Endurance tests come in all shapes and sizes. One person’s scaling Ben Nevis is another’s having to listen to the new album by The Feeling. For me, it’s getting all the way through car-crash interviews. It’s a similar journey each time – the realisation at the beginning that something is off, the quickening of the heartbeat as one or two of the subjects pick up on this latent awkwardness and batten down the hatches whilst someone else embraces it like an open goal, then there’s the dread as you look at the time on the YouTube video and realise there’s still five minutes left.
Even writing this is giving me palpitations – or perhaps it’s because I’ve just watched this video again. It’s from 1995 and takes place on The Word, the riotous but long-defunct Friday night music and culture show. This clip sees motormouth Mancunian Terry Christian interviewing both Faith No More at the height of their success and MTV presenter of the moment Lisa Kennedy, and you can see it in full below. Good luck!
It's possibly the worst interview ever conducted, and definitely the most excruciating six minutes in the history of mankind. What we have here is a perfect storm of things that could go wrong, and do go wrong, and then get worse.
There’s Faith No More, lovers of chaos and not so much lovers of stupid questions. Terry Christian’s first mistake is to take aaaaaages to get his question out and when he finally does, he gets the name of the ex-bandmate he’s trying to get them to talk about wrong. Great start Terry! Then he gets a glass of water in his face, and you wonder if it might have been better for him if the water had set off the earpiece he had in and he got electrocuted and it knocked him out for the whole show.
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen and Terry stumbles on. Eventually, he realises he’s interviewing a band way too smart, or not arsed enough, to take the bait, and turns his attention to Kennedy. His line of questioning is dubious to say the least: his sole angle, it appears, is to find out if she’s a virgin or not. Nice one Terry! It’s like The Cook Report but for old 90s pervs who don’t know what a woman is. Writing all that has actually made me want to watch it again, maybe it’ll be more enjoyable this time.
Nope, still awful, I think I might go and drink some toilet water to wash it down.
