Abstract
In his surprisingly enjoyable Oxford Dictionary of Journalism, Tony Harcup defines an interview as “a journalist asking somebody questions for the purpose of obtaining information and/or quotes for a news story or feature”. Lynn Barber's technique has always involved a lot more than that. Her interviews are potted adventure stories, where our heroine beards the chosen celebrities in their lairs – invariably described in meticulous detail – and spars with them, seeking to probe beyond their image and extract something significant and surprising. By the time she has spelled out the background, the setting and her preconceptions, there may be little room for actual quotes, yet the pieces are invariably more revealing than conventional interviews largely transcribed from the tape recorder. Barber has had many imitators but, at 70, remains the mistress of the genre.
You might think, though, that we know enough about her already. There have been two volumes of her collected interviews, a couple of books about sex and An Education, a memoir of her early years focused on a disastrous affair with an older married man, made into a popular film. Presumably it was the success of that last book that encouraged her publishers to commission this new one – a combination of autobiography and random musings on her technique, interlaced with eight of her greatest hits.
The reprinted interviews take up 95 of the 211 pages and for the most part are more rewarding than her often banal commentary that fills the spaces between them. At their best they are riveting, highly polished, clearly the product of much thought and work. Such is Barber's reputation that when, in 2011, Christopher Hitchens knew he was dying, he summoned her to interview him in Washington. The result is a moving and perceptive portrait of a man who feels he has a lot more to achieve, but knows he has not much longer to live. There are revealing accounts, too, of her skirmishes with Marianne Faithfull and Tracey Emin – both in 2001 – and Hilary Mantel in 2012.
Yet although the blurb describes the book as “wonderfully frank”, I doubt any young journalist seeking to emulate Barber will find many clues as to how she has managed to maintain her position over the years in the notoriously shark-infested waters of the national press. “I'm not the pussycat I appear,” she confides. “I'm quite tough.” We had already worked that out for ourselves.
The chapter entitled “On interviewing” bristles with inconsequence and statements of the obvious. “The point of background research is that you don't waste precious interview minutes asking for information you could have found out beforehand … Having a tape recorder break down is another horror but nowadays I take two recorders just in case … To be a good interviewer you have to know yourself pretty well … An interviewer can't afford to be shy about asking questions.” And the dress code? “My only rule is not to wear anything that looks too expensive because I don't want to seem to be showing off.”
There are brighter moments. She is funny about actors, confessing that as she never goes to the theatre she does not know how to distinguish between the good and the bad. “And then they tell you that really they're very shy and that playing this role is like climbing Everest, and you want to bang your head on the wall and scream ‘Shut up!’” Nor does she like interviewing sportsmen because they “never seem to have anything interesting to say”. Her encounter with Rafael Nadal confirms that view: it is by far the weakest of the eight.
She opens the book by pointing out that growing up in the 1950s, she had no aspirations to be a celebrity interviewer because the career did not then exist. Now it is so pervasive in the media that Tony Harcup's Oxford Dictionary of Journalism devotes three entries to the phenomenon: separately defining celebrities, celebrity and celebrity journalism (“coverage of the lives, loves and even lies of celebrities”). Harcup's frisky compilation of words, phrases and concepts applicable to our trade will prove as valuable to digital natives (those who “have grown up or have always worked in an era of online journalism and social media”) as to old-style hacks (“used in a spirit of self-deprecation by many journalists about themselves and colleagues”).
Inevitably there are some errors. He is wrong to define the op-ed page as one that carries “opinion and leader columns”. Op is short for opposite, not opinion. The term originated in America for the page opposite the editorial page, customarily devoted to signed articles by columnists and outside contributors. And is there such a word as “usie”, which he defines as a selfie involving two people rather than one? We can all pick nits, but overall this is a cunningly compiled and mostly authoritative work of reference that is fun to read, ending with a useful chronology of journalism's highs (1647: Levellers call for a free press) and lows (2011: Hackgate).