[originaltext]W: With all your experience of interviewing, Michael, how can you

W: With all your experience of interviewing, Michael, how can you tell if somebody is going to make a good interviewer?
M: Oh, I say, what a question! I’ve never been asked that before. I think that the prerequisite obviously is curiosity. The people who have done my job failed to have been good interviewers because basically they’ve not been journalists. Um, my training was in journalism. I’ve been 26 years a journalist and to be a journalist means that you like meeting people, and also you want to find out about them. So that’s the prerequisite. After that, I think there’s something else that comes into it, into play, and I think, again, most successful journalists have it—it’s a kind of affinity with people, it’s an ability to get on with people.
W: When you’ve done an interview yourself, how do you feel whether it’s been a good interview or not a good interview?
M: I can never really tell on air. I have to watch it back, because television depends so much on your director getting the right shot, the right reaction.
W: How do you bring out the best in people, because you always seem to manage to, not only relax them, but somehow get right into the depths of them.
M: By research, by knowing, when you go into a television studio, more about the guests in front of you than they’ve forgotten about themselves. And, I mean that’s pure research. I mean, you probably use... in a 20-minute interview, I probably use a 20th of the research material that I’ve absorbed, but that’s what you’re gonna have to do. If anybody ever tries to tell you that as an interviewer just starting, that you wing it, there’s no such thing. It’s all preparation.
W: And does that include sticking to written questions?
M: No, I mean what you do is you have an aide memoir. I have, my... my list of questions aren’t questions as such, they’re areas that I block out.
W: Have you got a last word of encouragement for any young people setting out on what they’d like to be in a career as an interviewer?
M: I envy them, I mean, I really do. I mean I’d go back and do it all again. I think it’s the most perfect job for any young person who’s got talent and ambition and energy. And the nice thing about it is that the proportion of talent is only five percent: the other 95 percent is energy and no examinations to pass. I’d love to do it over again.
6. According to the man, what makes a good interviewer?
7. How does the man feel whether an interview done by him is good or not?
8. How does the man bring out the best in the interviewees?
9. What questions are on the man’s list?
10. According to the man, what is the nice thing about being an interviewer?