by Emily Maitlis
It's thirty seconds to
air. The interviewee has walked off in a huff. The next guest hasn't
arrived. There's a wall of riot police behind me. The cameraman only
speaks Hungarian and has cut my head out of the shot, but I don't know
his word for "wide angle." Then comes the quiet. Utter silence in my
head. We've just lost comms with the whole team back in London. I can
choose to scream. Or to surrender to the moment. Then, a hand is waved
at me as a visual cue. And I start talking.
The things that
are said on camera are only part of the story. Behind every interview
there's more. How the story came about. How it ended. The compromises
that were made. The regrets, the rows, the deeply inappropriate comedy.
Making news is an essential but imperfect art. It rarely goes according
to plan. Emily Maitlis never expected to find herself wandering around
the Maharani of Jaipur's bedroom with Bill Clinton or get invited to the
Miss USA beauty pageant by its owner, Donald Trump. She never expected
to be thrown into a provincial Cuban jail, to drink red wine at Steve
Bannon's kitchen table, or spend three hours in a lift with Alan
Partridge. She certainly didn't expect the Dalai Lama to tell her the
story of his most memorable poo. The beauty of television is its ability
to simplify, but that's also its weakness: it can distill everything
down to one snapshot, one soundbite. Then the news cycle moves on. Airhead is Maitlis' step back from the white noise. Before and after the camera started rolling, this is what really happened.
