Michele Hewitson: Pick of a wild bunch

Deborah Chambers, QC (left), Su Polard (centre), Laila Harre (right)

The most barking year of the back page yet might just be 2014. And that was just Pam Corkery. And I didn't actually interview Pam Corkery this year. But she has still managed to be my Interview of the Year. Usually I ask the mad questions around here, so I was quite grateful to Corkery who also wins, hands down, the prize I usually award myself: Maddest Question of the Year. Corkery was the new press secretary for Laila Harre, the new leader of the Internet Party, otherwise known as the party you have to announce that you are about to commit political suicide. I had wanted to interview Corkery but of course as a press secretary her role was to stay in the background, keep her trap shut, and smooth troubled waters. Cue hollow laughter.

About, oh, five seconds after I arrived at Harre's house the press secretary said: "You've lost a lot of weight. Have you got Aids?" Things went swiftly downhill after that.

The leader got upset about my questions, some of which were - amazingly, I know - about Kim Dotcom. The press secretary tried to calm the situation. She made things significantly worse. Who would have thought? Later that night, the press secretary phoned me which made things significantly worse, all over again. She had said as I left: "Are all your interviews as explosive as this?" I should have said (but was too intent on reeling down the street to do so): "Only when you're involved, Pam."

Most Jaw-dropping Revelation of the Year: Paul Henry has had therapy. The not-so-jaw-dropping bit is that his therapist, he said, described him "as the most highly functioning dysfunctional person he'd ever met. It's a great line. I know no more than that". None of us do.

He would take this as a weird sort of badge of honour. He's competitive even about being dysfunctional. Actually, now I've had time to think about this, it's not much of a revelation. For what is therapy but another opportunity to talk about oneself?

He is capable of flashes of insight. Is this a surprise? Possibly not. He is interested in, or at least entertained by, himself. He said he was "a bit of a shit". That is not the, possibly, surprising bit. He said that he: "Wasn't a great husband. I'm entertaining and I'm unpredictable and those things can be very, very good in small doses but long term, you'd tire of some of those things, don't you think?" He also wins Rhetorical Question of the Year. He was very, very good - in a small dose.

Because Second Best Revelation of the Year, or stuff you really didn't want to know, any year, goes to Paul Henry. He is a part-time nudist. He goes days without clothes. He goes to mixed, naked spas, in the States - thank goodness - but draws the line at naked barbecuing, or volley ball playing. Quite right, too. That would be really weird. The sort of stuff you'd require therapy for.

I met a man who knows all there is to know about orang-utans, the conservationist Dr Ian Singleton. We went and looked at an orang-utan, at the zoo. It rushed over and began banging on the glass. Why was it doing that? "He's banging. He's trying to bang some sense into you." He - the orang-utan expert, not the orang-utan - is from Yorkshire. I thought he'd be endlessly enthusiastic about apes, but he said orang-utans lead really boring lives, and that going into the forest to study them is really boring, so he chain-smokes to help pass the time. He is a very funny man. He also has a very active fantasy life. He insisted that the orang-utan (the banging one) smoked roll-ups and was an English football fan. They do say they're just like us. They are like him, anyway - in which case, orang-utans are top blokes.

The actress Su Pollard was in town for the show Annie, but we were talking about her legs. She once said, when she was 60, that she had the legs of a 25-year-old. How were they holding up? "Yeah, not bad. Me pins are quite good." We had a good look at them. They were quite good. I award them Legs of the Year. "I try to keep them toned, Michele." She is 64 now and likes to walk past building sites and get a whistle. The geezers always Hi-de-Hi her first and then she says: "Give us a whistle!"

You couldn't miss her. Her fashion sense is, as her mother once said, "gregarious". As loud as her voice, then. As a director once said: "Pollard, lower your voice to a scream." She's a scream. She has had, I said, some rum fellas. "Oh, I've definitely had some rum ones!" She married one who was gay, and then not gay, presumably, and then gay again. "I don't think he ever went straight, to be honest." Another, The German, had a life-long ambition to be "knifed by the Queen. He meant knighted! Ha, ha! Hilarious!" I'll say.

What funny domestic lives people lead. These funny lives are endlessly fascinating to me but often not so fascinating to those who have lived them. The Dutch composer, Edo de Waart, got very grumpy about my questions about his wives. All I can say is that if you're going to have six wives and I'm interviewing you, I am going to ask why. I should not have asked about the car bumper stickers (which may or may not be a true story.) A first lot were supposed to have read: "Honk if you have been married to Edo de Waart", and the second: "Honk if you haven't been married to Edo de Waart". He didn't think this was at all amusing. "But I can see how some stupid people think it's amusing." I must be stupid then. "Oh, well, that's up to you." He is a maestro.

Hasim Rahman, the clean-living drug dealer turned boxer, has two wives, and eight children. That seemed a lot to me but, nope, that was nothing. His father has at least five wives (he's lost count) and maybe 17 kids (he's lost count, and small wonder.) His son's scant two wives live 8km from each other and he runs between houses, to keep fit. Eight kids. He must be fit.

Nicky Hager, the investigative journalist and author of Dirty Politics, met me for lunch. He wouldn't, he said, have a cake, although: "I'm not against cakes". He said this so seriously and examined the cakes so thoroughly and fairly before deciding against one that it made me laugh more than anything anyone else said this year. He is decent and serious and he has what I called a peculiar home life. He said: "I know! I'm sorry!" I suspect he meant he was sorry for being interesting. He lives with his daughter who is in her early 20s and next door to them lives his daughter's mother and her husband and their child. He claims to have had the odd girlfriend since he and his daughter's mother split up (before the birth of their child) but who knows, really? Let's just say he's not against girlfriends.

Vegetarian of the Year is the self-described "feral, wild man", hunter and adventurer Davey Hughes. I had thought it would be funny to take him to a vegan cafe where I could ask him about killing things. I thought it might appeal to his sense of humour. "It does. I ate a blueberry muffin once." He's not against vegetables, as long as they're wrapped in bacon: "It's hard on peas."

It's okay to shoot a zebra and not a giraffe, according to him. Giraffes, he'd heard, were "not all that tasty ... zebras do taste really good." Still, why was it okay to shoot one and not the other? "I guess it's the same as when people choose a dog. I mean, what's the difference between a schnauzer and a great dane?" You're not choosing a dog to eat it! I spluttered.

I should have seen one of his terrible jokes coming. I didn't. So I said: What a silly analogy. "It's not. Because a schnauzer you could put in a microwave. But a great dane?"

Brainbox of the Year, TV news guy and author Tim Wilson, had a new book out this year. It is called News Pigs, which was coined by his great mate Steve Braunias. The brainbox also got married this year, to Rachel. I said I always thought he'd marry Steve Braunias, which he, quite rightly, ignored. He's a Catholic convert and they are much tuttier than the born ones.

He said, of his wife: "You know, she once observed of me that it was a weakness of mine that I tended to overvalue intellectualism." Does he think that's true? "Absolutely." And did she mean his own intellectualism? "She could have been referring to that."

He said, about our God vs No God debate: "It was very Dawkins versus the Bishop of Canterbury ... but maybe scaled down a bit." Only on his side. "On my side. More like a stammering convert up against a princess of atheism, a deacon of disbelief!" He is also a satirist.

I went to see Lady Deborah Chambers QC, the divorce lawyer with the scary reputation. Scary is not a word she appreciates. "It sounds kind of slightly childish to me. It sounds like a child who's scared of a monster under their bed or something. I don't think of myself as frightening, but I suppose if you are nervous about being cross-examined by me someone might feel intimidated". She looks rather scary, being tall and toned and blonde (it hides the grey better, she said.) "I think I'm pretty tough." She grew up in Glenfield, she said, by way of explanation. Her second husband, the Supreme Court judge Sir Robert Chambers, died of a brain aneurism last year. She bought a painting, by Andrew McLeod, to mark what would have been his 60th birthday. It's on the wall of her chambers and I asked about it and she cried.

She sent me a sweet and funny card, and a bottle of champagne. Not so scary, after all.

I went to see Millie Elder-Holmes because she was doing Fight for Life and so she was told she had to talk to me. She was nervous and vulnerable and strong and gentle. Her partner, Connor Morris, had been killed earlier in the year and she knew she was expected to cry - she grew up in the public glare of her adopted father, Paul Holmes' fame. I didn't want her to cry; it would have felt exploitative and so I didn't ask the questions designed to make her cry. I think she was happy about that and she relaxed and we had a good interview. She's clever and funny and swears her head off and I liked her. She thinks people are sick of her and think she's always in the media, and she is but, as she says, what can she do about that except make the most of it? She does, though, have a complicated relationship with inherited notoriety, not least because she was a P addict, a long time ago, and nobody is likely to let her forget it. People write ghastly things to her on her social media accounts. I said, "oh, don't read them", but of course she does. People wrote ghastly things to me about her after the column appeared, most of them saying they couldn't be bothered reading the piece. But they could be bothered writing to say they couldn't be bothered. Ho hum.

Thanks to everyone who could be bothered reading this page this year, and to everyone who was kind enough to appear on it and for putting up with my bothersome questions.

The Michele Hewitson Interview returns in February.