John Campbell made his RNZ Morning Report debut with Ingrid Hipkiss on Monday.
If you had been worried the gravitas of Morning Report might sand off some of John Campbell’s more effusive edges, you would have been reassured when, in a pre-show tease at 5.58am, still two minutes prior to his official start time, he gushed: “My giddy aunt!”
His first official words, after the 6am news, were to co-host Ingrid Hipkiss. He said: “Thank you for having me on your show.”
“I was hardly going to do it on my own,” she replied.
Host of Morning Report is the role Campbell has been preparing for all his life and arguably the most natural fit of all his many career iterations. As he told Hipkiss this morning: “I was such a pretentious and insufferable little bugger that I actually listened to national radio in my student flat.”
His first interview was with Brent Mountfort, a provincial president of Federated Farmers, who, while discussing the impact of Cyclone Vaianu, told Campbell the cover of his spa pool had blown away. At the end of the interview, Mountfort said what a privilege it had been to talk to Campbell for his first interview. Campbell, reciprocating, said Mountfort should get the spa filled up and they could sit in it together.
“That took a turn,” Hipkiss said at the conclusion of the interview. “Just so you know, we don’t usually take spas with our interviewees.” He said he would bear that in mind when speaking to the Prime Minister later.
Nathan Rarere came on to talk about sport.
“Kia ora, Nate,” Campbell said. “How’s the leg?”
Rarere replied: “I need a spa, I think.”
Campbell laughed his infectious, impulsive childlike laugh. He said a listener had already written in to complain about the mental image of him in a spa with the Prime Minister.
By the time the Prime Minister showed up for his interview, Campbell had done mostly light and fluffy. How would he transition?
Almost unbelievably, Luxon opened with the exact same line he’d used when talking with Campbell’s former colleague Tova O’Brien during her first show on Breakfast two weeks ago: “How’s the first day at the new school?”
Campbell laughed enthusiastically and replied that if he studied harder, he might one day graduate. If Luxon hoped the opening gambit would soften Campbell, he was as wrong as he had been when O’Brien had to remind him he was the country’s Prime Minister, not its CEO.
Campbell opened by asking what the PM had been hearing about Cyclone Vaianu. Luxon tossed off some talking points and Campbell interrupted. Luxon began to drift from the question and again Campbell interrupted.
When Luxon began talking about the national flood plan, Campbell interrupted once more, but this time the Prime Minister carried on talking. Campbell gave way, then, when Luxon finished, he said concerns had been expressed about turning the proposed flood plan into action. Luxon again began rambling, and again Campbell cut him off:
“Prime Minister, sorry to interrupt but the road is closed again ...” As statement of fact: Perfect. As allegory for the interview itself: Even more so.
At the end of the interview, he told the Prime Minister he and Hipkiss would be alternating conducting the weekly interview. It was a very Campbellian thing to do: A signal that he was part of a team and not the CEO of Morning Report.
He had hit his stride. He turned around a boring interview with a guy from Australian Supercars by saying: “Mitch, I know this, you’re just going to cringe when I ask you this question and go into a foetal position and go, ‘Good god who’s interviewing me?’… What is a Supercar?”
Mitch went on to say the cars are currently on the water on the way to Christchurch for the next event, at which point Campbell produced another zinger: “Mitch,” he said, “I got this job because I don’t miss a trick. You say the cars are on a boat but there ain’t no boats in Taupō.”
This is the power of a master interviewer: Someone who deeply understands not just their subjects’ minds, emotions and behaviours but also their listeners’ – and knows how to manipulate the former to serve the latter.
In the show’s last half hour, he went to another level. It was not just the quality of his work but the verve and brio with which he conducted it. In the last 10 minutes, he reached a fever pitch of Campbell-ness, entering something close to a manic state and producing 10 minutes of radio so chock full of incredible moments that it was impossible to turn away.
First, after a field report on a barber finished on a note about awkward haircut chat, the following remarkable exchange:
Hipkiss: “Are you a haircut chatter, John?”
“Chat! Constantly,” he said. “I get my haircut every second Saturday.”
Hipkiss spoke for all of us when she said, her voice full of shock: “Every second Saturday?”
“Yes,” he said, deadpan. “I’m super uptight and just like to look like this.”
During the final interview of the day, with the head of Wellington Zoo, he uttered the already-immortal line: “I don’t want to cast aspersions on the monogamy of your gibbons but could they be polyamorous if they wanted to?”
When the zoo’s head told him they were monogamous even in the wild, he appeared to completely lose control, shrieking: “Go the gibbons!”
He slipped in a comment about the poetry of Sylvia Plath, and then, too soon, it was 8.59am and time to sign off.
“John, are you going to be back tomorrow?” Hipkiss asked
“I’ve loved it!” he enthused. “I love working with you, Ingrid.”
“Oh well,” she said, “it’s early days.”