Radio Geoff hides hint of steel

Geoff Robinson says all his interviewees are wonderful and the one he's working with at the time is always the very best. Picture / Mark Mitchell

What a funny life Geoff Robinson leads. He gets up at an ungodly hour, drives through an almost empty city, then spends three hours in this "strange little room and you sit and talk to yourself". Oh, and to you, should you happen to be listening.

We are sitting in this room because it is the logical place to take Robinson's picture. So he is sitting in his usual chair, in the studio that National Radio's Morning Report is broadcast from, and I am sitting in the chair the politicians and other assorted newsworthy types occupy should Robinson have won, or lost, the toss to interview them. I've got a better chair at my own desk, and that is saying something.

"Not very prepossessing, is it?" Robinson says contentedly.

Here, he and co-host Sean Plunkett toss for the interviews they want, and the interviews they don't want.

This is a long-standing tradition, and so is the fact that Robinson refuses to make any comment about whom he likes or doesn't like interviewing. He doesn't want, or not want this, or any interview. He doesn't hide from them but "one of the things about working on radio is that you are able to preserve a degree of anonymity".

He also refuses to comment on his co-hosts, past and present. "Quite right too. They are all wonderful and the one I'm working with at the time is always the very best."

Lindsay Perigo, I remind him, once said that he wanted to kill him: for being so disgustingly cheerful so early in the morning. He wheezes away at that - he has a wheezy sort of laugh anyway, but at the moment he is recovering from the flu, so he sounds like a tubercular seal. So: "Wheeze, wheeze. Lindsay Perigo has a colourful turn of phrase."

Which is as much as he is going to say? "Indeed."

I might be tempted myself, in a while, because he is a wily old thing and if he has learned nothing else from interviewing people he has certainly learned to let a monosyllabic answer fall with a disquieting clunk into dead air.

Morning Report turned 30 years old this month, and Robinson started at the old NZBC in 1970 so he should have a few tricks. It is no use trying to play any on him. I tried asking him whether he thought the labels Gentle Geoff and Snippy Sean - which I've just made up - are fair. Or whether there's any truth to them. Silly me for asking. Robinson has no opinion on such matters.

Actually, I think he is ever so faintly defensive about being thought the softer interviewer of the two. He says he has no idea whether politicians might be relieved to get him instead of Plunkett. I thought I certainly would choose Robinson before I went to see him. But he can be quite steely.

He does, he says, get letters complaining about him. "Oh, sometimes I'm accused of being insufferably smug."

And is he? "You tell me."

He is not, you see, paid to have opinions. He is paid to ask questions of the news makers. He is old-fashioned in this.

He was trained to approach interviewing as a way of extracting information. And what a jolly good thing this is too. You won't catch our Geoff slagging off other broadcasters in public, or getting paid for talking drivel in a women's mag.

He doesn't talk drivel. I don't imagine he'd do small talk terribly well, although he does a reasonable impression of being terribly polite. He says what people most want to know is "what time I get up".

He doesn't waste words and there is this: You should not be able to tell what Robinson thinks on any issue. God forbid that he should announce, a la John Campbell, that he voted for this or that party.

He has been married for 36 years and his wife still does not know how he votes. He doesn't know how she votes, either. "It's none of my business." I think this is a bit odd. He doesn't. But then, as I've said, he leads a funny sort of life and he has had a long time to get used to it. It is a "constraint", but "you have to accept that, I think". The only opinion he offers is that he is bemused by the idea of people listening to the radio in the shower. "I think 'get a life'. I mean if you've actually got to take a radio into the shower, there's probably something seriously wrong with you." Oh dear, I say, a good percentage of Geoff's listeners are sickos with no life. "You said that. Not me."

He looks like his voice: Slightly tweedy, slightly English, but otherwise nondescript. He wears sensible, comfortable, well worn-in shoes. He looks, and sounds, like a don.

In the Herald files there are two very old, very dull stories about Robinson. That's it. They tell us nothing about him. "That's good," he says.

He is at once in the very midst of what happens in the news, every day, and yet his work hours mean he maintains a detachment to what happens in the world.

He doesn't listen to the news when he gets up at 4am. He listens to Concert FM in his car on the way to work. He is not a news junkie and, in social gatherings, he is very careful never to express a view on anything.

He doesn't want anyone to be able to say, "Oh, Geoff Robinson said this the other night." That would, he feels, compromise his position.

He came to New Zealand from London in 1965 and felt at home. "I liked the idea, perhaps, of a smaller pool rather than a bigger pool."

I think it says quite a lot about him that what he fell in love with was the splendid isolation. He liked that there were not crowds of people; that he could walk to work down a city street without feeling jostled. So his is the perfect job for someone who likes empty streets and not many people.

A lot of people love and respect him without ever having met him. That much was apparent on the day of Morning Report's birthday. Why, the PM as much as promised him a gong, I tell him.

He didn't hear any of this. He was in bed with the flu. He maintains he had no idea about the accolade from Clark. But "I'm holding out for a peerage".

His father died some years ago and he didn't quite make it back to Britain in time to see his mother again before her recent death. His parents did visit. I said, "They must have been very proud of you," and he said he had no idea. But surely they must have listened to him on the radio on their visits. He said "I believe so."

Even if they had handed out any praise, he wouldn't share it. He wouldn't want to be seen to be blowing his own trumpet, even if vicariously. Gracious, that would be tantamount to holding an opinion. Anyway, they are not a demonstrative family: "We're not big huggy kissers. Stiff upper lip chaps, English public school and all that."

I know that there is one topic that he gets quite excited about - for him - and that is space stories, particularly ones involving Nasa. You can hear it in his voice when he interviews somebody about space: He sounds like an excited little boy.

This is odd to see because it is, in any case, odd meeting the voice you hear on the wireless every morning. Radio has a magic the telly doesn't: It's those disembodied voices. So it's like meeting a voice and finding out the voice has legs and a face and a personality. I asked him whether he had a radio persona and whether he was able to take it off when he got home. He said he wasn't sure, he'd been doing it for so long he never much thought about it. So I asked him whether his expressing privately held opinions publicly extended to not telling his children. "They'd probably tell you not, because every time they'd ask a question I'd say 'let's go to the book and look it up'."

So it sounded to me as though he might be a bit Radio Geoff even at home. "Well, my wife says, 'What you see is what you get.' Does that help?"

It does a bit. Except I'd be more likely to say, "What you hear is what you get." I'm sure I'd recognise the voice if I heard it in the street. I'm not so sure I'd recognise the man if I saw him again. And no doubt he'd be rather pleased with that.