There's a great interview with one of my favourite journalists, Martha Kearney, on the Guardian website, which you can read HERE. She's one of the nicest people in the lobby, but her niceness conceals a fairly hard-headed political brain. During the Conservative leadership contest she made a 15 minute film profile of David Davis for Newsnight which for several reasons we were extremely unhappy with. She reacted in a way few other journalists would have and instead of becoming defensive or aggressive went out of her way to talk it through with us. I'm not sure how anyone could ever fall out with her - which is a great strength as a journalist. This is a short excerpt from the piece...Jeremy Paxman winds her up about that job endlessly - she will walk into the Newsnight studio and, in front of guests, he'll tweet: "Any jam recipes, Martha?" (She tells him, not in so many words, to knob off, as she did a few years ago when Paxman caused outraged by emailing blonde jokes round the Newsnight office; Kearney leaned on him until he ruefully sent a follow-up salvo of anti-men jokes. The two get along famously.)
9 comments:
When I fist glanced at this post I immediately thought of the Day Today episode where Chris Morris, in full Paxman mode, reduces his interviewee to tears as she tries to explain her charity jam sale. Highlights include “Sebastian Coe? I hate Sebastian Coe!” and “you could make more auctioning dogs”.
I realise this comment is both very geeky and totally irrelevant to your post.
"£5000!!! That's rubbish!!!" Great show.
Martha Kearney is excellent and it was absolutely terrible that she wasn't made political editor when that smug, vain, stupid bald arsehole whose name I forget was.
the best quote in that Day Today interview is: "you could make more money sitting outside of a London tube station with your hat on the ground, even if you were twice as ugly as you are, which is very ugly indeed"
Martha - my goodness I would.
Martha - oh my goodness I would.
oops - got a bit carried away there (but who could blame me)
So you and Polly Toynbee are agreed about one thing then.
Martha has long been the woman I would most like to have dinner with - after my wife of course!
Thank God I wasn't the only one to assume they were looking at a potential Morris-ism!
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