I’d love to suggest I embarked on my career with a grand plan. But really, it was just me wanting to meet people I like to watch
Never meet your heroes is the cliche, as everyone knows. Except me, apparently, because I have spent my career doing the opposite. In fact, it was down to my insistence on meeting people I admire that I have a job at all. The year was 1999, and I was not, contrary to what Prince had promised, partying at all. Instead, I was doing interviews for my student paper, because that sounded like a good way to meet people I’d always wanted to meet. These lucky folk included Ian Hislop, because I liked Have I Got News For You, and the late Richard Whiteley, because I liked Countdown.
My mother spotted a writing competition for young women in the Sunday Telegraph, and so I entered my Hislop and Whiteley interviews. (This is exactly how Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein got their starts in journalism, too.) For the first and last time in my life, I won an actual competition. On the back of this, I was offered a job at the Guardian, where my first interviews were with Simon Amstell and Miquita Oliver, because I liked their TV show, Popworld, and Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish, because – can you guess? – I liked The Adam And Joe Show. I’d love to suggest I embarked on my career with a grand plan. But really, it was just me wanting to meet people I like to watch.
