I interview people and write about them for Good Weekend magazine and, each time the process is over, I feel both cheating and cheated, and wonder if I should ever do it again. My disquiet came to a head in April 2008, when I was ejected from ‘celebrity chef’ Gordon Ramsay’s house in Wandsworth, South London, at about 8.20 a.m., a quarter of an hour into what was supposed to be an hour-long interview. The third time I tried to ask him a question about his drunken, violent father, Ramsay replied:

Out of respect for you and your magazine, I’ll call my publicist in Australia and call it a day … I’m not here to talk about my father … Everything that you’ve got on there [he pointed to my digital recorder] for the last, 17 [sic] minutes is about, you know, ‘How do you see in yourself your father …’ I’ll talk to the magazine. It’s all on tape. We’re just gonna switch to food. Total respect. Your position … Good to see you. Let me see you out.

He was measured, polite and smiling. On the doorstep of his home, he asked if I was a freelancer or a staff writer. I thought he was trying to make small talk.

I had arrived at the house an hour and a half earlier, met by Ramsay’s wife, Tana, who said there had been scheduling error—but Ramsay’s publicist or assistant had called me only the day before to move the interview forward. I had flown from Sydney to London only to interview Ramsay. To be sure of getting to Wandsworth at 6.45 a.m. (the interview was to begin at 7 a.m., but Ramsay, like the Queen, expects his visitors to arrive early), I had to catch a minicab from the other side of London at 6 a.m. At 5.30 a.m., I checked that my fingernails were clean, because I had read in Ramsay’s autobiography, Humble Pie, that he ‘hates’ dirty fingernails. He also hates dirty trousers and dirty hair, lies in the kitchen, clockwatching, mummy’s boys, fat chefs and chefs with names on their jackets. I hoped I would be sufficiently clean, honest, independent, dedicated, slim and modest for him.

Despite my precautions, I was out on the street after exactly 15 minutes and 31 seconds of the interview. I had never been to Wandsworth before, and I felt like the guilty survivor of a one-night stand, pacing the walk of shame. There was a bus stop across the park from Ramsay’s house, and I stepped onto the first bus that came along. I asked for the station. What station? Any station.

Of course, I thought of Janet Malcolm who famously—too famously—wrote:

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

Malcolm’s is a brawny, confident, confrontational polemic. It affects a snarling, robust point of view. It is rhythmic, lyrical and concise, but in the guise of being self-revealing, even self-loathing, it is self-regarding and self-dramatising. It places the writer at the centre of the world, standing for—or against—every colleague who is not blinded by ignorance or conceit. It leaves the interviewee powerless, vein, credulous or pathetic. But The Journalist and the Murderer is a reference point where coordinates are hard to come by: lecturers tend not to teach practical interviewing skills at journalism schools, but they do teach Janet Malcolm’s knowing denunciation.

I called the editor of Good Weekend. She was concerned and sympathetic, and asked how I felt. How did I feel? I wanted a cigarette; I wished I’d had some more breakfast; I was worried she might be reluctant to pay my expenses; but beyond that, I did not feel anything much. Even if an interview is seduction, it is not rape, and the other party has every right to back out.

I had not been warned that some subjects were off limits with Gordon Ramsay, but if I had checked the files, I would have come across Stephanie Bunbury’s Ramsay profile in a 2003 issue of Good Weekend. Before the interview, Bunbury wrote, she was given a list of six ‘forbidden topics’ which, if mentioned, would cause Ramsay to ‘get up and leave’. These included ‘his father’.

In September 2008 I interviewed US Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne. I told him about Ramsay, and he said:

I would’ve killed him if I were in your position. I would’ve written so bad about him … I mean, how were you supposed to know that there’s six things he doesn’t discuss, then ‘Get out of my house’? You know what, I always hated his restaurant, now I know why. He’s so full of himself. It makes me annoyed to hear that.

But I was not angry towards Gordon Ramsay as a man, because Gordon Ramsay was not a man to me, he was a job. I did not consider I’d had a personal interaction with him, much less an argument. I suppose I saw the aborted interview as the equivalent of a carpenter accidentally hammering his thumb: it would not make him feel like a particularly good woodworker, but he would be a fool to blame the nail.

Earlier in the year, I had flown to Los Angeles courtesy of E! Channel, to report on E!’s coverage of the Golden Globe TV awards. As it happened, the awards ceremony was cancelled due to the screenwriters’ strike, but E! nonetheless went ahead with a previously organised question-and-answer session for the foreign press with two E! presenters, Ben Lyons and Giuliana Rancic, who would have been reporting from the red carpet at the Golden Globe Awards night if there had been a red carpet and a Golden Globe Awards night.

Rancic spoke broadly about interviewing celebrities. She said:

E! gives us books—binders, folders … they’re huge … When I first started, a month ahead I would read all my binders and make notes, and then I realised ... I was too worried about the next question, and I had to ask them about the director … No, you don’t. No-one cares. Ask them about the fun making the movie, who they’re dating, who he wants to meet tonight, what they’re wearing. I realised the less I prepared, the better the interview was.

A journalist from an Italian magazine said European actors expect questions about their craft. Rancic replied:

That is true … We’ve learned that lesson. Some of the more serious overseas actors do like to do that, so you have to start the interview with the art questions and the movie questions—and, you know, you stay awake—and suddenly you just throw in, ‘Are you dating Javier Bardem?’

For a while, I wondered if the only thing I had done wrong with Ramsay was to ask my questions in the incorrect order.

*

Until Ramsay, my most difficult interview had been with John Pilger, published in the Sydney Morning Herald in January 2005. This came as surprise because Pilger was (a) a socialist, and therefore a comrade; (b) a journalist, and therefore a comrade; and (c) somebody I admired.

When I was young, I wanted to be John Pilger, travelling around the world, wrathful and incorruptible, confronting murderers, indicting torturers, and giving succour to the oppressed masses (I particularly looked forward to the travelling-around-the-world part). Pilger’s book Heroes sat on my friends’ bookshelves alongside copies of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Letters, the spinal integrity of which remained uncompromised. Our bedrooms were papered with political posters, advertising socialist newspapers, or quoting anti-Nazi activist Martin Niemöller, Irish revolutionary James Connolly or Joe Strummer of the Clash. We were so radical, we were never going to stop smoking dope—even when we were, like, twenty-five or something.

Today, student revolutionaries of my generation are consultants, public servants, salespeople and lifestyle journalists. We would not know where to go to buy dope—or socialist newspapers, for that matter. Only John Pilger seems the same—still denouncing the US war machine, still fighting for the underdog against the running dogs. He was sixty-five years old and he had two grown-up kids, but his official biography still listed one of his recreations as ‘mulling’.

I had heard Pilger could be difficult. In 2003, he told TVNZ presenter Kim Hill, ‘You waste my time because you have not prepared for this interview … This interview, frankly, is a disgrace.’ Hill said later that Pilger might be ‘so angry about the world that merely suggesting there might be another way to look at it, in order to elicit a view from him, felt like some kind of outrage’.

Well, I won’t do that, I thought. I’ll establish some common ground. I’ll phone him up and introduce myself as the ‘Last Marxist on the Sydney Morning Herald’. ‘I don’t like people who wave their flag as the “last Marxist”,’ he said.

Nor, as it turned out, did Pilger like to be the subject of profiles. And he certainly didn’t like the Sydney Morning Herald. I asked to interview him face-to-face, but he said he could not because he had to go to the airport afterwards, which was like saying he couldn’t go bowling because it was raining in New Zealand. I wondered if he would have accepted that kind of restricted access from a subject, or if he would have turned up at their doorstep, alone and vulnerable except for a camera crew, and demanded to know what they had to hide.

He asked what I had written before, and what ‘kind of story’ I was planning. I wondered if he wanted to do the interview at all. ‘I think you have to persuade me, don’t you?’ said Pilger. Well, not really. The interview was supposed to be publicity for the John Pilger Film Festival in Sydney.

‘I don’t do publicity,’ he said.

I said I was not interested in doing the interview if he was not, and left it up to him to phone me back. Ten minutes later, he called to set up a time for a formal conversation because, he conceded, he would like as many people as possible to know about his festival. ‘I have no reason to trust the Herald,’ he said, ‘but I won’t hold you accountable for the sins of the Herald.’

I called at the time Pilger had suggested, and there was no answer. I called again and again, then I called the publicist.

‘He’s a funny man,’ she said, sympathetically.

An hour later, I tried again. Nothing.

‘He’s a funny, funny man,’ said the publicist.

I finally got through to Pilger ninety minutes after we had arranged to speak. He apologised. He had been on the phone to his son. Once more, I wondered how he would deal with an interview subject who refused to meet him, was reluctant to speak to him, demanded to know what kind of a story he was contemplating, and could not even honour the time he had arranged for a phoner.

Throughout 2008, many of the people I interviewed were journalists in one way or another. Even Ramsay’s by-line regularly appears in the Times, although his raw copy is probably about a palatable as my cooking. As the year went on, I wrote long character sketches of Chloe Hooper, whose book The Tall Man was based on her dispatches for the Monthly magazine; Steve Toltz, whose novel A Fraction of the Whole was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and who had previously written a column for Inside Film magazine; and Oscar Humphries, who had been appointed editor of the Australian edition of the Spectator. I liked all three of them. They were nice, thoughtful, clever people.

All of those interviews were offered to Good Weekend by publicists, and suggested to me by the editor. I had initial doubts about Hooper and Toltz, both of whom were youngish writers from well-off backgrounds whose careers consisted largely of study, travel and working on their books. I thought they might be unforthcoming, because middle-class people often treat every detail of their lives—and even their opinions—as if it were a great and terrible secret; and because educated, creative people sometimes affect an undiscerning mistrust of the media, a naivety masquerading as sophistication that is particularly baffling since most Australian ‘lifestyle’ and cultural journalism is insipid hagiography.

*

After the Ramsay debacle, I wrote an essay for the Media Alliance’s Walkley Magazine, about the way I constructed profiles. I said I always looked for the comedy in people, but I also tried to find the tragedy, the hardship they had to overcome. I sent the Walkley story to Hooper before our interview, so there would be no misunderstanding about the nature of the piece. Her publicist read the article and advised her against doing the interview, apparently believing I was describing an individual pathology rather than an industry standard. Hooper, quite bravely, agreed to the meeting nonetheless.

Hooper knew what made a good interview because she had interviewed scores of people for The Tall Man. She knew what constituted usable quotes and what was a waste of everybody’s time. So I was surprised when I asked her what her experience of school had been like, and her first answer was, ‘Good.’ I took this up with her in an email exchange after the story had been published. She was charming and conciliatory, and wrote to me:

‘It was good’ is totally pathetic, I completely agree. But knowing the tape recorder was running left me inarticulate … The article, I’m sure, did a lot of good commercially. Everyone saw it, everyone read it. You might feel I was a terrible, withholding, guarded subject but the irony is you have now written ‘my story’ for the next however-many years. It’s the piece that everyone else who interviews me uses as a guide, and I can feel the narrative hardening around my feet like concrete.

But it is difficult to identify with success without struggle. It is not romantic or life affirming. It carries no useful life lesson, except that people who get off to the best start tend to finish first. Both Hooper and Toltz had been educated at the best and most expensive single-sex, non-selective (except by income) independent schools in Australia: Hooper at Lauriston Girls (motto: ‘Holiness, wisdom, strength’) in Toorak, Toltz at Knox Grammar (motto: ‘The manly thing is being done’) on Sydney’s north shore. Each had wealthy parents and stable families. They played down their moments of despair because, I suspect, they did not want to be ridiculed for complaining about hard times when they were so obviously privileged.

When my editor asked me to interview Toltz, I contacted his publisher, my friend Ben Ball at Penguin, and asked what was interesting about him. Ball said, ‘To me, the most interesting thing about him is that somebody so normal could have written a book like that.’ Of course, that is not a very interesting thing at all. Ben suggested I look at a story Malcolm Knox had written about Toltz for the Sydney Morning Herald. Knox fleshed out Toltz’s largely unknown background, but his story included this dispiriting exchange:

Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of the story behind the novel is how little depends on direct personal experience.

‘I haven’t been part of the criminal world,’ Toltz says convincingly. ‘I don’t have a great respect for reality or getting the “facts” as a means of putting together a story.’

Asked if his relationship with his own parents gave any nourishment to the creation of Martin and Jasper, Toltz laughs: ‘I don’t think that line will take you anywhere.’

This seemed to leave nothing to talk about with Toltz. If you cannot discuss fiction as recycled, distorted, exorcised, wish-fulfilled life experience, and the author will not talk about himself either, you might just as well speak about the book to the table hand at the printers (and Toltz is the only person I have interviewed who suggested a good person to include in the story might be his book editor). I sent Toltz the Walkley story, too. I had begun to imagine the piece was a kind of contract and, by reading it and accepting an interview, the subject was agreeing to abide by its terms.

Two things stand out as interesting about Toltz: the fact that he is Jewish, which most people are not (although I am), and the fact that he went to one of Sydney’s boater-wearing, rugby-playing, boys-only Combined Associated Schools, which most people did not. He would not talk much about either. He characterised the casual anti-Semitism of his playground peers as no greater discrimination than another boy might suffer for being fat, or adopted. Perhaps Toltz is a rare Jewish creative artist for whom prejudice is not a hatpin in the heart – and perhaps one day singing tomatoes will inherit the earth. When I pressed for more detail about his reaction to the comically traditional discipline at Knox Grammar, which he left for a state school at the age of sixteen, he emailed, ‘Don’t forget—my life started when I left Knox!!! If it was for [sic] me, I’d keep the Knox stuff down to a bare minimum.’ This is not true on any level, from the biological to the poetic. Nobody’s life—least of all Toltz’s characters in A Fraction of the Whole—begins at sixteen.

Toltz spoke easily and wittily about things that really did not have much to do with him. He had had some funny jobs and he had not been very good at them. By Toltz’s account, he was not good at anything much. When I asked him to name his biggest achievement before the Man Booker nomination, he cited a certificate he received for ‘hand-eye coordination’ in year one at Knox. He was an underachiever, a bit of a drifter, to whom success had come as a surprise. I knew this was rubbish but, to my shame, I built a story around it, because (a) all the usable quotes he gave me led in the same direction; and (b) it allowed me to structure the familiar struggle-failure-success sequence around Toltz’s modest self-appraisal. By the time the story left the subeditors’ desk, this narrative had become even explicit, and the introduction to the piece read:

At school, he wallowed in a sea of mediocrity. At uni, he made cringe-worthy films. And as a writer, he had 13 years of failure—until last month, when his first novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Mark Dapin meets the late-blooming Steve Toltz.

It took a letter from a reader to put it into perspective (a rare—not to say unprecedented—event). Dawn Watkinson of Hawthorn East, Victoria, wrote:

Your feature on Steve Toltz (October 11) brought back a flood of recollections, dating back to that era of boaters, pulled-up socks secured with elastic bands, and … a blue certificate. The last of these recognised Steve’s completion of year 1 at Knox Grammar School in 1979 and, of course, his special talent. How do I know? I, as his class teacher, identified this gift—his ‘hand-eye co-ordination’. Even as a six-year-old, Steve was probably ‘the boy less likely’ to become a merchant banker. But a boy with ‘a flair for failure’? Never! Now he can no longer grin wryly and claim this as a special talent. His novel is published. It is in bookshops. And now with his Booker Prize nomination, he’ll have plenty of readers. Of one thing I am certain: Steve Toltz is most certainly the boy less likely to become seriously overawed by self-importance now that he has become a literary success.

Toltz was not much of a failure, it had just taken him quite a long time to write a novel, which was fair enough, since it was quite a long novel. In a sense, Toltz played the interview game well: he did not give me no story, he gave me the same story he had given Knox. It was not a true story, but it was not a bad story, and it was one with which we both could live: the lazy journalist and the private writer.

After the interview, I asked Toltz why he agreed to speak to the media if he found it so painful. He said:

I feel like this is a slightly vexing process to be even a low-level public figure. But I figure that because I didn’t want to publish it myself, and if I’m allowing somebody to publish it, then I have a responsibility to do 55 per cent of what is asked of me—although really I’ve been doing about 85 per cent. The actual process isn’t painful. When you sit in a room all day by yourself, it’s actually nice to talk to people. It’s just that I enjoy my anonymity, and obviously it’s an unusual thing for a person who likes anonymity to be doing publicity.

When the Hooper and Totlz profiles were published—and I had succeeded in squeezing two large and complicated lives into a small and simplified structure, making heroes of the meek, and high walls out of hurdles—I felt as though I had accomplished something pointless, like growing celery upside down.

My next subject was Oscar Humphries, a person I had not realised existed. Humphries—educated at Cranbrook (motto: ‘To be, rather than to seem to be’) and Stowe (‘I stand firm and I stand first’)—had, for no discernible reason, been appointed editor of the Australian edition of the British conservative magazine the Spectator, to which his father was a long-time contributor. My Marxist side (or ‘left brain’) was delighted to find a child of the upper classes who actually barracked for his own team. When I met the affable Humphries, I was even more pleased to hear him spouting the benefits of meritocracy while benefiting so completely from nepotism and inherited wealth. I had been worried I would not be able to write anything friendly about him, but he was a likeable, fragile man-child who had already suffered enough from the unfortunate things he had written about himself in newspaper columns in his early twenties.

In some ways, Humphries was the anti-Toltz. Toltz told me how glad he was that he did not have a public platform at nineteen years old, because he would have been embarrassed today by the ridiculous things he would have said then. Humphries had that platform, and said ridiculous things that embarrass him today. For example:

I am an old 22. I feel like I have lived many lives in many different places. I’ve loved more than most and seen more than most but that also means I’ve hurt more.

Unlike Toltz, Humphries had something to fear from the media. Whereas Toltz had achieved something—a book, a Booker nomination—Humphries had only been something, and it was not even clear what that something was. As Humphries admitted, during the short time he had lived in Australia and written about his life in a gossipy column in the Sunday Telegraph Magazine: ‘I couldn’t’ve done what I’d done—got all these pieces written about me—anywhere but Sydney, because really I wasn’t doing much at the time, I was just there.’

Humphries—personable, photogenic and candid—courted the newspapers for publicity to build himself into a personality who could then launch a career in the media. The press helped him fashion a shell, then saw that it was hollow and smashed it against a wall.

Toltz's novel - at its best, witty, good-hearted and ambitious - is, at its worst, a fairly clueless critique of the media, because Toltz’s ideas about the media come from the media itself. He regurgitates tabloid journalism's self-serving, self-loathing self image as the blood labour of vampires who descend on the innocent and tears them to shreds to satisfy the worst instincts of it audience, but Humphries knows the people whom the media turns on with the greatest ferocity are those who turned to it in the first place.

A few weeks before I met Humphries for Good Weekend, an interesting telephone interview between Humphries and Nick Leys appeared in the Sunday Telegraph. Leys, a journalist from the newspaper whose magazine had, a few years earlier, lent Humphries the cross on which to crucify himself, then took the opportunity to repeatedly stab him in the side with a spear. Leys asked Humphries—in only lightly veiled terms—if he thought he was a ridiculous person. Humphries told me it was difficult for him to hear those words:

People don’t read their own reviews essentially, and, in my case, my reviews are not about a book I’ve written, or a film I’ve made: they’re about me, which is deeply unpleasant. In this capacity, as the editor of the Spectator, a serious job on a serious magazine, I’ve encountered questions like—they’re not really questions—‘Aren’t you unqualified to do this?’ ‘Aren’t you a bit of a joke?’ ‘Aren’t you like a character your father would have created?’ in the case of Nick Leys. I thought the last question was ridiculous, but I answered those questions. As tempted as I was to hang up, I didn’t, because I don’t agree with him. I think I’m doing a good job, and I think I’m up to the job. Therefore I was able to argue my point.

All the time I was talking to Humphries, I was mentally reviewing the mechanics of the interview. I asked him if he still spoke to Tamara Mellon, the Jimmy Chu president with whom he famously had an affair. Then I asked him how he felt about me asking that question (not great). I became worried that if I thought too much about how I was maintaining my balance, I might fall over. Meanwhile, Humphries was edging along his own frayed, familiar tightrope. He said:

When you do give an interview and you’re overly candid, there is a sense immediately, almost before you [finish] of regret. There’s a sense of giving little pieces of yourself away. And the weird thing about it is once you’ve done it, it’s done. You cannot take that piece back. So whether you’ve said something about your family or your relationship or an emotional truth, there’s no undoing that, you’ve exposed yourself, and you feel a bit ridiculous. So I really am trying not … And I think I’ve been quite measured, haven’t I?

For almost a year after our brief interview, Gordon Ramsay haunted me, like some vaudevillian, vulgarian spectre with a pig’s head in a toque tucked under its arm. The man went to strange and enraged lengths to ensure my piece was not published, thereby giving me enough material to write a longer and more important story. His publicist asked for assurances that the ‘tape’ of our interview would not be made public. My editor declined to give those assurances, and Fairfax Digital floated but abandoned the idea of running the recording on Fairfax websites to promote the story.

Ramsay threatened to pull out of the Sydney Good Food & Wine Show if my story ran. He offered another interview to Good Weekend, which was to be only about food, only on the telephone, and only conducted by my editor. He said he had never been treated so badly by a journalist in his life. (This was a man who was secretly filmed abusing his employees on a TV show entitled Britain’s Unbearable Bosses; whom the food critic A.A. Gill called ‘a wonderful chef, just a really second-rate human being’; who had one of his kidney dishes described by food critic Fay Maschler as ‘toxic scum on a stagnant pool’; and who, after pronouncing that he had not been at the birth of any of his children and had never changed a nappy, was, by his own account, ‘labelled the ultimate sexist git, chauvinist pig, a total arsehole [and] got completely panned by just about every woman journalist going’.)

Each time I heard of his newest clubfooted intervention against my piece, my opinion of him soured. At first, I was partially on his side. Why should he have to answer questions about his father, when he was coming to Australia to demonstrate the correct way to cook sea bass, or something? It seems that Ramsay had confused Good Weekend with the Good Food & Wine Show (‘We’re doing the Good Food Show, is that right?’ he asked, as he sat down. ‘Is that what this is talking about?’). The interview had come through a Sydney PR company that was contracted by Good Food Week, which was in contact with Ramsay through a Melbourne PR company that seemed to represent chefs, which dealt—perhaps indirectly—with Ramsay’s personal staff. Somebody forgot to communicate the ‘rules’ for interviewing Ramsay to me or my magazine. Had I known them, I would have abided by them, and cannibalised whatever background I needed from electronic archives. Inevitably, when an interviewee refuses to talk about something, the journalist simply reprints the last significant comment they made on the issue, then the interviewee complains that the media simply regurgitates the same old misconceptions about them. I had not been sent to London to write about his relationship with his parents. The only thing I had been told to do was take a look in his kitchen.

Prior to publication, I argued with my editor and the chief-sub over the conclusion of the piece, which was:

Maybe he finds it hard to separate the rest of the world from all the people around him who have to do exactly as he says—who want to do exactly what he says, because they want to be like him.

On the other hand, maybe he just did not like me. Which is a shame, because I thought he was okay.

They argued it sounded a bit pathetic. However, I wanted it to reflect my mood at the end of the interview, which was not angry, defiant, confident or triumphant (I got him! The ‘real’ Gordon Ramsay!) but a bit pathetic.

When Ramsay arrived in Australia for the Good Food & Wine Show (he decided to come, despite the publication of my article) he gave an interview to Nine Network’s 60 Minutes but initially refused to let Seven’s Today Tonight into his press conference. The Seven show asked to interview me instead, about ‘celebrities who get too big for their boots’ and to try overmanage the media. I refused the producer’s offer, then the reporter rang and appealed to my sense professional solidarity. At the last minute, Ramsay’s people gave Today Tonight the access they wanted, so the show dropped the petulant-prick angle and I missed my debut on tabloid television.

Weeks later, the vapid, manufactured non-scandal of Ramsay’s affair with Sarah Symons helped keep the bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan off the front pages of even the broadsheet newspapers. Today Tonight contacted me again to make a comment about Ramsay’s image, but I refused, and instead watched Kathy Lette’s attempts to insert herself-as-commentator as the quatrième (or maybe cinqième) person in Ramsay’s miserable ménage a trios.

I have thought about the Ramsay interview often, but small things puzzle me still. I had expected Ramsay to have a ready wit, to be quick with the mal mots he seems to coin so effortlessly for the cameras—but, unscripted and unsupported, he was barely coherent.

I kept on asking about his father even after Ramsay warned me off (‘The bullshit at home … I don’t want to continue regurgitating,’ he said) because I was trying to catch one complete quote from the scattering of loosely connected words that he threw into the air in response to my questions both about his family and everything else. I could not imagine how it any of it would make sense once it was written down, so I kept on probing (for three questions, rather than ‘17 minutes’). I was also surprised how quickly he had decided to suppress the interview. He must have been calculating how much influence I had at the magazine from the moment when he affably enquired whether I was a freelancer.

The US rock journalist Chuck Klosterman said, in a radio interview:

There’s this cliché in journalism: ‘Save your tough questions for the end.’ I think the complete opposite. I ask the hardest questions almost immediately, if I think they’re the most important questions. Now, if the person walks out, that’s not a failed interview. That tells you more about that person than anything that they could have said, because clearly they are so unwilling to respond to this one issue that they will actually leave, knowing that that will become the totality of the story.

It would be nice to think this was what happened with Ramsay, but it was not. I have spent too long trying to draw a professional lesson from the Ramsay experience, because I wanted to find a way to prevent it from happening again. There are problems with broadsheet celebrity journalism. It lends importance to trivia, by echoing the tabloids’ preoccupations with background and relationships, and trivialises what is important, by relegating to the background the book, the movie or (to be generous) the food show. Media novices often do not fully understand what they are doing when they consent to a profile-style interview, and media veterans may go in with no intention of revealing anything of themselves. The journalist is hopelessly compromised from the start, since he or she was only given the interview because the star has a product to promote, and almost anything the journalist writes will help serve the subject’s purpose. The celebrity ducks and weaves and leans and blocks when, most of the time, the journalist is not even throwing punches. The fight is fixed.

But the issue with Ramsay was not about trivialisation or consent, concealment or cooption. It was not about journalism, any more than it was about his father. There was no comfort to be taken from Chuck Klosterman and no admonition deserved from Janet Malcolm. In the end, I was simply wrong about Ramsay. He is not ‘okay’. He is a vindictive, duplicitous bully—but that does not matter and he does not matter and celebrities do not matter and stories about them do not matter.

So why should I bother producing another? I cannot answer that question, but it is a scorching morning in Sydney, and I am packing my bag for a winter’s night in London, where I will be meeting Seasick Steve, a white bluesman with a yellowed songbook stuffed with roughly polished stories, to interview him and write about him, to cheat and be cheated.

— Mark Dapin