The questions that change everything

Transcript:

Hello, everybody. Hi.

Good afternoon.

And hello, Mark.

Thanks, Helen. Hi.

Mark, do you think there’s such a thing as a stupid question?

It’s complicated that I am I’ve worked in various companies where the chief executive at some point says there is no such thing as a stupid question.

And believe me, there really is. And I’ve been in, I’ve I’ve been in rooms where they were asked. But as a general principle, no. It’s it’s correct that I understand why people say it is. It should encourage anyone, no matter how young, to ask a question.

If anyone here if you’ve seen the various films or plays about Enron, Enron collapsed because the journalist asked the question, how does Enron make its money?

And, they said they were so stupid. That’s a completely stupid question, but actually it was a very good one as it turned out.

And the company collapsed because their wealth and their share price was an illusion. So that’s a great example of what and actually, the journalist in that case said, I’m sorry if this is a stupid question, and it wasn’t.

So no. There isn’t.

Do you reckon you’ve ever asked one that isn’t a stupid question?

That is that is or isn’t?

Or maybe a question that you’ve thought, oh, that was a bit stupid.

No. I’ve never, no. Be well, I mean, I just think you have to not think like that.

It depends kind of interviewed it. I’ve done I’ve interviewed three thousand five hundred people at least for TV, radio, or newspapers, and it depends the level of risks. So, this week, I’m doing an interview for The Guardian with someone, and I will just take more risks. I mean, because I’ve got the tape, and I will transcribe it.

You’ve you’ve got to be careful in broadcasting because you have a producer in your ear.

And, a very clever and successful journalist, her career was quite badly affected because the producer said in her ear during a discussion, but what is DNA?

And she repeated this on air. Severe back to her reputation. There’s people seeing her as someone who would know what DNA was. And she did. Now, that’s complicated because that was what’s known in broadcasting as being the viewer or the listener’s friend.

But you tend or I would anyway. I mean, you tend to fudge it around by saying, you know, for anyone that hasn’t studied Latin or physics or you know, ever could you just my great friend and mentor who was very it’s a huge influence on me, Melvin Bragg, Lord Bragg of Wigton.

One of his catch phrases on in our time is, could you just pack that for us?

Which you see again you could see is a stupid question, but it’s not because it just gets yeah.

But say you try you you try to avoid hideous embarrassments on air in particular if it’s live. I’ve done a lot of live interviews. The recorded ones, again, has less risk. So, yeah, in the in many in the live interviews, you would just think, if you don’t quite know what, if you’re not sure about something, you would be more cautious.

Mhmm. So I’ll stop in a minute. But, so if you’re doing live broadcast interviews, it’s as if you’re listening to yourself on a slight delay, and you will stop hopefully stop the question or sentence before it becomes too embarrassing. That’s why, broadcasters tail off sometimes with three dots because they realize they’re about to end their career.

Hopefully not from me today, though.

No. No. No. No.

You’re So you’re asking questions, I think, often on behalf of the audience in your your series.

You’re asking questions that we want to know the answer to. How would you or would you tap into that beforehand, or do you just ask what you wanna know?

Now, I mean, that sorry. It sounds patronizing, but that’s a very good question. I mean, it’s it’s very hard to, it’s the most difficult thing is to establish before any interview what is the purpose of this interview. So the kind of interviews that a lot of you would have done or been on the end of, the purpose of a job interview is to decide whether the person is fit for that job or you want to work with them.

In the kind of stuff I’ve done, it’s a really difficult balance. I mean, if you I’ve interviewed JK Rowling two or three times, I think TV, radio, and print, and that’s a really difficult one, because if you say what do people want from that interview, there will be people who want to know why does Harry play that shot in Quidditch in the Chamber of Secrets?

Why does he use his left foot or hand or whatever? I don’t know very much about Quidditch, but I can’t remember the rules. But, you see, they really really want to know it at that level.

And then there will be a group of people who only want her to be asked about her views on trans rights.

And then there are a group in the middle who just want to know, which is what I would want to know actually, how do you go from sitting in a cafe in Scotland as a very poor single mother to being one of the most powerful people probably in the world is the amount of money. But also that you see JK Rowling and there’s a lot of snobbery about her still. But when people look back at history, there’ll be a few writers, I think. Dickens is one of them, Ian Fleming who wrote the James Bond, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang books, who just have this extraordinary, gift for writing popular literature.

And so for me, you want to get somewhere you you might consider, you know, go somewhere near the two other areas, but really you’re getting to that. I am the thing I’ve always remembered is it changed my well shaped my career a lot, is that I discovered just when I was starting out in the nineteen eighties, God help us, that, the first, the first regular interview series in an American in any newspaper, but it happened to be in America, which was in the eighteen eighties, was called What Are They Like At Home?

And I think that’s a really good question there because, if you interview Joe Root, we mentioned today, Harry Brook, Kamala Harris, whoever, Keir Starmer, you of course want to know about their public life, but what he really wants to know is what are they like at home? And I so I I always keep that question in my head. And Sir Martin Amis, the, I say sadly late now, but one of our great writers who died recently, and he did a lot of interviewing and he helped me early on because I talked to him about, doing the three interviews.

And he said, what you’re telling the reader is what is it like to be in a room with that person? And I think that’s another very good question. Just get a sense of the space of them in the room, how they behave. They become too obsessed with whether they tap their left foot as I am at the moment, but you might mention it once.

You just keep be alert to all of that.

And you’re sort of there breaking I imagine these people must be interviewed thousands, if not more times across their career. How do you break out of asking the questions that they’re asked every day and into something perhaps deeper or more personal?

You can’t always. And it is it was a real shock to me once. I for radio, I interviewed sir Terry Gilliam at the end of a day. Anyone who’s seen, Notting Hill, there’s this thing called The Junkers, and they still go on. They go on less now because, actors have got wise after COVID, and they do them on Zoom now. But they used to come to a hotel in, London normally, sometimes Manchester Leeds.

And, I’d asked for the last interview of the day because we wanted more time than most people because we’re doing a half hour special with him. And when I got to him, it was his thirtieth interview of the day, and, the previous twenty eight had been translated from the Japanese or into Japanese with a simultaneous translator.

And I mean he was he was catatonic by the time we got him. But on the other hand, I thought this is it’s such an it’s so amazing of me. This is how they live their lives, these people, that I got him to talk about that, what it’s like to give twenty eight consecutive interviews in a language that he don’t speak, in which indeed he was being asked the same questions every time. And I think he said he even learned bits of Japanese because the translated the translated answers were all the same, because it was always the same question.

So that’s one. But you, yeah, you just try to start with something people don’t, don’t expect. Not in a gotcha way, which is a thing people say about journalists, but just start somewhere different. So when I interviewed Spike Lee, the film director, many years ago, I’d seen him on Match of the Day, a cutaway to him at Arsenal and I thought that’s interesting. So we started talking about Arsenal.

He he quite difficult interviewee. I mean, he’s a very very great film director but he’s quite difficult interviewee.

He’s been asked a lot of stupid questions.

But he, you know, that he he really engaged on that because he hadn’t expected to be talking about our sort of why he supported them. So that’s a good example.

Yeah.

I imagine we can all relate to sort of sitting on back to back Zoom calls all day and having an initial sort of breakout of the norm within the days.

I just think also I mean, one thing I should remember, you know, be interested in, you know, be interested in enthusiastic. So, I mean, there’s a thing that goes on which is called, in the term in journalism is a is a cuttings job where you read every interview they’ve ever given and you interview them about those interviews.

And I hate that. I just I like to start from a blank sheet of paper. But yeah, curiosity and interest. There’s, I read a lot of newspaper advice columns, you know, what he used to call agony aunts or uncles. Not because I have lots of problems, but because I write fiction and it’s the most amazing insight into people’s secrets and psyches in those columns because you know people write in and say, say that I’m having an affair with my sister-in-law and my brother-in-law and now my fiance has found out, and it’s just so extraordinary, but, one of the most common, and I hope not too many people in this room engage with this fact, but it’s quite startling to me. One of the most common letters to advice columnists is I’ve been going out with this guy, and it is normally a guy, for two years.

And in that time, they have never asked me a single question about myself.

And you do hear that anecdotally a lot, and it just fascinates me because they need to, they need to go on a course, but, if you you’ve got a problem with your and this might you know, interviewing is a formal thing that some people do, you know, we’re doing it now and you do it for jobs. But, it’s such a huge part of human life interviewing people.

You know, conversations with people. I I mean, I one of my mentors in journalism said, you know, everyone has got something interesting to tell you. It’s it’s broadly true. It’s very occasionally at certain weddings and dinner parties. It gets stretched that one, but it is it is broadly true, because and people love talking about what they do for, a living.

So, you know, I got picked up by a taxi driver the other night, and he said, oh, thank God you’ve turned up because the previous four didn’t turn up and said, I don’t get paid. And I said, how does that work? And it was kind of and then he talked about the whole system. So I think that’s good.

And I suppose in that situation, you’ve not you’ve not met the taxi driver before. No.

The some of your interviews, you will have met the people before and built up a relationship. And how does that affect the dynamic of the conversation that you’re having across years where you’re having these conversations?

That’s one of the big questions in interviewing is is are the best interviews done by people who have never met the person before or by people who have, an established relationship and trust with them?

I think it can vary in each case. I think you have to be very careful. Actually, in this well, it’s not in this city, is it? It’s it’s in Salford.

But, Matt Chorley on five Live, who has a long history of interviewing Boris Johnson, He very bravely actually did what we take all the terminology from spying, from John McCarrie’s novels, but he burned his sauce this, wheat. That’s not a cooking thing. It’s s o u r c e. He was so direct, I think in a good way, and rude to Johnson that I don’t think Johnson will ever give him another interview.

And you have to be prepared to do that.

In the arts, it’s, you know, it it obviously helps if I mean, I’ve interviewed a lot of writers about, you know, seven or eight of them their books over a twenty year period. And I think in that case, it is useful because they know you know their work.

I mean, the biggest complaint from writers is that, they’re being interviewed by someone who has never read any any of their work, and that’s quite a serious problem. You wouldn’t, you know, you wouldn’t accept if you were a cricketer or a footballer being interviewed by someone who haven’t seen you play. And I don’t I don’t I don’t understand why it’s different myself.

Yeah. And that, I suppose, the the burning sauce of breaking relationship brings us a little bit to as we were speaking at the start, where if you encourage that culture of openness and dialogue, then you’re also, I suppose, risking questions that might risk breaking a relationship.

Or Yes.

That’s why, in my view, you shouldn’t ever meet them before the interview. I mean, even if you’ve met them before for a previous interview, don’t meet them before the next one until you do it. Because that’s where they say, could we not mention the fourth and fifth wives?

You know, could we not mention this? And it’s really difficult once that’s been done. And it’s a nightmare now with the streamers in particular.

I mean, probably Apple plus are the worst, I think, in my experience, but they try to control every aspect of it, and they want to know all the questions in advance.

If they could and they do try, they they would give you the answers in advance.

I mean, sometimes they offer to do the interview. This is quite common now.

To do the interview.

Yeah. They say, you know, Nicole’s really busy, but I could just do an interview with her and then give it to you for your publication. It’s very bad for business.

But that is but but that that isn’t about that. It’s about control. And I mean, obviously, you talk about this all the time, but everything has changed because of social media.

And the scrutiny now on an interview. I mean, Matt Shorty, you know, this week while he was interviewing Johnson, he had in real time x’s and texts coming in saying, how dare you treat this man like this, you know, but or and indeed the opposite, you know, you’re you haven’t exposed the level of liar that he really is. And that’s an extraordinary new thing for broadcasters is that is that the you know, having a producer in your ear in your ear is one thing, but having an audience to that level is really, you know, that’s a huge new development, I think.

Sort of what widens the conversation more than two people?

Maybe they’re two hundred percent.

Yes. But it also puts more pressure on and it’s it probably will make most interviewers more nervous. Mhmm.

You know, of what they say.

Because I was I was brought up a Catholic, and so the confessional that you have in Catholicism, I’ve also that’s a very good model for the interview. Okay.

Not not necessarily in terms of, you know, people aren’t necessarily admitting sins, but I just think that You’ve got time.

It led but what it was, you know, and it’s it’s awful because it led directly to, abuse in some cases. It made it possible, but, it was this dark box in which you were looking through a grill into the face of this priest. So the the aspect of I tried to get into that. So if when I when I do TV interviews, the longest possible tape, the two I think two hours is the longest you can get, push the cameras as far back as possible, bring the lights down. So that and that’s why, you know, radio interviews are often by far the most revealing because it’s just there is no crew. I mean, there is, but they’re behind the glass.

It’s just you and the person in the room, the studio. And I, you know, I like to have the lights low so that you can so that’s what I mean about the confessional thing. It should ideally be you and them locked together, and the fewer interruptions, the better.

So you’re thinking a lot there about, yeah, the environment that you’re asking the questions within. When you’re preparing in advance, are you thinking about what answers you want to get from them and forming the questions around the answers you’re looking for rather than the questions that you’re interested in.

How does that work? No. I so what because, I mean, I also among the other things I do, I mean, I write, radio plays and novels. And, yeah, it’s it’s a dialogue and I it may be for this reason, but before the really big interviews, so John McCarrey, David Cornwell, who I did a number of long interviews with.

And because he was a trained spy and one of the great dialogue writers in English literature, I thought I had to take this very seriously. So I think I spent about four days, and I wrote, well, I’ll ask this, and then he might say that, he might say that. And then there was a whole like, you know, if he goes to that answer, I’ll go to this question. And I wrote it as a play really.

It was like a screenplay by the end because it was so long. But, but Yeah. And that’s an extreme case, but I think you have to But then you have to also be prepared to throw away the plan. And I know it’s difficult if you’re interviewing for jobs, you should have to ask all the candidates the same questions.

But, I think with a more informal interview, it’s really important to leave space for stuff to happen in the room. I mean, I drive around the country quite a lot for going to theater and football.

So I support a I live in Northamptonshire, so, I come to the north really quite a lot to watch them lose to people, Northamptonsan. But, but I listen to a lot of local radio. And you do gen it horrifies me. You hear, someone will ask a question, and then the interviewee will say at the end of it, yeah, I I haven’t talked about this before, but yeah. So that’s when I kill my mother, and then they say, and then in nineteen ninety eight you made the film so and so with, and it’s because they’ve got a list of questions.

And a producer once shouted in my ear, oh my god, they’ve answered question nine before question two. And I couldn’t care. I mean, it’s, but you have to so that’s the thing, and this does apply to relationships, job interviews, everything. Listen, listen. You have to.

There are, you know, all all interviews have terrible terrible flaws, and I do. But, the worst one that, I think interviewers have is not listening. And if I’ve ever seen an interview go really, really wrong, it’s because the interviewer has not listened to me.

And there are certain politicians, you know, and you sympathize with them, and they’ll say, but but I’ve I answered that two questions ago. And it’s because the person is just following one to ten, which has been worked out. And it’s difficult because of, you know, impartiality and broadcasting.

You do have to plan your questions.

But I think you also have to, with a pen, think, oh, well, they’ve done two, so then I don’t do two, or they’ve done three.

Yeah. And that it sounds to me that it’s not just the case of actually listening, but showing that you’re listening and it being a person feeling comfortable and acknowledging that they’re hearing.

Yes. So that’s the thing, you know, which we all want in life. Yeah. You want to think that, I was once interviewed by someone on the radio about a book I’d written, and they were writing the link for the next item while interviewing me.

And they had a book open in front of them, which unfortunately wasn’t mine, they discovered when they they looked at it. And yeah, you you don’t feel that you’re being listened to in those circumstances.

What advice would you give to someone who clearly helps people feel like they’re being listened to enough that they can open up to the next question for someone to actively listen and make people feel.

I think I think it’s again like I said about the confessional really or, you know, in talking to your loved ones. You you ideally it’s got to be as much of a cocoon as possible.

And, you know, particularly in the TV interviews, we always had a it took ten minutes at least to get the interview back on track after if they came in to do makeup, or there was a tape change, or a light blue, which is a quite common thing in broadcasting, you would lose the momentum and the energy. And that’s what you got back. So I, and I go to theater a lot because, you know, one of the things I am is a theater critic. And what actors are taught is to be in the moment every moment. And I do think that’s very useful, for interviewing.

That it’s like, you know, there’s an energy between you, And if you start getting bored or nervous, they will. I mean, this is just, how things work.

Yeah. That’s hot, I think. I don’t know. Honest for a second here. When you’re having a conversation with someone and you’re then thinking, oh, I need to make sure that I respond to this in the right way or I need to the next question I’m following up, that’s a lot of different threads to follow in your mind all at the same time.

I suppose leaving, as you said, leaving space between allows for that.

Well, I think you have, yeah. I think you have to have a plan, but you also have to be prepared to abandon the plan.

So there’s a quote I often use, which is Mike Tyson, the boxer. He said everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

And in an interview, you should not actually do that. Although Jeremy Clarkson did once actually. But, but you should actually do that. But it’s it’s it’s quite a profound thought, which is that from Mike Tyson, which is that, you can plan and plan and plan. And this is not for me to say, but I mean, this almost certainly applies to business.

But if something changes, then you have to be ready to change.

And I think that’s important in all.

And you know, again, I’ve seen I’ve seen interviews in which they were so determined to get one thing that when it became apparent they weren’t gonna get that or it is a false product premise or whatever, they just kept going.

Kept going to get to the same point.

Well, to ask the same question over and over. I mean, there’s one ex you know, extreme case, Jeremy Paxson, my old colleague, and I mean, not very well at the moment, but he was, you know, one of the greatest interviewers.

But he with Michael Howard, the then home secretary for younger people in the room, he he asked him the same question fourteen times on Newsnight.

And he claims it was because the tape wasn’t the next tape wasn’t ready, and they said just keep going.

But actually what it was is that he suspected, as we have to say for legal reasons, he suspected that Michael Howard was lying to him.

And so he thought, and it’s quite a good instinct actually, is well if he’s going to lie then just let him, Sorry, allegedly lie. If he’s going to allegedly lie then we’ll really go for it. He can say he can repeat it fourteen times.

It’s all on YouTube, but it’s an amazing moment or series of moments.

But that’s it’s like, tennis or that once you get into a rhythm, it’s quite hard to get out of it. So once Paxman had asked the same question for the fifth time, Michael Howard and, you know, there’s this, I say, this external thing judging what you’re doing if you’re the interviewee or the interviewer.

So Michael Howard is thinking, can I just say this is ridiculous? Can I walk out? And actually, he, which is what happens in tennis, he dropped into the rhythm of the interviewer.

And neither of them could stop until eventually Paxton did.

But he’s not many many people have tried to do it subsequently, but it needs to be in a very particular circumstance in which it’s pretty clear that you’re not being told the truth.

In that scenario where you’re your thinking in advance is a particular answer that you’d like to get during the interview or particular topic you’d like to get into in the, the person you’re speaking to doesn’t, for whatever reason, isn’t giving you the answer, how do you how do you adapt or flex to to either get there or change on something?

I think you’ve got to decide when to let go. I mean, a historian, Antonia Fraser, she said something I think really interesting about King Henry the eighth. She said that if you write about King Henry the eighth, you have to realize he doesn’t know that he’s going to divorce all these women.

He thinks that each one is the, gonna be the real thing.

And so you see people aren’t always lying. So if we’d been able to interview Henry the eighth and, you know, in our cynical journalistic way, we said, come on, Henry. This one’s not I mean, you’d obviously lose your head at that point, so you’d have to be quite careful. But come on, Henry. This one’s not how long is this one gonna last? Is this gonna be like eight weeks or ten weeks? And he would have been terribly affronted because, that’s not how he saw himself.

He saw himself as someone who had finally found the right.

And you know in the end it’s like I mean, you know, I’ve known I knew a journalist who went beyond Henry VIII. He’s married eight times actually, but and in the end it’s like musical chairs that there is one, you know, someone eventually will be the one just through the process of time.

But this this guy used to get really upset when people said, oh, God. I’m not giving you a present this time because I’ve given you a I’ve given you a present in the last four. And it it really infuriated him and he said, no no no. I’ve fallen in love for the first time.

So I always think that’s quite useful. This that people are not always lying. They they they may be lying to themselves, but that’s a different thing. And so you have to judge what kind of lie it is.

Yeah. Interesting.

And, like, getting that deciding that on the spot and whether you’ll dig into that further or Yeah.

And, you know, and I interviewed a lot of writers and artists, and they they’re terrible judges of their own work.

They’ll say now you say, well, in in four of your books, there’s someone who’s abandoned by their mother and that happened to you, and they say, no. No. No. No.

No. I don’t know. No. No. I wasn’t thinking about that at all. And interestingly, they’re not lying, and they eventually sorry.

Do you have time for the story?

Very quickly, so We have time.

There’s a book called, The Beatles’ Lyrics in which Paul Muldoon, the poet, interviews Paul McCartney about his lyrics.

And it’s hard to believe really, but it appears to be true.

When they get to, let it be, and Paul Muldoon, a Catholic I think, says well you know Mary, the mother of Christ is supposed to have said let it be, but your own mother was called Mary, and she died when you were a teenager. And so therefore, mother Mary speaking words of wisdom let it be is an incredibly emotional line.

And he says, yeah, I never really thought of that as being about my mother. You see, obviously it is, and Muldoon is right, but it’s he’s not lying about that, and that’s one of the things that critics and interviewers do. You can help people to make discoveries about their work, which is the best thing actually because I wouldn’t have been you know, very occasionally someone will write to you and say, oh, that, you know, I understood something about myself from that interview. Rarely, and it’s more it’s more, you know, you’ll hear from my lawyers or that kind of thing or but, it’s but, no, in the in the best cases, those I mean, I I there are letters I cherish where someone said I haven’t understood that about myself or my life because and that will be a long interview, obviously, but but those are the good moments.

Yeah. You’re building up really meaningful relationships there over time just through asking questions that make them think.

Yeah. Except at all. I mean, essentially, all interviews are failures because you never get exactly what you hope for, but then that’s just what.

And I think you have to be realistic about it. I I mean, I work with someone who, there’d be catastrophic errors or, you know, the interviewers interviewees head would fall off in the course of the thing, or the studio would burn down, and they’d skip out of studio and say, wow, that went really well. And, I think it’s slightly worrying temperament there, because it suggests the lack of self criticism.

So I think you have to be. And I may go the other way, and that has to say, I think all interviews fail at some level. Apart from this one.

Apart from this one.

But, but, yeah. So you’ve got to be self critical.

Okay. On self critical then. Is there one question that you wish you’d asked and comes back to you and said, oh, I wish I’d asked that.

I mean, it just it seems horribly smug. No. Because, if you’ve done enough preparation, you and that’s why you have the plan.

So that is more likely to happen to people who interview without any kind of plan because it’s like when Ed Miliband did that speech without an autocue and he forgot the bit on tax.

So you have to be really careful. So, yeah, I I I always any, you know, even the the one I’m doing this week for The Guardian for newspaper, I’d always have a list of questions.

And then, you know, when you’re thinking, have I asked all those? So I don’t think that’s ever happened to me.

The other side of that, which is any that I’ve regretted, yeah, but most of them end up on the, cutting room floor or in my, my little tape recorder. So you can always, you know, unless it’s live, you can always get back from, you know, it’s disastrous that. I had I mean, six six people walked out of interviews that I did, but I don’t actually regret those questions because I think it seems sacrilege to do it in this place. But, yeah. So Alex Ferguson, he, he he walked out of an interview with me.

And and that was actually this ties into everything we’ve been talking about, which is the so we’re given eight minutes for the radio, but not live. Recorded eight minutes. And normally, comfortably, you would think, well, ten questions I’ll have on my sheet of paper, and that would easily cover eight minutes.

And after three minutes, we’d got through all of them because all he said was aye or nay or just complete silence.

And then I asked my I thought, you know, it was my one that if that happened, I thought, well, this will have to encourage him to open up a bit. So I’d done the I can’t remember what the sunswear at the time, but it was something like, I said, I noticed that, eighteen of your first team squad have published autobiographies.

And I said, that must be quite an extraordinary thing for you. I mean, you must go you know, even even if you just go through the index, it must be really interesting that there are eighteen people who have written about being managed by you. And he said, never read one of them. Never.

And so we were, and and it was desperation really, and then I just thought I’d watched, one of their matches on Sky the weekend before, and he was famous. I mean, people have followed these things. Fergie time was a famous thing that he, I mean, essentially I probably get lynched if I say this here. But so, essentially, the view of other fans was that if Manchester United was winning, he wanted the game to stop after ninety minutes dead.

And if they weren’t winning, they were drawing or losing, then he wanted to go on for another fifteen minutes. That was essentially how Fergie time worked. But if they were winning, he used to do this thing. He had this gigantic watch because footballers and football managers do, and he used to hold it up to the camera like that.

And I said, and this was the most disastrous question ever really, I said I said I was watching the match at the weekend and it must it must be really quite difficult, the thought that, yeah, the camera there’s a camera on you all the time because that’s what Sky brought in because they have so many cameras. They can have one on the manager. And, you know, I’m just interested in how conscious you are of that. Does that make you self conscious?

And he did his usual never think about it. And, I said, oh, but that thing you do where you hold up your watch and you tap it at the camera. I said, that’s a bit theatrical, isn’t it? And he he went berserk actually.

And, all we know in these I mean, thankfully things are much these days.

You know, there isn’t any of this sort of prejudice, but some people have suggested that in his Scottish childhood and adolescence that theatrical had certain, implications that he hadn’t liked. I don’t know if it’s that or not. I think, in fact, it was just that he and it happens to politicians, isn’t it? It may happen to CEOs.

Who knows? They’re just so used to only being told what they want to hear that any criticism and you see that actually, I realize now when I talk about it. So this is a so, yeah, what has happened there is that he was used to controlling everything, and he wasn’t in control of that interview. I mean, neither was I as it turned out, but I thought I was.

But, and it would lead ultimately to Manchester United TV in which, the current manager if he is is he still the current manager? Do we know anyway? He’s, they are interviewed only by people from the club, and that’s the way that was heading then.

Yeah.

And, you know, he was banning journalists from press conferences, which is a bad look, I think. But that was all about controlling the questions.

I’m afraid we have no Fergie time today.

No. Well, thank you. The other three that worked out. So Jeffrey Archer walked out, and, yeah, he was oh, one of the Bee Gees. Yeah. I lost a Bee Gees at one point.

That’s an incredible line.

But we’ve got through the whole We’ve got through.

Nobody’s walked out. I don’t think I wasn’t watching too closely.

Well, no. We’re going to walk out now. We are.

Thank you so much for chatting with me today. Thank you so much for your attention.

Have a good rest of your day.

Thank you. Thank you.