Among his thick black crop of hair a meagre smattering of greys is coming through but "only the greys of a man turning 40", according to him.
"The shorter [hair] is the more manageable and the more I look like a paratrooper. I don't feel 50, I don't feel 40 actually ... I feel 37 and three months."
With no bucket list as such, Henry liked the idea of running away on a boat. But not the kind with "decrepit old people whose food has to be moulied up before it passes their lips and they're going to the toilet before they've finished their meal".
He said he'd always had this secret thing about people who packed up their lives and sailed away.
That and dwarfs.
"I haven't lived with dwarfs, that could be fun," he said. "But it's like old people, some people think dwarfs are nice just because they're small people but I reckon they'd be like small dogs, savages."
Henry said he wasn't especially fond of the elderly - some of whom were merely nasty young people grown up - and said others were far more concerned about his midlife milestone than he.
The Howick-born, Bristol-raised broadcaster's 50th will be celebrated by lunch out with his mother Olive - for whom he'd have to "send a security van" - and his three daughters.
Henry, as a father, distanced himself from Maori Party MP Hone Harawira when it came to his daughters dating.
"Hone is indeed more racist than I. It's not enough that they're nice, not enough that they're kind, they also have to be brown ... Whereas I haven't set a colour restriction for my girls."
On his own love life, he dodged questions and tried to divert attention to radio host Mike Hosking across the room.
Then Henry - whose antics have led to numerous Broadcasting Standards Authority complaints - insulted yet another minority group.
"So what I do is I pretend I've got on the chair, okay, and then I'm a tetraplegic and I just slide right down," he said, demonstrating.
Last month TVNZ was ordered to broadcast a statement retracting comments he made about singer Susan Boyle being retarded, and a decision on a March incident in which Henry mocked a Greenpeace spokeswoman's facial hair is pending.
He claimed he was never reined in by producers before he'd made his point.
"You can't stop until you've made it known what you were going to say ... You don't actually have to say it, but you have to make it clear what you were going to say because the humour is in that."
Everybody had a line, he said, it was just that some people's were "further out'.
Henry said he'd mellowed with age but was less tolerant of pointless news.
He conceded there was some truth in former TV reporter Janet Wilson's blog on too many non-newsy blondes on television, but he just didn't care.
"I seriously think that I've become less tolerant of people asking questions like that ... the whole Janet Wilson thing - does it matter?"
There were "plenty of unattractive women" on television anyway, he said.
"But sometimes I do think 'God I'm working with kindergarten students', which is obviously what Janet thinks when she watches, but in actual fact I don't think it's that they're much younger than they were, it's just that we're older'."
He had no plans to retire but wouldn't cling on, either.
"Oh no, I won't wait till they kick me off. I just won't be there one day. The saddest thing in the world is people desperate to hold on ... shall we name names?"
Gentle prompting, followed by a dictaphone in the face and: "You're not going to make me say Mark Sainsbury, that comes from you, not me."
Some Henry moments...
