Imagine an Indian Larry King asking Sanjay Dutt about hiding grenades

We’ve got the scandalous celebrities, but the Indian media is yet to find its own Larry King or Barbara Walters.

WrittenBy:Rajyasree Sen
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On this week’s episode of the new mini-series The People vs OJ Simpson, they showed a re-enactment of the first of Larry King’s many interviews with various people connected to the murder. This interview was the one conducted by King of the murdered Nicole Brown’s friend, Faye Resnick, who had written a tell-all book on Brown and Simpson’s marriage before the trial had even begun. Right after his interview of Resnick, King interviewed Simpson’s lawyer, F Lee Bailey and later, Simpson and Johnie Cochrane as well, all on his show Larry King Live on CNN.

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Watching the re-enactment of the Resnick interview made me realise once again that on Indian news channels, the concept of a celebrity interview programme is simply not there. Of course, we have interviews, but they are conducted by the same handful of journalists who report on current affairs, politics, and even report from the middle of war zones. They’re the usual suspects: Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai, Shekhar Gupta, Bhupendra Chaubey, Karan Thapar and Rajat Sharma. While I’m sure this is a sign that they’re all-rounders, it doesn’t mean that any of them are particularly good celebrity interviewers.

A celebrity interview is not the same as a hardline political interview. It is meant to bring out the personal side of a celebrity known for their professional achievements (or lack thereof in some cases). The problem with celebrity interviews on Indian television is that they alternate between offensive, fawning and aggressive.

Just think of the interviews that Larry King did from 1985-2010 for CNN. He interviewed (among others) Tammy Faye, Barbara Walters and Anna Nicole Smith. Speaking of Barbara Walters, for her earlier show 20/20, Walters interviewed everyone from politicians to actors. She interviewed Margaret Thatcher, Vladimir Putin, Fidel Castro, Michael Jackson, Anna Wintour – and famously got a lot of flak for asking what kind of tree Katherine Hepburn would want to be. This was after Hepburn, who never gave interviews, agreed to give her one. The answer, by the way, was “an oak” (for its strength and beauty).

Take a Diane Sawyer, who conducted the first interview of Caitlyn Jenner announcing that she was a transgender, on ABC News. If you haven’t seen the interview you should and while you’re at it, send the link to our Indian interviewers as an example of how not to fawn or look out of sorts in an interview. That Diane Sawyer interview was everything the Barkha Dutt special interview of Deepika Padukone speaking about her depression wasn’t. Sawyer didn’t start weeping or asking maudlin questions. She didn’t make redundant statements or gaze at Jenner with doe eyes. Perhaps my favourite interview of Sawyer’s is the one she did with Jacey Dugard who was kidnapped and kept in captivity for more than 18 years.  It’s a lesson in interviewing.

If you like your interviewers to be less earnest and more sardonic, you could watch Jon Stewart who on The Daily Show interviewed Barack Obama and asked the American president about his really unimpressive first debate during the 2012 elections. Stewart interviewed Al Gore about selling Current TV to Al Jazeera, which was largely funded by oil money. None of these interviews – even those of pop-culture icons – are easy to do. Even if the celebrities were frivolous, the interviews weren’t and at the end of the programme, you knew much more both about the person behind the mask of fame as well as the world in which they operated.

That’s what a good interview show does — it asks the questions you want answered by those in the spotlight.

It’s not like we don’t have good journalists in India. We have great ones who’ve been reporting for decades. The only one who manages some semblance of intelligent questioning across fields is Shekhar Gupta. Dutt and Chaubey swing between Oprah-esque questioning and genuflecting. Or we have the overly sentimental and dramatic and nonsensical. I’ll never forget Koel Purie Rinchet interviewing a thoroughly disinterested Naseeruddin Shah and him curtly refusing to play her acting “game”.

Going by the levels of controversy that surround them, Indian celebrities are tailor-made for American-TV-style interviews, which is why it’s a shame that we don’t see them on television. Imagine a one-hour special asking the recently de-jailed Sanjay Dutt what he was thinking while hiding grenades in his house. Or watching Sanjeev Nanda being asked if he feels he got let off just a tad easy in his drunk driving case. Or asking Sachin Tendulkar about his political correctness.

There isn’t a prominent business family that doesn’t have a few public scandals that are begging to be explored on television. Is it so impossible to ask Anil Ambani (or his brother, if you can get him to agree to an interview) on the brothers’ tiff and how they made up? Why can’t we ask Amarchand Mangaldas’ ex-partners and brothers, Cyril and Shardul Shroff, about their falling out? Because our journalists are either too busy genuflecting to the altar of celebrity or pussyfooting around their interviewees so that they don’t upset them. Or worse, they’re shouting questions at their guests.

Simply put, it’s odd that we do not have dedicated interview shows across news channels, despite India throwing up a worthy interview candidate by the hour across professions. Yet the best we can do is have panel ‘debates’ in which no one hears anything and everyone yells. Perhaps some of the problem lies in how focused we are as Indians upon scoring points. Debates have winners. Interviews, on the other hand, are conversations and conversations don’t end with rankings.

Net net, if you want to watch a good celebrity interview show asking interesting questions, don’t go looking for it on Indian news channels. Click on the links I’ve shared earlier and say a prayer of thanks for YouTube.

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