New Zealand Prime Minister John Key takes a selfie after appearing on MediaWorks new morning show Paul Henry. Photo / Getty Images
The Spinoff's Alex Casey logged on to follow Paul Henry's new venture via social media - and found the result underwhelming.
Trying to juggle online streaming and tweeting as a television viewer is often a tough balancing act. Check Twitter. Watch the show. Read tweets. Miss something good. Go back to watch it. Tweet about it. Someone else has tweeted it. Too late. At 6am when I tuned in to Paul
Henry - this wasn't an immediate problem.
The online stream ticked along smoothly, by comparison to the fuzzy interview mics, no-show talkback callers and intrusive Brooke Fraser bowel questions. There did seem to be a small air of confusion about the official hashtag. I was forced to keep three tabs open: #paulhenry #paulhenryeverywhere #paulhenryshow, all filtering in new tweets in 5 minute intervals (this isn't quite X Factor NZ, yet).
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Paul and the studio gang would check in sporadically (every 45 minutes or so, aka 400 years in social media time) with Perlina Lau in the 'Social Media Bunker'. I was expecting them to pull up tweets from the hashtag and respond to Facebook comments, instead we got some odd pre-planned segments. Which, for a first episode, is completely understandable. There was one sliver of Twitter's opinion on the Easter surcharge, but the main topics were a parody video about gluten and a chat about how Prince Harry doesn't like selfies. "I'm not sure I care about this," Paul smirked.
