Paul Henry: the man Kiwis love to hate.
PAUL Henry is 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 mocked an environmentalist for appearing on his show sporting hair 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 in New Zealand).
But - and this is why so many of us who disapprove 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 well-developed 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 wider than usual.
Then in late 2010, Henry learnt that there are things you can't say on air. While interviewing Prime Minister John Key about the NZ 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. Henry's mocking of Indian minister Sheila Dikshit's name around the same time sealed his fate, and - after a public backlash - TVNZ pushed him off a cliff.
Channel Ten declined requests for an interview with Henry, but it is not hard to predict some of his likely 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 quietly sinks without trace.
Adam Dudding is a senior journalist at the Sunday Star Times in Auckland.
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