Ask any journalist for career advice and they’ll probably share this tip: be prepared for interviews with rude, boring or even indifferent subjects. And so in content marketing… Here’s our (first) collection of interviews that have gone sour.
1. The artist I once interviewed an artist who made me climb through his window to get into his flat, and then he refused to look at me. He was a lovely, if a little eccentric, man and spent the whole interview standing up with his back to me, staring at the ceiling while I perched on the edge of his sofa. He only looked at me when I was leaving and said: “I feel so much better now”. – Laura Powell
2. The celebrity chef I once interviewed a top chef at his restaurant. The said chef is known to be a prickly customer and has a reputation as being a bit of a firebrand. When I arrived I was introduced to him and we conducted the pleasantries. He then asked me to sit in the dining room for a few minutes and wait for him. While I waited he, very visibly (and audibly), proceeded to bollock a member of his team in front of me (and a couple of diners) for some transgression or another. The rant lasted for a number of minutes, until he joined me for the interview. Awkward… The whole thing struck me as a somewhat contrived, stage-managed way of both enforcing his reputation as a no-nonsense, alpha male chef as well as setting a few ground rules for the interview about to follow. Either way, it didn’t really work. He just looked a bit of a buffoon. Shame really, as he was really good value in the interview, but my lasting impression of him will always be my first one. – Michael Jones
3. The CEO I was interviewing a high-profile retail CEO and it was all going well, until I mentioned some previous press comment about his approach and in particular a nickname he had been given in parts of the press. He reacted very badly. So I moved on to the contentious issue (probably unwisely) of an overseas operation that by general consent wasn’t going too well. He rejected my analysis of the situation before promptly curtailing the meeting. – Richard Cree
4. The finance director On the magazine I used to edit, we had a profile format that involved spending a whole day shadowing a finance director. By the third issue we ended up scraping the bottom of the barrel: a day in the life of the FD at a private equity firm. He was a lovely chap, and the running of private equity (PE) funds is always an interesting topic. But if you’ve ever been to the office of a PE firm, you’ll know they’re pretty barren: quiet, sterile and featureless. The FD only had three meetings that day – only one of which was really interesting, with a copper-turned-private eye from the Metropolitan Police called in as a result of a data security breach. It was a great conversation to listen into and it featured masses of experiences and advice readers would have loved to hear. And it was entirely off the record. – Richard Young
5. The F1 pit-crew member My worst interview must be the most boring man to hold the stop-go lollipop in Formula 1. In what was supposed to be a quirky, exciting interview for a men’s magazine, the conversation went: Me: What’s the camaraderie like among the pit crews? Lollipop man: We get up to all kinds of pranks along the pitfall Me: Like what? Lollipop man: Oh, I dunno… Me: Go on… Lollipop man: Like, we might hide each other’s screws – that’s always a good one The interview continued like this for about 40 minutes, and in the end I only managed to use about three minutes of it. – Rob Haynes
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