Have you noticed there’s something strange going on with the sort of questions people are being asked in TV interviews recently? It might be politicians defending the total shoeing their party just received in a by-election; it could be exhausted, sweat-soaked sporting heroes basking in the glow of victory; or it can even be gameshow contestants celebrating in a shower of gold foil after scooping the jackpot by correctly identifying Leonardo DiCaprio’s middle name as Wilhelm. In these situations and countless others, interviewers are asking the same question. ‘How much…?’
The Fall had a song called Gut Of The Quantifier. Now we have a glut of the quantifiers. ‘How much does that mean to you?’ ‘How much of a disappointment is this?’ How much of a blow is that?’ ‘How much joy are you feeling right now?’ These questions, and many in a similar vein, have all been asked by interviewers recently. They’ve somehow become a staple of the live TV experience, usually in the aftermath of a dramatic event. We witness something on our television screens that quickens the pulse or makes us cry. It’s intensely exciting and now we want the insider perspective. We know what it was like to watch the story unfold, but we crave the insight of the person actually living through it. Instead, we get: ‘How much…?’
I find it such a frustrating line of questioning because the interviewer is sucking the life out of the moment. When asked ‘How much…?’ the subject can only answer in one way. The answer is already dictated by the person asking the question, who arrogantly assumes how the interviewee is feeling and relegates them to little more than a grader of that emotion. ‘How much does that mean to you?’ Good luck getting an answer that deviates much from: ‘A lot.’
If Sally Field had been accosted by one of these quantifiers before giving her famous ‘You like me!’ Academy Award acceptance speech in 1985 and asked how much joy she was feeling, the spontaneity would have been snatched from the moment quicker than La La Land losing its brief grip on the 2017 Best Picture Oscar. Of course, the person being grilled can ignore the quantifying quiz and establish their own speechifying agenda, but invariably the easiest and most natural thing to do is to respond to what you’re being asked.
Live television at its best is gripping because of its unpredictability, so interviewers should place more trust in the medium and stop trying to control it. If that doesn’t happen, perhaps we should look to those on the receiving end of inflexible questioning to be the ones to effect change. A shower of gold foil to the first interviewee who measures how much happiness he or she is feeling by spreading their arms wide, or leaving a tiny gap between their thumb and index finger, and saying: ‘Exactly this much.’ Or a sarcastic: ‘Metric or imperial?’
Another option would be to supply on-the-spot interviewers with one of comedian Richard Herring’s Emergency Questions books. Emotional grading would be a thing of the past and we can find out if the former MP Neil Parish has ever seen a Bigfoot (the Sasquatch kind, not the tractor), whether Novak Djokovic has strong feelings about where cutlery should be placed in a dishwasher, or if the winner of Tipping Point has ever been pot holing. How much would you enjoy that?
