Watch George Squirm on TV

April 7th, 2015

I was zipping along fairly well talking about Pennsylvania plants and my new book for the April 12 edition of the hour-long “PA Books” program on the PCN cable network.

PCN’s “Pa. Books” program airs every Sunday evening. I’m on the hot seat April 12, 2015.

Then host Brian Lockman hit a question that blanked me.

What do you do in that situation?

Say, “I have no clue,” and look stupid?

Or make something up, figuring most people aren’t going to know anyway?

Or take the politician route and try to dance around the whole thing?

I went with Door No. 3 – kind of.

If you’d like to see what baffled me and how I fumbled around this stump-the-chump moment, tune in to the videotaped version that PCN posts on its website for about a month after the airing.  You can also download an audio podcast of the show for free through the Itunes store.

I’m not on TV all that much and never have been interviewed for that long. I’m usually on the other end of the questions.

PCN’s Director of Programming Francine Schertzer invited me to be on the show, which involves in-depth interviews each Sunday evening with authors of Pennsylvania-related books.

The cover of my first gardening book, the “Pennsylvania Getting Started Garden Guide” on the 170 best plants for Pennsylvania yards.

My new “Pennsylvania Getting Started Garden Guide,” which is primarily a best-plants-for-Pennsylvania book, qualified.

Although the show is taped ahead of time in PCN’s Trindle Road studio near the Camp Hill/Hampden Twp. line, it’s a live format. When the camera comes on, you go an hour straight with no breaks, no cuts, and no re-do’s.

You go into this studio with a stage and two chairs and a remote-control camera pointing at you with a bookcase in the background behind.

Brian didn’t give me any clue ahead of time what he was going to ask, although I did see a rather lengthy note sheet on the table beside him.

After a couple of minutes of getting acquainted, the camera turned on and we were rolling.

I fielded some easy questions about how I got started in gardening and a few of the peculiar “challenges” we Pennsylvania gardeners face.

Brian kept peppering away about invasives and favorite plants and such, and I even did pretty well when he said, “So I could just pick a random plant out of your book and you could tell me all about it?” (I passed the test three different times.)

But after I happened to mention that overly aggressive and commonly used non-native plants can elbow some of our natives out the way, Brian asked for a few examples of natives that are endangered.

That’s when my eyes pointed upward, as if I was hoping the answer would somehow be written on the PCN ceiling.

I think I tried to wriggle out of the blankness by saying they were mostly “woodland shade plants” and that the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources had an online list of them.

This is also the point where I can be seen squirming around in my seat.

Squirming is actually a good thing when it comes to interviewing. It’s a sign that authentic journalism is taking place.

Viewers get more honest, realistic information and insights than when shows are rehearsed.

When you don’t even know what questions are coming, there’s no opportunity to come up with polished, PR-approved, politically correct answers.

I should add that I don’t believe Brian even referred to his list of questions. That’s an impressive interviewer when you can keep firing away on-target questions for an hour straight.

When you can do that, you get a more natural, flowing interview than one where you’re just reading down through a pre-determined set of questions.

I’ve seen lots of interviewers do that, and they often miss out on logical follow-up questions and the flexibility to go down a different road based on the answers they’re getting.

Francine tells me they usually do little, if any, editing, so what you’ll see on April 12 will likely be the raw session as it happened.

I haven’t seen it, which is another hallmark of journalistic integrity.

The show also will be available for viewing online for about a month afterward on PCN’s “PA Books” page, Francine tells me.

If you’re not familiar with PCN, it’s kind of Pennsylvania’s 37-year-old version of C-SPAN, airing 24-hour programming on statewide public affairs, live government proceedings, news conferences and even some sports.

The programming is mostly unedited, often live, and unbiased. What you see is what you get. There’s no slanted analysis, no political name-calling and no egging on guests to bad-mouth the other side.

Frankly, that’s very refreshing to me as a rapidly aging, old-fashioned news man saddened by the loud polarizing that so much of our radio and cable-TV programming has degenerated into.

PCN is carried on 145 cable systems statewide and reaches 3.2 million homes.

That’s a lot of people who might see George squirm…