Simon Mayo – Favourite Things

Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and past times that make them who they are.

Simon Mayo is a radio presenter and author. He has worked for BBC Radio since 1982, presenting BBC Radio 2’s Drivetime for eight years. He currently presents Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review on Radio 5 Live, and has taken over the weekly Greatest Hits Radio show. He launched Scala, a new, independent classical music digital radio station, where he presents the mid-morning show. Mayo’s children’s book series Itch has also recently been adapted for television and is available on iPlayer now.

These are a few of his favourite things…

Short questions

I should say early on that I sometimes get this wrong too, but the art of doing an interview is to keep the question short (and do your prep and listen). This is particularly true of political interviews, but it applies to celebrity interviews too. A typical mistake is to come up with a question that is so long it is clearly designed just to show how much you know about the subject; when the prime minister has a press conference, you see the incredibly intelligent political journalists lining up to ask questions and because they only get one question they try and hook three or four in together. This makes it the easiest thing in the world for the PM to duck and not answer. Larry King on CNN was the master of the short question. He saw the power in “why” and “I don’t understand can you explain”.

This isn’t an excuse to ask questions that don’t mean anything, it is just the best way to hold people to account. Short questions don’t allow time for the interviewee to think about their answer, they just have to answer honestly. And if they don’t give an honest answer, it is very obvious. So, out with the multi-sentence, multi-clause question, and in with short, pithy, neat, precise questioning, I’d say.

Periodic Table

I am not a scientist: I did history and politics at university and I am a radio presenter of popular and classical music. But, around eleven years ago my youngest child, who was ten at the time, came back from school only interested in science. So, I thought, for reasons I still can’t quite work out, that I’d write him a short story, something I had never done before. Around this time, the first iPad came out and there was an interactive periodic table app recommended by Stephen Fry. I got it and it was mind blowing. In it, it used the phrase “element hunter” – someone who collects the periodic table. I thought, someone else must have thought of this and written the adventures of an element hunter… but they hadn’t. So I did. I wrote it as a short story for my son, then it became a long story and then it got published. In fact, the television adaptation (called Itch) has just premiered on iPlayer.

The story introduced me to this iconic image of the periodic table; a baffling array of numbers and letters. It was arranged in the shape we recognise today by a crazy Russian called Dmitri Mendeleev and everyone else has followed on from him. When you look at the periodic table, you’re looking at not just this universe, but every other universe too. If you have your mind blown by something at 50 years old, it makes a big impression.

Bruce Springsteen

I am a late convert to Bruce Springsteen and as in the way with late converts you can get very messianic about things. It is hardly rocket science to choose someone like Springsteen but there is something about the way he carries himself, the way he writes, and the way he records and performs which is, for me, unique and fantastically appealing. He has a passion and sincerity which is hard to match. He has also done a lot of therapy which means when you interview him, which I have done once, he opens up very fast. He has managed to write about growing old in a way that so many pop and rock stars have failed to do. I interviewed Roger Daltrey a few years ago and he was lamenting the fact that Pete Townsend, who was such a great chronicler of what it was like to grow up, hadn’t really written about middle age and old age. Springsteen’s music, particularly his most recent album, is quite haunted by loss and growing old. I think he is a genius and there is nobody else who you watch live and think he looks like he could happily play for twelve hours straight; he appears to be having the best time of his life on stage, and maybe he is.

Filter Coffee

I am a coffee fiend. I have to watch how much I drink, so I only have one pot a day with three cups worth in. I am completely caffeinated by 8.30 in the morning and I am quite boringly pedantic and precise about what I drink. I like filter coffee over espresso because you can usually get it milder and more flavoursome. I discovered a company called Union Coffee during lockdown, and I get their fantastic filter coffee delivered.

My favourite is an Ethiopian coffee called Yirgacheffe. Their tasting notes always say crazy things that I can never quite recognise in the coffee but occasionally you recognise a hint of it. According to the tasting notes the dominant flavours for yirgacheffe coffee are citrus and floral with notes of kumquat, peach and toffee, but you could have fooled me. There is nothing worse than starting the day with a hideous brew, making my coffee is the highlight of my day. How sad is that.

Foul weather 

I should put a caveat – I don’t want anyone to get injured or blown away or anything like that. But the fouler the better; wild and stormy weather makes me want to put on a coat and go out on a walk. If we are by the seaside, a storm makes me want to go for a swim.

In the winter when everyone likes bright, cold, crisp days I think they are mad: I want cloudy and stormy. I think it comes from living down on the Sussex coast as a child and going on walks in the roughest weather possible; the waves crashing, salt and sea in your face; I found it thrilling. I know for a fact if I lived in America, I would be one of those stupid tornado chasers. Maybe I still will be one day.