The perils of one’s fifteeen seconds of fame ! You will see from the first post with this title that I was interviewed for a German TV station (based in Stuttgart) for a news item they were doing about the proposed privatisation of German railways. I was agin it.
Well, back in March I was contacted again by the same station, this time by a different reporter who was doing a documentary. Could he come over and interview me ? OK. He was going to be at Paddington. I managed to get an afternoon off and hurtled down by GNER which was only a very few minutes late and across to Paddington on the Metropolitan Line. There was the reporter and a film crew and we spent a very busy couple of hours interviewing me on why I thought rail privatisation the way we did it in the UK was a bad idea. (Incidentally, some jobsworth from Heathrow Express said we couldn’t film with his trains in the background without a specific permit even though we had a permit to film within Paddington station — neatly illustrating the point about the ridiculous fragmetation of the rail service). The film went out in the summer and I had about 6 or 8 minutes out of the 45. Much to my surprise, I was the only person they had interviewed in the UK.
What this does illustrate, apart from a rather sad eagerness to appear on TV anywhere in the world, is the weird world of the Internet. The initial contact was via Wikipedia, where a kind friend had, unbeknown to me, added a link to my website under the heading railway enthusiast. This then led to the second interview. So I end up as the voice of UK concern about rail privatisation on German TV ! I’m sane, my views are reasonably well informed, and I don’t look too nerdy, but it does make me wonder about the role of chance in the affairs of men.
PS. Any other media outlets wishing to hear my views are welcome to get in touch.
