PATRICK GOWER: On Paddy

In which the heart-on-sleeve TV journalist reveals more about his demons and just a little about what really makes him tick.

- MICHELE HEWITSON

In Paddy Gower's upcoming documentary, On Cybercrime, he is fitted with an electrode-studded cap designed to measure his brain patterns while he binges on his phone, which, he says, he spends eight hours a day on. He looks like Coronation Street's Ena Sharples, should Ena Sharples have ever worn a space-age version of her famous hairnet. He looks ridiculous. He often does. You could not accuse him of being afraid to look ridiculous. It is part of his appeal; of his hard-to-define charm.

I like to imagine the technician going home and being asked what their day had been like and replying, "I monitored the inside of Paddy Gower's head." To which I would previously have said the only possible response was, "Good luck with that."

Before Gower was properly famous for not being afraid to appear ridiculous on national television, I interviewed him. That was in 2014, when he was political editor at 3 News, now Newshub. I phoned to ask him for an interview and he said yes and bounded over the road from the telly studios to the pub. He complained, cheerfully, throughout the entire interview that I wasn't being as friendly as he'd expected me to be. And about how I was trying to get inside his head; to get him to be reflective. I was stressing him out, he said.

I had raised the episode he was probably most famous for: chasing the Labour MP Chris Carter through the corridors and down a stairwell at Parliament. He complained about this: it had been four years ago, he said. "Are we getting another beer, because this is stressing me out."

I was being an attack journalist, he said.

I may have spluttered into my drink.

"Could we please have another drink relax a bit? Are you going to have another wine? Please?"

That was then. This is now, and how it goes now is that to get an interview you go through the head publicist and negotiate.