I often wonder about the difference between long form interviews that are podcast to audiences on streaming platforms and interviews oral historians record. Interviewing techniques can be surprisingly similar. Listen, for example, to Matt Gibberd’s interview with Maria Balshaw, retiring head of the Tate Modern, on Homing where the interviewee’s home is the setting for a wide ranging conversation, beginning, as oral historians do, with early life and growing up. The answer isn’t in interview technique. 

Or listen to Imran Amed talking with Bella Freud on the Business of Fashion where she describes realising that she could contribute something of herself in her conversations with her guests. This is a difference because oral historians acknowledge shared authority when it comes to interpretation (the person who asks the questions matters to what gets recorded). But we prefer to remain behind the microphone during the interview and not contribute our own voice, feelings and reflections as Bella increasingly does in Fashion Neurosis (now in its third season).

Can we learn from this approach and use our subjectivity to deepen the questions and extend the reflections our interviewees offer? 

Still thinking