Still photo credit – Isabell N Wedin.

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It is a stunningly personal question that reflects the inner vulnerability of our most influential broadcaster. No, he is not an egotist: he is, at heart, a little kid rattling round an enormous Remuera mansion with three small dogs and a cat, wanting to be liked.

Now the house is for sale, his job of 22 years ends on December 19 and for Paul Holmes, life as he knows it is about to change forever.

Holmes has done it all: the big gory stories, the sob stories, the scandals. He infuriated American yachtie Dennis Conner so much the man walked off the Holmes set on its first evening. He became the interviewer-of-choice for the famously difficult diva Dame Kiri Te Kanawa. He has bared his soul over his alcoholism, his prostate cancer, his marriage break-up and his affair with Fleur Revell. He fronted up to the nation over his step-daughter

Millie Elder’s P problems. For 15 years he worked two jobs – his arduous NewstalkZB gig which required him to get up at 4am and Holmes after the 6pm news on TV One, which kept him working late into the evening.

Many would have crumbled under the strain. Holmes just got louder, prouder and more irascible. He was still in his early 50s and enjoyed devouring the news of the day before the rest of the country woke up. His beloved producer, Phil Armstrong, who died suddenly of cancer in May this year, was still around. “We would meet on the steps every morning for 21 years and, you know, we were wildly successful,” he says.

“Doing breakfast made me well-briefed into the evening. I just loved them, loved the jobs. It was an immense privilege, brought a fellow a bit of prestige.”

He doubtless drank too much and his first marriage cracked under the strain. He swung through the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s with a succession of pretty, sexy, flirtatious women on his arm and married two of them. His first marriage was to Hine Elder, mother of his step-daughter, Millie, and 17-year-old son Reuben. He tied the knot a second time with Deborah Hamilton, a real estate saleswoman. Many of their close friends, “the Friday night group” says Holmes, are real estate rather than media people.

Today the wooden sideboard in the sitting room is crammed with photos, many of them Holmes with different people: Bill Clinton, Te Kanawa, his children – and with an old, extremely attractive, girlfriend “it’s strange how that one works its way to the front”.

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