Basté's predictable interview with Salvador Illa

This week Salvador Illa made a television double feature. He said he didn't want to make a spectacle of his illness, but he made sure his return was well-publicized. On Tuesday, Ariadna Oltra gave him a good institutional interview on TV3. And on Wednesday, on La 2 Cat, Jordi Basté gave him a guided tour of the Palau de la Generalitat. As the presenter himself warned, it was a more human interview. The president's recovery further justified the program's personal tone. Certainly, the time Basté spent asking him about his illness, his hospitalization, and his management of his position during his leave was interesting. But once again, in the Pla seqüència there is so much attention to technical flourish that scriptwriting is neglected. Basté, perhaps too focused on choreography, is on autopilot when asking questions. The script for President Illa's interview was documented from previous interviews. Basté asked the president questions he already knew, and only asked him to confirm the data: "You are a believer...", "We have only seen your wife once...", "You have a daughter...", "Were you born in La Roca?", "Did your family live there?", "Where do you live?", "When did you start in politics?", "Then you move to the Department of Justice, right?", "You lived in Madrid during the pandemic...", "Are you an Espanyol fan...". Even when he asked about his brothers, he asked if they fought, looking for a specific anecdote that the president had already explained publicly in the interview with Ricard Ustrell last year. "Is that about the glasses true?", he asked. Basté knew it very well because Illa himself had already explained the story: when the brothers fought, they would take a truce to take off their glasses to avoid breaking them and having their parents buy new ones.The problem with the script is that there is no question that is well-researched, designed to make the president explain something different and new. And so it is very difficult for an interview to evolve into truly new, personal, and more intimate places. No matter how much they distract you with a guided tour of the Casa dels Canonges or the assistant performs a magic trick, dialogue remains the most important thing. And in Pla seqüència, this is being forgotten. A lot of technical display but little scriptwriting. It's not enough for Basté to ask the questions. The questions cannot be beginner-level. Since the script has no personality or audacity, the answers become highly predictable. A good interview, so-called "human", must know how to lead the interviewee to unexpected places, to reflections they hadn't planned. And this is only achieved with questions that have been thought out to learn something new about the person, not what you would find on Wikipedia. It was evident that Basté knew, more or less, what Illa could answer. And if the interviewer is not surprised, neither is the viewer.