The TV chat show, if not actually dead, has been in intensive care for a while now, hooked up to machines that go bleep. But the long-form interview, as pioneered by John Freeman’s Face to Face in the 1960s, is a tougher customer.
Laurie Taylor’s In Confidence series on Sky Arts has featured the great and the good, the less great and the really quite bad, all of them attracted by the professor’s gentle sociological probing and the show’s reliably modest viewing figures, which suggest that no one will notice if it all goes terribly wrong.
This book is Taylor’s artful distillation of more than 60 interviews, shaped according to his own tastes and preferences. Cleo Laine was his teenage crush, Alan Ayckbourn is a friend from way back, E.L. Doctorow clearly his favourite novelist. Tom Baker, another old friend, admits that when he was young he had only one ambition: to be a martyr.
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