Your Public Best - Lillian Brown [98]
PREPARING FOR YOUR TELEVISION APPEARANCE
Once you have accepted a commitment for a television appearance, you will need detailed advance information about it. Guests often appear at a TV station not knowing the name of the show they are booked for or even the name of the person who is expecting them (usually the booking producer). Such a guest may be detained unnecessarily by the security guard at the front desk because he or she lacks basic information about where he or she is supposed to be. Any security guard or receptionist working at the front desk of a television station can regale you with stories about lost or unprepared guests who show up in the lobby.
Among such lobby incidents that I have personally witnessed are (1) the guest who shows up for a live morning news show a half-hour after it has gone off the air for the day; (2) the guest who shows up at 9 p.m. for a taping session that was actually scheduled for 9 a.m. that morning; and (3) the guest who comes in and says he has to go on “in the next ten minutes or I’m leaving,” when in fact he was not scheduled to go on the air for another hour or so.
Similarly, guests have been known to show up in a TV makeup room when they were scheduled to appear on a radio program aired in the same building. Or they may say to a makeup artist, “Why do I need makeup for a radio interview?” when the show they were booked for is actually a TV show!
Once at the studio, an unprepared guest may ask the producer the subject of the interview, whereupon he or she prepares a few hasty, last-minute remarks—which come off sounding like a few hasty, last-minute remarks. Or the file the guest has been given by a staff member may lack the very piece of technical information or statistics that he has been asked to discuss; someone told him to show up, and that’s all he did.
All of this frustration can be avoided by careful advance preparation. You need to know the date, the time you are due at the studio—plus the on-air time if it is a live show—the name and exact address of the station, the name of the show, your station contact, and his or her office telephone number. You need to know whether the format of the show is an interview, a telephone call-in, or an on-camera “read,” and whether it will be live or pretaped. You need to know how much time is allotted to your appearance—ninety seconds, six minutes, or a full hour. You need to know who else will be on the program with you, whether you will be interviewed by one person or a panel, and the subject (s) to be discussed.
If you are a celebrity who refuses to answer personal questions, you need to tell that to the booking producer in advance. If there is one person in the country whom you absolutely refuse to go on the air with, you need to communicate that fact. If you are wheelchair-bound, wear a hearing aid, or have any other special needs, that, too, should be told to the producer in advance.
Not long ago, I was working in a TV studio as the makeup artist for a network talk show, and we were expecting an advocate on veterans’ issues. Because he called the station several hours in advance of his scheduled arrival time and told the producers that he was wheelchair-bound, the studio was able to remove some new electronic equipment that had been partially blocking the corridor to the studio for several days. If he hadn’t called in advance, his interview would have been delayed while the equipment was moved out of the way.
Some government officials and members of the legal profession are barred from speaking about certain topics to the press. Among them are judges involved in important cases, Department of State officials involved in matters of secrecy, and Pentagon brass involved in national security. If you ever find yourself in similar situations, do warn the producers in advance that if asked certain questions, you can’t answer them.
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