Yesterday on my LBC show I did something I’ve never done before. I terminated an interview because the guest wouldn’t stop ranting and refused to engage with the questions I was putting. We were discussing whether Britain should pay reparations to Jamaica for its part in the slave trade. The guest was Kofi Klu and he was supposed to be putting the case for doing just that.
In some ways, if you have to terminate an interview you feel you’ve failed as a presenter, but in the end you have to think of the listeners. It may be vaguely entertaining to listen to someone rant and rave but when they repeat what they have just said and refuse to engage with you in the way any normal interviewee would, there’s surely little point in carrying on. Perhaps I let my frustration show a little too much, but in the end my judgement was that there was nothing to be gained by continuing the interview. I still think that was the correct conclusion.
