It’s been a sad double-shock to hear about the passing of both that creative Australian superstar Barry Humphries, and – along with him – his most famous character…
…the bedazzling Dame Edna Everage!

But in looking back over each of their colourful lives, we can rejoice that the universe has been left with a treasure chest of lessons in successful media interview performance.

In my time as a broadcast journalist I was blessed to be able to interact with both Dame Edna and the man behind her – as will be revealed.
But throughout the glorious experience of my own world exclusive interview with the housewife megastar, it was clear that there was never any need for Dame Edna to undergo media interview response training from anyone.
Both Barry and Dame Edna always seemed to be naturally gifted performers in the media spotlight – and any other limelight going!
And while selecting some Dame Edna highlights for you, I’ve been reminded of how she reigned as the Supreme Mistress Of The Pre-Thought-Out Sound Bite throughout her 60-plus years.
Whenever Dame Edna was interviewed, Barry Humphries had clearly done much pre-appearance thinking – a lesson for us all.
You can see plenty of evidence of Barry’s pre-interview preparation in this Dame Edna interview – a little below – with British daytime TV star Lorraine Kelly.

Barry Humphries had gone to the trouble of finding out the name of Lorraine’s mother and husband before coming on the show – as well as even researching her last holiday!
And if you look closely at the following parade of sound bites in these Dame Edna video highlights below, you can spot still more evidence of Barry’s advance preparation.
Dame Edna’s pre-prepared sound bites were often impressively clever though, admittedly, far more waspish than I would typically want those who I train in the business world to be.
Her barbs were all-the-more devastating because they were invariably dropped into the interview with such masterly comic timing.
And they were typically delivered with something that every interviewee should be aiming for: “planned spontaneity”.
THE ART OF “PLANNED SPONTANEITY”
This term relates to the fact that, ideally, you want to be delivering your carefully-crafted pre-prepared lines in a way that seems as though the words have just suddenly popped into your head.
So while many of those Dame Edna witticisms had characteristically been worked out in advance, she generally revealed them sounding as if they had been dreamt up on the spot!
As entertainers, Barry Humphries and Dame Edna were always seeking to get the biggest possible laughs.
For most of the rest of us, when delivering pre-prepared soundbites in interviews – even if they may sometimes be amusing – our main aim should typically be to deliver them naturally in a way that brings the most powerful impact.
There’s some video guidance on performing in interviews in this vodcast.
If you – or members of your team – need guidance in soundbite crafting and delivery for potential future interviews, check out the media interview response training information at:
https://www.michaeldoddcommunications.com/media-master-classes/
My initial first-hand observations of the genius of Barry Humphries were made when I worked on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Sydney mid-morning radio show, City Extra.
I used to get the chance to see Barry occasionally breeze in for a cosy on-air chat as Dame Edna with programme compere, Caroline Jones.

Because it was radio, and in the days before any of those studio web-cams, both Barry and Caroline would talk as if Dame Edna was decked out in her characteristic finery – over-the-top glasses and all.
But now that, sad to say, both Dame Edna and Caroline Jones have transcended to the great broadcast studio beyond, I can now reveal a shocking secret.
I used to be able to peer through the window that separated the studio from the programme directors controlling it, and observe that all the magnificence of Dame Edna’s clothing, make-up and hairstyles that listeners were hearing about was entirely make-believe!
So while our 2BL listeners could picture the great dame in their minds as she prattled on, there was only the dressed-down Barry Humphries magically making it all happen for them.
But Barry Humphries, when he needed to, was quite a performer when playing himself.
I witnessed this while later working in the Australian capital, Canberra, when he was given the honour of addressing the National Press Club.
Questions on these occasions were mostly provided by members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery – as we would seek to outdo each other with the most challenging blowtorch-on-the-belly shots at whoever was the guest star on display.
At the time, there was a prominent impersonator on ABC TV called Max Gillies (seen below as US President Ronald Reagan) who was exceptionally good at mimicking leading politicians – from Australia, America and beyond.

So I asked Barry Humphries why – when Max Gillies could perform as so many different characters – that Barry performed so few.
Quite rightly Barry Humphries replied – with just the slightest of patronising sneers – that what he was doing, by inventing and performing his own characters, was rather different from what Max Gillies did.
Barry 1, Michael 0.
Thank goodness Dame Edna was absent on the occasion!
If she had been at the podium, it would have been more like:
Edna 100, Michael 0.
But I did eventually get my own up-close chance to learn just how brilliant Dame Edna could be after I became an ABC London correspondent and she took part in a publicity stunt outside Buckingham Palace.
Her main aim seemed to be to go into bat for her then-sponsors – London black cab drivers – who were in a particularly fierce phase of their ongoing battle with rival mini-cab drivers.
So while the gathered media forces could ask her about any topic, Dame Edna managed to lace her answers with a variety of lines about how passengers could easily be “taken for a ride”, in the most negative sense, in those supposedly awful mini-cabs.
Of course, Dame Edna was duly chauffeured to the media interaction point just outside the palace in the most polished of black taxis, after which we peppered her with kerbside questions about the issues of the day.
What we mainly received back was barrage of highly amusing soundbites about those mini cab drivers who would allegedly take the most unnecessarily convoluted routes and end up with their passengers being lost and overcharged in the process.
At this moment I should point out that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation schooled its reporters to get, whenever possible, our own separate interview with any available star performer.
So at the end of this Dame Edna “media scrum”, I dutifully asked if I could have my own individual interview for our radio listeners back home in Australia.
The publicity-insatiable dame readily agreed – providing I did the interview en route in the taxi journey back to her London hotel.
So away we went – Dame Edna and me – creating the ABC’s world exclusive interview full of, regardless of what I asked her about, a taxi-load of soundbites about the superiority of black cabs!
Alas this was just before the arrival of the internet.
Efforts to get my glamorous assistant, Ms Google, to find this long lost interview online for you have therefore totally failed.
So in the spirit of those imaginative City Extra listeners, you’ll just have to visualise how wondrous it was to be gliding through the streets of London in the back of that black taxi with the fully dolled-up global megastar herself in unstoppable majestic flow!
Keep smiling Possums,
Michael