Mr Deadpan

Eating Media Lunch's Jeremy Wells. Photo / Janna Dixon

I feel sorry for the waitress. Every time she ventures near us deep in the underground innards of central Auckland's Gravity Cafe, Jeremy Wells seems to be in the middle of talking about bestiality, sex with a prostitute, or his own conception. Although a discernible blush creeps up the waitress' neck on each occasion, Wells doesn't pause. In fact, I get the feeling the TV presenter/comedian/reporter (my definition) - "microphone guy" (his) - is enjoying the extra audience.

When he talks, hands clasped beneath his chin, he mostly fixes his gaze on the ceiling as if to draw inspiration from above, or on the water jug as if to glean drops of wit from it. Switching from friendly to stand-offish, from eloquent to vague, from confident to self-deprecating, from serious to definitely not, Wells seems to sport several personalities - or, if this is a performance, several personas. All of whom make me sweat for a candid answer. I find I'm jotting down "must be taking the piss", "sounds sarcastic here" and "actually sounds earnest", while he seems mighty pleased when I don't know whether to believe what he's just said.

He left me speculating on what happened in a certain North Shore brothel after Wells, wearing a helmet-cam, prepared to have sex with a prostitute while filming a sex special for Havoc (the 1997-2002 hit show he co-hosted with Mikey Havoc).

I remember the strong implication he'd done the deed. Says Wells: "Yeah, there was a weird moment where the sex worker was looking at me and I was looking at her and we sort of thought what the hell'." He pauses, waiting for a reaction, and I bite. "So you did?" "Well, I shouldn't really say," he grins. "I feel terrible, no I won't say. Put it this way: I definitely got to know her in that half hour." There's no pressing him further.

Wells doesn't deny he likes to shock. In fact, the 31-year-old seems to be missing an embarrassment chip, if his leftfield questions, poker-faced piss-taking and no-holds-barred pranks on Havoc and the offbeat media satire Eating Media Lunch, are anything to go by. Unleashed on the unsuspecting and the overly confident, that deadpan poker face nods sagely, giving pillocks just enough rope to hang themselves by blathering on.

But Wells is offended - or does a good job of feigning it - when I suggest one of his weapons is ridicule. "I don't really see myself as a person who ridicules people," he says firmly. "We definitely don't ever set out to ridicule. We never say 'who can we get this week' or anything. Ever." Still, Wells admits people are wary of him, with or without camera, and says it's getting harder by the week to get people to talk to EML, whether celebrities or commoners. "Most people won't. As soon as we say which show it's for they say na'."

So he and the EML team have tracked down some unwary foreigners. In the first of three episodes, screening this Friday, the show stops by the Minnesota State Fair en route to the recent Republican National Convention. With relish, Wells relays a chat with the fair's barnyard spokesman about cannibalism - "I mentioned that people say pork tastes a lot like human" - and bestiality, informing said spokesman that there's 1200 bestiality complaints to the New Zealand SPCA each year. While I note "taking the piss" in capitals, he swears by this (untrue) tally before launching into a spiel about the morality of bestiality: "If a male dog decides to have sex with a woman is that wrong? I mean, it's not really." It's much the same argument he put forward in Minneapolis, shortly before being detained by the police.