When Kirsty met Madonna
“The Independent“‘s Ian Burrell meets “Newsnight” presenter, Kirsty Wark, who is used to interrogating politicians and celebrities and has won kudos and invoked controversy, beating the rest of the global media to clinching an interview with Madonna at the height of the Malawi orphanage story.
Wark came under criticism over her interview with Madonna last year, with the Independent newspaper declaring “Awestruck Kirsty lets Madonna off the hook”. Part of the carping centred on the way the interview room had been decorated, with gothic black candelabras, white drapes and petals scattered across a table. It was hardly what Newsnight viewers expected.
Wark explains that Madonna was not as Machiavellian as some have suggested and that the interview location – a “bland room” in the New York offices of Warner Brothers – had not been dressed for the benefit of the BBC. “The set was a bit of a problem but never mind. We had to slip in behind a series of interviews about her new children’s book so we had to take the candles and the drapes, which would not have been our choice.”
Getting the interview at all was a great scoop, largely engineered by a BBC producer. “We’d had a bid in to do Madonna for a long time. And then it came up at the time that she had been taking flack and she wanted to do a British interview,” says Wark. “She watched old Newsnight interviews. It was completely straight, completely unstarry. She didn’t have any fuss.”
Wark says she found Madonna “Interesting. I think she’s pretty fiercely smart but very guarded.” So was that why she didn’t give Madonna a more difficult ride over the controversy surrounding the star’s involvement in separating a child from his father? “I did ask those [questions]. Some of those were there and some were in the longer [BBC4] interview. But I did ask these questions definitely.”
Her view is that Madonna adopted David Banda because she “wanted to make a difference“. “It’s not an accoutrement. If you take a child you take a child for life.”
From news.independent.co.uk.
Thanks to Vincy.