Beacon in the murk
HARDtalk interviewer Stephen Sackur once said a journalist needs “curiosity, courage and confidence”. After three decades as a newsman, he has all these attributes in spades.
HARDtalk interviewer Stephen Sackur once said a journalist needs “curiosity, courage and confidence”. After three decades as a newsman, he has all these attributes in spades.
Stephen Sackur, presenter of esteemed BBC interview programme HARDtalk, is the master of the tough question. It turns out his credentials as a time traveller are also impressive. I ask him a not-so-tough question – what is he up to today? – and end up tumbling through a tear in the space-time continuum. “Ah, today we’re interviewing former Mexican president Vicente Fox, so we’re going to be busy through the day,” he says authoritatively down the phone from London. What? But I’ve already watched Sackur’s interview with Fox on Sky’s BBC World News channel. “Oh, you’ve seen the Fox interview? Sorry. I thought you wanted to know what we did yesterday.”
He was helpfully tweaking temporal reality on the trot to allow for our different time zones, possibly forgetting that New Zealand was at the time 13 hours ahead of him. After his years spent grilling sometimes recalcitrant presidents, prime ministers and personalities – “the good, the bad and the ugly,” as he says in his Twitter bio – you suspect he’s learnt to maintain a measure of control, even over the laws of the universe.
Back in real time, where Fox is already well and truly interviewed, Sackur has a day planned that sounds quite relaxed. “I’m preparing for a trip I’m about to go on so, no, I’m not doing an interview today.” He has interviewed everyone from Shimon Peres and Hugo Chávez to Noam Chomsky and William Shatner, who insisted on calling him “Stevie Boy”.
Author Kathy Lette once ambushed him with an on-screen Valentine’s Day smooch. But the Fox interview is a classic in any time zone. “Mr Fox, you can’t bandy about the word Nazi lightly!” pleads Sackur. They’re talking about
Fox’s expletive-heavy Twitter responses to Donald Trump. Fox doesn’t hold back on HARDtalk, either. “This crazy, dumb guy, Trump … In the name of 120 million Mexicans, we are not paying for that stupid wall!” he declares. “So far in this interview,” sums up Sackur, sounding as if he’s getting a migraine, “we’ve had ‘crazy’, ‘dumb’ and ‘stupid’.”
He can’t often have found himself in the position of advising his interviewee to put a sock in it, or at least tone it down a bit. “I think he’s teetering on the edge of undermining his own credibility when he starts talking about Nazis and all that stuff,” he says of Fox, though he understands the impulse. “When you no longer have power, you have to try very hard to make an impact, to cut through, and I think that’s in a sense what Fox is doing these days. He’s found a way to do it by out-trumping Trump with his language. Obviously, it makes fantastic telly.”
“You have to be tough. If people are deliberately trying to avoid and obfuscate and deny, then you have to be prepared to keep coming back.”
There’s inevitably a gladiatorial element to the business of calling public figures to account. Sackur has spoken about auditioning to replace HARDtalk’s famously combative first presenter, Tim Sebastian, in 2004. “[They] were trying to find someone who would be grumpy enough for the job.” Sackur was that grumpy man.
He takes a slightly less hectoring tone than Sebastian. “Ha! I’m laughing because every morning I wake up to Twitter comments or emails or social-media reactions telling me to stop interrupting so much. I think I’m probably a little less in your face than Tim. It’s important just for me and who I am to try to remain courteous, broadly courteous, as I go through the interrogation.”
But interrupting is surely part of the job, otherwise you’d get a verbal press release from media-trained public figures. “Absolutely. There’s only any point to doing a long-form interview if it’s quite intense in its challenge and it really is trying to dig a little bit deeper. Of course you have to be tough. If people are deliberately trying to avoid and obfuscate and deny, then you have to be prepared to keep coming back.” Interrupting is a signal to the audience.
“In the end, I can’t force people to directly answer my questions. I can’t force them to be honest and truthful. All I can do is perhaps indicate if I feel that they’re using the tactics of avoidance to stop getting to the heart of the matter.”
Even New Zealanders who don’t normally watch HARDtalk became aware of Sackur in May 2011 when our then Prime Minister, John Key, went under his knife. Sackur cross-examined Key over New Zealand’s “100% Pure” promotional slogan, citing environmental scientist Mike Joy’s view that New Zealand is “delusional” about how clean and green we are. “I don’t share that view,” beamed Key. “Yeah, but he’s a scientist, it’s based on research, it’s not an opinion he’s plucked from the air,” said Sackur. “He’s one academic and, like lawyers, I can provide you with another one that will give you a counterview,” declared Key. In comparison with the rest of the world, we are 100% pure, he insisted. Sackur: “But 100% is 100%, and clearly you’re not 100% …”
It was, in retrospect, a little Trumpian. “A little bit,” Sackur says, laughing. “It makes me wonder a little about New Zealand, too. It’s striking to me how many New Zealanders remember that particular exchange so clearly. It suggests to me that maybe your politicians and your Prime Minister aren’t challenged very much at home. If that became so memorable, it makes me wonder what the hell everybody else was asking the guy,” he says. “It didn’t do Key any damage at home, that interview, or did it?”
Not so as you’d notice, I tell him, though the exposure the exchange got here possibly increased awareness of the yawning gap between hype and reality in the political discourse. Sadly, we haven’t got anything here like HARDtalk or anyone as grumpy as Sackur, apart from, possibly, when the occasion permits, Kim Hill.
HARDtalk is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary when we speak. This month, BBC World News will feature celebratory content, including Sackur’s interview with actor Sir Ian McKellen and two specials featuring HARDtalk presenters talking about the job.
For a former BBC foreign correspondent who reported on the fall of the wall in Germany in 1990 and who was an embedded journalist with the British Army during the Gulf War, he has been settled in a mostly studio-bound role for a while. “Oh, you’re not kidding. I never imagined I’d do any job for going on 12 years. When my kids were growing up, I decided it was perhaps time to settle down. I started doing HARDtalk, I enjoyed it and I guess they figured that I could just about manage to do it, so here I am.”
In the process, Sackur has become one of an increasingly rare breed. “There aren’t many international broadcasters that remain committed to long-form interviews.” And these days, the show is operating in a climate where the value and integrity of mainstream journalism are being systematically questioned and undermined. Does this erode the mandate of a show such as HARDtalk to take an aggressive line with the powerful? “Well, it’s a great question – the climate does matter. But no, I don’t think it undermines my mandate at all. I would say, on the contrary, it boosts the value of what we do. I refuse to worry about the degree to which, in the media climate, there is more and more discussion of fake news and alternative facts. To me, that simply represents the reason why HARDtalk and the journalism we do are so very important.”
SIt’s amazing who does front up. There was Sackur’s absurdist encounter with disgraced, sexting former US congressman Anthony Weiner.
ometimes it’s about speaking truth to power. Sometimes it’s about being mean to Gwyneth Paltrow. In an interview in Cannes last year, Sackur brought up Paltrow’s top spot,
back in 2013, in a “most hated celebrity” magazine poll. “What did I do?” wailed Paltrow. “Maybe you just make people feel bad sometimes,” Sackur said, helpfully. Ouch. Sackur is unrepentant. “We can’t become a celebrity show like so many others where people come on just to puff the latest movie, book or product. With Gwyneth, they didn’t want us to talk about her divorce, but it’s become so much a part of her story I felt we couldn’t do the interview unless I did ask her about the divorce. So we’ll never become a show where we accept conditions.”
It must sometimes be awkward after a rocky interview. “Usually, things are fine, because I try to be human afterwards, even if it’s been tough. Very occasionally it’s very frosty.” Yes. There was the one with former President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria. “When the lights went down, the mikes were off and we shook hands, he said through gritted teeth, ‘Stephen, you’ll be hearing from my lawyers tomorrow.’”
He’s only had one walkout: sometime PR guru Max Clifford. “He’s in prison now, ironically, on some sort of sex charges,” muses Sackur. “That wasn’t why he walked out of my show, but he’s no longer in the community.”
He has interviewed Bill Clinton and George W Bush, but that was when he was working in news. “I used to be the White House guy in Washington for the BBC.” He’d love to interview Donald Trump, as who wouldn’t, but that’s unlikely. “No US president would ever do HARDtalk, because their minders, their communications chiefs, would tell them it was insane. ‘Why would you do HARDtalk, Mr President? It’s half an hour of tough questions, plenty of downside and not much upside, so don’t do it.’”
It’s amazing who does front up. There was Sackur’s absurdist encounter with disgraced, sexting former US congressman Anthony Weiner. “Oh my god. It wasn’t the most successful interview, to be honest, because he couldn’t really explain to himself why he’d agreed to do it. As soon as I started to get into the sexting stuff, he got very snotty and very edgy and mocked me for asking stupid questions. Why would the BBC stoop to such lows? But of course he knew as well as I knew that had it not been for the sexting, we wouldn’t have been interested. The whole basis of the interview was the car crash of his life. Then to say, ‘Well, I’m not going to talk about the car crash’, and yet still sit down and do the interview, is sort of meaningless and pointless.”
Still, the encounter revealed a character who might have been crafted by Shakespeare, or possibly Ricky Gervais. “Funnily enough, I went with my daughter to watch the movie Weiner the other day and had all these flashbacks. He is such a frankly weird and extraordinary guy.”
Some of Sackur’s favourite interviews have a slower burn. There was his gentle conversation with Sir Nicholas Winton, who organised the rescue of 669 mostly Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Prague. Winton was 105. “It was such a privilege to meet him. Obviously, I wasn’t grilling him. It made a big difference that it was done in his own home.” The studio interviews are recorded as live and, despite the ritualised nature of such encounters, can sometimes hit a raw nerve.
“I think, as much as anything, HARDtalk is a little bit like a psychology show or a psychiatry show.” The doctor is in. There was an extraordinary interview with crime writer Patricia Cornwell. “She got into very deep territory about her own life and her own sadnesses and pain and in the end she started crying a little bit. She left really quite shaken up by the whole thing, but not in a bad way.” Job done.
He’s aware HARDtalk can be a challenging watch. “I wouldn’t pretend that’s the easiest way to spend half an hour.” But he’s convinced there’s a future for such shows. “If I didn’t believe there was an audience for that level of discussion, then we’d all pack up and go home. Everything I see and hear when I travel the world suggests in some ways – and it’s precisely because of the climate you’re talking about – people are more receptive to, and longing for, that sort of journalism than ever.
“Speaking in these terrible terms they use in the ad industry – your USP – we have developed a unique selling point because hardly anybody else is bothering to do it any more. People have lost faith. Without wishing to sound holier than thou or self-satisfied or complacent, I think what we do is a bit of a beacon in a pretty murky world right now.”
True: as everything burns around the last outposts of serious public-interest journalism, the taller they tend to stand. “Well, yeah,” he says, with a wintry laugh. “You just hope the fire brigade is around in case the fire gets too intense.”