Interviewing the Interviewers
Year after year, University of Hertfordshire students and members of the local community have been trained in interview techniques in order to take part in university projects or to carry out assignments of their own.
So what help can the thoughts of professional interviewers additionally provide? Not just those who operate as journalists and broadcasters, but people working in a range of professions where asking good questions and helping refine answers is a crucial part of the job.
To start this developing series, Andrew Green here interviews the veteran radio and television journalist, Peter Snow CBE. In his distinguished career, Peter worked as a correspondent for Independent Television News, going on to become one of the principal anchors of BBC2’s Newsnight programme. Peter also found fame through his energetic analyses of General Election results as they were declared. He enjoyed an extensive, wide-ranging career on BBC radio, not least in the area of history programming. Indeed, history has been at the heart of Peter’s output as an author. Everywhere his career has taken him, Peter has had to work out the best ways of eliciting accurate and telling information from those he has interviewed.
Interview with Peter Snow- Oral Histories Team
Sir Anthony Seldon is arguably the most celebrated political biographer of our times. He has been compiling accounts of the terms in office of successive British Prime Ministers since the days of Margaret Thatcher. Each biography has been rooted in substantial quantities of interviews with observers of each Prime Minister’s tenure..
Anthony Seldon’s interest in oral history dates back to the beginning of his career, when he studied oral history practice intensively in the USA. In 1983, he and his late wife Joanna Pappworth produced an immensely practical and helpful guide to oral history interviewing, By Word of Mouth.
Sir Anthony has been headmaster of several independent schools. He was the co-founder of the Institute for Contemporary British History. His list of publications extends well beyond political biography. Sir Anthony’s walk along the length of the Great War Western Front was the basis of his hauntingly memorable The Path of Peace.
However, the interview below was focused very much on the work that goes into his political biographies, the latest of which is Truss at 10, an account of the brief tenure of Liz Truss as Prime Minister.
How does Sir Anthony begin the exercise of assembling each new biography?