William Drummond was a writer, based in Edinburgh. He was friends with Ben Jonson, the English poet and playwright.

Jonson stayed with him for two weeks, and Drummond made notes of their gossipy conversations in his diary.

Two hundred years later, the diary was discovered, and the gossip was published.

Is it an interview if neither person involved intended the conversation to be published? Not really, no. But in what meaningful sense is the publication different?

Both men were dead, of course, but they both suffered reputational damage.

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I’ve been doing some research about something completely different, unrelated to this Substack, and listened to several episodes of a podcast that really doesn’t go out of its way to please.

It lacks emotional highs and lows. It deals with huge numbers and abstract ideas.

And yet I was gripped. How can that be?

Here are the notes I made immediately after listening.

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As you see, I added black ink responses to my own red-ink comments, as if in dialogue with myself.

Dialogue, huh! It can really be something.

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I’m working on my book proposal.

And that involves reading lots of books.

Every so often I make handwritten notes about what I learned from the book. They don’t cover everything - just the bits that stuck in my head.

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Does an interview have to have a Winner, and a Loser?

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Earlier this week, I met a friend and former colleague on the Financial Times. Like us, his wife used to be a journalist. She now does something else, and has a very high profile.

He told me she was on the phone once, soon after making the transition to her new role, talking to a journalist.

“She was saying things like, ‘Oh, I understand, I’m one of you…’,” he told me.

We were in a restaurant, waiting for the food to arrive. I hadn’t seen him for about 14 years.

“And I thought, ‘No! No, no, no!’,” he continued.

“I wrote a sign on a piece of paper and waved it at her. It said, ‘Journalists are not your friends!’”

I told him about my ongoing plan to write a book about interviews and interviewing.

I told him I was troubled by the transactional nature of interviews. Who wins? If the interviewer wins, does the interviewee lose?

If they both win, does that mean the interview is a dud - or, to put it another way, does it mean the viewer / listener / reader loses?

Does it really have to be a winning v losing thing?

I don’t know the answer(s) yet. I guess that’s why I really want to write the book.

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A few years ago, Robert Twigger was invited to talk about his (then) new book on the Today programme, on BBC Radio 4.

That, in the UK, is about as good as it gets.

He posted a link to the audio on Facebook, and indicated how many minutes you needed to scroll through to get to his bit.

Rob is a friend of mine. I worried that people might not bother to click on the link, or scroll through the irrelevant passages. So I made him a sort-of video, using only the relevant audio, over a photo collage of Rob, smiling, and the BBC interviewer with his headphones on.

It was easy, and I was happy to do it.

.

This week, Rob mentioned that he’s offering to coach would-be authors, and I asked if I could help him record a short video for his website.

He hadn’t intended to make a video, and had no idea I was going to offer this.

I sprang the idea on him, but Rob loves that kind of thing. (We both trained in theatrical impro, but that’s a story for another day.)

Anyway, he agreed.

So we talked for about 10 mins, and then I did a rough cut (90 seconds) and a finer cut (59 seconds).

You can watch both of those here. The longer one is in black and white, the shorter one goes to colour. I challenge you to tell me the missing 30 seconds!

Anyway.

This morning it occurred to me that you might like also to hear the full recording - the whole thing - raw.

I hope you find it interesting, useful - or both.

Till next time.

JPF

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpaulflintoff.substack.com