Heavenly Interviews

In Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey there is a depiction of heaven that rather appeals to me. It is like a big, white, eighteenth century coffee shop, where great minds get together to debate matters of principle in a gentlemanly manner. Einstein chats with other scientific greats like Newton, Aristotle, and Station; and you can easily imagine Dr. Johnson being witty with Dickens, Beckett, and Chaucer or Quentin Crisp holding court with Byron, Elagabalus, and Lao Tzu.

Alas, all the available evidence suggests that heaven does not exist, so we will have to content ourselves with fancies. Lately, my own fancies have been much embroidered by listening to some curious old interviews that I found archived on the internet.

Bob Claster’s comedy talk show features Peter Cook, Quentin Crisp, Douglas Adams, John Cleese, and Tom Lehrer amongst others. In the Cook and Crisp interviews he also includes plenty of the original material, far more than you are supposedly allowed, which makes it even more poignant.

Don Swaim’s interviews on Wired for Books were made around the same time, but feature literary authors rather than comic writers. They are slightly less well-informed, but equally enjoyable.

What I like most about these interviews is not what the interviewees say, but the gaps between what they say. In those gaps, you can infer the thought processes containing the years of accumulated struggle that has gone into making them the kind of people that earnest Americans want to interview. Cleese and Cook berate themselves for being lazy. Tom Lehrer’s eyebrows arch as he calmly states that he hasn’t got anything left to say. Brian Boyd smiles as he states his ardour for Nabokov’s works. John Updike stutters as he talks about male witches. It is endlessly intriguing listening. Best of all, I don’t find it at all distracting as I do with most music, it is just a pleasant counterpoint to my web design work.

28 Jan 2009