15 feet. That's how far I'm sitting behind Prince（王子） Andrew in Buckingham Palace in the south drawing room. It's November 2019. It's about to start. I've got a pretty good idea it isn't going to go great but I have no idea how exceptionally（格外地） badly it's going to go. Now you're with me here right now and imagine yourself.
You don't have to close your eyes. Just think of those 15 feet. I'm behind the back of his chair and all I can see until the day it actually goes out in fact, when I hope you watched it too, all I can see is the back of him. So I experience（经验） it from that angle（角度） and from that angle（角度） I can see some things. First of all, I can see he's had a new haircut. Second of all, I can see his suit fits really badly.
Sorry, that's so superficial（表面的） but they have so much money. The next thing I can see is the bottom of his shoes. Slightly（轻微地） scuffed. He's not clearly carried everywhere. And I can see the body language which you can't see in that final vista. And I can see the tap（轻叩）.
Tap. Tap. Not in snakeskin boots to be clear. Of the left hand foot as he's there getting more and more nervous. As would anyone as that interview goes on. Now（现在） why on earth did he agree to do that interview?
I asked you that question myself even though（ 虽然） I was the one that convinced（使确信） him to do it. Why on earth did he agree? I have to be honest（诚实的） with you guys. I never thought he would say yes. It was my job as a booker at Newsnight to convince people to come on the program. Now you might think there is a queue（行列）.
I can tell you there was never a queue. And if it was, it was the world's smallest queue and somebody was lost on the way to the toilets. No one wants to come on. The reason is obvious（明显的）, right? You're going to be mauled by Jeremy Paxman, Emily Matless, and that mauling is going to be on live（活的） television. And not only that, it's going to be watched by all the most important people in the country.
And they're going to be feeding back your disastrous（灾难性的） appearance. So why would you come on? It was my job to try and convince you to do stuff（材料） against your interests. And effectively（有效地） that's what I did day in, day out. Now most of my job was really like（喜欢） going on 99 first dates and not getting a second one. The 100th is the one that it's all about.
And I never, for a moment, imagined that this particular 100th date, so to speak, would be a yes. Usually what happened with my job is they'd kind（种类） of like（喜欢） say no quite early or they might take a couple of years. I have to be very thick-skinned, very good with rejection（拒绝）, and very resilient（弹回的）. On this particular time, it was really a quite unusual situation. I wish I could tell you it had some dramatic（戏剧的）, amazing start where I was on like a private（私人的） jet（喷气式飞机） or something. How it began, as it often does in modern life, it began with an email.
And in that email I had an offer from a PR I'd worked（使工作） with before, who I'd been very nice to. I always tried to be very nice to everyone, not in a fake（伪造的） way. Jess, as my mum always taught me, no one's better than me, I'm better than no one. In fact what she factually said was, I want to teach you, because we were working class, market people, they left school at 14. She said, I want to teach you to mix（使混合） with princes（王子） and paupers. Don't think she meant it literally（照字面地）. And so here I am trying to convince people to come on.
And this email lands into my inbox. And the email says, interview with Prince Andrew. Now guys, remember this is before anything really went down for him. This is the year prior（在前）, whole year before that interview happened. And in that email we have an offer for something really rubbish called a puff（喷出） piece. Now in TV industry speak, that means I get to say, hey, I'm Prince Andrew, I'm amazing.
Let me tell you more about how I'm amazing. And lastly（最后）, I won't take any questions. And by the way, I'm amazing. We don't do those at the BBC. Sometimes we do, but not on my watch. And that particular thing was the first interaction（相互作用） I had with them.
Now I turned it down of course, because you know, to be a little pretentious（自命不凡的） for a moment, we owe（欠） you a duty（职责） as licensed fee（费） payers if you are, we owe you a duty to make（使） sure that we ask the questions that matter, because that is what we do. We're truth（真理） seekers（搜索者）. We're trying to find（找到） accountability（ 有责任）. We're trying to find answers to important questions. And so I turned it down. I did not even tell my boss.
And then I signed off. And my sign off was, if in the future Prince Andrew would like to talk about more wide ranging（（在内）变动） matters, then please get back in touch（触）. Guys, they never get back in touch.