eyebrow magazine pays tribute to Gordon Brown with a song marking his first year’s… achievements. Happy anniversary Gordon

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Now this was an amusing interview, if ever there was one. Barnbrook arranged to meet us in Becontree:

‘There won’t be any problem with us doing our piece in that cafe’, he barked. ‘I did one for The Times recently; we’ll do it there’.

We arrived at the cafe a couple of hours early, to set up the interview and to scout around for best light quality etc (actually that’s a bit of a lie, we wanted to gorge on English brekka). We started speaking to the lady who owned the place and when we mentioned we were interviewing Barnbrook in an hour or so, she went potty.

‘I had them guys from The Times last week, and we’ve only just finished scrubbing the shit off the walls which someone came in and smeared everywhere after they heard we had let him in here’, she shrieked.

‘I’m sorry but you can’t do it in here.’

‘Ok then’, our plaintive voices echoing, as we backed out the door.

We ended up doing the interview in a nearby park. Someone walked past Barnbrook and waved. He fattened up with pride, grinning at us in a ‘I told you so, I’m really popular here’ manner. Unfortunately, his crumpled suit meant he couldn’t carry it off with as much panache as say, Mugabe.

Interview went without hitch. BUT – and this is the amusing bit, two weeks later, I texted a friend of mine; Richard, who was under my phone as, well, Richard. The text went something like this: ‘Richard when are we meeting up, are you around next week’.
The reply came back, within two minutes, asking me not to contact him for the next two weeks, but suggesting that after the newspapers had calmed down (This story had just come out about him) he would MORE than make up for lost time (etc.etc.)

I was rather affronted that an old friend had taken it upon himself to act like such a dirty dog, until I realised my mistake.

Cripes this interview was hilarious. And not because we planned it that way. Widdy said yes to our interview request and we had some pretty bog-standard questions planned. We turned up to Parliament and we were greeted by an intern from Widdy’s office who told us that Widdy had been working her ‘to the bone’. Poor sod looked absolutely terrified. Anyway we walked in to Widdy’s office and she was monstrously rude to me, refusing to look me in the eye, or even lift her head when she shook my hand. On the other hand, she was very polite and friendly to my (male) colleague.

Either she felt threatened by the presence of another female, or she just doesn’t like women. Or she does like women.

Anyway, the interview got going and I was getting fidgety to get some interesting answers from the interview. We had planned to ask her about her time as an agony aunt for the Guardian. We asked her some hypothetical questions which she responded to, just about; she was getting angsty by the direct nature of the questioning. I then asked her a question that she took really personally and the interview was abruptly stopped to the words of:

‘Right. End of interview. That’s disgusting, how dare you ask me that sort of question. I’m a Catholic, you know.’

Which was hi-larious! (the Catholic bit). If she had had any sort of humour she would have responded with a quick answer and that would have been the end of it. Instead, the whole thing got written up by Matthew Bell, from the Independent on Sunday plus there was a load of amusing mash-ups of the interview on the web. I saw her a week later when we were filming outside parliament for something else. I had to hide between two parked cars.