Buried treasure

I wasn’t even looking for it, but I found the interview I did with Woody Allen in 2001, broadcast on Radio 4’s Back Row in 2002, languishing on a cached page within the labyrinthine BBC website for a programme no longer on air. It’s not the very best sound quality, but you can listen to it via RealPlayer here by clicking on Listen to the interview.

It was my last edition of Back Row as presenter, as I had just been commissioned to write eight episodes of Grass with Simon Day for BBC2 and couldn’t possibly fit that in with my new teatime job at 6 Music, so Back Row had to go. This was a sad decision for me. I loved my two and a half years at the helm of the weekly film show, and during that time had interviewed many, many fascinating and famous people, from Tom Hanks, Hugh Grant and Kevin Costner to old timers Ernest Borgnine, Robert Altman and Ronald Neame. But Woody had been my hero since I was 18 and it was a great honour to spend 40 minutes of quality time in his company, covering not just the film he was here to promote, The Curse Of The Jade Scorpion, but his whole career and worldview.

The irony was, at the time of broadcast, Jade Scorpion had still not found a UK distributor, but we ran the interview anyway. Anyway, have a listen, if you’re interested. What you need to know is that at the beginning of the interview – we were side by side on a sofa at the Dorchester Hotel – Woody’s body language was such that he clearly didn’t trust me: he was turned away from me and was looking at the carpet. As my questions progressed and he realised a) I knew his work, and b) wasn’t about to ask him about his knotty private life, he gradually turned round to face me, and by the end of it, we had eye contact and he genuinely seemed relaxed, and was having fun. (We had lapel mics, so his answers were audible from the start.)

My successor on Back Row – which has since been rebranded The Film Programme – was, of course, Mr Joe Cornish.