George & Nick on Piers Morgan Tonight

PigLove wrote:Yes, Atalante! Poor Nick. That was so annoying.

If I had been Piers (how many times do I have to say it?), I would have BEGGED Nick to start blogging.

it's me wrote:flowerpot? means? not important?

When ‘honesty’ is counterproductive

By Nestor Torre
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 20:08:00 01/28/2011

AFTER LEADING off with his headline-making “buena mano” interview with the Oprah Winfrey, CNN’s new nightly interview show host, Piers Morgan, lined up other attention-calling talkfests with “shock radio” maverick, Howard Stern, and other big-deal guests.

Alas, none of his followup interviews were able to rise to the level set by his much-publicized encounter with Oprah, during which she heaped praise on him for his “potential.”

So, what does this say about Morgan’s prospect as the host of a major talk show with “legs”? It shows that he can’t afford to relax, and that he must do each day’s show with focus and ferocity, as if it were his last.

Talk-show icon

Stern, who’s a talk-show icon in his own right, said it best when he agreed to talk to the new kid on the block: He warned Morgan that a great first week of shows was wonderful, but the real test of his talent and determination would be how he could still come up with great shows while interviewing less than wonderful and powerful people—like the Kardashians?

Morgan got on Oprah’s good side, because he adjusted his usually catty and cynical interviewing style for her benefit. With Stern and his other, subsequent guests, he sometimes went back to his bitchy style, and thus came off as less of a class act.

Yes, he was being truer to himself, but the “honesty” has turned out to be counterproductive.

For instance, in his panting quest for the steamily quotable quote, he asked Stern about the size of—ah, what the late Ishmael Bernal liked to refer to as “the scepter of a man’s manhood.”

Stern did play along and gave his eager interviewer the racy sound bites he wanted, but viewers could see that the “shock radio” icon was disappointed in this brash, new upstart, who was prepared to pollute the airwaves just to give his new career a yowling boost.

Morgan fared better later in the course of his first week on CNN, when he interviewed George Clooney and his newsman-dad. The show ended up as a memorable exchange of ideas, because Clooney chose to focus, not on his moviestar persona, but on his humanitarian initiatives in Sudan.

Questions

Morgan tried to get some fan-mag questions in, but the classy Clooneys smoothly parried off his tabloid-y thrusts. George had agreed to do the CNN interview to illuminate viewers about issues, not his stellar bedroom antics, so Morgan’s cheesy game was up.

Aside from Clooney’s fine showing, the interview was also distinguished by the great first-time look it provided into his similarly exceptional dad, Nick, who came across as an outstanding person in his own right.

Best of all, when George and his father interacted with one another, viewers were gifted with the great pleasure of seeing two generations interacting perfectly, heart to heart, leaving their interviewer holding the bag—and looking definitely like the odd man out.

From The Independent

John Walsh: Have we lost the art of the good interview?

Thursday, 3 February 2011

The CNN commercial for Piers Morgan Tonight shows the great man standing, arms folded, face a-smirk, as a number of adjectives unfurl beside him: "Piers Morgan is Provocative," it promises. "Challenging. Fun. Pushing the Boundaries of the Interview ..." I've seen some of the daily shows and I'm not sure the final claim is justified. On Tuesday, he interviewed Tony Blair about Egypt. "If you were still prime minister," Morgan began, promisingly, "would you be calling on your friend Mubarak to resign and leave?" There followed a cloud of diplomatic persiflage from a furrow-browed Blair ("We're talking about a period of transition until the elections ... whatever happens, there's going to be a change") through which a Paxman or Humphrys would have sliced like a scimitar through jelly. Piers did nothing.

Speaking to a screen link of George Clooney the other night, he harried and intimidated the actor with such belligerent queries as: "Why wouldn't you think of running for the presidency?" Turning to Clooney's dad, who was in the discussion to bring added emollience, Piers asked: "This is a really double-edged question, but what's the proudest you've ever been of George? And what was the least proud?" Eliciting the controversial news that George's dad has always been "proud of George every day", Morgan went for the kill. "What's the naughtiest he's ever been?" Oh, he was very naughty when young, said his fond, snow-haired pop, "but he always made me laugh".

Some people may find this approach endearing rather than cringe-making, but it didn't do a lot to push the boundaries of the interview. Nor did his encounter with Ricky Gervais, fresh from his triumph at the Golden Globe awards, where he'd abused the leading lights of Hollywood. "You can wipe that smile off your face," he told Gervais as the latter took his seat. "You know what happens to naughty boys, don't you? They get a good spanking." Having convinced the watching (if rapidly dwindling) audience that British men were a bunch of overgrown schoolboys obsessed with bottoms and le vice Anglais, Morgan and Gervais embarked on a lengthy mutual smirkathon.

Ricky said he'd done nothing wrong. Piers asked him whether, having invited a hammerhead shark to dinner, the organisers should have been surprised when everyone got eaten. It wasn't exactly Torquemada. The more pretentious and silly Gervais became ("I think the art of comedy isn't to make people laugh, it's to make people think") the less disposed was Piers to confront him or to say: "What in the name of arse are you on about?"

I wouldn't be so critical, had I not recently been given the box set of the Face To Face BBC TV interviews with distinguished people, that ran from 1959 to 1962. They were all conducted by John Freeman, and are utterly brilliant. Freeman's face is never seen (though there are cutaway shots of the back of his head); his curious, reedy voice – alternating friendly and indulgent tones with rapid-fire bombardment – comes out of the dark and his questions, politely relentless, extract extraordinary responses from his lamp-lit guests.

Bertrand Russell, a leading light of CND when he was interviewed in 1959, blithely remarks that he would happily have dropped an atom bomb on the USSR in 1948, to avoid a larger nuclear confrontation. Dame Edith Evans, looking like an El Greco saint in a fur coat and a shaving-brush chignon, tries to stave off Freeman's probing about her unworldliness ("What do you like about the country?" "The quiet – and not being bothered by silly questions") but soon succumbs, revealing how excited she was to meet Marilyn Monroe, and assuring viewers that the lecherous drunkard Dylan Thomas was "very well behaved" in her company. Fancy that. By the end she's eating out of her tormentor's hand, even when he is so impertinent as to ask about her money and her unmarried state.

Under Freeman's sleek, provocative questioning, the comedian Tony Hancock quaked and floundered so much there was a public outcry. Asked what he was reading, the jack-the-lad pop star Adam Faith assured Freeman he was "just about to start" on Aldous Huxley, no, really I am...

Fifty years after these encounters were first broadcast, one can say: "Now that, Piers, is pushing the boundaries of an interview."