Channel 4

I have now completed 10 of the tasks I listed a couple of days ago.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon being interviewed for a Channel 4 television program on the Te Genero affair, to be broadcast in September. It was an interesting session that took place in the Royal Society of Medicine, which is like a Gentleman's Club for Doctors.

I have done a fair bit of television in the past, but this was a bit special as they had two cameras running - one for me and one for the interviewer. Normally they only have one and they take pictures of the interviewer doing his 'noddies' afterwards. Noddies are when they cut to someone nodding in response to answers.

Television is such a powerful medium and so easy to fake. One of the things they had to stress to me was to look at the interviewer, not at the producer. if I kept looking from one to another, as you do when you have more than one person in the room, it makes you look shifty. in the end the producer had to hide under the table so I wouldn't see her.

Remember the film Broadcast news some years ago. They had this guy interviewing a punter about some tragedy in her family, and then they cut to the interviewer who had tears running down his cheek. the broadcast got plaudits until someone remembered that he'd had only one camera with him. the tear shot must have been shot as a noddy afterwards and the tears were gelatin.

Of course, the whole thing is edited and you reshoot the questions several times. It's easy to be spontaneous when you do it for the first time, when you've never heard the question before, but when you know what you're going to say it sounds like you're acting.

I expect the program will be on the web eventually so people will be able to judge how I did.