Patrick Gower

In the documentary, Gower gets personally confronted as he investigates his own drinking habits. "One of the things that people will see tonight is I actually ...

Newshub National correspondent Patrick Gower's back with another two night documentary, this time looking at alcohol. He talks to Jesse about the series and ...

We've watched as Patrick Gower tackled meth, marijuana and hate - but his latest documentary is the hardest-hitting so far.

You're as bad as I am," stammers a drunken Gower, battling with his booze. Sure, people were worried about their friend and his coping methods, but nobody wanted to mention it. "Here's a fact. But Patrick Gower: On Booze is different. But he wasn't okay. As he sinks his teeth into the issues that this legal drug is causing the country, we see a different side of the journalist - and a different side of ourselves.

OPINION: By making Gower the focus of this documentary, an opportunity was missed to focus on other very real, very harmful effects of alcohol.

Since writing about my own mother's alcoholism I have been encouraged to attend an Al-Anon meeting, set up for family and friends of alcoholics. It would have been good to see more of them, as a wider response, rather than as a Gower intervention. It is both brave and important to speak openly about issues that countless Kiwis face behind closed doors. A doctor telling Gower he is lucky to be healthy does not have the same effect. But an alcoholic with zero consequences, no health issues and what appeared to be a very “easy” ability to stop. It was promising that a well-known and well-respected journalist was being so open about tackling his own hazardous drinking.

If someone in your family suggests you have a look at Patrick Gower's alcohol documentary, perhaps you should take the hint. I watched it before coming to.

So what's the value of that you might ask? Tim Dower: Gower's new doco is a great piece of television Tim Dower: Gower's new doco is a great piece of television

Newshub's national correspondent drunkenly stumbles around his old flat and into the sober light. Paddy Gower has carved out a niche as being up for anything.

And that he is a man. Gower’s great gift to the necessary discourse in this instance is that he is so relatable. For a man who’s made a career out of synthesising ideas and information for television audiences, he is utterly stumped when it comes to ingesting the information required to make a change. It’s still too rare to see men attempting to deconstruct elements of toxic masculinity and I would happily have watched more of that and less of the industry statistics. The obvious is the facilitated-by-television access he gets to his drunk self. The cop ride-along and scenes from Courtenay Place give some broader context to the social harms alcohol causes, but they’re a bit too fleeting to compete with what’s become a very personal story. It’s here that you start to understand the collision between the up-for-anything, likeable television personality and his heavy drinking. Not going to lie, I had a bit of a cry at this point. So far, so Paddy. He is Paddy G and he is up for anything. Gower starts the special by heading to a 21st birthday on Crate Day, our national celebration of binge drinking. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that Paddy Gower has always been up for a drink. Like a vine, drinking is so tightly coiled around our concept of socialising, it’s hard to know where to begin pruning it back.

OPINION: We've watched as Patrick Gower tackled meth, marijuana and hate - but his latest documentary is the hardest-hitting so far.

You're as bad as I am," stammers a drunken Gower, battling with his booze. Sure, people were worried about their friend and his coping methods, but nobody wanted to mention it. "Here's a fact. But he wasn't okay. But Patrick Gower: On Booze is different. As he sinks his teeth into the issues that this legal drug is causing the country, we see a different side of the journalist - and a different side of ourselves.

Patrick Gower has opened up about how his alcohol addiction and the pressures of his role as Newshub's political editor combined during the 2017 election to ...

In an attempt to understand his drinking problem he met with Dann, who in doing the same political reporter job at competitor TVNZ for years was familiar with ...

It is filled with facts and figures about alcohol, who drinks it, how we drink it and the damages it causes, but more than that, he's come clean about his own ...

However, if there is someone in your life who you are worried about, how do you strike up a conversation about their drinking without offending or judging them? One in five of us are hazardous drinkers like Gower – unable to see the damage alcohol does to ourselves or to those around us. For some, this documentary is filled with a few home truths – watching it might have been confronting or even triggering. As the old saying goes, "it's not what we're drinking; it's how we're drinking". One thing that struck me watching this documentary is how our drinking might weigh on our own minds, but we don't necessarily talk about it to those around us. As he states at one point in the documentary "Hard-drinking is part of my life ... the only thing that will stop me drinking is a bad hangover". In putting himself out there, he's hoping that we in turn stop and think about our own drinking, or the drinking of a loved one, and question how we have normalised alcohol use in New Zealand. I think there will have been a variety of reactions to this documentary.

A rare event happens on television tonight. Three will screen a serious panel discussion in prime time. The topic is New Zealand's booze culture and, ...

Hawkes uses Gower’s sessions with a psychologist to form the narrative backbone of the film. Controversially, it also has a 10pm curfew for children aged 12 to 16. Reader donations are critical to what we do. Iceland can be an inspiration.” So, what will the panelists discuss? I think he is a rare person.” Gower's insistence that heavy drinking is actually normal finally ends with what his psychologist calls an “awakening to booze”. He has “survived the Titanic” and had a “psychic shift”. Three will screen a serious panel discussion in prime time. I had no confidence, eh?” Gower’s ability to emotionally connect with the people he is interviewing and get them to “freewheel” or forget about the camera is one of his strengths and it allows Hawkes to make fast-paced, entertaining documentaries – documentaries that can rate on a commercial network. Gower told Newsroom he was supposed to be “merry” for the interaction with the students but his drinking “went off a cliff” and the cameras kept rolling. The documentary took a hard look at Gower's heavy drinking and what lay behind it, but it didn’t provide many answers as to New Zealand’s longstanding problem of alcohol abuse.

What you need to know: Panelists will discuss everything from the age New Zealanders start drinking and if there are too many bottle shops, to whether it's ...