Down the line

There are lots of weird things that happen when you have a book published but one of the weirdest of all has to be radio interviews.

I did quite a few when my book was first published and some more last November with the John Llewellyn Rhys prize, so when I was asked to do one recently, I thought I’d be a seasoned pro. I wasn’t.

Firstly, not only does everyone assume you’ve done this a million times before, they also think you should know what kind of shows the different stations in the building broadcast, how many there are and who they are hosted by. You should then know which corridors to go down, and which doors to go through, and which ones will cause a major broadcasting problem. On top of all of this you are to understand that everything needs to run like clockwork. Unfortunately, even if you arrive 15 minutes early for your interview, you run the risk of arriving at the same time as a box of milk shakes being delivered to Simon Mayo, causing you to end up being almost 6 minutes late.

Secondly this was a ‘down the line’ interview (basically means sitting in a room on your own and speaking into a microphone. Like a telephone conversation but somehow ‘hardcore’). 

So, once inside the main building, which is oddly reminiscent of a bowling alley -the reception bit where you swap your shoes for the clown’s shoes- a nice lady tells you ‘you can go through now’. Through to where, you’re not entirely sure, so you go through some doors and sit down in an empty room for five minutes. Then she comes to get you to say you’ve ‘gone through’ to the wrong room, and leads you in to an identical room up the corridor. She leaves you in this new empty room with 3 pairs of headphones and three microphones. You sit down gingerly next to one of those banks of expensive looking sound things that you see in recording studios on the television and put the red headphones on. Your interview is at three o’clock and you watch the second hand tick round, feeling your palms getting sweaty and suddenly you have no idea what it is that has brought you to this studio, what on earth it is that will be asked of you, and how you will possibly make noise come from out of your throat. The second hand passes 3 and nothing happens. You wonder if you are on the correct headphones. You wonder if somewhere someone is watching you on a screen or through a spy hole. Would you betray your lack of experience if you picked up the other headphones and listened to see if any noise was coming out of those?

You squint at a set of lights with signs that you can’t quite read next to them. What you can read says “If the red light flashes… if the amber light flashes… and if the blue light flashes…” and you can see that the red light is on but not flashing and you can’t get up to move closer because your headphones will strangle you.

Then the smallest of blips on the line, and a confusing rattle of speech, and for a horrible moment you think you’ve been dropped straight into a quiz, but no, it’s an advert for crisps. The advert for crisps replays over and over, the words are Man-crisps! And then there’s a noise like an airplane.

Ten minutes after 3, a friendly voice comes down the line and you are shocked at your own voice that ends up coming from your very own throat. A few of your answers to the questions get a bit flabby, and for this you are grateful that there’s no one in the room with you, because you flap your hands in panic trying to work out how you will end the sentence, and trying to remember what question it is that you’re trying to answer. Sometimes if you feel you’ve fluffed it, you slap yourself on the forehead.

And then it’s all over and it’s all been friendly, and you just really hope that the very nice interviewer had switched you off before you did the automatic kiss noise down the phone that you do to your mother when you say goodbye.