Charles on… anything that comes along

Well, John Naughton was one…

A Newsnight journalist rang me on Friday evening, just after we’d arrived in deepest Suffolk, to see if I’d be interested in coming on the programme to talk about the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. I declined gracefully on the grounds that (a) I like being in deepest Suffolk, and (b) I wasn’t sure the story was such a big deal anyway.

And a female writer I know was another who is now spitting tacks about not having checked her email..

I dunno - I got called about 7.30pm, while I was freezing as I tried to soak some hay (don’t ask). Couldn’t answer the phone at first, because my hands were freezing, but managed to call back. Newsnight? Love to! (On the way back from the station earlier I’d been listening to the News Quiz and thinking ‘That’s not so hard, I could do that, gissa job..’) Glad to! Hurrah! (The phrase “scraping the bottom of the barrel” never arose. Though we did a long conversation about what I thought and so on.)

So they arranged a car. To take me from Essex wayyy to the east of London right over to TV Centre in the west of London. (Will they still do that if/when it moves to Manchester? Bet Newsnight and BBC Breakfast won’t move there.) Taxi arrives 9pm, satnav says we’ll arrive on the dot of 1030 at our destination. “What!” says the shocked researcher. “We were told it would be 10!” Hurry up, I tell the taxi driver, who doesn’t seem inclined to.

Soon though the satnav says we’ll be there at 1020. Then we get to London and it all slows down. The minutes tick back… phew, 1025, we’re there. Hustled through, quick bit of orange face makeup. Then stand around in the green room, which is about the size of a phone box, with Kirsty Wark and John Harris of the Guardian (who I’d not met before but looks just like he sounds) and Tony Parsons, who were there for the Newsnight Review portion and some bloke who was going to talk about drugs for Parkinson’s Disease and someone else and Michael Crick, the political correspondent - I mentioned a possibly mutual friend and he said “Tell me all the dirt!” Ah, the political writer at work. Somehow we got into a discussion about sub-prime mortgages and CDOs, which at least I know about. And then they all vanished, and then it was time to do the interview, and you’ve seen the rest. And I got back long past midnight, having found out more abuot the taxi driver’s family history than was useful. Though the tale he told about the civil engineer who built a block of flats facing the wrong way round - because he misread the plans - was quite entertaining.

Even so, how many people did, or do they ask for things like this? 10? 20?

All right, I’ll shut up about it now.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• My Newsnight appearance - yeah, well, watch it now (4 February 2008; score: 49%)
• So how exactly do you tell the difference between "human" and "artificial" sudoku? (11 May 2005; score: 39.56%)
• The answer to one is "pants".. (17 June 2005; score: 33.62%)