I used to be a journalist
While researching Norman Cook at the Library today - ie. trawling through the internet - I happened upon this article I wrote for The Observer, Sunday 4 July 1999, about the media's fascination with asking famous people mundane questions. I reprint it here partly because it is quite prescient in places, partly because it contains a number of references which seem antique (such as Adam and Joe having their own C4 show - if only!), and partly because I can barely believe that the Observer was giving me so many words to play with at their expense in 1999. It's also very unlikely that I'd have been able to research the piece by trawling the internet at that time. I didn't even have a modem connection in 1998 and was still keeping an alphabetised cuttings library at this time. I'm not even sure if the Observer had a website? My guess is that I researched it old school! Them were the days.Ask A Silly Question ...
What's in your pockets right now? I'll tell you what's in mine. Some small change, a clean hankie, door keys, a Cartman keyring, some Fisherman's Friends and an asthma inhaler. How revealing. From the contents of my pockets, you, the pop psychologist, have ascertained that I suffer from asthma, follow South Park and have a front door. It really is astounding what you can find out about somebody from their belongings. Now, if I were famous, you'd have a scoop, a telling insight into my character, for we live in forensic times, when the scrutiny of celebrity has reached the invasive intensity of keyhole surgery. While unscrupulous tabloid journalists go through your dustbins round the back, the more resourceful detective will be at the front door, asking you straight out: what's in your fridge, what's on your mantelpiece, or - perhaps most revealing of all - what's on your record player?
Channel 4 has just launched All Back To Mine, a pally, televisual take on Desert Island Discs, in which pop celebs talk us through their record collection, selecting key tunes that theoretically shine a light into their soul, but in reality will have been hand-picked by the programme's producer to provide an 'eclectic' menu of musical clips (in the first programme, Fatboy Slim aka Norman Cook picked out one punk record, one soul record, one acid house record and so on). Though the title has been underhandedly 'adapted' from Mojo magazine's All Back To My Place (a revealing steal, since popular television is turning into one long magazine), Desert Island Discs is the template to which All Back To Mine owes its commission.
But with respect to Roy Plomley, the idea of the questionnaire as key to the soul was not new when he invented the programme. Marcel Proust famously filled in a questionnaire at a friend's birthday party in 1884. Proving himself a horribly precocious 13-year-old, to the question 'Where would you like to live?' he wrote: 'In the country of the Ideal, or rather, of my ideal.' In response to 'Who would you have liked to be?', he parried: 'Since the question does not arise, I prefer not to answer it.' Seven years later, Proust submitted to another questionnaire, sealing its respectability forever. Favourite painters: Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt. Favourite poets: Baudelaire, Alfred de Vigny. Favourite colour: 'Beauty lies not in colours but in their harmony.'
Desert Island Discs is, however, by far the best-established clinic specialising in 'favourite things' psychoanalysis. Pillars of society have, for 57 years, been selecting eight pieces of music, providing eight biographical jumping-off points for Plomley, Michael Parkinson and latterly Sue Lawley. While most guests are candid enough to select truthful, representative cues, some politicians shamelessly exploit a golden opportunity to paint themselves as the fully-rounded human beings they so obviously are not. In 1996, Tony Blair's list was, typically, all things to all voters: The Beatles, Debussy, Robert Johnson, Bruce Springsteen, Classic FM fave Samuel Barber and - here's the curve ball - 'Cancel Today' by obscure Latin guitar duo Ezio. (Perhaps Tony had heard them on the radio in Tuscany. Or perhaps Alastair Campbell had.)
Such calculating dishonesty exposes the 'favourite things' approach as flawed - although who can blame Tony for trying it on? When you or I are asked, in real life, to name our favourite music, we reply: 'Oh, all sorts really, a bit of anything.' It's a conversation-stopper, so the advanced social animal will instead reel off a prepared list of artists who make them sound effortlessly cool and knowledgeable ('The Beta Band, early Roy Budd, Basement Jaxx, Giant Sand, The Delfonics, Mercury Rev before they got on the cover of the NME'). When, in 1086, King William conducted the first survey of England, you can bet one bright spark tried to outwit the Domesday Book auditors by claiming to have a much cooler breed of pig than he actually had.
On Channel 4's The Adam And Joe Show, the DIY duo subverted the endlessly corruptible Desert Island Discs format by arriving at a celebrity's house by the back door and ruthlessly ransacking their actual record collection for the specific purposes of ridicule. The slot is called Vinyl Justice.
But such investigative rigour is usually deemed out of bounds in this cosy shopping-list world where every radio station worth its salt has its own pipe-and-slippers variation on Plomley's brainchild: Radio 1's My Top Ten, Radio 2's Personal Choice, Radio 3's Private Passions, Radio 4's The Tingle Factor (tunes that make the hair on the back of the neck stick up). In the Eighties, the BBC ran the TV series My Favourite Things, expanding the brief from music to, well, everything. Margaret Thatcher eulogised a hideous ceramic figurine commemorating the Falklands based on the flag-raising at Iwo Jima - and how much more human it made her seem! In these days of fragmented scheduling, celebrity's choices makes an ideal 10-minute filler, be it My Monet, Music for the Millennium, or The Nation's Favourite Comic Poem. If anyone from a TV production company is reading, My Ugliest Ceramic Ornament remains up for grabs.
What makes us so fascinated with the mundane tastes of the rich and famous? Does it bring John Redwood closer to us if we learn, as we did in one newspaper's weekly Fridge File, that his Zanussi contains Heinz Weight-Watcher's Dressing, red pesto and Waitrose jam? (His press advisers clearly think that it does.) Is it a worrying side-effect of Hello!-mania, where a star's new baby or toy boy is now only marginally more interesting to us than what make of toaster they have? A more practical answer is that there are simply too many celebrities now, and without the available quality time in which to truly get to know them, we must rely on the diagnostic shorthand of what's-your-favourite-colour?
This vapid questionnaire-culture cuts society up into small, bite-sized pieces and spoon-feeds it to us. It elevates the mundane to an unwarranted level of import (the Eighties pop singer Howard Jones keeps three Toblerones in his fridge) while reducing valuable insight to trivia (in Woman's Own's Loves And Hates, we learn that Chris Tarrant hates Americans). What's worse is that the format knows no bounds; fridge-inspection can be found in every publication from highbrow to no-brow. One broadsheet supplement invites celebrities to Show Us Your Pants.
In an effort to restore some intellectual ballast to this brain-bypassing approach to journalism, Vanity Fair has been publishing its Proust Questionnaire since 1993, a 25-question census which - in name chiefly - reminds us that the clipboard model is not a new one. Proustians on the staff of Vanity Fair, including London editor Henry Porter, thought that naming their questionnaire after him was a splendid wheeze. But forget the fancy literary back story - questionnaires are a great fallback for magazines because they can be done by fax. And publicists love them because they're quick, and if push comes to shove, they can fill them in themselves.
Whether discovering that Anne Widdecombe enjoys listening to the recorded sounds of hippos for relaxation (as we did on Desert Island Discs last week), that Joanna Trollope's greatest extravagance is 'posh soap' (the Guardian Questionnaire), or that TV's Gail Porter's number one smell is Gaultier Le Male (Passions in Now magazine), this is psychological profiling by way of the playground, and no more reliable a judge of character than the unthumbed copy of that Isaiah Berlin biography 'left out' on someone's coffee table, or the casually draped John Coltrane album atop their hi-fi. And yet, it seems, everybody's at it, pushing us, like pressurised players in a docusoap, to make ourselves sound far more exotic and interesting than we really are.
Now, in my other pocket, I have a loaded pistol and tickets to an Ezio gig
posted by Andrew Collins @ 12:04 PM
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I suppose two things in favour of this questionnaire style are:
1. someone *might* say something bizarre and odd. how they choose to lie might be revealing
2. if you have a set list of question - like 'In The Actor's Studio' - (available on YouTube if you want to see lots of actors crying as they talk about their past traumas and Kevin Spacey doing Al Pacino impressions) - if you have set questions, the interviewee doesn't feel that it's odd or rude when you move onto more invasive questions about their life or history - cos, yeah, everyone gets asked these questions.
p.s. trivial moment - the bottom of this page: © Andrew Collins 2007
you're living in the past, sir!
Ezio...flippin' 'eck!
But I digress. I have interviewed several hundred slebs in my life, and I can't for the life of me think of more than a handful I would like to speak to because they're mainly so uninteresting, and the ones who actually have something fascinating to impart will not gain you a commission because they are neither Jordan, Posh, an X-Factor quarter-finalist or a WAG.
At least none of these examples contain the most vacuous question of all: 'what's your favourite colour?'.
I used to be a journalist too. God I miss it. I'd kill to ask a handful of questions, no matter how inane.
Hang on - wouldn't you have got more out of Scarlett if you'd just emailed her a questionnaire?
I was flicking through Empire this morning and the only interview that didn't seem scripted was Danny Boyle's...
I remember the section in NME (Rebellious Jukebox, I think) which used the questionnaire format. Was always the first bit I'd read... word for word you'd probably get more from the artists there than in a three page interview. Steven Wells writes well, but in those days his pieces were rants with the occasional quote thrown in.
Yours were top notch, obviously, AC.
*crawls*
Interesting article!
Speaking of "All Back To Mine", there's a collection of CDs called "Back To Mine". The premise is very similar - it's a CD compiled by bands and DJs with tracks they wouldn't normally get to play in a set.
I can heartily recommend the Adam Freeland one. There are some great tunes in there and it's all well mixed.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss_w_h_?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=back+to+mine&x=0&y=0
I think Blair would have been more likely to hear Ezio (or Ezio & Booga, as I seem to remember they were originally called) if he'd hung around Cambridge at all in the early 90s. Barely a week went by when they weren't playing The Boat Race or The Junction...
Off topic, but was the mince pie you gave Richard Herring from Costa? I quite like the ones with almonds on top.
Yes it was.
The Observer did have a webular site back then, but it was a bit sparse. The actual Observer page is unavailable, but here you can see what the Guardian site looked like back in April of 1999:
http://web.archive.org/web/19990429173228/http://www.guardian.co.uk/index.html
(The headline is 'Keegan says yes to England job' - that could be a 2009 headline for all I know about football)
Andrew,a question(unrelated but by no means silly)
Will you and 'Banter' (and hopefully some of the regular participants) be returning this year? I really hope so because for what it's worth I think it's magnificent.
Kate
Kate, put it this way: Radio 4 have not told us there won't be another series of Banter. However, neither have they said that there will. I can't understand why they're not jumping at a fourth series!
I use online resources for research a hell of a lot (the Times Digital Archive, we salute you), but I find that to get the most from the wealth of information that's been cast out into the ether, it still helps to have a smattering of general knowledge. Random details and half-remembered connections make me search for things I didn't know I was looking for and make the result more interesting (to me, if no-one else). I see a lot of things now on TV and in print that reek of 10 minutes (if that) on Wikipedia, and if you're better informed than the person telling you about x, what's the effing point? My house is still full of analogue research materials, or, as they used to be known, books, magazines and photocopies. Fellow researchers (and, for that matter, interviewees) sometimes ask "How do you know that? How did you find that?". It's simply the way I was (and you obviously were) trained, and I thought it was a pretty basic skill.
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Well said, Louis. As I sit here in the British Library (as indeed do you), I am surrounded by students and other researchers with great big piles of books in front of them. They are also using the internet, clearly, but nothing can ever replace books - and cuttings - for research. You're far more likely to find something you didn't expect in a book than on a webpage - and as you say, the only information you can really trust online is that which is taken from books or newspapers. It's a valuable tool, but not a replacement for actual research. You're bang on when you say that you need somewhere to start - which can be a memory or a thought from your actual brain - and you also have to use your own experience to filter the information.
I love Wikipedia, by the way, but it's a means rather than an end.
Wikipedia is, indeed, a wonderful starting point and source of quick, non-contentious information, but the unwary user deserves all they get if they place blind trust in it. Rampant falsehoods seem to be dealt with quickly, but if you catch one before it's been deleted and then perpetuate it, that's a problem. I had immense fun on Saturday night thwarting the premature ejaculators who wanted to be the one to add "He is the 11th Doctor Who, and I am the king of the Wikipedia Doctor Who updating hobby" to Matt Smith's entry. I just kept undoing their additions until it was official. I mean, it was blindingly obvious who it was going to be once they'd said 'youngest ever', etc, but that's not how reference works, er, work.
I've got to schedule a day or two up at Colindale in the near future, because I need to find things that I know can be found only in 1950s copies of the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, News Chronicle and the Manchester Evening News. Wikipedia gathers knowledge, but its policy on sources means that it actively avoids adding to it, so someone still needs to search and publish.
Jump they should! While the current Radio 4 shows have great line-ups, none have as good a premise as Banter (I'm thinking of 'Act your Age',surely it's not that easy to pigeonhole people into a generation?).
Anyway the fistoffun.net archive can only last me so long and I miss it! If all else fails do you think Richard's attic and the built-in mike on the Mac could support a popular panel show?
Kate
Hello Andrew,
it's baffling that Adam & Joe remain so great but are no longer on the telly. As someone who clearly knows about all things TV, do you have any non-libellous insider info as to why this is so? It's sad that their show on 6Music, despite being excellent, does have a slight whiff of Alan Partridge about it "I don't want to be on 6Music - nobody listens to 6Music!"
Large cheer. B
According to The Word, they get 600000 listeners on 6Music- I'm sure they are reasonably happy.
There is a book to be written about the changeover between the pre and post internet days. In 1999 it was exciting, going on the internet.
I really hope there is another series of Banter as well. You never know I suppose.
Hey, I love the Beta Band! Thanks for bigging them up, even if it was a few years ago.
Ben - nice to hear from you by the way - I have asked Adam if he anything to say in reply to your question. Let's see. I think Adam and Joe's show on 6 Music (which I listen to as a podcast) is one of the very best things on the radio. I usually rail against the opportunistic recruitment of TV stars to the radio, but in this case - as pointed out elsewhere - it's been radio's gain and TV's loss.
Interesting fact: Joe took over from me as the host of Radio 4's Back Row in 2003.
I miss out on Adam and Joe, the bedroom radio being strictly analogue. By the time I get downstairs on a Saturday morning, Radio 2's got its hooks into me. I should persevere, however. I caught the compilation on New Year's Day and nearly suffered asphyxiation by laughter during the hot water bottle discussion ("Don't you call it a hotty botty?" "No, it's a toasty rubber sack") and the words they'd added to the Antiques Roadshow theme.
Following Ben's question about why Adam and Joe aren't on the TV any more, I brought this thread to Adam Buxton's attention, and he provided this explanation - stressing that he doesn't speak for Joe and it's his personal view on the matter:
Basically the TV stuff we most often get offered are panel shows and all that horrid shite and both of us have learned from bitter experience that we don't belong there really. The shows we would like to make, no one wants to commission at the moment. We keep hoping someone will ask us to travel to exotic locations and make glib comments once there but so far no offer has been forthcoming. Now Joe is busy with his screen writing and I'm doing bits and pieces of acting and video making so there isn't the time to get together as a duo and apply ourselves properly to cracking the TV nut. We both miss it occasionally but honestly, being on 6 Music has turned out to be much more fun than anything we did on TV, albeit very different. I don't think either of us feel the least bit Partridge-ish or resentful about life in the digital margins! We seem to have found an audience that on the whole, likes what we do and will forgive us the shortcomings that perhaps a more mainstream audience would not, so we're delighted.
So there you go. If you haven't tried Adam's blog yet, you should. And there's an FAQ there, which covers this kind of stuff too.
Thanks for the reply, Adam.
Thanks for getting a response from Adam, Andrew.
As a loyal 6Music (and Adam and Joe) listener, I feel a bit resentful by the sentiment that they're too good for the station! It is a national station after all - better than some shitty local commercial station. And being in the digital margins means presenters can fly under the radar a bit more - I've heard plenty of daytime swears and offensive remarks that Ofcom would surely frown upon, but usually no-one complains. We're a forgiving audience!
BTW I'm gutted that despite being an ex-presenter, you've outed yourself as a Smooth listener! Where's your loyalty :-)
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