Things sometimes go wrong, and we have to deal with them on the spur of the moment.
I have been through two sessions of 'media training' and have accumulated quite a bit of experience of newspaper, television and radio interviews. But the scenario I faced yesterday was one I had not been trained for. I was reminded of two recent events involving others - one when John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister in the Labour government of the time, asked for the tape to be stopped during an interview so he could start his answer again, only to be remined that the interview was live. The other event I recall was when BBC Television Centre took a man who was there for an interview for a low grade post and whisked him into the studio for a live discussion of a technical aspect of IT.
I was in Bucharest, Romania, for the launch of a joint Masters programme being offered by the University of Sheffield (via our International Faculty) and a Romanian partner university. The launch had been at the British Embassy, and we had been given a very privileged send off by the Ambassador and his senior team. Part of the publicity that had been lined up was a live panel interview on one of the main Romanian TV News channels at prime time - 1800 hours in the evening.
Media training says that one should always ask the interviewer before the start as to the line of questioning he or she is likely to develop. There was no chance for that, since the programme was already running when we arrived at the studio so we only met the host of the programme when we were shown onto the set while footage of the morning's launch at the British Embassy was being shown.
I was told that any questions to me would be given in English and that my answers would be simultaneously translated behind the scenes to be broadcast in Romanian as a voiceover. I was also provided with an earpiece into which an English translation of the discussion with my two fellow interviewees, both Romanian, would be piped. In that way I could follow the course of the discussion.
Our glamorous interviewer (the host and lead personality on her own daily news show) asked me a first question in English and I replied. So far so good. She then turned to my fellow interviewees and switched to Romanian. I waited for the English translation through my earpiece - but simply heard an amplified version of the Romanian discussion. I quickly realised that I was not going to get an English version at all.
Media training also says that in group interviews one should look interested when colleagues are speaking, and try to reinforce their message through body language. So I turned my attention to that and sought to look engaged.
The second question to me, again in English, was a 'stand alone' question that I was able to deal with. But I then realised that the discussion with my colleagues was moving into a phase where they were being expected to comment on each other's answers and add further material. The inevitable happened: turning to me the interviewer said in English: "could you give me two sentences to add to what your colleageus have said."
Fortunately I do have a passable knowledge of Italian, as well as reasonable French, and although this was my first visit to Romania I had found that it was possible to at least understand what was being said, if not the detail. Romanian is closest to Italian within the family of Romance languages. By concentrating hard I had grasped the nature of the responses of my two colleagues, and was able quickly to think of two international dimensions that they had (I believed) not covered, so I gave my answer using those two points.
That was it and we were quickly ushered out of the studio ready for the next item. One of my Romanian colleagues immediately said that the simultaneous translation for me must have been incredibly quick since I was able to answer the final question without waiting for the full tenor of the previous answers to be provided for me. It was only then that I was able to let the others know that there had been no simultaneous translation at all piped into my earpiece.
I will probably never know how effective the interview as a whole was. But sometime next week the TV programme should be published on the web and I will look keenly at it to see what expression crossed my face when it dawned on me what was happening.
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