The Beeb

The ordeal is over. The three minutes LIVE on air has passed, and I survived. Why this should hold such terrors for me I don’t know, but it does. When the BBC car arrived for me yesterday at dawn and brought me through empty early morning London streets to Broadcasting House I felt as if  I were being taken to my execution. It is the idea of a live interview that terrifies me- what if I should suddenly become overcome by the giggles, or start stammering, or not understand the questions asked or have an attack of touretts and start swearing or saying rude things? Now, those possibilities are remote, but they do exit, so they had robbed me of all sleep during the preceding night...

Once in the venerable Art Deco building, I was taken through a vast hall full of seemingly hundreds of working desks – mostly empty at this hour- with computer screens until we arrived in an area which had a sign above it advertising the fact that we were now entering  the LIVE broadcasting zone where silence must reign. To me it might as well have read ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here...’

I was shown into a waiting room from which the recording studio with the news readers/presenters was visible through glass walls. Another  interviewee was sitting there drinking coffee and looking through his notes. He turned out to be a transport union official and he was there to talk about Brexit. I confessed to him that I was very, very  unhappy...then it all happened and we were brusquely shown in to the recording studio on tip toes where we were silently kitted up with earphones. My fellow interviewee went first and was of course brilliantly concise, confident and a marvel of concentration. My heart was thumping away so loudly that I was sure it must already  be audible to the millions of Today listeners who were having baths, brushing their teeth or making toast.  I comforted myself with the fact that it was at least so early that most people I knew were certainly still in bed...

And then it was finally my turn. We went off to a bad start, but strangely it was the interviewer, Martha Kearney, who fluffed it, not I! She began by talking about the new exhibition of images from Djenne at the BRITISH MUSEUM rather than the British Library... so I had to begin by correcting her. Then she wanted to know why the manuscripts of Mali were important, and I was able to cobble something together about Sub Saharan Africa having been seen as a place virtually without history since it was believed that there was no written documentation, but that the study of the Malian manuscripts during the last thirty years had proven that on the contrary, West Africa was rich in centuries old documentation through the Arabic manuscripts etc etc... and the rest went if not swimmingly, at least I believe it was a pass...

The ordeal is over, and now I will actually just enjoy the Private View of the Djenne Exhibition tomorrow night at the British Library. I will give my speech, but that holds no great terrors- the place will be full of friends. The event is heavily oversubscribed and  many people who did not RSVP in time are now finding themselves unable to attend!

More later...