The chief presenter of BBC Newsnight vividly chronicles the pains and perils of news televisionEmily Maitlis’s book isn’t an autobiography. By the end we are none the wiser about what she was like as a child, her personal relationships or the pivotal moments that led to her becoming arguably the BBC’s sharpest interviewer and lead presenter of Newsnight. While she does devote a chapter to her experience of being stalked, Airhead is mostly a compendium of her biggest interviews with politicians, celebrities, thinkers and, in one case, an actual living god. In showing us what happens in front of the camera as well as the chaos behind it, her aim is less to tell her life story than reveal the blood, sweat and tears that go into planning and delivering the news. “Unlike print there is no room for annotation or commentary as you go along,” she writes in the introduction. “What appears on the screen is what people see. Everything else is just interpretation.”And so we accompany Maitlis as she is dispatched to Paris to cover the Bataclan terrorist attack; to Hong Kong to report on the umbrella democracy protests, and to Boone County, Iowa, for a Democratic caucus in a snow-smothered farmhouse. There are one-to-ones with Donald Trump, Tony Blair, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, the former civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal, Emma Thompson, James Comey and more, and here the presenter is able to share the build-up and comedown around each exchange. Some accounts work better than... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2019-04-18 00:00:00 UTC ]