It's not easy being John Campbell

TV3 presenter John Campbell is all jitters with his new show Campbell Live, due to go to air on Monday. Picture / Dean Purcell

John Campbell, whose TV3 current affairs show launches on Monday night, has been talking for almost two hours.

"Am I talking s***?" he worries.

"I'll let you know if you are."

"Good. Thanks."

"In print."

"Jesus. You will too, you bugger."

Campbell is tired. He flew in from Melbourne at 1am, was in bed at 2am and up again at 6am.

He had interviews and photo shoots all day and stood guard by a stairwell where Carol Hirschfeld was interviewing an author. He's scuttled to and from the TV3 cafe to get refreshments for people and says he's looking forward to sitting down. In the meantime he is being photographed, obediently climbing around poles and leaning over balconies.

He wonders whether to have his suit jacket open "so you get more white". When the photographer asks him to stand there and just relax he says, "No, I don't relax."

The TV3 boardroom is as sterile as a padded cell except for posters of Hilary Barry and Toni Marsh. This is good because Campbell is easily distracted.

John tells how he tagged along while Carol Hirschfeld did an interview. He stayed as quiet as he could and was told by the subject: "If you were in America you'd be on Ritalin".

He tries to avoid sugar because it works on him like rocket fuel.

"I was always slightly noisier than people around me."

Campbell's energy drives his focus but also his worrying. He worries about relaxing.

The question he would ask himself is, "Do I ever relax? Do I ever stop worrying?"

And the answer is: not very often.

He worries, he says, about the "usual nonsense, like whether I talked too much when we had people over last night and whether I spend enough time with the kids".

Then he worries about worrying. "What I thought would happen was when you got to 40, you would worry less, that you would know what a funny little thing life is and that it is complex and you're not always going to navigate as well as you would like.

"I thought by 40 you would learn to live with that, but I think that's bullshit."

He watches "gloomy, grim, grim" films and thinks it's quite funny when I suggest that a video and chocolate night at John's would involve him climbing the walls on a sugar rush followed by a collective plunge into suicidal despair.

"That's right!"

This all makes him sound very sombre. He is not. He trolleys about TV3 calling people "darling" and "gorgeous" and greets every single one as a long-lost friend.

He will not hear a word said against the coffee we're drinking because the cafe ladies are "sweet" and should be forgiven for burning the milk.

This is the guy who says he is now used to the concept of personality-driven shows but cringes when it's his own, Campbell Live, due to start on Monday.

"This is going to be one, isn't it? Is it? No. Well, to a certain extent."

He suggests it won't be only his personality, because there are "some great personalities on it". There's Carol, Jacquie Brown, Richard Langston and Phil Vine.

But the ads are running, and he's the only guy in them.

Campbell doesn't like the billboards and all the hoop-la.

"That's not part of my self-image and the moment it is, I'm *****. I really don't see myself in those terms. Even talking about it makes me get butterflies in my stomach."

He doesn't understand it when strangers tell him, "You so love yourself".

"I just think, 'How do you know?' And it's just because I'm on the telly."

He's trying to explain that John Campbell is the guy who thinks it is a "terrible, terrifying and embarrassing moment" when silence falls at a party and he's the only one left talking.

He's "the socially awkward person, never goes to parties, much prefers to stay at home, avoids social gatherings unless I have to be there, totally. And I'm that guy."

But put him in a work suit and he says he has a "Clark Kent transformation".

"I'm not saying I become Superman, but I become someone else entirely. When you're not dressed up, you're just 'that guy' again.

"But I've done the greatest thing I could possibly do for myself, because I was always going to be 'that guy', but somehow I've stumbled upon a job which gives me a licence to be somebody else as well. It's fantastic.

"I can go on television and be rude to the Prime Minister. I would never have been able to do that. It's great. It's a great job for someone like me. Television should be full of nerds."

He is a bit of a geek and has been so since adolescence, which he says he squandered on reading a lot of books while others were having fun.

He admits to wooing ladies in Wellington with his poems, which were "bloody awful".

"All of them are lesbians now, I believe. I put them off heterosexuality forever with my verse."

Tell him you went fishing and he won't ask about the catch - just: "Jesus. Did you wear a lifejacket?

"That's the sort of thing I worry about when confronted with the outdoors. I just want a lifejacket really.

"I'm happier indoors. Good things happen indoors. I like to see the outdoors from the indoors, I like a view of it but I've got no desire to be out there."

He gets his blood sports in the studio, with politicians or the powerful as quarry, firing accusations about unanswered questions.

But he likes Aussie talk show host Rove, who doesn't ask the hard questions at all, because he "was gentle, like a happy-clappy Christian, you know, the really nice sort".

He likes Rove because Campbell is partial to the odd gentle interview himself, and says he loathes cynicism, is bored with it and thinks it has become reflexive and brainless.

He doesn't like road rage, people who are rude to flight attendants or angry people like those in Western Australia "where there are a lot of big utes and they drive right up behind you and you look in the rear vision mirror and they're just angry, angry people".

He doesn't understand it.

But he does get het up about other things and blames this on his "visceral response to life".

So there he is hammering away about his admiration for John Pilger and advocacy journalism and why there are never bylines of "people with strange names" in the paper.

He's been thundering on about this for many years now but still works up quite a crescendo and is yelping "they're embedded with the white guys" and I'm looking around for the red button that might summon security, when he suddenly deflates, looks sheepish, and says: "So, anyway. Sorry."

Then he's off again, about how he hates bigotry, and he works himself into another contortion about collective stupidity.

America is apparently not collectively stupid because it spawned such authors as Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, but it is because it voted Bush back in, and "there's no way you can say anything about Bush that is good".

He lives in New Zealand because he likes it, and because America has that collective stupidity and he doesn't like England, where he did his OE, because "the climate's shite and I don't like the class system and I don't like the monarchy".

He says he needs a holiday from himself. I think it must be exhausting to be John Campbell and he thinks this is funny.

"It is exhausting being me. It's exhausting knowing me too. I'm exhausting for all concerned."

He does not know how he's managed to stay bereft of cynicism. "It's not a decision I've made. It just hasn't happened. You know, like some people can just keep running."

"Like the Forrest Gump of current affairs, then?"

"I've got to go now," he retorts and snorts. "No, I'm just teasing. The Forrest Gump of current affairs? Jesus."