Inner view

I’ve done a lot of TV interviews on location, but never in a studio, until today. Community TV station Channel 31 did an interview for tonight’s “C News Focus” story on public transport. The interviewer guy asked a couple of curly questions, so hopefully I acquitted myself well. It airs at 10:15pm.

A few observations:

If I look uncomfortable, it’s because they asked me to put the microphone lead inside my shirt.

The interview went for 6 minutes, but they were intending it to go for 5. So it may get edited down a bit.

They put some makeup on me, but they didn’t try and hide the pimple below my mouth. I’m hoping it was out of shot most of the time.

A lot of people get pretty bad channel 31 reception. Amusingly, so does their office, with big TVs in the foyer tuned to their channel appearing very fuzzy.

PS. 11pm. Not too bad. Having watched it, the only glaring slip-up I noted is that the host made a comment about the PT system costing $1.8 billion per year, and I didn’t pick him up on it (because I didn’t have the correct figure in mind at the time). This is not the case — it’s about $500m a year. It should be cheaper (it was only about $374m a year in the 90s) but it certainly isn’t $1.8b. The higher figure appears to come from an opinion piece by a road lobbyist in The Age last week, which inflated the numbers.