A Curious Career Read Free Page B

heart. Even when the name is someone I’ve never heard of (Lady Gaga, shockingly, but it WAS the very start of her career) my reaction is always to say yes, and then to do some frantic Googling later.
    The only people I flatly refuse to interview are ones I know to be boring (usually because I’ve interviewed them before or met them socially) or ones I don’t think are worth five pages of the readers’ attention. I also have a block about doing what I think of as ‘wives’ (they could also be husbands, or lovers) who are only famous second-hand by virtue of their partner, and I deeply hate doing ‘victims’ or people with heart-breaking stories to tell. I want my subjects to have achieved something in their own right, even if it’s the sort of something that broadsheet readers don’t necessarily approve of. I once got a lot of flak for interviewing Kerry Katona – why were posh Observer readers supposed to be interested in her? Actually I thought her achievement – to survive a hideously chaotic upbringing and forge a career as a pop star, columnist, and all-round celeb – was pretty impressive, even heroic. I think we despise such people at our peril.
    Being so nosy, and being a professional interviewer, makes it hard for me to be a guest at dinner parties. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s not actually polite to ask, ‘What happened to your last girlfriend?’ Or (which I have been known to do), ‘What happened to your face?’ You have to waste time fishing around and even then you often come away without a proper answer. I find it frustrating, maddening – I can’t actually do dinner parties. On the other hand, if I get stuck in and start asking all the nosy questions I want answered, people are sometimes a bit too flattered, a bit too thrilled. They are apt to phone me afterwards wanting to continue the conversation: ‘When I was telling you about my last girlfriend . . .’ And, worse, they expect me to remember everything they told me before whereas, without a tape recorder, the chances of my remembering anything at all are slim. The great thing about interviews is that you can have a very intense conversation, and then switch off your tape recorder, write the article, and forget about it. Celebs understand that. But it is harder in real life.
    I have quite often been described as ‘fearless’ which makes me laugh. Just see me in a field full of cows, or in a lift that gets stuck between floors. Try taking me on the Tube. I am fearful of many things, including fish, but I am not on the whole fearful of asking people questions. After all, it is very unlikely that anyone would commit murder in an interview and I suppose I have the advantage, as a woman, that no one is likely to punch me.
    But by fearless I think people mean I don’t have the normal English fear of social embarrassment. I don’t worry about making a fool of myself or seeming stupid. I’ve never felt any desire to be cool. And if a conversation takes a nasty turn, if I provoke someone into losing their temper or shouting at me, well it’s all familiar stuff because I spent eighteen years in Twickenham being shouted at by my father. I think this is something that perhaps confuses people about me. I have a genteel accent and come over as (I think) a harmless middle-class woman. But actually, I’m not the pussycat I appear. I’m quite tough, as my interviewees sometimes find out.
    When I started, I was often asked why I chose to interview stars, why didn’t I interview ‘real people’? The obvious answer is that readers are more interested in stars. But then, so am I. I admire them for their talent, but even more for the courage it takes to become a star, to leave the cosy camaraderie of the herd. And I’m always interested in what gave them the drive to do that. A few stars like to maintain that it all happened by accident (Michael Palin is the worst offender) but I don’t think it ever happens by accident – there