Argh! In a stroke of major misfortune, I am stuck at home with a stinking cold for most of today and so, to my great disappointment, was unable to meet Roger in person. Gutted.
I did, however, have a very interesting chat with him over the phone. He has a very dry sense of humour.
On calling his hotel room:
Me: Hello, is that Roger Cook?
RC: No, it’s the bogeyman. Of course it’s Roger Cook, who else is it going to be?
And that’s how it started. It is also how it continued, with me occasionally being chided for my lack of wit. (A fair and just accusation.)
It cheered me up, which is no mean feat when I’m under the weather. (Usually I get stupidly maudlin. A bout of flu once had me weeping at an episode of Pet Rescue.)
I will use a lot of the interview for a 600-word piece for the Media & Marketing page on Monday.
However, to answer Bounder’s question:
RC: It’s a bit of an accolade to be parodied. In total I have been parodied 23 times – yes I have counted them. The first time was on Not the Nine O’Clock News by Mel Smith. It was hysterical.
I was also parodied by Spitting Image three times. Two of the times they weren’t very funny – one had two puppets of me and I was beating myself up. That’s just ridiculous as I never beat anybody up on The Cook Report. They also gave me a terrible brash Australian accent.
The third was really good. It was me doorstopping God, accusing him of selling the Holy Land as a timeshare to the Muslims and the Jews. That was very funny, but I think with Spitting Image most of the talent was in making the puppets, not in the writing.
He answered that at the Q+A too, although not in that detail.
He’s certainly a very prickly man, he even managed to make “Bridget Bardot” sound like an insult (he was talking about the name of some award that the programme had won for the protection of animals).
I was put off by the general loviness of the occasion from trying to find out what he thought of modern journalism – though I’m guessing it wouldn’t be complimentary as he wasn’t about much (apart from his team and their work).
It was pretty much how you’d imagine: http://tinyurl.com/2omm56
My interview got chopped back a bit, but he went on to say that he didn’t feel that the internet was a good forum for investigative journalism as blogs lacked credibility.
He was also suspicious of different funding models for investigative journalism such as Pro Publica: http://tinyurl.com/36ej7x
So in summary, television isn’t commissioning new stuff and no other media platform or model is good enough. I suggested that, in his opinion, investigative journalism’s future must be stuffed. His response was that TV will always go in cycles and that another form of investigative journalism will appear, although it will probably be more centred on the cult of personality.
Oh, and he said he didn’t watch much television any more, as he thinks it’s mostly rubbish. Have to say I agree with him there.
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