One of the most familiar faces in local television has made a return as the host of The Chase New Zealand.
When you take a show as popular as The Chase with a host as beloved as Bradley Walsh and create a Kiwi version, you have a challenge. Who could step up as local host and not be summarily dismissed as a pale shadow of the cheeky UK original?
Enter Paul Henry, a bona fide household name in Aotearoa who may reside at the spicier end of the hosting rack, but who’s nonetheless most at home there, with his quick wit and deadpan delivery. After all, though we associate Henry with Breakfast, This is Your Life and his eponymous late-night show, his first ever TV gig was hosting Every Second Counts.
So The Chase is a return to game show form for Henry. Not that he’s unaware of the challenges. “Bradley Walsh is synonymous with The Chase,” he says. “And that for me is one of the big challenges, because obviously when you do something, you want people to like it.”
This show, in particular, is a hard formula to tinker with because, as Henry says, The Chase is a familiar source of comfort. “I mean, it's in your home for an hour before the news every night of the week. And when you see a different version of it, subconsciously you'll be slightly less comfortable. Doesn't mean you're not going to love it, but there is a little challenge there for us.”
But Henry has cleared plenty of hurdles in his long, varied career, only occasionally coming a cropper. Aside from radio and TV, he’s stood for parliament and written three best sellers; he’s made wine, he makes gin, and he was recently appointed to the TVNZ board.
'What an extraordinarily weird question' - Watch an interview with Paul Henry on TVNZ+
These days he and his wife Diane Foreman divide their time between Auckland (where Henry sometimes moors his yacht) and Palm Springs, California, where he has a Mustang parked in the driveway. One of his greatest pleasures is to jump in that car and take a road trip to Phoenix, Sedona, Arizona, Nevada, or his favourite – Las Vegas where, though he’s not much of a gambler, he loves the “fabulous” restaurants, hotels and shows.
Along the way he takes in the desert, which has become something of an obsession. “You’d think it would be better to be by the sea, or in the bush, but I've really become a desert person,” he says. “Because, more than any other environment, the desert changes. Every summer's day in the desert is also winter's night. It is extraordinary.”
Henry, who you mightn’t have picked as a nature buff, expounds for a few more minutes about the desert, the Joshua Tree and the many mysterious creatures who live their secret lives in a wide variety of differently shaped holes.
And then we move on to the human of the species, which in Palm Springs is generally wealthy and frequently famous – neighbours have included Barbara Streisand and Leonardo di Caprio. But it’s the no longer living who fascinate Henry more. He’s a regular visitor to Frank Sinatra’s grave which is just down the road, he reveres the late Lucille Ball, another ghostly neighbour, and appreciates Liberace’s grand-piano-shaped letter box, a five-minute walk from his house.
It's all a long way from the bleak tenement block in Bristol, England, where Henry spent his school years, having moved there from Auckland with his mother after she separated from his dad.
'I convinced myself that I was royal'
Hennry makes no bones – they were extremely poor, at least in a monetary sense. But he received a lot from both his parents in other ways, he says. From his dad, he got a toughness: “He was very much, if you don't know how to do that, no one's going to help you work it out, you know? That's how I feel too. If your leg has fallen off, work out living without the leg.”
Or sometimes, just pretend you still have it. Henry admits (or happily reveals), that while living in those terrible flats, he developed “an extraordinary ability to imagine I had a lot and lie... I lied to myself, so I created an extraordinary backstory which, if people stopped long enough, I would tell them about, but I almost didn't need them to know it because I knew it. I mean, it was so strong that I couldn't honestly swear it wasn't true.”
And the story? “I convinced myself that I was a member of the Royal Family, albeit a quite distant member of the Royal Family who'd fallen on hard times.”
'What an extraordinarily weird question' - Watch an interview with Paul Henry on TVNZ+
As an adult, no longer so small, poor or fantastical, Henry returned to that “nasty part of Bristol” and hunted out his childhood home. By this point he’d clambered out of poverty via the BBC and was working in TV in New Zealand. He had a camera crew with him when he knocked on the door.
“It was just unimaginably hideous, much more hideous than I remembered,” he says. “This is literally a housing place for people who've got no jobs. And they are the children of people that have never had jobs, you know what I mean?”
The tenants at the time were kind enough to invite Henry (and presumably his crew) inside.
“So I walked into that tiny, tiny little flat, all of the windows were closed and they were sitting there with this huge plasma screen on the wall watching Avatar.”
Henry laughs with delight. There’s something in the image – the combination of squalor and fantasy that’s maybe reminiscent of his childhood, living in those very same rooms, convinced he was a long lost Windsor.
'People worry about things beyond their control'
These days – powering through the desert in his Mustang, enjoying a bottle of his own 2017 pinot noir on the deck of his yacht, or trading cheeky insults with The Governess on the set of The Chase – Henry no longer needs to imagine he’s someone he’s not.
Does he have regrets? “No, no, no. I mean, there are always things you could have done a different way,” he says. “But regrets just flash through my mind really quickly. I mean, the worse thing about regrets is dwelling on them, which is usually pointless.
“People spend a lot of time worrying about things that are completely beyond their control and usually in history.”
Ditto criticism. Unless it’s factually incorrect, Henry says he doesn’t get worked up about negative press. “One of the things that annoys me the most are people who've put themselves in the position of being reasonably well known for whatever reason and then complain about it. You know? Because the easiest thing in the world is to just not do it.
“Obviously everyone cares a bit... But some people care so much, they do almost nothing. They just sit at home watching Avatar.”
Paul Henry: wit, host, writer, sailor, gin and wine maker. Also sometimes, opinion divider. But a pale shadow of Bradley Walsh? Nope.
Watch the Chase New Zealand, Mondays, 7.30pm on TVNZ 1, and streaming on TVNZ+.
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