OPEN
UNIVERSITY
9123 OU11 - Interviewing for Radio
I wasn't allowed to do the interviewing on videos, since Richard was always there and insisted on taking this role. To be fair, I let him do the interviewing since he was much more experienced than me and did a good job. On the other hand, I had to do the interviewing on my own sound recordings.
In fact, these were discussions between a number of participants rather than individual interviews. Thus, we obtained the specialists in a number of fields, usually three of them, and asked them to discuss some aspect of the future.
I remember most fondly Jonathan Porritt, then heavily involved in green politics, being the ideal guest. He asked me, before we started, what I wanted to get out of it; and then proceeded to deliver everything that I wanted. The others were not quite so professional, but they were also amenable. My only problem child was one of the directors of a multinational who literally dried, about ten minutes into recording. Hugh, who was producing the recording, wanted to carry on; but I didn't think the commercial director would have been able to. So I insisted on starting again, much to Hugh's disgust since it meant more editing. In fact, knowing that he could always start again, the director had no problems with the second take.
Perhaps the best recording of all was with three politicians, who of course were very used to having a microphone put in front of them. These were the parties' representatives on the European Union, then the European Economic Community. Thus we had David Howells, who headed the foreign affairs committee in the Commons for the Conservative government, and Menzies Campbell, who was Liberal party spokesman on Europe, as well as George Robertson, who was then Shadow Minister of Defence and later became head of NATO. I set the scene by saying that we were looking at the future of Europe, and I didn't want them to be embarrassed in six years time when the situation changed and their rhetoric was distanced by events. Accordingly, they all dropped their normal party stances and produced a very good summary of how they actually saw the future of Europe. Indeed at one stage, when some bickering almost broke out, one of them actually stopped the others by saying "Since we all agree on the main points there is no point in arguing about details". This interview was recorded in a hotel near the House of Commons. Immediately afterwards they trotted off the House of Commons, where they then indulged in a very bitter debate about their supposed differences on the future of Europe. It is terrible what politicians have to do for their party.
Usually, though, we recorded in BBC studios. Mostly these were modern sound suites, but we managed to get into a couple of rather historic ones. First of these was the BBC's concert hall, in the basement of Broadcasting House. This was meant to take, of course, the full BBC Symphony Orchestra, so we were huddled in just one corner of it. The other one was in the studio at the BBC's overseas broadcasting operation, on the Aldwych. This was one of the original studios. Best of all it had one of the very old massive ribbon mikes you see in newsreels of the 1950s. On the other hand, it still worked very well and we recorded the session without a hitch.
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