How to be an air head – by a brainbox
The title has to be dealt with first. emily Maitlis is one of our most talented TV journalists — and I, for one, cannot understand why this totally serious, multilingual woman, now Newsnight’s chief presenter, was not given the coveted Question Time gig.
But an ‘airhead’ is a bimbo, so why feed sexist prejudice by calling your first book — a fascinating, perceptive, intelligent and gossipy examination of ‘The Imperfect Art Of Making News’ — Airhead?
Maitlis explains that she is trying to ‘invert the cliché’, describing the ‘moments of utter panic’ when you have no idea what will come out of your mouth next; when what seems to be between your ears is, indeed, empty air.
her intention is to ‘illuminate that combination of careful thought and utter chaos: the big, deep breath that comes when you’ve
lost contact with the gallery, the guest has walked out, the riot police are at your back and all you hear is the sole instruction to keep talking’.
Anyone with aspirations to work in television news, any wannabe presenter who thinks it looks pretty easy to read an Autocue, should study this book and take on board just how hard the whole thing is.
Are you prepared to grab your case, leave your family, sweat (mentally and physically), argue, chase, think on your feet, miss your children, lose your way in an interview — knowing all the time that, even though you are part of a team, you carry the can?
What’s most impressive about Maitlis’s
whistlestop tour through trying television moments is her frankness about how easy it is to misjudge themoment. Again and again, she admits she made the wrong call . . . and frets about priorities.
So, not an autobiography, but a serious book about journalism, disguised in anecdotal chapters about her encounters with thegreat and the good and the rather awful — from Bill Clinton through David Attenborough and to SteveBannon and Russell Brand.
What happens when you areinterviewing a senior politician and it becomes clear that you cannot ask the question on your mind?
Maitlis is in India to interview Bill Clinton, in punishing heat. She wants to ask him about Monica Lewinsky, who has written about her entanglement with Clinton two decades on.
But she is pre-warned Clinton is unwell and (effectively) must not beupset — and, if he is, the tape will bepulled. In the end, the decision has to be taken: no Lewinsky question.
You warm to her frankness: ‘I was terrified. Absolutely terrified.’
Emily Maitlis seems endearingly starstruck by David Attenborough, Emma Thompson, Simon Cowell, some naked Chippendales she met in Las Vegas and, above all, by playing a character called Emily Maitlis in a comedy sketch with Alan Partridge.
In stark contrast, she writes movingly about the Grenfell Tower disaster and the ethics of emotional involvement when you have to interview the Prime Minister on the story.
Few things can be predicted: ‘I’m writing this book to try to dispel themyth that everything that happens in television is planned’ — and that an element of ‘chance’ is ‘the essenceof . . . the job’. Maitlis sometimes gets caught out by her own profession. She is filmed ( a smartphone, it must be) while doing a radio interview with Emma Barnett, gives away too much — and hates being caught looking scruffy without her make-up. Trivial? Not in the slightest. The searing honesty that informs Maitlis on this, as well as on migrants in Budapest, her compassion for those who present an unsympathetic face to the world, the intelligencethat informs the most succinct paragraph on Brexit I have ever read . . . all this leads the reader towards a deeper understanding of an essential part of our culture: current affairs.
This is a book that engages at every level — and so I’ll take‘brainbox’ perhaps, Ms Maitlis, but not ‘airhead’ . . . no, no, no.