The Guardian has one of those fun little pieces - no, stop, they can do them, they used to hire me occasionally to poke their readers through the bars for example - and it’s about how people do vox pops and end up not realising who they are talking to.
One fairly well known historical one is someone going up to Clem Attlee in 1964 (I think that’s the date!) and asking whether he might be thinking of voting Labour. For foreigners not quite up to speed with Britain Clem had been the Labour Party’s leader for a decade and more, Prime Minister for 6. Just to make it even more fun he was by then Earl Attlee (and had been for 9 years) and so didn’t in fact have the vote.
But The Guardian:
Don’t you know who I am? Why vox-poppers failing to spot celebrities is such a good thing
Henry Winkler praised his rescuers, Chloë Sevigny talked us through her outfit, Baz Luhrmann gave dating advice – all without being recognised! They are just like us after all
And it is all fun. There’s a fire alarm in a Dublin Hotel, reporter type interviews one who has evacuated and it’s all, well, thank you sir, you’ve been very helpful and all that. Without realising, for a moment, that it’s The Fonz. The other two in the story well, I don’t even recognise the names let alone the pics of the people concerned so I’d give people a break on that.
But there’s one from history that I do really like. BBC TV is trying to do vox pops on a train. Quite why, not sure. But it’s about monetarism and the economy. Perhaps trying to see whether all this stuff about M3 and M4 and the rest (this is back when monetarism and inflation targeting were all the rage) was getting through to the, well, perhaps informed segment of the population. So, business class on a long distance train (first class that is). And a vox pop.
They end up with this guy with snow white hair, elegantly but chaotically dressed with a very fine, cut glass, accent. Who then gives a 5 minute peroration on all the details and is, in fact, word perfect first time out.
The accent came from his having been Head of Pop at Eton. The clothing, well, some came naturally, some because he was a professor. A professor of economics. At the London School of Economics. Actually, one of the people who taught me some economics. Laydeez ‘n Gennelmen, I give you Richard, Lord Layard. The peerage coming partly from his academic work on welfare systems and equity in economics, partly because he was an advisor to the Labour Party on matters economic like….what’s right and wrong with monetarism and M3 targeting and so on.
Now, I will admit I’ve not seen that footage, only been told about it and the story. It’s one of those that you never do want to actually investigate - why disrupt narrativium with some appalling reference to reality? But I did, a bit, there was some point when we were in email contact and I did ask. Was that story really true?
“Well, I don’t know, I can’t really remember it happening….”
Which, given the constraints of the British class system - how they’re taught at Eton and how we’re taught at the LSE - is a full throated roar of laughter at the joyousness of that day when it did happen. Well, that’s my insistence at least and I will not accept any so-called evidence which contradicts it.
So there.