He needs to. It has been many years since I could bear waking up to Morning Report. The grim, serious problems of society ought to be the first things to enter my head each day, but sorry, let me read about it when I'm ready.
Hosking wakes me up, I get to National Radio in the car. That is where I heard Robinson announce his retirement on Thursday. It was done with typical class.
Nobody on air, not even his co-host, knew it was coming. The shock in the studio was audible. He said he was grateful to Thompson who thought it better that he, Robinson, make the announcement himself. Honesty with class.
He mentioned that his sign-off on April 1 will be the anniversary of the day Morning Report began in 1975. Can it possibly be that long? It was compelling when it began. He and Lindsay Perigo, chalk and cheese, gentleman and aggressor, were a perfect combination. Perigo had a mind like a razor and a wit to match Muldoon. Robinson was the relief, the chummy one.
He still is. Robinson is the voice that says, relax, don't take this too seriously. It's important but it's not the end of the world. People make mistakes, do wrong, but that's life. They are good people.
We need that counterpoint in news and commentary.
Robinson's greatest word is "goodness". It is his instinctive response to somebody who has just told him the roof is falling in.
"Goodness."
It is clear he doesn't mean to diminish the weight of the offence or the calamity being described to him. He is genuinely as angry or worried as he can be.
After more than 35 years and 30 different co-hosts, it is hard to imagine Morning Report without him. National Radio is probably in for a morning make-over as drastic as Seven Sharp.
It will want to devise a programme capable of restoring it to the place in public life it enjoyed when Robinson and Perigo were in their heyday. Morning Report in those days was essential listening for everyone in, or interested in, politics and public issues. Its interrogations of ministers and policy-makers often provided insights and explanations that were not readily available in an era before governments routinely published their advice. It is hard to remember when the rot set in. For me, it was probably the 1990s when the programme became an endless catalogue of woe about public service funding cuts.
Perigo had long gone, his best successor in the aggressor's chair, Kim Hill, had moved on. Hosking was hired briefly to give the programme more pace and edge but didn't quite fit. Sean Plunket became the hard cop.
He and Robinson did their best with boring material. When the Shipley Government gave way to Clark's, National Radio's standard fare changed from funding cuts to social policy. Too often when you tuned in it was to hear a discussion in tedious jargon about some tendentious research that had come to an unremarkable conclusion.
It remains that way. Ministers in the present Government hardly ever go on. John Key prefers a weekly chat with Hosking on ZB where Steven Joyce is also a regular. But it is not the same.
National Radio has to make itself essential again, which doesn't mean unremitting aggression. If Geoff Robinson has to go, his gentle manner, good humour and light touch should not be discarded.
But he is probably irreplaceable. I wish Holmes was here to give him his due.
