Press award so youre getting used to this uh, actually, fifth oh, sorry i got my facts wrong wow, ok, so youre really getting used to it. How do you go about setting up an interview . I mean, do people come to you . Do you approach them . How does it work . Its, i mean, its an endlessly changing field. 50 sometimes there is a certain circuit of interviews coming in which follows the Book Publishing circuit. So publishers will have their big titles that they want to present. There are certain kind of political cycles, big films. Again, there is a kind of, there is a movie production cycle, but lots of it is a mixture of people who might be about to do Something Interesting that they want to talk about. Theres no particular rhyme nor reason to it, really. Do you prefer the ones, im saying this slightly with my Culture Editor Hat on at bbc news, that my heart slightly sinks when its a junket, which we call them, you know, in terms of, you know, somebody� s got something to promote and youre going to meet them. Does your heart slightly sink at that point . And what are you setting out to do always . Are you always setting out to get people to reveal more than theyve revealed before . Always. I mean, thats literally the definition of the job i dont do junkets at all. Junkets, for listeners who arent aware, is when you will have a movie star whos starring in a new film, and the film company will arrange for literally 20 or 30 journalists to come and sit in little round tables with the star in kind of groups of three or four, and they have a couple of minutes each. And luckily, i dont go anywhere near that. I mean, ijust think thats the kiss of death. I dont know anyone whos ever said anything interesting in those circumstances with us, we ask for at least an hour, and very often it can be two or three, sometimes even four, if i can keep them talking. How long was Pamela Anderson . Because you got Amazing Things out of her. 0h, a whole day that was amazing, yeah. Because shed already written a book at that point, right . Shed written a book. But she said more to you than shed said in the book. Which is myjob. But quite impressive. Thats literally it, you know. I mean, if i had to describe in one sentence what i do for a living, its i try and get an interviewee to Say Something they havent. This might be a multiple clause sentence, that they havent said before, and that they werent intending to say, and possibly, that they might regret saying. Thats, that. I think you would have to include that sort of sub clause in the sentence, yeah. And how do you do it . Because i know when you won this latest of the five awards, the judges praised your Meticulous Research and psychologically astute questioning. How do you prepare . Oh, i mean, katie, its such a mixture. The simple thing to answer is the preparation question, which isjust you just prepare. You prepare forensically and exhaustively, and you Read Everything you can that theyve ever written. You try and watch everything or listen to everything theyve said. You read all previous interviews. So, how many weeks of work would go into one interview . It will depend upon the person. Some people, its fairly light, with some people it could be a whole week of reading and reading, watching, listening and, crucially, thinking. So, when you feel as if youve just, youve got this encyclopaedic knowledge of this person, its almost like sort of sitting your finals on a different person for each exam. Once you feel like you know absolutely everything, of course, 99 of what youve read or learned about them, you wont actually, it wont come up in the interview. It may not even come up in the piece when you write it, but here it gets slightly mysterious, katie which is what ive found is that somehow, if you walk into an interview armed with this enormous sort of body of research, even though you never explicitly identify that youve done it, some weird, by some strange alchemy, its communicated to the person that youre interviewing that youve really done your homework. And what ive found is that if you havent done your homework, that also communicates itself, and that is the kiss of death. So, the very simple way to explain how you get people to open up is to show that youve done the work before you get there, and they definitely need to feel that youve shown them the respect and the courtesy of learning everything. And sometimes, youll Say Something and theyll laugh and theyll go, my god, you know more about my life than i do thats a tick in my head, you know . Thats good. And how much of it is then what happens in the room . I mean, obviously youve prepared, but then, i mean, i think youve got, for example, quite a good theory about body language. Fascinating. Well, this, i didnt know about at all, katie, until the pandemic came along. Because i had always assumed that the art is all about the words that i say, to get them to say words, that its all words, right . Thats myjob. And then the pandemic happened, and i had to interview people on zoom, and thats when i discovered that actually, id invested all this significance in words and id also thought that myjob is all about getting them to open up to talk. And i discovered very quickly, doing this job on zoom, that i was wrong about both of those things. And the first one is that so much of the job is getting people to stop talking because theyve obviously, i mean, i might be doing it right now as im speaking to you, katie. The person being interviewed doesnt really know what the interviewer wants or, and so its very easy, unwittingly, to kind of go off around the houses and bore the interviewer to tears and theyre sitting there, im often sitting there in myjob thinking, oh, geez, the clock is ticking. Ive only got 90 minutes with you. Lets not waste ten on an anecdote ive heard you tell ten times before, and at that point you have to get them to stop. Thats the critical thing. How do you do that . Thats the interesting thing. It turns out that you do it with your body. My body, if i was interviewing you and you were waffling on about something. Often happens not the interviewing, you interview me, but the waffling definitely on my part. Id think, oh, god, katie, please, youve got to be quiet. And almost unconsciously, my body would adjust in really subtle ways that will tell your body to stop talking. And crucially, your head wouldnt even realise that ive told you to stop talking. And then, through that mechanism, this sort of sense of trust and collaboration is maintained. But when youre on screens, you literally have to just interrupt people. And i learnt very quickly from experience. You do that two times, certainly three, the interview is toast. Theyre never going to say anything they hadnt planned to somebody whosjust interrupted them. I find myself nodding a lot in interviews, and then i look back at the camera and i think, oh, you just look like a nodding donkey. Its terrible i dont know what you do, ros. Im sure i do plenty of nodding. Im just listening to you, decca, and im wondering, in the moment, can you tell if an interview will translate into a great written piece . Because of course, youre writing these interviews up. Does one automatically follow the other . Absolutely. Oh, you can. Theres like a bell in your head. And every time the interviewee says something quote worthy, interesting, new, it can be partlyjust a turn of phrase. Part of myjob is to get people to speak in the most colloquial of terms possible, because the difference between an interview and a written piece is that youre speaking off the cuff, that youre sounding like a human being, and we express who we are so much through how we say as what we say, and so im listening out. Excuse me for flicking im listening out the whole time for turns of phrase that tell us who they are, and also things that they havent said before. And its literally like a bell going off my head. Ting, ting, ting, ting, ting. And the worst place to be in my life is 45 minutes into an interview and the bell has not tinged. Thats when i start to panic and thats when you go wildly off piste. Decca, thank you very much indeed for being with us. We appreciate it. Youre going to stay because were going to carry on talking about creativity in a moment. I want to talk first about creativity in terms of tv formats, because weve got the creatives behind two of the most popular tv formats of the moment with us. Dean nabarro, co creator of the 1 club, is here in the studio. The 1 club is a Hit Quiz Show thats itv� s second biggest entertainment series of the year. Congratulations on that, dean. Its been sold to. In i2 territories including the us. And weve heard today ukraine and hungary. So, well done. Thank you. And matt bennett also joins us. Hes shine� s Senior Executive producer and one of the creators of channel 4s series hunted, the reality show that sees 12 ordinary people go on the run from a team of expert hunters. Lets hear a clip of hunted. Right, team. Listen in. Weve got 12 fugitives at large on the London Underground network that is a little bit of the series hunted. Matt, youre with us. Its, by any measure, been successful. The seventh Series Finale aired on channel [i on sunday. Youve sold this format all around the world. I wonder if you go right back to the beginning, what was your original pitch for what the series would be . Yeah, were chuffed to bits, i as you can imagine, with how its been received this year. Really, really good. And it started for me ten years ago when i was approached by the creative director, tim whitwell, who, incidentally, made that prison. Series with Gordon Ramsay that decca was talking about. Synchronicity yeah, there you go and, so, yeah, he approached me and i was, i was filming a series. Id obviously upset him because he put me on an island with 12 other hairy blokes for a month to starve and film for a series called the island with bear grylls. And when we got off that island, he had this other idea, which was, which turns. Into hunted, which really is trying to answer that question about whether we can go on the run in 21st. Century britain with all the technology around us. And this was back in sort of 2014. L and, you may or may not remember, but britain had been revealed as one of the most surveilled countries in the world. You know, we were up there and still are, i think, with china and russia, i and edward snowden, that fella who was american, or still. Is american, but now in exile in russia, had revealed how much informationl was being shared between our governments. And so, that was Reallyl Prompting in the papers discussion about National Security and individual privacy. So we were, we thought, j you know, we didnt want to make a dry documentary. About the powers of the state. So, we wanted to tackle this sort of overwhelmingly important issue of our time in a sort of modern, entertaining piece of television. So youre making an entertainment format, but youre also trying to make some big points. Once you got it on air, was that what the audience was interested in, or were they just interested in seeing if the contestants got caught . Ultimately, they were just interested in whether the contestants got caught and we had, i mean, its. An incredibly, incredibly complex mechanic to make hunted. And when were making it, we need three, we need a staff of 300 people to get it on the screen. And the key person behind that is a fella called kevin oleary. | and if anyone follows twitter| during the hunted broadcast, youll find kevin on therel because hes our referee. But he was also, was, formerly a very seniorj metropolitan police officer. He oversaw the security for the 2012 olympics. And was once head of the undercover unit l for the met. And he helped us, he agreed to come on board, really,. To help us create the mechanic that allowed us to replicate the powers of the state, so long as we only revealed and its important. I say this because so long as we only revealed methods that are out there in the public domain. So there are obviously still policing methods that i dont know about, but obviously kevin does, that we just dont show in hunted for sort of, l you know, proper, grown up reasons, really. But it took us nine months. It took us nine months to design that and test that mechanic. And, you know, we even sent out. So, for example, just to find where cctv cameras were, i we sent out 800 freedom of Information Requests to map where all the state cctv cameras are in britain. I we designed a method of reporting anpr cameras. We even had anpr cameras in our cars, in the hunters cars. We worked out how to listen to phone calls. I we employed ncc, an amazing Cyber Security company, to lend us their key people. So an awful lot of planning is, is what im picking up. Yeah. A lot of planning. Matt, id like to bring dean nabarro in because dean, youre the co founder of magnum media and the co creator of the 1 club on itv, as i said, alongside andy auerbach. I just think everyone should hear a clip of that, too, just for fairness. Anyone has a chance to win because this show is the ultimate leveller. Its the quiz that tests how your brain really works, as our questions are all about logic and common sense. So who will make it to the end and answer a question only 1 of the country can get right and win up to £100,000 . | well, that was lee mack, the host of the 1 club. And just explain for people who havent seen it, although many people have, as i said, you know, whats the idea behind the show . Well, the idea is that theres 100 people and that we have taken a whole lot of questions, which are all brain teasers. So, theyre not things that are whats the capital of france . Theyre not, they dont have an actual kind of General Knowledge answer. And weve essentially taken them off to one of those places you might get a regular survey, like, who are you going to vote for . What do you think of this Washing Machine . Whatever. A yougov, kantar, whatever, poll. And weve asked them across these questions, weve sent these questions off, brain teasers, to a Cross Section of the country. And we are able, with that, to know that 90 of the country can answer this question or 80 this question, all the way down to the 1 question that only 1 of people can answer. Which makes you feel really good and of course, with 100 people, a theres a Natural Whittle which goes down, you know, the assumption is that if those percentages are correct, youd get a whittle down to the 1 . And thats, thats really it. And you can ask yourself. Matt, you know, used the idea about, you know, a question. A lot of things hes been doing as a question, then turning it into entertainment and i think thats probably the similar thing to the 1 club. Theres a question at the heart of it, which is, you know, how clever are you . But in the kind of the real world of thinking, you know. It doesnt really matter whether youre eight or 80. It doesnt matter what school you went to, doesnt really matter kind of what level of education or your memory ive got a great memory, but doesnt mean that im particularly clever. Theres all those sorts of things. And where do you fit in . Are you in the top 50, as lee just said, or are you the top ten or are you in that 1 . And its Bragging Rights and as were talking about creativity and well come back to it much, much more later. Yeah. How did you come up with the idea . I mean, i know your Production Company is much smaller than shine, the one that matt works for. Yeah, were tiny. I think its just two of you. Its a miracle its even on tv well, hold on, youve got six Million People watching it every week, so something went right. Something went right. Its those 10,000 hour things, isnt it, that people talk about . You finally get that way. Andy and i, andy auerbach, probably one of the cleverest people ive ever met in my life, also one of the nicest, by the way, um, we worked together, we worked together for years. Wed always share an office together. Wed sit together, and get our lunch together, come back. And i would always go through the daily mail, the mail online or the mirror or whatever. And one of my, one of my great sort of pleasures at lunchtime, and every now and again i would see one of those kind of Click Bait Kind of titles, which is, you know, you have to have an iq of over 150, only people with an iq of 150 will be able to answer this question, or only 5 of people in the country can see it. It was always one of those sort of, can you spot the Bear In The Woods or whatever, it would be, or how many, you know, those sort of things, and i was always really good at them. And i would go over, like i said, to andy, who is one of the cleverest people ive met and im not, and i would go, ive got it, ive got it, have you . And he would never get it. Never~ and it would be like my best bit of the day. Id love it. And i would get these and every now, you know, id see them over months. And then, one time, i cant remember exactly when it was, i saw a question. And it was a kind of essentially an equation, like, numbers in a sequence. And there was a car covering it, and ijust couldnt work it out. I took it home to my son, who was 11 or maybe 12. Hes 18 next week, by the way. Thats how Long Development takes in tv. And he got it in ten seconds, under ten seconds. And that was the thing, which is, if an 11 or 12 year old could get something, perhaps that shows you that it doesnt really matter how old you are, there was something in it. And then we wrote some questions. We sent them off. We thought, you know, actually no disrespect to the mail online or whatever it is, but, you know, is it true that only 5 of people could do that or 10 . So, we want to know the truth. We sent it off, we came back. And then that became a fascinating thing to us, which was what percentage were we . And just briefly, its sold in 12 territories, including america. Yes. Did you set out to create a format that would work across the world . No, not at all. We. Did it come as a nice surprise . Yes, it was a lovely surprise we didnt set out to do anything, really. We were just. Apart from make a great quiz show. We were just amusing ourselves with an idea, and it very, very quickly became clear to us