Patrick Gower is the latest high profile media person to look at the impact of alcohol in New Zealand by examining their own drinking habits. Mark Jennings previews Patrick Gower: On Booze, which screens on Three tomorrow night.
One of the most alarming parts of Paddy Gower’s latest documentary is seeing the guy stripped down to his undies and standing in front of a body scanner - it is not a pretty sight.
The participants in the scene, a fitness trainer and nutritionist understand the staged nature of it but their responses when assessing the journalist’s body fat seem spontaneous.
How bad is it? asks Gower: “To be honest mate it is pretty fucking bad,” says the trainer. The nutritionist grimly adds that Gower’s stomach has double the volume of fat it should have, “so you are at high risk of cardio-vascular disease”.
As we know, Gower has already made high rating documentaries on illegal drugs weed and P but this time it’s a legal one - booze. It was a natural progression for Gower. His journalistic journey through addictive substances surely couldn’t circumvent the biggest and most pervasive of all drugs.
Gower’s own beer belly (usually hidden by a well-cut suit jacket) testifies to a liking for booze. Less obvious, given his successful career to date, is his penchant for binge drinking.
Like many New Zealand males of his generation, it started early.
“I was 15. My old lady had gone on an overseas trip, so dad was looking after us. He had a party for his birthday and got a keg and I was allowed to drink…. Ended up spewing on the lawn outside.”
Nothing particularly unusual about that. Most teenage kids, certainly those of Gower’s era, have thrown up on alcohol - but for Paddy it didn’t stop there.
“Hard drinking is part of my life ... the only thing that will stop me drinking is a bad hangover”.
Without spoiling the watch, the documentary follows Gower’s journey of self-discovery. It could’ve been cliched but somehow, it’s not.
The success of Gower’s documentaries has been important to the network. They have provided Three with its biggest audiences in recent years and out-rated whatever TVNZ has countered with.
While the wins have no significant financial benefit for the network, they are important for morale - it shows the behemoth can be beaten.
Gower’s look at booze and what drives hard drinking should, in theory, rate its socks off.
It will have a good lead-in from Master Chef NZ and has been heavily promoted on-air.
And it is on a topic most of us are familiar with - 80 percent of the adult population drink.
RNZ’s Guyon Espiner made a similar documentary in 2021 based around his decision to give up drinking two years earlier.
Espiner has won plenty of plaudits for outstanding work in his long career in print, television and radio but says the impact of his documentary, Proof, surprised him.
“It is the most reaction I have ever had to a story. I had to put aside two days a week just to deal with the emails that were flooding into my inbox.
“I loved beer, I truly did, and I had great times drinking with friends and colleagues, but I just couldn’t moderate my drinking even though I wanted to, and I tried. And that’s the thing there are about a million people in New Zealand that struggle with moderation. “
Espiner’s documentary looked at the role advertising and the availability of alcohol plays in our booze culture, but Gower’s is more about holding a mirror up to himself and by implication others who struggle to control their drinking.
Talking with Gower (over coffee) it’s discernible that he didn’t enjoy the personal exposure and experimentation in the same way he did with the documentary on marijuana.
“This wasn’t like smoking dope with some good-looking women in California. Usually, I enjoy watching the finished product. I can sit on a plane, get out my phone and watch the final cut and think this is quite good. But I can’t watch this, I just can’t really.”
Gower says he didn’t start out to make a documentary about his own drinking. “I knew I would do some drinking to be part of it, but we actually started off doing some zooms with Iceland which has upped its drinking age to 20 and crashed binge drinking among young people.”
The plan had been to travel to Iceland, but Covid disrupted this and other filming ideas.
The decision to focus on Gower’s own drinking came after director Justin Hawkes had filmed a discussion between Gower and his friend RNZ Morning Report host Corin Dann.
The two were great rivals when they were political editors for TV3 and TVNZ respectively.
Dann and Gower discuss the only time Gower failed to show up at work at the appropriate time.
Gower had ended up drinking whiskey with Winston Peters in a bar in Courtenay Place the night after covering Peters’ decision to go into a coalition with Labour in 2017.
“The stress of the job had got on top of me, and I couldn’t handle the job or the alcohol or anything,” Gower tells Dann who replies: “You weren’t okay at that point, that’s why I was worried and others around the (press) gallery who are fond of you were worried too ... we were worried about you, but we never talked to you about the booze or rang you up.”
According to Gower, the discussion with Dann (it is filmed in a bar) changed the course of the documentary: “I didn’t think he would hit me so head on…. That was the moment the doco changed.”
It also led to a conversation (see the video above) with Dann’s wife Lotta, who successfully overcame her alcohol problem and wrote a book on her experiences.
What happens in between the conversations with Corin and Lotta Dann becomes central to the story and as Gower puts it: "Some people will be taken aback, it’s some personal stuff - really personal.”
I ask Gower why he decided to expose himself to the degree he has given he could’ve stopped the filming or judiciously intervened in the editing.
“I am interested in pushing limits. Pushing limits creatively and journalistically interests me.”
Patrick Gower: On Booze (Tuesday 8.35pm on Three)
