The inexhaustible Richard Quest makes a trip to Singapore to see who and what make the country run. Michelle Teo catches up with him to find out what makes him tick and what ticks him off.

Richard Quest doesn't stay still for long. The veteran business news television correspondent is often out of his chair or booming in animated speech, whether on set in television studios in London or during the interview with Options, when he grabbed this journalist's notebook and scrawled in it to demonstrate what he says are his terrible shorthand skills.

But his distinct style of presentation, described in the mildest terms as dynamic or exaggerated, is very much who he really is in person. "Bombastic, obnoxious, loud, pompous, arrogant — I've heard them all. Why would anyone assume it's deliberate? That's who I am," Quest says. "If you don't like me, don't watch!"

Watch him is just what people have been doing for the past 25 years. Quest is known for his lively approach to interviews and business features, enduring snowstorms in Helsinki and tear gas fumes in Athens. He has interviewed presidents and prime ministers, bankers as well as bakers, the Dalai Lama and the Pope, and has travelled the world over chasing stories from the mundane to the bizarre, including a "Quest for magic" that saw him perform magic in front of a live audience in London.

These days, he anchors the daily Quest Means Business show on CNN, the 24-hour news network started by media mogul Ted Turner in 1980 and which now forms part of Time Warner Inc's stable of film, television and publishing businesses. Quest also hosts the monthly Business Traveller show, which helps executives make the most out of work travel.

But covering business news would not have been Quest's career if his father had anything to do with it. As a young man from Liverpool, he had obliged Quest senior, a doctor and lawyer, and obtained a law degree from Leeds University. "I like criminal law. Because all life is in crime, don't you think? Scandals, people's miscreant behaviours; but I just preferred to do journalism." Despite being called to the Bar, Quest never practised, preferring instead to pursue his interest in journalism that was already apparent in school.

"There's something magical," he says, explaining his passion for journalism. "I remember, as a kid, listening to Morning Merseyside on BBC Radio Merseyside, having a transistor radio and just thinking, where does the voice come from? And being at the studios and going, he's speaking there and there're no wires. That's why they called it the wireless! And being fascinated by this, fascinated!"

Quest went on to dabble in radio at university and after law school, won a BBC scholarship and became a trainee in 1985. In 1989, he was assigned to New York City as the BBC's North America business correspondent. "I just fell in love with this idea of telling people what had happened. There's something that drives me, telling somebody something that happened that they don't know," he says. "I can get to 40 and regret being a lawyer. But I can't get to 40 and regret not being a top journalist."

Man to watch
In 2001, Quest moved to CNN. Having recently turned 50, there's no doubt that he boasts an impressive career history, as he rattles off a list of significant events that he has reported on. "I have covered every financial crisis that's happened since the mid-1980s. I was in court when Michael Milken [the 'Junk Bond King' indicted with racketeering and fraud] was sentenced. I did cover the junk bond scandal of the 1980s, I covered the dotcom boom and bust, I covered the Asian financial crisis, the Argentinian financial crisis, all the way to the recent financial crisis." To his detractors, he says, "at least give me credit for knowing what it's all about even if you don't like me doing it".

Armed with that experience, Quest now makes it his business to make financial news palatable for all. Quest Means Business, broadcast during evening prime time in Europe and Asia, is promoted on CNN's website as "the definitive word on business". His most recent trip to Singapore, in partnership with the Economic Development Board, was to produce a series of special reports on the country's innovations and its economy's impact on the rest of the world. That meant putting on a hard hat and navigating Keppel Corp's shipyard, where massive oil rigs are constructed, or winding his way through miles of waterworks at a treatment facility operated by Hyflux.

And in light of the banking scandals raging in the UK and US, Quest also spoke to Singapore's Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam and CEO of DBS, Piyush Gupta, asking whether the banking regulatory environment in Singapore could allow an event such as the Libor-rigging scandal to erupt. All of which could be pretty dry stuff, but Quest keeps it sharp and engaging. "Business news has traditionally been boring and spectacularly badly done," he says. "When I started at the BBC, it was a ghetto! It was a ghetto where they would shove out material. God forbid you had to do the stock market report. No one wanted to know."

Yet, Quest argues, business and economic decisions are among the most important ones that people make. "You rapidly realise that after fresh air, water, food, and possibly sex, the most important things in life are how you earn and spend your money." As such, it really riles him that the proportion of business news in regular television programming is meagre compared to the extensive coverage of other world affairs. "I think there's a bias against business news. I think at the first whiff of opportunity, editors will run another 15 acres on the Palestinian issue, or Afghanistan or Iraq — all very important stories — but 12 million people are out of work in the US as a result of this crisis.

The unemployment rate in the eurozone is 11%. It's an offensive number! And they still haven't solved the crisis." In fact, he believes that the real beginnings of the recent global financial crisis could have been reported far earlier. "One of the reasons more of us did not report the crash of 2008 is, we couldn't have got it on air. And even now, editors would rather concentrate on the politics of it, rather than the economics of it, because they understand that. That's where they can hang their hat on."

Whatever the case, Quest has set out to change the way business news is presented. News items on his show are often illustrated with analogies or props to make the subject material more engaging. At the launch of the euro a decade ago for instance, Quest travelled through the markets in Europe buying baguettes and such, to compare the impact the common currency had on the common man or grocer.

Last year, he employed the use of rugs and reproductions of US dollar bills to explain the impact of quantitative easing on the US economy. And in a recent broadcast about young entrepreneurs who have made their fortune producing and selling jelly moulds, Quest had several dishes of the dessert in various shapes — including one in the form of Buckingham Palace — quivering on the presenter's desk in front of him.

"But I'm a firm believer in Einstein's view. I'm all in favour of making things as simple as possible, but no simpler," he explains. "If somebody's interested they'll watch and they'll bear with you. I don't feel the need to have every single person understand me, if they're not interested."

Reel to real
There's never a dull moment with Quest, who regales his interviewers with anecdotes about his life as a television personality. Having been in front of television cameras for half his life, Quest is the consummate celebrity and has accepted being treated as public property. "I love it when people come and ask to have their picture taken!"

Of course, there are certain situations that could be trying, such as when he was on a difficult phone call to the editor and a stranger walked right up to him and took a picture with him, without asking. Or when, more recently, an American tourist in London spotted him at a distance and yelled out to her friend to have their picture taken. "My natural instinct is to say, 'don't be so rude'. But you don't. She is terrified that you're going to walk away without her getting a picture. So, she is just going to grab you and ask for that picture. And you've got to understand, this might make her day, or it might not."

And he concedes that as a high-profile TV personality there are things he can no longer do, such as going on political marches, or public places, to avoid unwanted attention. His public status also means being careful about causes he may want to support, to avoid any conflicts of interest. But there's no doubt he has graciously accepted whatever constraints that celebrity status brings. "That's the rules of the game. It has come to me quite slowly over the years and I've gotten used to it. And I think if it comes to you fast, overnight, you'll find it more difficult to deal with it."

It is perhaps this approach to life in the limelight that has helped Quest weather the fallout of a nasty situation that could have led to the end of his career. In April 2008, he made news headlines on both sides of the Atlantic after being arrested for loitering in Central Park in the wee hours of the morning, reportedly with a rope tied around his neck and to his genitals. He also had a small bag of drugs in his pocket. A judge later ordered him into drug rehabilitation.

Quest is conscious that the incident will haunt him for a very long time. "If you're asking me about an incident that's happened some years ago, you might as well just ask it," he says. "I'll be blunt, yes. New York, 2008. Do I wish it hadn't happened? Absolutely. Do you have to learn and move on from that sort of incident? Absolutely."

Perhaps it was because Quest had established himself as one of the most recognisable personalities on CNN that it took only a couple of months for him to return on-air at the channel, and not long after that, to bounce back at the helm of a new show. As he explains, one can only be better after experiencing mistakes and misfortune.

"You get through those things. They define, they challenge, they make you rethink and they make you take stock. And the strength is not in what happened. The strength is in how one responds to the help of family and friends. And that, I think, is what you take from challenges that happened," he philosophises, adding that such events somehow form the foundations of one's life. "As you're building your career, and particularly when you're in the media, when you're in the public eye, you can find yourself on shifting sand. And it's only once the concrete has gone in that you realise whether the building is standing on firm ground."

Does it bother him though, that people are still asking about what happened in 2008? "God, no. They're going to be asking that on my dying day! It'll be my obituary!" he exclaims. "I can't avoid it. Google me! It'll be the first thing that comes up! You live with it!"

This story appeared in The Edge Singapore on July 30, 2012.