A new documentary from BBC Wales examines the career of daytime TV’s influential celebrity interviewer Mavis Nicholson. Its producer and lifelong fan Carolyn Hitt, who interviewed Nicholson during the making of the film, pinpoints the skills and approach that made her stand out:
The first female chat-show host in the history of British television was a middle-aged woman from Wales. Mavis Nicholson talked her way into this ground-breaking role in the early 1970s and enjoyed a 25-year career interviewing some of the biggest stars in the world - from David Bowie to Elizabeth Taylor.
She has been a heroine of mine since my schooldays. Off sick or home revising, Mavis On 4 was my afternoon treat. The studio was intimate and minimalist. Two chairs, Venetian blinds and, considering it was a daytime show, weirdly late-night lighting. But it was the content that mattered not the style. Against this simple backdrop, conversations of nuance, depth and insight unfolded.
Bette Davis, Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall...it didn’t matter how major the celebrity and how many times they had played the interview game before, Mavis got something from them that no-else could.
As one of her former producers, JohnTagholm, explains: “Sigmund Freud said that he wasn’t so much interested in the man doing a handstand in front of him as what fell out of his pockets. And Mavis was interested in what fell out of people’s pockets.
“She wasn’t interested in men or women showing off for her, telling her what a great actor they were or a great painter or a great singer. She picked up on what they said incidentally when they were talking about those kinds of things and went for them.”
Direct but never combative, probing but never prurient, Mavis provided a twice weekly masterclass in the art of the long-form interview. In my view, that’s almost a lost art now. It may survive on radio but it’s largely disappeared from television in our age of comic chat shows and PR-driven sound-bites.
This is one of the reasons I found myself on Mavis’s sofa 30 years after I sat on my parents’ settee glued to her programmes. I wanted to remind people how great the long-form interview can be - and celebrate the woman who was arguably the best interviewer in the business.
So what can we learn from Mavis’s searching and intelligent approach? Meticulous research was a given but it was also essential for Mavis to create a connection with her guest before the cameras rolled. This proved a particular challenge when she was given just 15 minutes to get acquainted with Hollywood icon Elizabeth Taylor before their televised conversation (below).
“Liz Taylor was wheeled to the door of the room where we were going to film her,” Mavis recalls in the programme. “She seemed nervous and scarcely caught anyone’s eye. I felt desperate as I liked to meet the person and get acquainted before I interviewed them.
“Eventually she looked up from the hand mirror she was using to touch up her makeup and asked me, ‘Have I got lipstick on my teeth?’. I looked and said ‘No’ and asked her, ‘Have I got lipstick on my teeth?’. She met my eyes at last: ‘No’, she said and smiled. And from that moment we engaged, and phew! We got on and it was a good interview.”
Mavis also had the courage to go off-script if the conversation took an unexpected turn. Indeed she resisted pre-prepared lists of questions.
“Once I was in that studio there was only one person alive in the world and that was the guest. I wanted to be concentrating on what they were saying,” the retired 85 year-old writer and broadcaster explains.
“Something they said would lead you to another question that perhaps you hadn’t thought of beforehand. I’d always carefully read researchers’ notes, always had meetings with people and listened to all points of view and I’d read the guests’ books or go to see the play/film they were in and all that sort of thing.
“The homework was always done jointly but then I said I had to be left alone because if I was going to find out anything new about the guest it would come from the spontaneity of the studio and the conversation we would be having together. And when a conversation is good, you’re so engrossed in it, it’s like a blanket going round you both. You’re just sitting there, comfortably, engrossed in each other.”
But for me the biggest lesson I’ve learned from Mavis is the importance of sheer curiosity - the simple act of being absolutely fascinated by other people. It’s not as obvious as it sounds. Many of us are more interested in ourselves than those around us. But although Mavis has interviewed some of the most stellar names of the past 40 years she’d still be as absorbed by the person sitting opposite her on the train. And that’s the mark of a truly great interviewer.
Being Mavis Nicholson: TV’s greatest interviewer, 9pm, 25 August, BBC One Wales and BBC iPlayer.
Getting guests to open up: Victoria Derbyshire and Eddie Mair