How to Interview for Radio and Television
Over the past 10 years I’ve been fortunate enough to interview hundreds of interesting people, from Oliver Stone, Nicolas Cage and Dustin Hoffman to intellectual heavyweights like of Sir Patrick Moore, Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins. I’ve spoken to people who were raw with the pain of unimaginable tragedy and I’ve rejoiced in the successes of those who have overcome every obstacle to fulfil their dreams. I’ve done interviews that have won awards and I’ve made some of the worst mistakes in broadcasting history, or at least, that’s how it felt at the time. This guide is an amalgamation of tips and pointers that I’ve gleaned over the years from broadcasting, listening to broadcasting and listening to broadcasters talk about broadcasting. I’ve left comments open below as I’d welcome your suggestions, so consider this a “live” post. It’s important to note that while many suggestions will apply to all disciplines of journalism, some will not; print journalism has its own constraints and freedoms.
PREPARATION
Researching your Interview
If you are in unfamiliar territory, arm yourself with knowledge. The more you know, the more relaxed you will be if your interviewee references something from their life. I used to need to know almost everything there was about an interviewee before I ever spoke to them, I would scour the internet, read books, watch videos and read their past month of tweets. In fact, it’s something I still do occasionally. Ask your friends what they know about the interviewee or the subject – sometimes you’ll stumble across something that’s common knowledge to everyone else, but somehow passed you by. As long as you know as least as much as the average reasonably informed man on the street, you can’t make too much of a fool of yourself.
Legal stuff
Know defamation and libel laws – they’re pretty straightforward and for the most part are common sense. Basically, if you’re going to criticise someone or damage their reputation, any statements you make better be true (and you may need to prove it). There are a few get out clauses though, and a basic guide to the laws can be found here at the Digital Rights Ireland website (applicable in theory to both Ireland and the UK). There are changes on the way though in the UK and in 2009 Ireland updated the defamation act to include a bizarre blasphemy clause, but you’re unlikely to fall foul of it as there is no clear definition of exactly what blasphemous matter is in this country.
Prep your guest
Always brief your guest on your programme so that they know the tone. Who are the audience? Is it post-watershed? How much detail you want to give depends on the style of your programme. In light entertainment, you want to get fresh, natural reactions from your guests, so I think it’s generally a really bad idea to let them read the questions beforehand. Some of the PR-handled guests may request them, but will be happy with a list of vague topics you’re likely to cover. If you have a researcher, get them to ask if the guest has any funny, interesting stories about the topics you’ve mentioned. This pre-interview is how the major TV chat shows always get such great anecdotes: the guests know to have a story or two prepared and the researchers let the presenter know to ask the question.
If your interview is for a current affairs or news piece then there’s no harm in sending a list of questions or even calling the guest yourself to fact-check and rehearse exactly what you’ll be covering, it may even make a nervous guest more comfortable.
Confidence for beginners
There are plenty of books out there that tell you how to gain confidence as a person, but none of them will really prepare you for interviewing someone for the first few times. My advice is simple: start strong and you’ll stay strong. Make sure your introduction to your guest is clear and confident. Write it down on a piece of paper and have that paper in front of you as you record.
Know your equipment
Technical problems lead to awkwardness and apologies from you and even worse, impatience and contempt from your guests. Make sure you know how to use your recorder or desk. Make sure you know how to reset it after someone else has messed with it. Record and play back the sound on it before meeting your guest. Use a fresh battery and clean disk with lots of space, every single time. About 4 years ago, I was flown over to London to interview the entire cast of Poseidon, including Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss and director Wolfgang Peterson only to find out that the Minidisc was dirty. Leave no margin for error, ever.
Sound quality
This should go under the Know Your Equipment heading, but it’s so important, I gave it its own damn heading. Because the human voice is so dynamic, capturing it is problematic. Set your levels according to your guests loudest speech levels, ask them to count to 5 enthusiastically (most people just mumble otherwise and then get more animated during the interview). If your levels are too low, it will sound echoey and distant, which is means people strain to hear what you have to say; not a good way to start. If they are too high, your voice will peak and be limited by your hardware, resulting in a the sort of sound you hear on a mobile phone. NEITHER OF THESE CAN BE FIXED IN POST PRODUCTION. Keep an eye on your levels – listen to how it sounds in your headphones and keep them out of the red. Two other quick recording tips:
1: If you are outside and recording with a microphone, always, always, use a pop-shield (also known as a windshield).
2: If your recorder has any wires, tape them in place so the sound of them moving isn’t picked up.
Clarity is Key
This is where print journalism and broadcasting diverge. For radio and television, it is all about the talker. Good talkers make your job easy and so it follows that poor communicators make it a lot more difficult. As presenter of a science programme, I’m only too aware of the importance of clarity. If a principal investigator has a story about a cure for cancer but can’t explain in a way that people will understand I can’t use him, no matter how interesting his work. When inquiring about an interview always ask first: who’s the best talker of your group? Is there someone who has had media training or regularly gives presentations? Do you have a press spokesperson? And make sure you speak to them personally, particularly if it’s for a live programme. Over the years, I’ve been assigned countless interviewees that were supposedly “great talkers” who had “done loads of programmes” and found them to be painfully poor communicators. It sounds harsh, but your listener doesn’t owe you their time: if they don’t like what they hear, they will change the channel.
THE INTERVIEW
Your Voice
Very, very few people like the sound of their own voice the first time it’s played back to them. It sounds weird and uncomfortable the first time. It may seem counter-intuitive, but hardly anyone sounds natural and relaxed when they first start broadcasting – it’s a skill that’s developed through practice. Personally, my delivery is completely different to my normal speech, yet it sounds right somehow – a lot of this has to do with metre and emphasis. A monotonous voice quickly tires the ear and so most presenters develop a more dramatic affectation when they speak. The late Gerry Ryan was a master of dramatic speech using pauses, whispering, shouting and even character voices to constantly surprise his listeners and keep them wanting more. Underline the words that may benefit from emphasis or characterisation and try to bring a bit of variability into your speech.
Timing
If you have 20 minutes with your guest, you can probably span their entire career, but if you’re on a junket and have only 6 minutes of face-time before you’re moved on get your good questions out as early as possible. 6 minutes goes by really, really fast and to make it more difficult some interviewees will be monosyllabic and others take 3 minutes to answer one question. You should be able to guess how many questions you can fit in by the end of his or her first answer.
Introduction
Make sure you ask your guest how they would like to be introduced. Many journalists, experts or spokespeople represent more than one group, so make sure you get it right when you introduce them or they might have to correct you – remember: start strong, stay strong. Keep it nice and short and resist the urge to hype up or over-flatter your guest, it sounds shit.
Be original.
This may sound obvious, but it’s harder than it sounds. If you’re interviewing someone, the chances are you’re not the first and in the case of celebrities you almost certainly aren’t even the first that day. The best soundbites come from the unexpected, so rather than ask the guest the Wiki questions, ask them about current affairs, particularly if there’s a story that’s relevant to them, if it’s new and topical, it will be fresh to them and a relief from having to rehash the same answers over and over.
PR Interviews
Most high-profile Interviews are organised by Public Relations companies with one aim: to sell a product. It is common courtesy to allow the interviewee a brief mention of the product, but feel no obligation to plug it for them. We had Gok Wan in recently, he was brilliant: a charming guest who mentioned his Specsavers campaign briefly and without fuss. It may be tempting to cut the mention out in the edit, but be aware that if the PR company gets wind of it, you may not get another interview again.
Keep your questions short
I struggle with this all the time, always to my detriment. A common mistake from presenters is that they want to show off their knowledge on a particular topic. The thinking behind it is logical: I don’t know my guest personally, and I want them to know that I’ve researched this so they think I’m smart or well-informed and we can really get into this interview. If I impress them, we’ll form a good rapport. I’ll give you an example, I recently heard an interview go out where the interviewer said something like: Did you find that in your movies, of course you’ve done 3 romantic comedies so far since the end of the naughties and I believe some of them award-winning, one is nominated for an oscar isn’t it, your first, do you find that you always play the same roles? Reads ridiculous, doesn’t it? Listen out for it and you’ll notice presenters do this all the time. Ask your question: Do you worry about being typecast? if they want clarification or ask what you mean, then you can expand on why you asked the question.
If you are going to ask a Personal Question:
Again, do your research: How has this person responded to being asked those sort of questions before? Privacy is important to everyone and many people, including press-hungry celebrities consider many topics out of bounds. Unless it’s a burning question that everyone wants to know – consider whether it’s a good idea to offend your interviewee and the repercussions of this professionally, PR companies, reputation etc.
If you want to increase your chances of getting a response rather than a slap in the face, give your interviewee some sort of indication that this next question is going to be awkward. This can be as simple as saying “Now then” and flashing them an apologetic face, or if you wanted to be very polite you might say “of course you don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but everybody wants to know…” Reading that, it sounds like it gives them an easy out, but it works more like a challenge, and I’ve found most people give you some sort of an answer.
If you are going to ask a challenging question:
Of course, confrontation makes great radio and television. But understand that as a presenter, you’re essentially starting a fight: you don’t want to end up on the canvas with a black eye. Say, for example you ask a CEO about a recent oil spill or you might be challenging a publicly made comment by a politician. Before you open your mouth, you need to be 100% sure that you have your facts correct, and that you can quote the sources, if demanded. Two of my favourite interviews of the past year were calling TV “psychic” Derek Acorah a manipulative faker who took advantage of vulnerable people and exposing a “leading Irish homeopath” as a complete nutjob. But I made a rookie error when I interviewed an elected TD, Luke Flanagan, about his decision to continue to grow and smoke cannabis now that he was in office. I challenged him that the drug has long-term effects on a person’s mental health. Of course, he asked me to quote one single study. I couldn’t, I didn’t have the notes with me. Even though there are indeed studies[1] linking not just short-term associations with psychosis but also long-term use with schizophrenia, he won the argument and I ended up sounding like a fool.
A way of asking a controversial question without getting your hands dirty is the Bill O’Herlihy approach to criticism. The popular Irish sports presenter is regularly cajoled by his panel for knowing little about professional football as he never played. To sidestep this, O’Herlihy always asks his questions in the third person, deferring to an expert: The papers today are saying that we don’t need Stephen Ireland and we’re better off without him, what do you make of that? Rather than: We don’t need Stephen Ireland, do we? It’s a softer touch better suited to light entertainment as it rarely gets the red-faced indignation that makes for compelling broadcasting.
Sensitive Topics
You’ll find that if you are talking about someone’s illness, a death or an atrocity, you’ll instinctively change your tone, but often broadcasters try to fill emotional moments with words to avoid an awkward silence. Silence is golden, and this applies in broadcasting fifty-fold. If your interviewee is discussing something difficult, show them on your face that you empathise, but let the silence sit before asking your next question; it’s astonishing what 2 seconds of silence can do to add gravitas, sensitivity and emotion to an interview. Resist the urge to veer the conversation back to a comfortable subject, give your interviewee time to recover themselves and press on. A great presenter will know when to let the silence set in and when to move on. It’s a technique that XFM’s Andy Ashton passed on to me and was probably a large part of why our talk show won the PPI award last year.
After the Interview
Thank the guest and the PR person and if you can, try to memorise his or her name. Good manners will get you a long way and you can guarantee that the rep will remember your name the next time you meet, so put the effort in. It’s also helpful if you ever need a favour from them, such as tickets to a VIP event.
Save your notes
If your memory is as bad as mine it’s vital to archive everything. Have a folder on your PC where you store all of your prep sheets, they may come in handy for your next interview. Catalogue all of your guests’ contact details and make a note of how good a guest they were, so that the next time you need a guest on a particular subject you can see if they’re worth revisiting.
[1] 7. Zammit S, Allebeck P, Andreasson S, Lundberg I, Lewis G:
Self-reported cannabis use as a risk factor for schizophrenia
in Swedish conscripts of 1969: historical cohort study.
BMJ 2002, 325:1199-1201.
8.
__
Arseneault LJ, Cannon M, Witton Murray RM: Causal association
between cannabis and psychosis: examination of the
evidence. Br J Psychiatry 2004, 184:110-117.
An important review of the evidence from longitudinal studies of a
causal relationship between cannabis use and subsequent psychiatric
illness.