The Life and Times of a Brown Paper Bag by Kevin Milne

Author:Kevin Milne [Kevin Milne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869793623
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2010-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Some of the laughs we had did not always result in a story making it to air and were sometimes at our own expense. Philip Alpers tells a story about how he carefully set up a sting, having found the business address of a crook in an Auckland office block. At a time he was sure the crook would be there, he’d march straight in through the door of the business with a film crew and demand to speak to him on camera. Unfortunately his research wasn’t as scrupulous as it usually was and, when they burst in through the (wrong) doors, they found themselves face to face with a totally bewildered Marcia Russell, at the time a senior news executive with TV3. What made it more awkward was that Marcia was married to one of the top executives at TVNZ, who had responsibility for a large number of programmes, including Fair Go.

Quite recently I dashed down to the Wellington ferry terminal on a tip-off that arriving in 10 minutes were the people we were after for importing dangerous, knock-off GHD hair straighteners. They were two women, one Chinese, the other Caucasian. Sure enough, two women matching this description were taking their luggage off the conveyor belt when I arrived. I confronted them with a camera, asking if they were importing fake hair straighteners into New Zealand. They denied it, but of course they would. I followed them all the way out to the taxi rank, demanding responses. One claimed she was a visiting tour operator and this was not a good look for Wellington. Yeah right. When I got back to my office, there was a call from Absolutely Positively Wellington Tourism. Apparently, I’d been harassing two VIP guests, out here to promote the pleasures of coming to New Zealand. After what could best be described as a John Cleese moment, when the realisation of stupidity coursed through my veins, I offered to say I was sorry in every way possible — flowers, chocolates, the lot. Luckily, the lovely Wellington tourism people eventually accepted my apologies. While not wishing to minimise the distress I caused these innocent visitors, we do sometimes have to take risks to get our villains.

The closest we ever got to having the wrong guy on the show was in the nineties when we were investigating what we thought was a suspect tae kwon do club. It was programme day, the show going to air live that night. At about five in the afternoon, a TVNZ driver was despatched to Wellington airport to pick up the guy who ran the club somewhere in the central North Island. He’d been described to us, by phone, as a large Korean gentlemen, and the arrangement was that he’d wait at the Air New Zealand information counter for our driver to pick him up.

Sure enough, when our driver got to the airport, there was a very large Asian gent at the information desk. Our driver went up to him and explained he’d get him to Avalon for his TV interview.

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