he worked both ends of the day and there were times of exhaustion. But somehow, Paul’s work ethic gave him the desire to return day after day, despite the punishing schedule.   

This body of work made him at the time the highest-paid New Zealand radio performer ever and has shaped lives, informed people, teased thought, and created laughter and happiness.   

He was a broadcaster who was honest about his success, his personal failures, and his joys and sorrows.  

Importantly, he used his intelligence, his general knowledge and his skills to ensure others didn’t feel left out.   

Newstalk ZB could hardly have asked for more.