How will our time be remembered? The age of anger? The age of grievance? The age of victimhood, or of revenge? Perhaps all these things, but it will also be remembered as something else: the Golden Age of the long-form interview.

Universities may be dumbing down, people reading less, we’ve stopped writing letters or having dinner parties

Universities may be dumbing down, people reading less, we’ve stopped writing letters or having dinner parties

In the 1990s, when I was young, many of us yearned for such discussions, but usually got, on our four TV-channels, mere 15-minute slivers of the great and good. Only a revival of John Freeman’s Face to Face (presented this time by Jeremy Isaacs) seemed to buck the trend, while the buzz around Melvyn Bragg’s long final interview with Dennis Potter before his death – one of the most powerful episodes in TV history – showed our hunger for such things. Listening to an engaging person speak unfiltered and at length about their childhood, their work and the state-of-the-world could be the greatest TV imaginable. It recalled Potter’s own words about the medium: ‘Turn on, tune in, grow…’

Now, with the rise of YouTube, the long-form interview is everywhere. On Triggernometry, probably the most reliable home-grown podcast, hosts Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster – not so much the Ant and Dec as the Ant and Bee of their craft – have been interviewing tirelessly since 2018. Their show has featured an apparently never-ending list of Christian nationalists, comedians, anti-woke dissidents, trans-activists, gender critical campaigners and so on. Meanwhile, Spectator readers........

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