'Greatness is available to all of us, in our heads'

Opinion: Imagining yourself interviewed on the radio is one of life's great joys, says author Ashleigh Young. The hard part is when you have to do it for real.

Ashleigh YoungContributor
12 min read
An illustration of a radio tuning band.
Photo credit:Thomas Park for Unsplash+

This is one of a series of essays commissioned to commemorate RNZ's 100 years on air in Aotearoa.

My brother JP, a musician, used to work as a postie. Lots of musicians did. There was a saying that NZ Post was the Unofficial Creative New Zealand.

This was in the 2000s and early 2010s, and JP’s route took him around various suburbs in Wellington. A postie had a lot to contend with – dogs, lashing wind and rain, steep hills, people who would wait by their letterboxes for the mail to arrive (which it did every day, back then).

One of the ways JP sometimes passed the time along his route was to imagine being interviewed by Kim Hill. He might be on the Playing Favourites segment, talking about his favourite songs. Or the interview would turn to the songs that JP himself had written. In her intently searching way, that way of getting to the bottom of things, Kim Hill would ask about the musician’s life. ‘When you look back on that early album now, are there things you would do differently?’ or, ‘So, this album on the theme of shark attacks. Why? Why now?’

Kim Hill in the RNZ studio during her final Saturday Morning show, on 25 November, 2023.

Kim Hill in the RNZ studio during her final Saturday Morning show, on 25 November, 2023.

RNZ

One day, in passing, JP mentioned to another postie this habit of imagining going on the radio, and that postie confessed to doing the exact same thing: he, too, schlepped around his route with a glittering radio interview unspooling in his head.

This is the one of the gifts of radio – the gift of imagining going on the radio. Imagining our own reedy voices blasting across the nation, and absolutely killing it. People say that we all have a book in us, and I don’t believe that, but I do believe we all have a perfect radio interviewee in us, someone who can ramble on about our lives and dreams with great fluency. This person never forgets the names of common objects or hesitates for long seconds, is never insufferable or a blowhard or ignorant of major historical events. They are funny and wise, and flawed only in relatable ways. There’s a poem by Frank O’Hara with a much shared stanza: ‘Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern.’ He was talking about love, but I like to think he was talking about sitting nervously in a corridor, waiting to go on the radio.

When my brothers and I were children, my mother would sometimes interview us with the tape recorder. The tape recorder was a sacred object, shaped a bit like a tiny suitcase, with bulky keys for record, play, stop, rewind and fast forward, and a little window through which you could see the tape running. Very little preparation was required for these early interviews. ‘What did you do today?’ was a key question, and maybe, ‘What did you eat today?’ A single-word answer would suffice. But later there were more rigorous interviews. I remember my father pointing a banana at each of my brothers and demanding answers about some warships that had gone missing. ‘Frigates! Where are your frigates?’ To clarify, we were filming a skit with a video camera rented from the local electronics shop. But even though it was pretend, even though the microphone was a fruit, this adopting of roles –dogged journalist, hapless interviewee – felt like serious business was happening, and anything you said now would live on forever. I remember, too, being a reluctant contestant in an episode of Mastermind that we were filming in the lounge with that video camera. ‘Who is the Prime Minister of New Zealand?’ my father shouted, while a torch was shone in my face. ‘Lange!’ I finally said, after my mother helpfully murmured ‘David … ?’ There were yells of protest at this rule-breaking, but since nobody ejected her from the audience she continued to provide the first names of famous New Zealanders, and I made it through the round.

An illustration of a person pushing a button on a tape recorder.

The Young family had early practice at being recorded - with mixed results.

Thomas Park for Unsplash+

At five years old, something about the format of the live Q&A intimidated me. It was a test, above all, with potential for humiliation. But it was also a chance to prove you had the right answers, maybe even a chance to reveal some hidden greatness. A close family friend of ours – a sports writer and musician – made a series of tape recordings of interviews, where he was both interviewer and interviewee, talking about his songwriting. His music had never really broken through into the mainstream, but on those tapes he had arrived; his songs were known and celebrated and people wanted to know what his lyrics meant and who his influences were. Later, in the early 1990s, he published a memoir and, incredibly, he got to go on the radio with Kim Hill herself. I’ve looked for this interview, and I can’t find it. But I have heard that it did not go as well as the pretend interviews had gone.

Those of us who imagine ourselves going on the radio – the stories we’ll tell, the jokes we’ll crack, how we will account for ourselves – don’t speak of this habit often, unless we’re confident that the other person is of a similar bent. It’s unsavoury. There is a self-indulgence at work here, a wish to perform a mastery you don’t actually have, like doing air guitar. I question the wisdom of confessing to it now. But maybe there is also something joyful about imagining yourself being brilliant on the radio. It’s like imagining yourself as a Michelin-starred chef when you make a sandwich, or a Tour de France racer when you put on a small burst of speed going up a hill. Greatness is available to all of us, in our heads.

An incredible and unexpected thing has happened in my life, which is that I have been on the radio a few times now. Just a few months ago, I was getting ready to go on there. It was night time, and I sat in the dim Wellington studio with the microphone looking at me like a big mesh eye. I was going to be talking to Emile Donovan, in the Auckland studio, about The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen – a book about which a lot of people once had a lot of opinions. At last – nearly twenty-five years after the book’s release – like a sad foghorn through the mists of time, I could blast my own opinions across the land. I was looking forward to it – who doesn’t want to wrestle with the hard problem of Jonathan Franzen? And what a pleasure it was to have been invited at all – but I also wanted to flee into the night.

An illustration of a microphone.

The flipside to imagining being great on the radio is the heightened level of suffering you inflict upon yourself afterwards, says Ashleigh Young.

Thomas Park for Unsplash+

This is the problem with going on the radio, as opposed to imagining yourself going on the radio: you have to actually go on there. It’s real. For a week beforehand, I tried to corral my thoughts and feelings into decent soundbites. ‘Franzen captures a turn-of-the-century malaise and anxiety with an exquisite, painful, clarity – but he’s sure having fun while he does it!’ and so on. I imagined myself animatedly telling the story of Franzen’s glasses being stolen off his face and the assailant jumping into a lake as helicopters circled above. ‘An amazing story!’ Emile Donovan would cry. But there in the studio with the glass of water trembling on the desk, the carpeted walls absorbing all extraneous sound – I was left with my own quivery voice and clunking brain. ‘This book slaps,’ I think I ended up saying.

Of course, the flipside to imagining being great on the radio is the heightened level of suffering you inflict upon yourself afterwards. ‘Oh my god,’ I shouted at my partner, who had been sitting outside in the car eating a McFlurry and listening (I imagined) with his head in his hands. ‘That was terrible. I will die.’

‘It was all right,’ he said.

And yes. All of this melodrama stays in our heads, in the end. Very few things are wonderful or terrible. Very few people sound like geniuses or morons on the radio. Most people are just somewhere in the middle, being all right.

And when I think about it, the radio interviews I often enjoy the most, far more than those where the guest is hyper-articulate and prepared, are those that don’t go perfectly. The guest might be unsure of themselves, still figuring out what they’re saying; for the audience it can be a strange gift and a comfort to bear witness to another’s floundering and blurting. I also love an interview where the guest is spiky and defensive. In that category, Kim Hill’s interview with writer Joyce Carol Oates remains the greatest.

KH: Do you still write in longhand?

JCO: Yes.

KH: So I know that you revise and revise and revise, do you revise in longhand? I'm trying to get a grip on how much work that must be?

JCO: Well, I write every day and it doesn’t really matter. Did you ask how much I do? It’s incalculable. I mean, I’m not thinking about that.

What a joy, what freedom, just to answer: ‘I’m not thinking about that.’

Ashleigh Young is managing editor of Te Herenga Waka University Press.

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