Jake Chapman: a Hell of a BBC interview with Mishal Husain

Radio 4 Today programme’s Mishal Husain appeared to be channelling Emily Maitlis’s painful Newsnight encounter with Spike Jonze on Friday morning as she quizzed the artist Jake Chapman, known for causing scandals but here reluctant to be cast as a shock merchant (you can listen on BBC iPlayer Radio, the car crash begins to unfold at about 2 hours 45). The interview began uncomfortably with Husain stumbling over introducing the artists as the “brothers Dake and ... Jake and Dinos Chapman”, before her “good morning” to Jake was initially followed only by a munching sound: Chapman revealed that she had interrupted him eating cornflakes. Things then went downhill as Husain – after he refused to agree that the Chapman brothers set out to shock (“I don’t find it shocking”) – cited their images of “children joined together with penises instead of noses”. “I was explicitly told I couldn’t use the word ‘penis’ this early,” said Chapman. “I’m shocked you used it.” “On my head be it then,” Husain replied. The car crash then continued as (sounding like a mum talking to a stroppy teenager) she insisted he had to “describe!” his new show because “not all of us are going to make it to Hastings”; which led Chapman to mockingly point out that she could make it via trains, the A21 and “all kinds of public transport”, before saying the new art was impossible to explain because it was “too complicated and too early [in the morning]”. Nor was this clash her only Friday misery: Husain’s earlier questioning of new BBC Trust chair Rona Fairhead was ridiculed on Twitter by Channel 4 News editor Ben de Pear (“Big scoop for the BBC … Whoop!”) after it was trailed as being Fairhead’s “first broadcast interview”. Geoffrey Boycott would have been proud of Rona’s straight bat approach.