But I thought that what he'd wanted to really do was not silly jokes but was being a serious sort of journalist. Before he was a journalist he was a performing arts teacher, at King's School (where his son now goes) and then he did decide what he really wanted to do was journalism. He does things thoroughly, so he researched the way to go about this which would give him the best chance of getting a good telly job.
He said: 'I have always been ambitious ... Because when I decided to do it [journalism] I had a lot of people telling me that it was competitive. I had left it too late. 'Your chances are minimal'. But I suddenly realised exactly what I wanted to do and how I should do that and it involved a very carefully planned process ... I gave myself five years ... And I worked bloody hard at it." He got into a course in the UK from which the BBC took "a lot of the top people". He did go on to work for the BBC but says the goal was always to come back to New Zealand to raise a family. His wife, Jo, is a New Zealander and he had fallen in love with the country, and her, obviously, during his stint teaching at King's. They now have three kids, a boy and two girls, aged 12, 10 and 7, and the deal was that if he pursued journalism, Jo could give up being a lawyer, which she didn't much like, and stay at home.
They have a very nice house, with a pool, in Remuera, which ought to be about right given that he is quite posh, or sounds it. He says he doesn't think he's posh but that "I guess I was brought up posh". This means that "there was probably never a question about whether I was going to a private school". He went to Marlborough College in Wiltshire, on a music scholarship, where he was a chorister, which was both prestigious and hard work. You never got any of that mucking about, doing nothing kid time which might be why he is so ambitious about his work now. It might also be why he is fairly relaxed about things like having a very nice house but one which is well lived in. There is the usual kid stuff everywhere; they are not a plumped cushions sort of couple. He was a boarder from the age of 9 and says that even if he wanted his kids to board, Jo "wouldn't sanction it. I think she looks on all my personal issues as a result of that ... When we first met I wasn't very open with my feelings". His father was an orthodontic surgeon; his mother a teacher. He has an older sister and they had "a very nice and safe and happy childhood".
So if he was ever very posh, he seems to have got over it pretty well. Unless it is posh to feed your cat on the kitchen bench, and it might be. He said, in a slightly pained way, that the cat has to eat there because it is terrorised by the dog and that it's not a bench they prepare food on, and they don't feed the children on it either. "Not very often anyway. It builds antibodies." I dropped some crumbs (Jo's ginger crunch) on the dining room table and he said: "Oh, don't worry. I'll put the dog on the table. I normally put the dog up here to clean up after guests have come." I assume this was a joke but then the dog came in, soaking wet from a swim in the sea and rolled around on the carpet and then jumped on the couch and nobody shouted at it. So it might lick the table clean of crumbs for all I know. That, actually, would be properly posh and also eccentric but except for the name of the dog, he appears quite normal, for a television person. The dog is called Wilber, which is short for William Wilberforce (the English politician and anti-slavery campaigner.) The dog's owner is named after the Thackeray character in Vanity Fair which his mother was reading when "in the late throes of pregnancy" with him but which he hasn't read. He watched the film.
I don't know what his personal issues, apart from an early reserve (and perhaps being named after Thackeray's air-headed character) are. He is the most normal telly star type I've met and if he is as neurotic as the others I've met, he hides it well.
I did think he might be a bit pompous because I found a tremendously pompous quote about him, from when he was being a serious news journalist. It is: "Christie doesn't subscribe to any hard-drinking journalistic stereotypes. In fact, when his colleagues are at the pub for Friday night drinks, he says he finds his time better spent studying the National Business Review and browsing news websites." I may have read this out to him in a fairly sneery way. He said: "Who wrote that? Did I write that?" It made him sound awful, didn't it? "It's hilarious," he said. "Well, I probably said that. Excellent. Sounds like a really good guy who is going to end up ... on Breakfast."
Yes, well, as he raised it. I wondered why he had ended up on
Breakfast
which is, what? Entertainment? "Mmm hmm." Is that all right? "Mmm hmm." It might be a bit of a comedown after the serious news journalism he did on
Agenda
, say. "No. Not at all. I have a lot more fun doing Breakfast." He said he thinks he was okay at serious news journalism but "I think I'm better at fun ... Because it sits more comfortably with me because I don't read the NBR on Friday afternoons!" Why on earth did he say that? Was he trying to impress? "I don't know! That's hilarious. I was probably trying to fit a, I don't know ... It's not even a cliche, is it? But now I can safely say that on a Friday I don't think I've ever picked up a newspaper."
One thing about him is that he is incredibly vain. I asked whether he was, as a joke, because he once said he was, which was surely a joke. He said: "I think we all have to be vain to do what I do." Does he think he's quite good-looking? "I think I've gone to seed." He's 47. He asked, later, when he was having his picture taken, whether I thought he'd gone jowly. I don't, but of course I said yes. How much longer did I think he had in front of the cameras? About six months, I said. He professed to be elated at this good news. He is not a bit pompous and so neither of us have the faintest idea why he once pretended to be in another interview. He did teach performing arts so perhaps he was playing a role.
I said: "You're a bit of a diva, aren't you?" He said: "No! Have you been ringing contacts in the news room?" I said: "What would you think if I said you had a bit of a reputation for being a diva?" He said: "I would say that that probably goes hand-in-hand with being one of the front people." So, he is? "Not above and beyond any of the other front people." All right, who was the biggest diva? "All right. I'm going to tell you." Of course, he didn't tell me a single name so I gave him a few to choose from and he said he didn't know any of them. And he never listens to gossip either. "Certainly not," he said, giving me a crisp look which meant that I certainly should not listen to gossip either. But as he most so remarkably good-natured about the accusation, I'm willing to believe that he is on the very lower rungs of diva-ness. He said, seriously: "I don't see myself as a bit of a diva. I do see myself as somebody who doesn't just turn up at work and does his job and goes home again ... I will turn up at work and question what went right and what went wrong."
He is aware of the perils of being on the telly; the most perilous of which is that it turns people into prats. "I think it's when you first start getting the attention and ... you know, you might get invited to various things and you might go along and suddenly you realise that you're living a slightly different life from the life you had before." Which can cause people to become smug? "Well, you suddenly think you're special in some way when actually what you're still doing is going to work and coming home ... He was lucky, he said, that Jo picked up on this and said so "in no uncertain terms ... She speaks her mind, which is probably the perfect foil for someone who does what I do."
So he wasn't aware that he was becoming insufferable? "Insufferable! It was just a case of Jo gently pointing out that you don't need to go and do this and do that, you know: 'Just remember who you are.'"
He said he is himself on air and that you have to be and that you have to "prefer your own opinion, but at the same time you've got to save some of it for yourself". That seems about right. I liked him off air. He's just a bit cleverer, more thoughtful and rather droller than that guy on Breakfast.
