Robert Kirby
CHANNELVISION
Not often acknowledged as such, television interview programmes are a variation of so-called “reality television”. There’s actually very little formulative difference between, say, a Jerry Springer with his string of trailer-park trash and some hoity-toity BBC guru grilling consequential political entities. It’s only a matter of configuration. Both exercises are by their natures parasitic.
It is often argued that the “serious” television interviewer’s role is of worthy principle, that it serves to elucidate, to examine “in depth”. Such alibis are seldom honoured in practice. Too often the interview format is an opportunity to expose, to embarrass, to belittle.
There can be few better examples of the Jerry Springer instincts in fine spate than the BBC’s Hardtalk series. Ever since they gave its host, Tim Sebastian, an award he’s been getting worse. Never among the ranks of truly top-line television interviewers, Sebastian has shrouded his inadequacies by means of having a first-rate research team to provide him with the questions he needs to ask. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Having to interview someone new every day, five days a week, requires good back-up. In Sebastian’s case the researched material also acts as a sort of safety net, to stop him looking like a total schlenter.
Recently the presentational tone of Hardtalk has been heated up. They used to introduce the interviews with shots of a fire-eater billowing blooms of flame. Nowadays they have a lengthier billboard in which molten metal pours in a cast-iron mould and forms the title of the programme much higher on the thermic scale.
Once the billboard is done it’s over to the head stoker and another in his series of steel-melting interrogations of a selection of global movers and shakers, authors, politicos and so forth. Where Sebastian never fails is in his display of bad manners. He’s always interrupting his subjects, never allowing them to say things in their own way, overriding, finishing off people’s sentences for them. When all else fails he starts fingering their personal lives. He drops his voice to a compassionate tremble: “And then, when you were at last making your mark, there came the sudden tragic suicide of your only son. How did you feel about that?” But it’s when Sebastian’s professional attentions fall on some misbegotten “ethnic”, that he really comes into his prudent white man’s own. With a black visage in his cross hairs, the first thing Tim Sebastian does is slow down his talk. He lapses into the carefully enunciated, verrrrrry slow, not-too-many-long-words sort of master/peasant dialect.
No more was this gross patronisation evident as when Sebastian recently interviewed two black African politicians: Welshman Ncube, secretary general of the Zimbabwe opposition Movement for Democratic Change, and Tennyson Williams, representing an aid and humanitarian relief organisation in Sierra Leone. Post-colonial haughtiness was brilliantly demonstrated in these two interviews. In both of them Sebastian adopted the mien of a snot-choked headmaster addressing some miscreant fifth former. Out came the patient questions, the crushing homilies, the explanations of difficult words: “Has it not crossed your mind that the true meaning of democracy is one in which the wishes of the majority of people in your country have to be held paramount … you know, are important … at the very front of the queue?”
It must be wonderful to be given a worldwide forum, to sit on your little pedestal in London smugly pissing over the distant horrors of daily life in somewhere like Freetown, to wax Socratic on how the opposition in Zimbabwe should be responding to the thug-rule tactics of Zanu-PF. When Sebastian had the cockless Mugabe wundermensch in his studio a year or so ago, he couldn’t lick fast enough.
But watch him last week as he talked down to those who try against all odds and personal hazard to oppose Mugabe, or who take on the medieval hit squads of the Revolutionary United Front and, as you do, wonder whether colonialism will ever depart this wretched continent.
Then wait a week or two and tune in to Tim Sebastian in Hollywood, in a series of Oscar-week interviews with film stars. You will find that a thoroughly amiable Mr Hyde has plopped out from behind the bombastics. Suddenly Tim’s all smarmy, awestruck and let-me-fondle-your-greatness- for-a-moment-or-two. Eat your heart out, Jerry.