Here’s a poser. What is the best interview on You Tube?
By now there are thousands to choose from and more being added daily. Many of these are light hearted chats or mere publicity slots used to plug albums, books, movies etc.
An exception I recently discovered is a good series called The Alcove which may be old hat to you but is new to me.
It features an earnest, but very bright, interviewee Mark Molaro who, get this, wants his subjects to talk rather than being concerned to impose his own personality on the show.
They are a decent length too so come across as much more in depth. In other words the speakers can talk in a relaxed style without feeling they’ve got to come up with smart ass one liners all the time. There’s also no studio audience to try to impress. The success or failure of the interview depends on the wisdom and articulacy of the speaker. So far I’ve watched interviews with Naomi Klein and Greil Marcus, both of which were genuinely illuminating.
Described as “smart talk for a new global generation” the show’s other guests on an impressively diverse list include: Mark Pesce (Web technology expert); Helen Epstein, (HIV/AIDS expert & author); Byron Hurt (“Hip Hop: Beyond Beats & Rhymes”) and Naomi Wolf (“The End of America”). Interviews can also be seen on Mark Molaro’s website.
But for my money the best interview ever is a show I remember being entranced by when broadcast in the BBC Arena season in 1982. Over the course of about two hours, Orson Welles talks to Leslie Megahey about his extraordinary career which by his own admission is largely one in which he started at the top (with the Mercury Theatre and Citizen Kane) and worked his way down thereafter. Continue reading
