Book of the Week: Paddy f#$%ing Gower

The central problem I have with Paddy Gower’s autobiography This is the F#$%ing News is that he didn’t f#$%ing write it. There’s a laziness and a complacency to this as-told-to exercise, an indulgence of his star power – unlike All Blacks who require the firm of Cleaver, Paul & Associates to tell their stories to and hack into shape, Gower can probably write a decent sentence. He’s, you know, a journalist. He knows his way around a keyboard. Why did he need Eugene Bingham to act as his ghostwriter? Is Bingham going to write his Stuff stories for him, too? There are just some things you don’t tell someone, even your amanuensis, and the book feels detached, phoney, a bit unreal. The unexamined life is not worth publishing.
Gower talks (and Bingham writes) about his depression. He descends into it at the end of his time as Newshub’s political editor. There was an earlier episode of it in his late 20s when he worked for the Herald and rented an apartment in Herne Bay. He sat in it all day sometimes. He couldn’t leave the house. “It sunk in: I was staring at the shade.” Two metaphors for the price of one full-colon. What does it mean? Why, actually, was he depressed? Gower doesn’t say. It’s quite a solid yarn – he sets the scene, and he talks about going on Prozac – but there’s nothing beneath it. It’s just more of the kind of journalism he excelled at as a political editor.
Gower’s life is full of surface yarns. He was raised Catholic and sometimes goes to Mass. “I believe in God – I think God is the love all around us.” Could he expand on that? No. He was “a larrikin” at school and “a typical student in a massive party scene” at Victoria. What was his inner life? Don’t know. “I was a good reader.” Really? He mentions reading Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and then adds: “I wasn’t into the literature so much, it was more like, Fuck, these guys are cool.”
Later, as a political reporter, he says, “I was a bit of a character.” True enough, but characters are relational. Who does he relate to when he comes home from a hard day of being tortured news artist Paddy Gower? No idea. He bangs up a great big TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED sign on the front lawn of his personal life when he says in the book’s final page, “I haven’t shared everything in this book: I have a private life, private family and private friends. I’ve chosen not to share that stuff for a bunch of reasons, but mostly: That’s all I have left. That is the only thing now that is mine and is private. And I hope people respect that.” And ZZZZZ. In the final paragraph, he thanks his viewers. “After all, that’s what the fucking news is all about.” Gee I thought it was about telling people things they don’t know as opposed to keeping them in the dark.
Oh well. Gower is an adorable person with a good heart and you can never stay mad at him for very long. This is the F#$%ing News delivers on gossip, provides an inside look at the way news is made, tells yarns about Gower’s years in the press gallery. The book really picks up from page 91 when he joins 3News. Up until then it’s standard journo stuff in standard journo newsrooms. Gower on the Herald offices in the early 2000s: “The newsroom trend of the day for guys was pastel-coloured shirts, ties, and dress pants.” He joined a journalist strike that lasted for 19 days. “It always made me smile years later when I was covering the Labour Party’s troubles and lots of unionists and MPs would go after me…I’d quietly laugh to myself, I’ve actually done more time on strike than all of you put together.” What bullshit. 19 days! Gower, working class hero standing firm on the picket lines.
If there’s a love story in This is the F#$%ing News it’s with Duncan Garner. He persuades Gower to join his TV3 team in the press gallery. “Duncan was like a hurricane at that time, the dominant political journalist.” 100% true. “He had a swag of big stories to his name, and a collection of scalps…His type of television journalism was changing the game.” I would love to read Garner’s autobiography (I doubt he would stoop to an as-told-to). His force and his rage formed a philosophy so powerful that all his successors as political editor believed in it, from Gower to Tova O’Brien to Jenna Lynch, each of them with their own individual characteristics and talents but all of them disciples of Garnerism. Gower grasped it immediately: “Working in print was like using a scalpel, whereas in TV it was like being handed an axe – it was blunt but very powerful.” A blunt axe is one hell of a way to take a scalp and Gower tells the story of his famous, wildly entertaining televised pursuit of Labour wretch Chris Carter down two flights of stairs into the black and white tiles in the Parliamentary foyer: “I was wondering where he was going to go or if we’d be stuck in this three-person whirlpool in the foyer of Parliament forever.” Classic.
The love story came to an end when Garner quit but agreed to stay on for another year. It was a messy exit. The pair clashed. Gower started seeing a psychologist (“I would sneak in there, not wanting to be clocked in the waiting room”) and acted out an Oedipal need to kill his father when Garner finally left: “Finally, I was running the show. I started with a purge to cleanse Duncan from the office. I emptied out his desk…I wanted it all gone.” They included a stack of dirty dishes and a red high-heeled shoe under the desk. Rock’n’roll! Gower, the stern new captain of the ship, got on with his life’s work – to purge politicians. He tells us the art of the scalp. But he cannot tell us the point of the scalp: “Looking back, there were stories I did where it all just seemed so…pointless.” He then searches for a point, and dials up a cliché: “I needed to be tough on politicians or they would walk all over me and, by extension, the public. I was keeping the bastards honest.” No he wasn’t. He was just keeping the bastards scared. In the next chapter, he details taking David Shearer’s scalp as Labour leader. “I didn’t feel great, to be honest.”
The book loses steam on long boring chapters about the time he lost his passport and the time he asked Donald Trump a question at a stand-up (not something Trump is likely to remember) and the time he had an eye operation. But then the book soars again. There is a compelling chapter on his breakdown – the burn out, the drinking – that led him to quit as political editor. It includes a melodramatic scene, in which Gower plays Martin Sheen (an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to pick up the bill) in the opening of Apocalypse Now: “One night I was lying on my bed in a hotel in Da Nang, a city in central Vietnam. I’d taken sleeping pills but they weren’t working. The hotel was a place where American servicemen used to go on R & R during the war. It had shutters and a big ceiling fan swooping in circles…I watched it go around and around and I could see the pattern of my life. Around and around, chasing politicians, getting nowhere, sucking the life out of me.” He was still on the black and white Parliamentary tiles with Chris Carter. Carter had got away; Gower was stuck there, in purgatory.
So he quits. Leaving politics liberates him. He stops drinking. He starts talking about his feelings. He makes all those Patrick Gower On programmes. He films in Antarctica. We are told it’s quite cold there. The book loses steam, again, and then soars, again, in the book’s best chapter, its emotional core: March 15. As soon as he heard about the shooting, Gower booked himself the first flight to Christchurch. “I wasn’t clear on what had happened. No one was … As we sat there on the runway, I was looking at the time, wondering what was happening and why the hell we hadn’t taken off. Then cop after cop started filing onboard. They were going to Christchurch, too, and the plane had been held up for them. This was vey big.”
Gower’s work on the ground that day was one of our most outstanding broadcasters this century at his best, and, by his own account, at his worst. He reported live from 7pm until midnight. “Throughout the night, it was mostly just me and a camera operator.” In short breaks, he’d find people to go on live TV. He grabbed one man out of his lounge. “I didn’t even know what he’d witnessed until we were live. He’d come face to face with the terrorist but left alive.” Later, though, he tells a woman on live TV that the latest information was 40 people had been killed. “She had absolutely no idea … She burst into tears. A lot of people watching were angry and made complaints. And they were right.”
He stays in Christchurch (“I was like a reporter possessed, zoned in and focused”) and the chapter reads like Gower is still crossing live, has that same white hot sense of tragedy, of awfulness, of history. You never find out in This is the F#$%ing News who Gower really is or what his life is like but the March 15 chapter is more important than that. It’s journalism, powerfully and vividly presented, told by a master storyteller to one of the best reporters in New Zealand. Big story, expert collaboration; sometimes, a very good book.
This is the F#$%ing News by Paddy Gower (Allen & Unwin, $34.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.