FEATURE INTERVIEW: "Your chance to meet the real..."

Notes by Chris Horrie

A very attractive format to students because it is GONZO and features the journalist as star.

You will see a lot of "n-th" rate feature interviews all over the consumer press and semi-professional fanzine derived media. Most entertainment radio and TV (where there are celebrity presenters, etc) use a type of feature-interview approach - from Saturday morning kids TV and the Big Breakfast, through to the Parkinson Show and (in a way) Paxman - it is all about the presenter/writer being wonderfully clever and interesting.

One of the main practitioners in print is Lynn Barber - who does her "performance" journalism in the Observer and elsewhere - and very good it is too as an example of the format. It is surprising that there is no Lynn Barber show on TV. Possibly this is because she is not telegenic enough to compete with, for example, Ian Wright the ex-Arsenal footballer turned "feature interview" expert.

There is an example of Lynn Barber's work here. Almost inevitably the "interview" is in fact an account of the great LB having lunch with Graham Norton. She chucks in a few facts about Norton - thus muddling the style with a profile. It is entertaining writing but - as is normal with this style - we end up knowing more about LB than the subject. It is all PR driven - GN has a new show to plug.

The origins of this type of format was the "New Journalism" movement in New York in the '60s and was especially associated with Andy Warhol's "underground" magazine INTERVIEW in the 1970s. Hunter S Thompson, for example, once famously interviewed President Nixon and spoke only about American football, beer and things like that... and this was at the height of the Vietnam war.

So it is all very fashionable in both approach and content. It is entertaining, and therefore has its place. The important thing is not to mix this style with "proper" profile writing (as students in the past have done) just because you have seen it on the telly.

We would not be human if we did not want to have our own column consisting of of what we said to various members of the jet set during lunch at the Ivy. But we don't really need to go to college to study how to do that.

TV equivalents: Live 'n' Kickin'; Mrs Merton; Parkinson... and Graham Norton.

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