Paul Henry: I Was TVNZ's Performing Snake

An appropriate phrase springs to mind: "It's no use crying over spilt milk".
Disgraced ex-Breakfast host Paul Henry seems to be doing just that, accusing TVNZ of hanging him out to dry! He says they encouraged him to be controversial, and then let him take the rap for his on-air slurs (well, you made 'em, son!).
In an exclusive interview with New Idea magazine, Henry says TVNZ accepted his entertainment value and capitalised on him: "I was the performing snake with the sting in its tail. The better the performance, the greater the encouragement. And then when I turned around and bit someone's head off, they were happy to see the demise of the snake." He doesn't think it was reasonable. He says he was surprised how fast the mood changed, and that he'd turned from an asset into a liability...
Oh, come now! When you're a tv "talking head", you're just one of your employer's many assets to draw in advertising dollars. To be brutally blunt, you are there solely to drag the viewer from one ad break to the next: that's the harsh reality of working on television (and it's the same on radio).
If Henry now claims he didn't understand that reality, or that he hadn't felt the public mood shifting (after his myriad immature and irresponsible flippancies), then he's more naive than even his childish giggling on-camera would indicate. He was becoming a liability in the public eye for quite some time...
Yet even now, he says he has nothing to be sorry about (as he pockets a speculated $20,000+ for this New Idea article). I hope some of that money gets spent on his lovely mum - you remember, the one he featured regularly on tv, the one we all grew to like so much, the one who probably suffered far more embarrassment over this fiasco than even her son. She would have been mortified. He seems to not give a damn.
Meanwhile, New Idea will reveal Henry's future plans next week.
Can't wait.