I was asked the other day who has been the most interesting person I have interviewed’?. Been thinking about that. Thought it might have been Barry Humphries who was the incredibly funny Dame Edna. Then maybe it was Maeve Binchy the gloriously irreverent Irish writer who happily had her month’s supply of G and T’s at our lunch. The more I thought about it, the longer the list became. Such is a consequence of chatting with people since the 70’s (that’s the 1970’s).
Of late, Joanne Cash ( Johnny’s sister) would take some beating. Mind you Kiwi superstar singer Stan Walker probably did that. I chatted with Paul Potts, remember Paul?, the phone salesman who Simon Cowell petrified but Paul had the voice of an angel. I enjoyed my chat with him a lot.
To my shame I can’t remember the brave man who was the first to ‘come out’ and acknowledge he had AIDS in Australia. Greg Chappell the cricketer was not the fierce man people told me he was. I think Flo Bjelke-Peterson was all that you’d hope she’d be. It is with sadness that I never got to chat with Sir Jo…her husband and Queensland PM for years!. I was one of his ‘media chooks’.
And so the list grows and still I can’t elevate ‘just one’ to the top of the heap. But hang on. I think I can. I never interviewed him for either radio or the tele, but laying beside him on his bed towards his death, it was my chats with dad that I think were the best…as well as the saddest. Why did I leave it ‘ too late’. I didn’t record them and already my memory is dodgy. But I can remember thinking that although our relationship was littered with ‘slips along the road’ that for those precious moments, everything was ok.
Unlike my TV programs I can’t play them again ‘on demand’ .