How to become a TV natural

Crawford Media Podcast

Patrick Gower, or Paddy as he is known, was one of my first and favourite New Zealand news discoveries. Not that I discovered him in the sense of a talent scout. As you’ll hear in the podcast, Paddy moved years ago from print to broadcast, where he established himself as one of the most well-known and loved NZ TV personalities.

What fascinates me about Paddy is that his on-screen persona is so close to the off-screen reality. Also that he has no discernible “TV voice”, is a master analyst and communicator, and seems to love the constant attention that comes his way. For all his comfort in the limelight, however, Paddy is a sensitive guy and regularly goes through torture, often self-inflicted, in the course of his profession.

A great example is Paddy’s public self-examination over a poor interview he conducted in 2018 with far-right commentators Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern. I was standing by as he conducted that interview, and I can verify it was not good. Most journalists would have buried it: Paddy made it a key element in his riveting documentary Patrick Gower: On Hate.

Text versus audio

Subscribers to this newsletter are building steadily, which is wonderful. Please share, or let people know they can subscribe to the podcast by searching for “Crawford Media” in their podcast apps.

If you would prefer I dedicate more time to text-only newsletters, or you are getting more out of the podcasts, let me know. At present I don’t have enough time to make both full-length newsletters and podcasts, so I’ve chosen audio for now. It gives you such a clear view of character!

Have a great day,

Hal

The Crawford Media podcast music is”Ethernight Club” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit halcrawford.substack.com