The circle of life
There’s this
And then there’s this
Now…has Cleese become a Muggeridge or Stockwood? Or is he still Cleese while the interviewer is a credulous point-missing inquisitor?
Tip Jar
There’s this
And then there’s this
Now…has Cleese become a Muggeridge or Stockwood? Or is he still Cleese while the interviewer is a credulous point-missing inquisitor?
I suggest a third option, that the interview is a rude young person who doesn’t really want to talk to the person with whom she has secured an interview. She wants to talk about him, instead, in front of him, but not to him. She keeps trotting out her pet issues, again and again, despite his patent disinterest in talking about them, because she’s more interested in what she has to say than in what he has to say. She has no interest in him as a person, as a performer or producer, in what he’s doing, or why. She just wants cheap sound bites. As such, it’s a waste of time for him to persist with the interview unless he will be satisfied by talking over her. Maybe he had something more important or relevant to do, like water his plants.
An interview is not an interrogation. This young lady’s position in the BBC doesn’t give her the right to demand that people talk about things they aren’t interested in talking about. It’s remarkably rude of her to persist in doing so. Leaving the interview was probably the most polite option left to Cleese. It was silly of the BBC to air it, as it was a failure of an interview, a failure of an interviewer.
I was hoping she’d ask him whether or not he had two sheds.
I think that third option is a good one.
It’s also likely that he was lied to. In securing that interview, there was likely an exchange of emails in which the interview subject matter was represented to Cleese in a certain way. Cleese seems to have agreed to an interview on the understanding that it was going to primarily be about whatever he is shooting in Asia at that time, but it is plain that the interviewer has Cleese’s unwokeness in mind instead. Good on Cleese for detecting that quickly and for dropping out politely – he was only there because he had been lied to.