Nick Clarke award for year's best interview: Entries close 31 August
Kevin Marsh
Director of OffspinMedia and a former Today programme editor
Almost a decade after Nick Clarke died, the life and work of the respected former presenter of BBC Radio 4’s The World at One programme is again being celebrated with an award in his name for the year’s most enlightening or memorable broadcast interview.
Claimed last year by the BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen, for his extended interview with President Bashar al-Assad, the Nick Clarke award has previously been won by the likes of presenters Victoria Derbyshire and Steve Hewlett and the late novelist PD James.
It is open to the whole UK radio and television industry and the deadline for entries is 31 August. The winner will be announced at the Times Cheltenham Literature Festival in October.
Competition judge Kevin Marsh is a former editor of both Radio 4’s Today programme and The World at One, and a longstanding former colleague of Nick Clarke. Here - in the second of our posts this week recalling great interviewers - he identifies the professional and personal qualities that made Clarke’s interviewing “the best in British journalism”, and that have inspired this annual prize:
The question I used to dread come the annual awards season was: “What were Nick’s stand-out interviews?”
It was a question I could never answer satisfactorily - not because Nick didn’t do ‘stand-out’ interviews or hadn’t done any that year. He did dozens, hundreds.
No, it was because Nick ‘stood-out’ for qualities that went way beyond a single grandstanding moment on air.
I worked with Nick for a decade. Almost every day, his interviews made headlines or shaped the news agenda for the next 24 hours. Some would call every one of those a ‘stand-out’ except, for Nick, that was never the point.
Nick saw his role as interviewer simply: to try to get as close as possible to something we could call ‘the truth’.
He never doubted for a moment that his interviews weren’t about him at all. They were about the interviewee - finding out what that person had to say, challenging them, of course, with uncomfortable facts and inconsistencies, but listening far more than speaking.
Jeremy Bowen's interview with Bashar al-Assad won the 2015 Nick Clarke award
Nick had no time for self-serving ‘tough’ interviews that amounted to nothing more than ill-tempered formalities.
Nor did he have the time for those ‘look at me’ interviews where lengthy, convoluted questions left no time for the interviewee to answer with anything other than superficial banalities.
He was scathing about those interviewers who talked over interviewees for no other reason than that they were bored with an answer. In fact, he rarely interrupted in that way at all.
Nick had a perfectly tuned ear for oral punctuation. When the time came to challenge an interviewee, bring them back to the point or move them on, he would catch the briefest comma in their delivery and snatch his moment.
Nick took nothing for granted. He would turn up early each morning, frustrated that so many half-truths had become encrusted around some important story that it really had to be stripped back to the facts.
His preparation and research always meant going back to the original documents: the text of the speech; the transcript of the interview; never the way it had been reported elsewhere; never another journalist’s gloss on the story.
It will be ten years this autumn since Nick died. And I suppose the most telling ‘stand-out’ about him is that it seemed so much the right thing to do to create this award to celebrate all that made Nick’s interviewing far and away the best in British journalism. For too short a time.
Those who’ve won the Nick Clarke award in the past have shown some, but never all, of Nick’s qualities.
Perhaps the best we can do to celebrate those qualities is to try each year to discover the outstanding journalist who comes the closest.
Full details of competition rules and how to submit an entry, by the deadline of 31 August, can be found on the Nick Clarke award website.
Other BBC Academy blogs by Kevin Marsh, the Academy’s founding journalism editor
On the sofa with my heroine, Mavis Nicholson
Getting guests to open up: Victoria Derbyshire and Eddie Mair
