Clive Robertson has left the studio.
From his Talking Heads interview from a long time ago:
PETER THOMPSON: What are you interested in? Did you say want to say something through all of this?
CLIVE ROBERTSON: Um, I’d have to say the order of things especially at Channel 9, the order of news items. And if I said, “Look, this is really important”, I’d look at the camera and say, “This is a really important story” and set it up, and if it was an important story, then the audience think, “Oh this guy’s a good filter.” If you said, “Look, this is a silly item, I don’t know why we’re running it” and you run it and it is a silly item, you’ve got them. And it’s not a con. What that program did is different from most news programs is gave things what they really were worth.
PETER THOMPSON: But you were also by playing this role, undercutting the artifice what it is a lot of television.
CLIVE ROBERTSON: Oh, yeah, and did that go down well with the journalists? Have a guess Peter. “He’s ruling our station” and all that rubbish. I mean, we get a new item in at, say, 10.30 at night and I’d say, “By the way, you’ll see this at 6 o’clock tomorrow night” and they’ll say it’s the latest, “you know better”. “You can’t say things like that.” Well, you know, come on, so journalists are a bit thick as you know, Peter, you’ve worked with a few, they really are thick. I mean, they really should be sterilised.
I used to watch Clive back in the 80s when he was on commercial TV, because I was a slightly strange child drawn to programs that I wasn’t really old enough for. He may have been something of an influence on me. This is awfully sad.
