"Cheeky darkie" is how he repeatedly described the UN Secretary-General to his fawning, simple talkback audience.

indeed, is the symptom of - self-obsessed, hyperactive wankers egotists.

Never much liked the NZ Herald's editorials. Never liked him either. Thought his move to his own TV show was unwarranted, but there were some great moments and then it went from hard to soft and lost it's way and Holmes became a parody of himself and... I just never liked him. It was perhaps the fact that he let the audience know just how great he thought he was that made me dislike him. I've talked to people who have a respect for him that is reverential to the point of worship - and I just don't get it. Is it because I black? [W]
The Herald continues:
The argument can be made that others - notably Colin "Uncle Scrim" Scrimgeour and Maud "Aunt Daisy" Basham in the 1930s and 1940s - occupied a equivalent place in the nation's cultural life.

And doesn't that say everything. From the frenzied rantings of dear old "Aunt Daisy" that I've heard in documentaries she was a hyperactive, neurotic, annoying bitch lady and anyone with half a mind would have switched it over to anything else - even Radio Berlin - rather than put up with that shit. Were they rationing brain cells too? FFS. Mad women frantically knitting cardigans, at varying stages (pre- and post) lobotomy - that was the audience back then. Arguably Homes is in the same mould - a chattering, opinionated parrot, whose constant repetition of phrases (such as "cheeky darkie") in amongst the prattle keeps the shallow minds of the new audience similarly entertained: uptight white males - the sons of the Aunt Daisy listeners.

You would have to be fairly thick tolerant to put up with the ads every ten minutes or so on ZB (easily they have the most ads of any station). You would have to be something beyond tolerant to put up with filling your time voluntarily with commercial advertising if it was the sacrifice necessary to listen to the staccato indignation of the country's most uptight white males: Paul Holmes, Leighton Smith and Larry Williams. I can't stand them. I've tried listening - I have on the odd occasion tried - but Holmes is instantly irritating, Smith is bigoted, and Williams is just plain thick.

They say Holmes' columns are quite good, so I'll have to read at least one... at some point... in the distant future.