on TV studios

All right, I can’t go to sleep yet, so here’s a quick summary of my TV experience.

First, the chauffeuring situation was odd. I was ready on time, and the TV station driver picked me up on time. But then he headed for a strange neighborhood that differed from where I thought the studio was supposed to be. And I was right, it wasn’t the studio… We were going to pick up someone else. And then we waited and waited for this guy in front of his office. For half an hour we waited, and the guy did not appear, and the time for the show was fast approaching.

Since he held us up for that long, I was imagining a mousse-haired prima donna, but he was actually a kindly older man who was clearly busy at work. No hard feelings. And later it turned out that he was an Iran expert who was coming in not to join me on my own appearance, but for a show about Iran’s nuclear program on Saudi 1, the Arabic-language channel. I was on Saudi 2, the English-language channel.

We arrived just 4 minutes prior to airtime. I was expecting a very brightly lit room with lots of people in it. In fact, I was placed alone in a very, very dark room, with a window behind me (on the 12th floor) showing a gorgeous view of the Nile by night. That was my backdrop.

The earpiece was extremely poor. Sometimes the voice from Riyadh was scratchy, and a few times I heard nothing at all. In the darkness I could not see where the camera lens was, and had to try to remember where it was so that I could look at it. And at first the infamous “red light” was never on, and when I asked them to fix it it was thereafter always on, even when I was not actually on camera.

So, how did I know when I was on? There was a large-screen TV in the room, a bit off to the right, so I could sort of see myself out of the corner of my eye. But it was on a slight delay. Furthermore, I could hear my own words coming over the Riyadh sound system, through the earpiece, with the same delay of several seconds.

In short, it was a physically complicated and distracting environment, and a bit of experience would be needed to ignore all those distractions completely. I doubt I did it perfectly, though they seemed happy with my performance and said they want me back on the show. But one of the shows they wanted me back for is about Middle East politics, and I told them there are dozens of people at AUC, in Political Science and other Departments, far more qualified on that subject than I am.

The host was a pleasant and articulate gentleman named Asaad al-Asaad, based in their Riyadh studio. He looked like a suave but unpretentious 45-to-50-year-old. With him was another nice Saudi guy, in traditional dress, who heads some sort of prize-awarding academic foundation in Saudi Arabia (I couldn’t quite hear everything he said due to the scratchy-sounding earpiece).

I was one remote guest, an Arab journalist in Washington was the other, but there were fiber optic problems and the guy in Washington could be neither seen nor heard. Most of the conversation took place in Riyadh, I probably spoke for about 15 minutes out of the 60, and was asked four questions in all, which I wrote down on the piece of paper provided:

1. He asked me about my own prize (I didn’t tell him that, so his “sources” must have told him so) and wanted to know whether it motivated me.

2. What academic fields should have prizes?

3. How politicized are the Nobel Prizes?

4. What is preventing the development of Arab universities into world-class institutions?

In my answers I ended up going a bit beyond the letter of a few of these questions. My one surprise was that Obama’s Nobel never came up. I had assumed, wrongly, that that was the trigger issue for this particular show. But in fact, it was focused more on academic/intellectual prizes and how important they are for motivating first-rate work. (And I guess that topic does fit my job description, so my invitation does make more sense in retrospect than I thought it did.)

Afterward, they handed me a souvenir DVD with the whole show on it. It’ll be awhile before I feel like watching it. I found that I like appearing on TV, but wouldn’t you rather hear fingernails on a blackboard than watch yourself on TV?