''Appallingly smug'' ... Paul Henry is loved and hated in equal measure in New Zealand. Photo: Sunday Star-Times
New Zealander Adam Dudding explains why he kept watching controversial morning host Paul Henry, who will be on Ten's new breakfast show.
I'D RATHER go to work in my pyjamas than be caught watching the intellectual wasteland that is New Zealand morning TV.
But in the months before Paul Henry was sacked from TVNZ's Breakfast in 2010, I would sneak onto YouTube to be horrified or amused by a clip of his latest outrage.
The man is appallingly smug. He's a rich, self-satisfied right-winger who's rude about Hispanics and gay parents. He described British singer Susan Boyle as "retarded" and mercilessly mocked an environmentalist for appearing on his show sporting a furze on her upper lip.
Many Kiwis hope Henry's Australian adventures will limit his presence on our screens for a long time (he's still fronting a panel game on TV3).
But, and this is why so many of us who disapproved of him kept watching, he is frequently very funny.
So we're not sending you another Derryn Hinch/Andrew Bolt, more a low-budget Jeremy Clarkson.
Much of Henry's humour is schoolboyish: saying "donkey's cock" on air, or chortling at an Indian name that sounds like "dick shit". Yet he has a sharp brain (he can do proper political interviews when he turns his mind to it) and a sense of the absurd.
Not that he minds being hated. While accepting his people's choice award at the 2010 TV awards, he read out a piece of "fan mail" which read, in part, "Paul Henry, you are the most self-conceited little mongrel prick on TV. I would love Susan Boyle to shit on your ugly face." The smirk on his face was even wider than usual.
Then in late 2010, Henry learnt there are things you can't say on air. While interviewing the New Zealand Prime Minister, John Key, about the Governor-General, Anand Satyanand, he asked, wasn't it time to appoint a G-G "who looks and sounds like a New Zealander"?
The racist subtext - that a dark-skinned man with an Indian name couldn't be a real Kiwi - couldn't be explained away. His mocking of the Indian minister Sheila Dikshit's name around the same time only sealed his fate, and - after a public backlash - TVNZ jettisoned him.
It is not hard to predict his Australian targets. He'll keep up his attacks on his environmentalist straw man and he'll insult people who aren't white and well off and economically productive, plus a few who are. He'll make jokes about Julia Gillard and about fat people. As a car-collecting petrolhead he'll mock buses, and might say something off-colour about the Pope.
Love him or hate him - either reaction would justify his salary. The real disaster for Henry - and Ten's senior management - would be if he leaps across the ditch and sinks without trace.
Adam Dudding is a senior journalist at Fairfax Media's the Sunday Star-Times in Auckland
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