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Our boy goes global

4:00AM Thursday Nov 06, 2008 By Russell Baillie

Jeremy Wells puts his best reporter face on at the Republican Party convention. Photo / Supplied by TVNZ The satirical show Eating Media Lunch returns on TV2 tomorrow night for the first of a late-year burst of three one-hour specials. The occasionally controversial faux current affairs programme hosted by the fiercely deadpan Jeremy Wells has been racking up the miles in this its fifth year.

The first of the specials follows Wells to the Republican Party National Convention in Minnesota. Then next week it's a New Zealand post-election special (complete with psychics and astrologers) and EML's own take on the coronation of Tonga's King George Tupou V, before wrapping with a show dishing out its annual awards ...

So these specials. Does it feel special? So special. Absolutely incredibly special. It always is special.

The Republican convention show, are you having to edit it in light of the election result? The show itself isn't really about the American election, it's about the Republican National Convention that we went to a few months ago.

I read your Listener piece on it. Poor you. I'm sorry about that.

You described it as "part religious ceremony and part Nazi rally". Have you been to many Nazi rallies? Ah no, I haven't. But I have seen a few on television and I can see the orchestration - that's kind of what I was trying to get at. There are guys there who are essentially conductors with red hats who stand in the aisles and tell people when to cheer, when to quieten down and how much to cheer.

That's rather like having a studio audience, television does that all the time. It's essentially what the convention is. It is really made for television and the reason that they are there is they need to hit certain slots. So they want to make sure their speaker is on during prime time and there are major time considerations going on the whole time.

How did you get accreditation, because what the show does and what the Republican Party does are, well, kind of different? I think Americans are less precious than people give them credit for. It's a very conservative country yet they regard freedom of speech as a major thing. They are always talking about it and so they don't mind. We tried to get into the Democratic Party National Convention but there was so much media interest in that one they said, "Sorry, we can't let you in." But the Republicans were really, really accommodating and I guess maybe they needed more attention. They did ask for a copy of the show and we sent them one and they seemed fine.

So were you sharing a coffee pot with The Daily Show? No, I think there were 5000 media people there so you didn't really get to meet anyone. I saw Sean Hannity (Fox News conservative commentator), he walked past with three or four security guards around him.

Why would he need that at the Republican convention? You would wonder. Amazingly, he had more security than George Bush senior.

Isn't there a slight danger that post-election your coverage is going to feel dated? People don't have to watch it if they don't want to. Obviously it's pretty hard to go over and film it and come back and put it on the next week. That's probably not particularly easy. It's not possible for us anyway. Essentially it's a documentation of an event. It was a little while ago ... but we weren't talking about the election per se, more about the convention itself.

And so how was the Tongan royal tour? It was the opposite of the Republican National Convention in a lot of ways. Quite a contrast. There was a lot pork involved for a start - it was a pork-based ceremony, but it was amazing to see. I guess they don't come round very often and the pageantry was greater than the American one, which is quite remarkable.

You've done Republicans, the King of Tonga and you've got psychics on your election show. Aren't you picking soft targets? Well what else is there? Give us some ideas, please. I don't think I would call the Republican Party a soft target, the monarchy in Tonga is pretty powerful, and psychics - well they use the powers of the paranormal and spirits that we all know control everything and are all-powerful. So if you dug down a little deeper, you would find those are pretty powerful units.

And you are just the man to confront them? No, I wouldn't say that, but they're interesting things to go along to. The convention was very interesting and the Tongan coronation was very interesting as well, and psychics I am fascinated by.

This is EML's what, fourth, fifth series? The eighth series.

Well done. Have you ever considered EML - what is it for? What is it for? It's for entertainment purposes. It's not necessarily for anything. No, I haven't thought about that. I don't think it's for anything. It's totally disposable. It doesn't make any difference to the world. It's just a piece of entertainment that is on briefly and then disappears and goes into the TV archive forever, never to be watched again. But that is the nature of any media like that. It's fodder, essentially.

In an ideal world would you prefer to be on every week, looking at events of the week, more like a Daily Show format where you were more immediate? Well I think it's interesting because the comparison has been made a few times between our show and The Daily Show and I think that they are a long way apart. For a start it's a much better show and it's operating with a much bigger budget with a much better host who is actually funny. And they have a team of about 130 people, which is about the size of our newsroom at TVNZ, so they can put out a daily product. So it's just not possible to put out a show a week, unfortunately, that would be of a decent standard. We have a team of eight people to work on our show.

But the other thing is there is not actually that much going on in this country. It's a very small country. Arguably it's the most insignificant country in the world per head of population to land area. It seriously is. If we were wiped off the map it wouldn't change the world at all.

There wouldn't be that much stuff you could probably do on a weekly show. It would be a bit lame. It would be quite hard if someone said, "We have $8 million a year to do this satirical show every week."

You could always do it by gluing bits of rubber to people and have them impersonate politicians. Even that show they were probably doing 12 episodes at a time, once a year, so it's quite tricky.

Do you play a variation of yourself on TV - or is that the real you? Well I do walk around wearing a three-piece grey suit all the times. I'm like John Campbell. But it's my only suit. Obviously they have made some cutbacks here at TVNZ and ever since Judy Bailey left, the wardrobe budget has dropped away massively. Nowadays you are allowed one suit. I believe [Mark] Sainsbury has two, but one of them you can turn inside out.

What else do you want to do in TV? Wouldn't you rather be doing sport? Sport?

Well you play cricket, have a professed love of the game, you come from a sporting family. Are you the next Keith Quinn? I think you can enjoy sport and not have to work in sport. I wouldn't mind working in sport but there has never been an opportunity there. But I do love sport.

So will the Broadcasting Standards Authority be able to have Christmas off this year? I would say they should be safe this year. Well, you never know, do you? It always surprises me what shocks people and what doesn't and I guess that is part of the show, seeing where that line is. And it turns out in the past the line has been drawn at urinating on another person and that was deemed acceptable by the BSA. I guess we've come a long way in our broadcasting history.

So you've helped push TV into the future. Accidentally got it there by mistake, through laziness. I don't know what [the BSA's] views are on bestiality but we will find out after this series screens

Does one have to have a view? There are some things you don't have to think about. I guess there are some things. But bestiality is one of the core parts of what being a New Zealander is.

Good subject to end on. Nice one.

LOWDOWN Who: Jeremy Wells What: Eating Media Lunch, new series When & where: Starts tomorrow, TV2, 9.45pm

Deadpan

4:00AM Sunday Nov 02, 2008 Sarah Lang

Eating Media Lunch's Jeremy Wells. Photo / Janna Dixon

I feel sorry for the waitress. Every time she ventures near us deep in the underground innards of central Auckland's Gravity Cafe, Jeremy Wells seems to be in the middle of talking about bestiality, sex with a prostitute, or his own conception. Although a discernible blush creeps up the waitress' neck on each occasion, Wells doesn't pause. In fact, I get the feeling the TV presenter/comedian/reporter (my definition) - "microphone guy" (his) - is enjoying the extra audience.

When he talks, hands clasped beneath his chin, he mostly fixes his gaze on the ceiling as if to draw inspiration from above, or on the water jug as if to glean drops of wit from it. Switching from friendly to stand-offish, from eloquent to vague, from confident to self-deprecating, from serious to definitely not, Wells seems to sport several personalities - or, if this is a performance, several personas. All of whom make me sweat for a candid answer. I find I'm jotting down "must be taking the piss", "sounds sarcastic here" and "actually sounds earnest", while he seems mighty pleased when I don't know whether to believe what he's just said.

He left me speculating on what happened in a certain North Shore brothel after Wells, wearing a helmet-cam, prepared to have sex with a prostitute while filming a sex special for Havoc (the 1997-2002 hit show he co-hosted with Mikey Havoc). I remember the strong implication he'd done the deed. Says Wells: "Yeah, there was a weird moment where the sex worker was looking at me and I was looking at her and we sort of thought what the hell'." He pauses, waiting for a reaction, and I bite. "So you did?" "Well, I shouldn't really say," he grins. "I feel terrible, no I won't say. Put it this way: I definitely got to know her in that half hour." There's no pressing him further.

Wells doesn't deny he likes to shock. In fact, the 31-year-old seems to be missing an embarrassment chip, if his leftfield questions, poker-faced piss-taking and no-holds-barred pranks on Havoc and the offbeat media satire Eating Media Lunch, are anything to go by. Unleashed on the unsuspecting and the overly confident, that deadpan poker face nods sagely, giving pillocks just enough rope to hang themselves by blathering on.

But Wells is offended - or does a good job of feigning it - when I suggest one of his weapons is ridicule. "I don't really see myself as a person who ridicules people," he says firmly. "We definitely don't ever set out to ridicule. We never say 'who can we get this week' or anything. Ever." Still, Wells admits people are wary of him, with or without camera, and says it's getting harder by the week to get people to talk to EML, whether celebrities or commoners. "Most people won't. As soon as we say which show it's for they say na'."

So he and the EML team have tracked down some unwary foreigners. In the first of three episodes, screening this Friday, the show stops by the Minnesota State Fair en route to the recent Republican National Convention. With relish, Wells relays a chat with the fair's barnyard spokesman about cannibalism - "I mentioned that people say pork tastes a lot like human" - and bestiality, informing said spokesman that there's 1200 bestiality complaints to the New Zealand SPCA each year. While I note "taking the piss" in capitals, he swears by this (untrue) tally before launching into a spiel about the morality of bestiality: "If a male dog decides to have sex with a woman is that wrong? I mean, it's not really." It's much the same argument he put forward in Minneapolis, shortly before being detained by the police.

This'll be the eighth season (albeit a short one) of EML which, at 5 years old, is already one of New Zealand's longest-running satires and Best Comedy winner at this year's Qantas Film and TV Awards. "It was a great feeling," says Wells. "We'd been a finalist for a few years and we'd always lost so I assumed we were going to lose again, especially seeing our show isn't as funny as [fellow nominees] bro'Town and Pulp Sport."

Whether or not you're a fan of the show, there's no doubt its host is very funny. What turns the situation jokes and lightning wit from amusing to plain hilarious is his astounding mastery of the deadpan face, even when something's side-splittingly funny. "I find the easiest way not to laugh is to think about my conception," says Wells, with, of course, a straight face. "I think about my parents in a double bed somewhere in Henderson Place. It's quite sobering," he says, finally cracking and laughing. Jokes aside, he's simply trained himself to keep a straight face during "performance", although while the camera's not on him he's often grinning away.

Despite the apparent ease with which he endures embarrassing onscreen situations, Wells insists he doesn't have a thick skin. "I'm thin-skinned. Shocking, like a balloon!" He tells me he can spot his self-consciousness when watching himself on TV. As he seems to be making a big effort to get me to believe him on this, it crosses my mind that being so well-known for taking the piss must make it hard to convince people when he's being serious.

Something else the self-proclaimed "D-list celebrity" is known for, or by, is Newsboy, the name Mikey Havoc bestowed on his onetime-BFM newsreader which "just kind of stuck. Most people still call me that. Well, not most people, but lots. People who yell out to me yell Newsboy' rather than Jeremy Wells'." Although he says he's never tried to shake the nickname, he'd like to point out that people keep getting the inflection wrong: it's Newsboy rather than Newsboy.

Growing up in well-to-do Remuera with an older brother and his parents (he won't confirm but doesn't deny his mum is ex-Silver-Ferns coach Yvonne Willering), Wells always had an entertainer streak, making stunt-filled home videos with a mate and watching TV during his limited after-school and Saturday-morning viewing window. Sandwiched between his first three high-school years at Auckland Grammar and his seventh-form year at St Paul's in Hamilton was a year at strict Christian boarding school Wanganui Collegiate. He was expelled from the school for giving a cap of marijuana oil to a recovering drug addict at a Marton treatment centre. "It sounds so bad when you say it like that... but essentially yes, that's exactly what I did. To be honest, it's not something I'm proud of."

In 1995, he began the Bachelor of Communication Studies at the Auckland Institute of Technology (now AUT), before leaving in the final term of his journalism major. There are two rumours circulating about why he didn't finish the degree: one's that he went round crowing he'd already "made" it.

"Unbelievable!" says Wells mildly. "I hadn't made it, I hadn't even been on TV at that point." He says the other rumour, that he was kicked out of uni, isn't true either. So, from the horse's mouth: because he was news-writing and reading on Mikey Havoc's BFM breakfast show, Wells hadn't been able to go to enough morning lectures to fulfil the requirements to sit his media theory exam. He vividly recalls being hauled into the journalism head's office. "I'll never forget what she said to me," he says, slowing down to emphasise the words: BFM will get you nowhere'." The next day Havoc told him he'd been offered a new MTV show and did Wells want to be a researcher? He did. Soon TV2 snapped up the show and Wells was promoted to on-camera sidekick.

After six years on Havoc, and three series travelling round the country taking the piss out of such towns as Wanganui and Gore, Wells says it was time to move on - to EML. A Robin suddenly without his Batman, he admits it felt weird branching out on his own. "Performing's always weird. If you start to think about it too much you'll start to freak yourself out. So you try not to think too much."

The future is something else he doesn't think about, though he says he's sure the TV work "could easily all dry up very quickly. At some stage you'll get washed up and everybody will laugh at you and you'll just have to deal with that."

Still, it's looking pretty good for now, with season nine of EML and season five of Wells-fronted comic revisionist history The Unauthorised History of New Zealand currently under negotiation with TV2. He's also about to start filming new TV One series Birdland. "I love birds. I am a bird."

He's getting more tangential by the minute so I tell him I'm done. "Thank God!" he says, admitting he's much more comfortable shining the spotlight than being in its glare.

Once the recorder's switched off, he's much more fun and laidback with not a jot of pisstaking. When we chat about the US election, his intellect becomes blindingly clear: he's got an in-depth knowledge of at least the last half-century of US politics. And he becomes visibly more animated when we swap gossip about peccadilloes of the high-profile.

His most candid comment, presumably an interviewing tip, comes unprompted as we part ways. "What I do is not think about what should I ask but what shouldn't I ask. People hate you for it and it's embarrassing, and I hate uncomfortable situations, but it's worth it."

I can just imagine the current affairs show - Closeup with Wells, Newsboy Live - with Wells riling politicians and CEOs into incandescent rage. He looks at me as if I'm mad. "Current affairs? Me? No! How could people take me seriously?"

* Eating Media Lunch returns to TV2 this Friday at 9.45pm.