Posted by Peter
Paul Holmes has handed over his crown as the No. 1 Royal Pooh Bah, eat these ratings colossus of 1ZB. It’s been a long reign. I should confess right now that I am not a fan. I think he has been involved in a lot of bad effects on NZ’s media culture in general although I don’t hold him personally responsible. He just happened to be at the centre of a number of changes to the media zeigeist that have tended to promote commercial values and norms over more abstract ideas of public service. I also don’t like his broadcasting style at all what with my old fashioned preference for complete sentences, well-formed thoughts and exactitude of speech.
But there’s no denying his importance. He’s held all comers on the breakfast slot in surveys for about 20 years now. He’s done print, TV and radio on a huge scale. I think he was one of the first people to be part of NZ’s somewhat provincial and incestuous celebrity culture. We have learned a lot about him and his family over the years. Way too much in fact, but the sort of fame he has revelled in is a Faustian pact as the cliché goes.
At his best, he could be compassionate, lively, funny, intelligent, provocative and sincere and often all within the space of 1 minute. At his worst, well, I think we all remember his completely deplorable comments about Kofi Annan. No excuse whatsoever. Mind you, it didn’t hurt that particular survey and he got to make a few comments about public intellectuals that dog whistled to the darker side of his considerable audience. He tended to do that a little too often for my taste. See also his comments on wahi tapu. And of course the ranting about the Green Party.
One putative characteristic was his ‘everyman’ touch. He spoke for the ‘majority’; the common sense, middle of the road, silent, long suffering majority. At times this could descend into the sort of sullen resentment of difference that placed him alongside the likes of Rush Limbaugh et al. What Susan J. Douglas described as the ‘male hysterics’ in her delightful article on masculinity and talk radio.[1] The likes of Laws and Leighton do this more consistently and with far more venom that Paul but Holmes could certainly rise to toxic levels of ill-tempered, graceless and thoughtless conservatism when the mood took him. Too much playing to the sensibilities of the
proverbial angry, middle aged white males.
But he is in the pantheon of NZ radio alongside Scrim, Daisy, Merv and the other giants on whose shoulders we mortals stand. Holmes didn’t grow up in public, he grew middle-aged in public along with his baby boomer audience. Good luck to Mike Hosking and a shout out to Bill Francis for a beautifully managed transition. Ah well, at least we still have the CD. This one’s for you Paul. From one old ham to another:
And good holidays etc to everyone. Transmission will be interrupted for a fortnight while I sample the delights of Tauranga. Here’s a picture I liked from the brilliant Astronomy Picture of the Day site. It made me think of Kant’s lines from The Critique of Practical Reason: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.”
And here’s another Xmas bonus. A current fave rave. Wilco’s Hotel Arizona. Wilco performs “Hotel Arizona” at the Riviera Theatre in Chicago on Saturday, February 16, 2008 (Night 2). Some great guitar work here. I get the song being about telephones but the last few words of the quiet coda after the guitar Sturm und Drang are a motto for those of us writing radio (and audio technology) history: Hello, can you hear?/Hello, that’s all there is, that’s all there is/I guess all this history is just a mystery to me/One more worried whisper right in my ear.
[1] Susan J. Douglas, “Letting the Boys be Boys: Talk Radio, Male Hysteria, and Political Discourse in the 1980s”, in Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, ed. M. Hilmes & J. Loviglio, New York, 2002, pp.485-503.