Radio New Zealand - Te Reo Irirangi o Aotearoa

Kim Hill's John Pilger interview

Interview

Sunday, 30 March, 2003

John Pilger's behaviour was that of an adolescent prat - no question.

He knows as well as anyone that if you're going to front up on television to express strong opinions in an extended interview, those opinions are going to be tested by your interviewer. That's part of the interviewer's function - to elicit, clarify where necessary & challenge. The difficulty for the interviewer is to challenge without seeming to be pushing a personal barrow. It's called devil's advocacy, & the trick is leave viewers aware that the interviewer & the devil are two distinct entities.

Kim Hill had little opportunity to engage in devil's advocacy, or much else, for that matter, since it quickly became obvious that, no matter what her question & no matter how she asked it, Pilger was going to, as he put it, "deconstruct" it - which meant in practice that he was simply going to waste everybody's time picking the question apart & neglecting to answer it.

Personally, I wondered what must have happened beforehand for two people so strongly ideologically aligned to have such a public & seemingly incomprehensible falling out. Kim Hill's own comments subsequently indicate that NOTHING happened. Pilger was just being a pillock, for reasons best known to himself. Maybe he's always like that - it's clear that he has gigantic chips on both shoulders. His behaviour in fact bordered on the unhinged. It was infantile.

But it did have one positive side-effect - it meant that the director largely forgot about the equally infantile agenda, plainly apparent from the previous week's Face to Face, of treating the interview as choreography - distracting us with repeated close-ups of Hill's silly arm-waving, pen-flailing, eyebrow-raising, lip-pouting, nostril-flaring, finger-drumming or whatever other anatomical gymnastics she took it into her head to perform. As a viewer, I'm trying to make sense of the words being spoken. I am insulted that some trendy airhead in the control room thinks I'm more interested in close-ups of the interviewer's saliva. The self-styled embodiments of "hip" & "cool" who make these programmes should not assume that we viewers suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder just because they do. I can see the next step here - that Face to Face interviews will be broadcast with punk rock or acid jazz or rap or some other contemporary headbanging caterwauling blaring away while hand-held rapid-fire camera work of the kind now favoured in movies & television pseudo-dramas, intended to make us sea-sick, succeeds in doing so. Spare us!

I would also hope that Ms Hill - along with Mr Hosking & Mr Campbell - might have learned from the encounter just how irritating it is when the interview is treated as a monologue by one of the parties who just won't shut up. Among these interviewers it now seems to be de rigeur to talk over your guest. Ask a question & then almost immediately start talking - or shouting - over the answer. I hope it occurred to Ms Hill at some point that in having an interviewee shout over her questions before she'd had a chance to ask them she was getting a taste of her own medicine, & just how inefficacious that medicine is.

To all involved in the making of such programmes I say - we viewers do have something between the ears. We're interested in the subject matter, not the preenings & posturings of prima donnas. We don't need histrionics & hype. We'll take our current affairs neat, thank you very much. If you can't deliver it that way, go work for Juice TV.