Once a week long-time radio producer and author Rick Kaempfer shares his favorite brushes with greatness in a feature he calls “Celebrity Snippets.”
Joan Collins is probably most famous for her role as Alexis in the 1980s television series "Dynasty".
To me, the most memorable interviews aren’t the great ones. They’re the terrible ones.
Whenever I think of the worst interviews I’ve ever been associated with in my career, there’s one name that always comes to mind first: Joan Collins.
In the mid-90s, one of the big radio syndicators was experimenting with offering satellite interviews from New York. The idea was that a celebrity could sit in a radio studio, and do ten minute interviews in virtually every major market, and it would sound as if they were in the studio with each host.
The radio stations liked the idea because the sound quality was better than phone interviews. On the other hand, the split second satellite delay had a tendency to throw off the timing of the interviews. The host and guest often talked over each other, stopping and starting sentences; waiting for the other to continue. (You’ve probably seen the same phenomenon in satellite television interviews. Annoying, isn’t it?)
If only that was the problem with the Joan Collins interview.
Joan Collins arrived for her morning interviews with freshly done hair, and she made it known to the producers in New York that she absolutely would not wear headphones. I could hear the negotiations over the satellite as we prepared for the interview. The producers told her that she wouldn’t be able to hear the questions without her headphones, but she wouldn’t budge from her demands.
Instead of telling her she had no choice, they decided to rig up a tiny speaker so that she could hear the questions without mussing her hair.
Unluckily for us, we were the first interview.
As soon as John Landecker asked her a question, we heard the feedback. When she tried to answer the questions, we heard feedback. When we tried to play an audio clip of the movie she was promoting, we heard feedback. It had been going on for about a minute, but it seemed like an hour. It was horrible radio.
John finally said to her, “Listen, lady, you’re gonna have to put on your headphones and turn off that speaker. This is ridiculous.”
When she wouldn’t do it, John ended the interview.
We went to a commercial break, and listened in on the satellite to hear what she was saying about the interview to the people in New York. The first thing we heard her say was: “Well, he was a rude little bastard, wasn’t he?”
Yeah, Joan.
John was the rude one.
This story (and scores of others) can also be found in my first book “The Radio Producer’s Handbook,” which is still available at amazon.com
