Kim Hill signed off yesterday. Her legion of fans will be bereft.
I am not one of them. Hill is ferociously intelligent and can be an incisive interviewer. The problem is that she used her skills very selectively – purring with approval for people she liked, but occasionally eviscerating those she didn’t. Don Brash comes to mind.
Hill has a long memory. During the last segment of her final show, my name came up. (I didn’t hear this; a friend told me.)
The following is from RNZ’s account of Hill's exit interview with her colleague Bryan Crump:
"Her punchy and penetrating interviewing style has not been without critics, she says.
"The British writer Tony Parsons, who hung up on Kim during an interview before saying 'You've got your head up your arse' [I think that should have been after saying 'You've got your head up your arse'] and New Zealand journalist Karl du Fresne, who once called her [a] 'dominatrix', come to mind.
"'[du Fresne] hated me because I hadn't given a very nice interview with [former Australian prime minister] John Howard and also I say 'filum' [an Irish pronunciation of 'film'] ... Because he criticised me saying 'filum', I've never been able to stop in case he thinks he's won. So I do it all the time now.'"
I’m sure she didn’t mean to be taken literally when she said I hated her. Just for the record, I don’t hate anyone. But I think it says something about Hill that she still remembers something I wrote 13 years ago. I’ll take that as a back-handed compliment.
For what it's worth, my column about that 2010 Howard interview is here.
11 comments:
ANON "I dont care what they say about me, as long as they say something and spell my name correctly."
If the role of an interviewer is to elicit interesting and insightful comments from an interviewee, then Kim Hill has always been a failure. I remember her public interview with Margaret Atwood (who was visiting for the Readers and Writers Festival, I think) in Wellington in 2020. It followed Chloe Swarbrick’s public interview with Atwood in Auckland, which was pathetic. Everyone assumed Hill would do a much better job but it was equally unenlightening. People put it down to Atwood being a notoriously difficult interview subject, but I listened to an interview Tyler Cowen did shortly afterwards and that was two hours of brilliant anecdotes about Atwood’s life, her writing and her concerns about the political weaponisation of her books. The comparison made me realise what a poor interviewer Hill really was.
Kim Hill could be an exceptional interviewer, unfortunately she was also one of the RNZ presenters who fully grasped the post-modern post-truth group think. The real shame was that Mediawatch also became post truth during the Russel Brown era and never fully recovered. If Mediawatch had actually called out some of the things presented as settled science that aren't, perhaps we would have seen more exceptional interviews.
I expect she'll be replaced by someone worse, like Lisa Owen, or by someone with a speech impediment in the pursuit of diversity.
Yay - finally someone else who does not join the general hagiography of Kim Hill. I stopped listening to her many years ago because she was so rude to subjects she didn't agree with, talking over them, contradicting them and doing all she could to diminish them.
Kim Hill has been banned from my whereabouts for the past 20 years or so. It was about the time when my definition of purgatory was to be caught in an endless traffic chain of camper-vans, with the radio jammed on NatRad - and KH. Aaaaagh!
Oh well, she can look sideways to a retirement life of reading Jeffrey Archer books.
Kim Hill’s definition of an interview is “An opportunity to demonstrate how much cleverer I am than my subject”. The constant interruptions were tedious. NB tense - I abandoned her years ago. Totally unprofessional. Darling of the luvvies which says it all.
As it happened, also I listened to Kim Hill's so-called "interview" of Don Brash a few years ago - and that absolutely put me off Kim Hill from then on.
It was cruel, it was disgusting, it was terribly unfair to a gentle, mild-mannered person - and it was a quite unnecessary way of showing disagreement with an interviewee. From then on, of course, I became a great fan of Don Brash - and remain so to this day!!
Seems 'I'm with you' & others here. I was a fully-paid up fan, apogee being mid 90s when I was producing heirs and often pinned to the feeding chair. I recall the Archer interview well, not so much what was said but the tone, lol. Yes, the Brash interview was a turn-off, & some others. Seems I slowly drew away, in line with the general turn-off that Natrad elicited in me...Hayden Donnell on Mediawatch, Wallace C taking over The Panel & platforming the oafish David Cormack & some incredibly vexatious wimmin for International Women's Day once, Kathryn R's interview with Paul Goldsmith that was plain rude & what R Singers says above about her enthusiasm for things lefty...what she saw in Billy Bragg eluded me & just look at him now. I started podcasting her interviews that I thought I might bear until nowadays when I have abandoned her & National entirely. Fair to say there are other options now that absorb me, this blog being one. Yes Karl, compliment! (thanks for the FSU link)
I heard Kim Hill occasionally over the years. Saw a few TV appearances. It was mainly her voice that put me off. My descriptive of her would be supercilious. If you can catch up with the Oxford Thesaurus entry for supercilious you will know where I am coming from. Even so I think all of that is too kind by far. A skim through the Listener cover article confirms it for me.
Like many others above, I stopped listening to Hill years ago, after hearing her attack dog style with any interviewee that she disagreed with.
Her nasty, vicious interrupting style is not journalism.
Good riddance Hill.
"'[du Fresne] hated me because I hadn't given a very nice interview with [former Australian prime minister] John Howard"
I recall that interview, in fact it is the only time I have ever made a complaint to the Broadcasting Complaints Authority. Howard was a guest in our country and I felt he was treated shamefully by Hill in a way that reflected poorly upon all of us. It was broadcast by the tax payer funded Radio New Zealand network after all.
The BSA felt that Howard was an experienced politician and could be expected to put up with her crass rudness. (not their exact wording). Howard may have had to put up with it but I didn’t. I doubt she lamented my absence or cared much about my complaint. It appears she did omit to give me a mention in her final interview however, so Karl what ever you said must have penetrated more deeply into her psyche.
May she retire in peace. There has been much to be grateful for lately.
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