PlayStation's Game Development Boss Leaves Sony, May Head To Atari, In Multiplayer & other: June 2008

John Campbell is sitting in the studio explaining the "splendid unreality of television".

His hair, usually a sculpted hedge, is now fluffed up like a rooster's comb: the TV3 star has been running his hands through it in distress. Luckily the cameras are dead and the lights are off.

The set, he explains, is "like a very large garage". It's "weirdly intimate". Each night, while he waits to launch the show, the weather presenter is performing in front of the blue screen beside him. "For four minutes I have to sit here in complete silence." It's a time of agitation and repose.

But at 7pm, when he starts, he has no sense of hundreds of thousands of people watching him. "It's just me, the crew, and Carol [Hirschfeld] in my earpiece." His real audience is the crew, who "laugh or they don't laugh they're just like viewers", he explains. "I take my cue from them about how it is going."

And while he talks, the newsreaders are slipping out the other side of the garage, a downstairs room in a blah building in Auckland's Eden Terrace.

Campbell operates in a strange zone between public and private. He is, of course, a famous face and behind the face is a desperate urge to be left alone. The interviewer hates being interviewed, especially about himself, but that's what's happening now.

And we are discussing the fiasco over his "interview" with the thief who stole the Victoria Crosses: when the private Campbell was publicly humiliated. This open-air bollocking seems to have thrown him.

"There have been moments in this job when I've wanted Scotty to beam me up so much," he says. "Because like anybody in public life like anybody in any life humiliation, public embarrassment, shame, whatever, is exactly the same for me as it is for anyone else. I don't feel it less because I've been on television for so many years."

Campbell says the row over the purported interview actually a reconstruction with an actor playing the thief "knocked me because it was a mistake by us and it was just one of those things... in my experience of being a journalist, for what that's worth, for 20-odd years now, it is that very often disasters are simply mistakes. There aren't conspiracy theories or premeditation, someone just buggers things up, and we did there.

"We got this great get, you know. For whatever reason, this guy he still hasn't been arrested I actually think at some level he hadn't realised the magnitude of what he'd done. I think he actually needed to say to people, `Actually, reeeeaaaaallly stupid thing. I feel really stupid. I've given them back. I want you to know I understand."'

The thief seemed not so much guilty as embarrassed about what he'd done. "I mean, if you steal a bloody widescreen from someone the rest of humanity doesn't give a shit," says Campbell. "But actually he managed to steal something that everybody in the country cared about."

Campbell abruptly changes tack. "Had we just said `reconstruction', then... So afterwards we spent a lot of time saying to ourselves, buuuug-ah, bugger bugger bugger bugger bugger." The TV host seems almost as embarrassed as the thief.

"Highly-strung" is too limp a description for Campbell. The soul of the TV host is constantly twanging, and humiliation seems to have stretched it to new extremes of tautness. He has been in trouble before, of course, most notably with his controversial ambush interview with Helen Clark at the height of the Corngate Affair. Clark called him a little creep, and plenty of pundits took her side.

But in that case Campbell felt he was justified, a vital consideration for a man whose moral tone, and sense of his own moral purpose, is pitched pretty high. "I did that interview, and I don't resile from it," he says. "I think the BSA [the Broadcasting Standards Authority, which criticised him over it] got it wrong."

But this moral comfort is not available over the medal thief, which was just a botch. In this case, the TV host who freely admits he likes to be liked found himself spurned and lacking any excuses. The soul vibrates likes a hummingbird's wings.

A particularly wounding blow came from displaced alpha broadcaster Paul Holmes, who devoted a long newspaper piece to Campbell's "deceitful transgression".

"He didn't simply stuff up. Campbell deceived. It was the most deceitful transgression I have ever seen in television current affairs. It was astoundingly wrong. It was astoundingly stupid... "

Campbell declines to answer Holmes, but he does remark: "He's always nice to my face."

This year Campbell abandoned his trademark tie he now wears it only on special occasions and he misses it. The new look was an attempt to get rid of a possible obstacle to viewers in areas outside the big cities, where the show always rates best. "In the centres where we don't rate so well I think there might be a sense that I'm a bit, you know, a bit up myself or aloof or remote or something."

He loves wearing ties: it helps him feel like a TV host. "My little boy puts on a space suit and genuinely believes he's an astronaut. Well, for me, dressing up to go on television is part of the process of making the transition one is required to go into the studio. You're inventing yourself... So I miss the tie, but I'm getting used to it now."

Some wonder whether the tie is a prop to hide behind and that Campbell's elaborate courtesy is a defence mechanism to keep the world at bay. It's true, he says, that his politeness can be like that, especially when people see him out in the world and want to talk. "What you want to do is not offend them or be rude, and you also have to remember that that's probably the only encounter they're going to have with this chap who's been coming into their living rooms five nights a week. But equally I have to survive and move on, particularly when I live my life as middle-aged father of two."

But when he relaxes with friends, he says, his manners aren't a shield. Campbell's commitment to good manners is a passion.

"The real me is an extremely formal chap, you know, I believe strongly in manners and I believe strongly in do unto others and all of that kind of stuff...

"When I see somebody being rude to a waitress or an air hostess or whatever it reaaaaallly upsets me. Where is their mandate from? Who mandates them to talk to somebody like this? We should always leave people at least as well as we found them. I mean, that's the very least we owe them as citizens in the same community.

"I feel that really strongly and I find it odd that we live in a world where one has to justify that! I mean it seems to me that if one is an arsehole or if you're cynical or rude that somehow is seen as legitimate and real and honest and therefore in some respects meritorious. Well, as far as I'm concerned, that's a pile of steaming turd!"

There is too much cynicism in journalism. "One, it's lazy and it's a default setting. Two, it offers heat but no light. Oh, there's too much of it. Scepticism is a different thing entirely. Scepticism is entirely reasonable and legitimate and should be required of us."

But what irritates people about Campbell is gush. His enthusiasms are torrential and sudden, and cooler viewers think Campbell gets carried away. Some think it's a pose, but that seems to be wrong.

Today, for instance, he is interviewing Scott Dixon, the Manurewa lad who has just won the richest sporting event in the world, the Indianapolis 500. Campbell is thrilled at his victory, and when he finally gets through on the phone the joy overflows.

"Scott! Everyone is so proud of you!... Everyone is just stoked, it's just great news! Ohhhhh, congratulations!"

When he comes off the phone, Campbell is glowing and fizzing. It's "a wonderful moment for me because how can you not be happy for that guy? Even though I'm not a petrolhead motor racing fan, I don't follow it in the least, how can you not like the bugger?"

All journalists have felt this thrill of course, and they are as liable to nationalist pride as the next person. What is so striking about Campbell, though, is the extremity of the enthusiasm. His affection bursts out in great purple blobs, sometimes in strange places. Introducing the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz at Wellington Readers and Writers' week this year, Campbell said he had been so pleased at Stiglitz's defence of American monetary policy the US Federal Reserve targets not just low inflation but full employment "that I wanted to ask you to marry me!"

Campbell's politics also annoy some viewers: he doesn't keep them a secret, as most broadcasters do, and he once notoriously revealed that he had voted Alliance. Now he seems to want to change his image as a left-winger.

"I don't know where people get the idea that I'm a socialist... People have got it into their heads that because I like the arts and because I like music that I am some kind of parody of a white liberal," he says. "In fact I have a profoundly idealistic attitude towards just about every political persuasion as long as there's no bigotry there."

He was not party-political left, and he had voted for the Alliance's Laila Harre because "she was doing fantastic work on paid parental leave, she was a bright really impressive dedicated MP who even her opponents I think begrudgingly admired...

"And, in good faith, I believe it's inappropriate for me to support either of the two major parties. No, I just don't think that's right, because I interview them both. I feel very strongly about that.

"But I also feel passionately about democracy, so people who don't vote piss me off. So I've just got to cast my vote around the fringes really. And the people who criticised me and many of them were other journalists what, do they not vote? Do they abrogate their democratic right? I mean, you know, it was like people discovering that their parents have sex. It was!

"And some people who criticised me have media-trained senior politicians, which I would not do but I regard as a total betrayal of journalism."

Campbell says he is socially liberal and supported the civil union legislation, homosexual law reform "and all the isms or phobias or whatever I actively dislike. [But] my first job out of university was as a sharebroker, for God's sake. Many of my mates, people I love and adore, are right of Genghis Khan".

Those who accuse him of being too gushy forget about his interviews with politicians. "I've done some of the toughest, most robust, most controversial interviews on New Zealand television in the last decade." The Corngate interview with Clark was nothing if not tough. His Budget-night interviews with Clark and Key were Campbell at his best: sharp, hard, and fast.

When Key wobbled on how he was going to pay for National's tax cuts, Campbell barked and leaped, accusing him of being "as slippery as a snake in wet grass on this subject". When Clark waffled about Labour's tax cuts as being a response to economic hard times and high dairy and petrol prices, Campbell asked: "And polls?"

To those who say his show has turned soft, Campbell says: hang around for the next five months of the election campaign and see. He is also eager to scotch the rumour that his show is failing in the ratings. While it rated poorly at the start of the year, it has since lifted, according to figures from AGB Nielsen. It is closer to its TV1 rival Close Up than it was two years ago.

Campbell Live's ratings usually dive in summer, he says, because the show's audience is younger "and the problem with young people in urban centres over January is that they do stuff. They might be staying after work for a drink or having barbecues or playing tennis or going to the beach... We really don't see our audience returning in any numbers till daylight saving ends."

Campbell is an extreme example of what might be called the Actor's Paradox: a retiring and private man by nature, his job is to perform each day in front of a national audience. This courtly fellow must do what most people never do: his job is "to stab politicians in the front, not the back".

During the weekends, all he wants to do is take his daughter to the ballet and his lad to rugby and hang out with friends. "I'm not a gregarious person. I don't go to parties, so it suits me to be at home."

He can't explain these contradictions. "I haven't a clue."

His politeness comes from his family, he says, who "by the time I was sentient was truly middle-class and then became upper middle-class as I grew older". They lived in a beautiful home in the very expensive suburb of Oriental Bay in Wellington.

His father was a businessman who ended up as business manager for the 1987 Rugby World Cup. His mother a political liberal trained in France to become a chef and now runs a successful French bistro in Martinborough ("an epiphany", raved the New York Times).

The teenaged Campbell opposed the 1981 Springbok Tour, and his father was for it. But there were never any screaming matches in this family.

"Losing my temper's not really ever been a habit of mine. I find it very, very unattractive, deeply unattractive."

The family wasn't into "tantrum-throwing either". The worse things got, it seems, was that "Dad and I, during my adolescence, we on occasions took our own counsel."

So how did this shy and genteel chap cope with the hatred, such as the time a woman leaned into the pram he was pushing in Ponsonby Rd and told his daughter, "I pity you having him as a father"?

"You just have to let it not upset you too much, otherwise I shouldn't be doing this job," he says. He ignores the insane ones. But typically, if he thinks the person is right, even if they're vicious, "I often write back to them and say, `Actually, that's a good point."'

John Campbell always tries to be fair.

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