This week we were introduced to how to properly interview live guests. Before this I had interviewed people before when creating short pieces for our last radio show, but this time we were told to research each guest for the workshop and make questions for them according to what we had researched. We were told to already get into groups for this workshop, so I paired up with Chloe and Chloe to research each person and write questions.
In the workshop we were split into 3 groups to interview one person at a time. We had 7 minutes to interview each guest. Our guests were Charlotte Broughton, Ed Francis and Paul Tyler.
We started with Ed, from Eddie and Sunshine. Ed was in electro-pop duo Eddie and Sunshine who supported Ultravox on tour. They had some success before things began to fall apart, it was then that they moved to Lincolnshire.
As we had a bigger group we had 2 presenters, me and Aidan. I have never worked with Aidan before but we got on well and quickly worked on the task. The majority of questions we asked Eddie were based on what his life was like, where he played, who he met, whether he missed the atmosphere on the road. I asked the controversial question on where everything began to go wrong and what caused the bands split, and his body language changed. He seemed a bit upset returning to the memory, but he gave us a solid answer and was really open to the question. I changed my body language to be more open and friendly when answering the question, and understood that if he didn’t want to answer it that was fine. This was the first time I had interviewed anyone and got an emotional response such as Eddie, and I would like to do this more so I can learn to adapt and make them feel comfortable when faced with questions like that.
Our next guest was Charlotte Broughton. She has volunteered as Chairman of the Broadbent Theatre Group, north of Lincoln.
Charlotte was very calm when we walked into the room and informed us that non of the equipment had been working with the previous group. She was patient when we tried to fix it and we apologised for being so unprofessional, so we decided to just conduct the interview without any equipment. Unfortunately, and very embarrassingly we found out that one of our questions had the wrong information on it. We asked about her role as Chairman of the Broadbent Theatre Group to which she replied that she was no longer the Chairman. She did admit that the website was out of date and understood why we got this wrong, but it proves that we should have looked at more than one source to get research from as our source was out of date and so unreliable.
Our final guest was Paul Tyler. Personally I found researching into Paul very hard, as he didn’t have as much of an online presence as the other guests. Paul is a radio presenter and podcaster.
Paul was very comfortable in the studio already as he is a presenter anyway and is used to radio studios. He was able to talk on for ages and often we had to but in to ask the next question. Paul was very co-operative and was the easiest to talk to.
Surprisingly I really enjoyed interviewing these people, and I can only wish that we had some more time to talk and learn more about them. In our feedback each guest said we came across as friendly and helpful, and it was obvious that we had done our research.