When celebrities go bad

Today Dusty Springfield and Sylvester McCoy. The late great Dusty Springfield in for a whole hour decides that she will not talk about her past only her latest album which was called appropriately  'Reputation.'  So all my research and clever questions end up in the bin.  BUT actually it was a truly revealing interview about her as a person and sounded less like a living obituary which also sticks in my mind because when she died in 1999 of cancer on the very day she was to get an OBE I remember I dragged the tape out to discover there wasn't a second of Dusty that I could make into a meaningful cut.

Sylvestor McCoy in to partly plug Dr Who - he had just been in the Canadian TV film and he was also appearing somewhere like The Tricycle Theatre in some obscure production of something.  "I don't want to talk about Dr Who." he said on the way in "I'm not very happy about it and if you do ask me about it I will walk out."  Uh Oh I thought, but again it was a brilliant interview and I learned what an accomplished performer Sylvester was.

So in live radio and TV things don't always go to plan but that doesn't mean everything ends in disaster. So if your own plan ends in the bin, pick yourself up and carry on regardless. (As Kenneth Williams used to say - and there's another example of a badly behaved guest who drove a Producer, I once worked with, to tears.) (Pic Philips Records 1966)