A-list celebrities don’t do this. B-listers do it, though, and C-listers never stop doing it. Which is pretty amazing, really.
Imagine coming into a radio study, where you’ll get a plug for your new book, song, or appearance on a reality TV show and telling the presenter that they’re lazy, incompetent, uncreative, and generally boring.
All of this may be the case, but professional etiquette, common decency, and a sense of self-preservation precludes its articulation.
Yet, every day, some guest sits in a studio and, in response to some presenter query, says: “I’m always asked that question.”
In the process, they have grievously insulted the person across the table.
If the presenter has insight, they will be mortified at having asked such a bleeding obvious question.
No radio interviewer ever wants to be lumped in with vox populi.
They want to represent the public, but when it comes to questions, they want to frame them in a way Joe/Jo Bloggs wouldn’t think of because if asking key questions is that easy, everybody and their granny would be doing it. (Which, of course, they are; witness the podcast explosion.)
Nevertheless, to be told, live on air, that what you’re asking is so self-evident that a passing pint-swiller could have come up with it is not an experience to be subsequently recounted with pride.
In short, you want to choke the celeb in front of you.
Instead of delivering a reply, they have, unbeknownst to themselves, delivered a reproach.
Presenters pretend not to notice, but it rankles, man, it rankles.
Two reasons tend to prevent on-air choking of the sinner.
The first is that usually, the sinner isn’t a politician, so not as readily choked.
The second reason is that chat radio is tightly scheduled, and cutting a guest off at the pass could leave the show with seven or eight minutes of dead air.
Bottom line? If you’re a guest on a radio or TV show (or, indeed, a podcast), it might be good not to tell the questioner that they are so obvious in their approach as to match the off-the-top-of-the-head offerings of the untrained amateur out there.
You may not, however, be able to control the other deadly response, which is “absolutely”. That one’s deadly because it means what came out of the presenter’s mouth wasn’t a question at all, never mind a question everybody asks.
“Absolutely” is the only option presenting to a new guest on radio when an egocentric interviewer who fancies the knickers off themselves over their knowledge of the topic under discussion (and sometimes over their knowledge of everything in the world) interrupts a guest to proffer as much as 40 seconds of show-offery, sticking an inflective question mark on the end.
Professional guests — particularly, all credit to them, politicians — have the wit to ignore the statement self-identifying as a question, and buzz off along their own route, but if you’re new to the game, you figure the only way to go is to utter an obsequious “absolutely”.
Producers should count the occurrence of “absolutely” in any week’s broadcasting and fine the interviewers who cause more than three.
Nobody can fine guests, which is a pity, because celebs at B or C level tend to pay attention only to other celebs at the same level, causing them to pick up and repeat each other’s cliches.
One of the most egregious of these is the assertion that their new or recently new squeeze has “made them a better person”.
To which any decent interviewer would react by asking for concrete evidence for an outrageously self-serving claim.
An alternative would be: “We’ll judge that, rather than you, OK?”
That line should be accompanied by a softly affectionate grin — the kind that evoked that great line from Hamlet: “Oh, villain, villain, smiling damned villain.” Look, they’d deserve it.
Unstoppable giveaways, on the other hand, tend to be uttered by formers. Former this, former that — former senior civil servants, former ambassadors, mostly male, for the very good reason that, at the time their batch of assistant sec gens or consuls were being appointed, it would not have been the done thing to include women in the group to be interviewed.
Consequently, we now have a small, select, expert group of lads who commentate on radio programmes.
Most of them don’t let on that they know themselves to be part of a small, select, expert group, bless their gentlemanly souls. But the ones who missed out on the modesty gene are characterised by a deadly usage permeating their discourse like “Ooh, ahh, up the ‘Ra” runs through the oeuvre of the Wolfe Tones.
The deadly usage is “I always say”. A variant is “I have said before”. One is as bad as the other. Each is the cry of the once-famous, once-listened to. Each is the mark of the card-carrying bore.
Who, other than a bore, lovingly remembers things they themselves have said? It might be different if they quoted themselves as having said something so cleverly quotable that it appears in listicles of witty aphorisms about a particular topic.
But that’s not what is claimed. What is claimed is that this person uttered something previously that didn’t become a quotable quote, which survives only in the speaker’s own memory and is trotted out wearing livery confirming that its only value is in polishing the patina of their self-regard.
If “I always say” tends to emerge from the mouths of prominent men of advanced years, a more frequent phrase is associated with much younger women on the cusp of prominence.
That’s the one that mostly happens at the point of an interview where the final question has been asked of the guest.
The broadcaster then thanks the visitor for her time. (This, in itself, is hardly necessary, since the truth of it is that she wouldn’t have donated her time if she wasn’t flogging a podcast/book/movie/TV show.)
It sometimes happens at the top of an interview, too, when the guest utters the immortal words “thank you for having me”, thereby proving their ignorance of a great old music-hall trope where the joke is summed up with the statement: “As the actress said to the bishop.” (Occasionally, it’s “as the bishop said to the actress”.)
The origin of the phrase involves Lillie Langtry, beautiful lover of many famous and royal men, who became an actress when a pal named Oscar Wilde suggested that working in the theatre might solve her financial problems.
At a country weekend gathering, Langtry and another house guest, the Bishop of Worcester, wandered the gardens and the bishop hurt his finger on a rose thorn. Over lunch in company, Langtry asked: “How is your prick?” To which the Bishop innocently replied: “Throbbing.”
“Thank you for having me,” spoken to a radio host, has all those unfortunate actress-to-bishop implications.
It’s always said innocently. It shouldn’t be said at all.
Who, other than a bore, lovingly remembers things they themselves have said?
