He’ll Be Right co-host John Daniell, pictured in 2018, at his home in Auckland. A few years ago, I was having a drink with a friend and, having recently interviewed her father for a story, I mentioned how much I admired him. He’d run national and international organisations with success, had become rich enough to buy multiple beautiful properties and had now taken early retirement in an idyllic part of the world, all off the back of relatively humble beginnings as a teacher. And he seemed to be a great bloke. His only child had a different view. “Actually,” she said, “he’s made a mess of his life. He’s done all these big jobs and made all this money and now he realises that the one thing he really wants is to have a good relationship with me, but it’s too late. We don’t know each other.”