Mike Hosking: Behind the Mike

By FRANCES GRANT

How to watch breakfast television, lesson one: install television sets in the bedroom and the kitchen and anywhere else you fancy round the house.

Lesson two: don't sit on the couch and really watch it. Turn on the tellies and listen as you go about your morning rush. Watch what grabs you.

For the small number of you already attuned to TV One's Breakfast news and views programme - its average audience last year was 2.1 per cent of potential viewers, or about 70,000 people - this could be teaching you to suck eggs.

But co-presenter Mike Hosking knows this is a land where the breakfast telly habit has not yet caught on, and most of us still need instructions.

"You can buy a television for about 200 bucks. It's not the sort of big-ticket item it once was. We [Kiwis] don't have them in our kitchens. It'll come, though. People'll stick them in their kitchens eventually."

Breakfast returns this week . The new year brings a new presenting mate for Hosking - newsreader Alison Mau, replacing Susan Wood, who left because of the show's unfriendly work hours.

But Hosking is sticking with the two-and-a-half-year-old programme until it's part of the establishment. "My main goal for Breakfast, and I don't know how long it will take - I think it's almost there, maybe it's going to take another year or so - is to cement itself into the psyche of New Zealand. It took about seven years in Australia."

Hopefully for him and the network, we'll prove quicker on the uptake than our friends across the Tasman.

Meanwhile, over breakfast in a Ponsonby cafe, Hosking declares himself supremely happy both at work and play. He's fresh from a great golfing victory, winning the Michael Hill Charity Shootout with partner Terry Stevens. Among the vanquished: pros Greg Turner and Peter O'Malley.

As for the very-early-in-the-day job: "If you can do the hours, I think it's a wonderful lifestyle, it's fantastic. For that reason alone, I'd keep doing it for a period of time."

He's out of bed at 3.30 am and out of the office by 10.30 am. That leaves a lot of time for golf. "It's a great thing about television and the media generally - the odd hours. There's always somebody available to play."

But is there anything else he's hankering to do in broadcasting? "I think I've got it pretty much covered at the moment. I write my own column on golf, I do a bit of radio, I do a bit of television. What more could you want?"

Another round of his heavy-artillery interview show, Crossfire, perhaps? TV One hasn't confirmed it will return, but Hosking thinks it's likely. Another triumph springs to mind, the show's opening night interrogation of former Prime Minister Jenny Shipley and the post-match "I made it up" comment to Hosking's co-host, Linda Clark.

"It's kind of like, nothing you ever do again will top that. And so that was a fascinating experience, it really was. As far as the programme went, it went well, people liked it. It served its purpose.

"I think you've got to have a programme like that, especially with people like politicians. A politician in a six-minute interview knows full well they can get away, at least for two or three minutes, with filling time, if they absolutely have to. But when you've got nothing to do but fill 24 minutes and you're the subject, it's hard work, it really is."

While Hosking enjoyed the return to pitbull-style interviewing, he says Crossfire hasn't left him bored with Breakfast or nostalgic for the old days of Morning Report.

"The thing about Morning Report was that's just one side of me," he says. "What you see now on Breakfast is really me, that's what I've done for the majority of my career, and Morning Report was just a specialised area. In many respects it was a shame, there was very little room for any humour and lightness."

Regular Breakfast viewers will be familiar with Hosking's lighter side and the friendly digs he swapped with Wood. He expects his relationship with Mau to follow suit. "Alison and I have a not dissimilar relationship, a bit of needling that goes on between us and we have a bit of fun and a laugh ... I like her very much and Simon [Mau's husband, newsreader Simon Dallow], actually, he's a good bloke, I play golf with him."

Hosking can see the bright side of the newsreading couple's reunification of working hours at TVNZ. "It has bloody worked out outstandingly well. Because he's coming to read the news, once he's done midday he's available for golf. So that works out extremely well, couldn't have worked out better."