EDITOR’S NOTE: This post had been updated/corrected with new information. Due to technical difficulties at Regret, this information was added later than we would have liked. We apologize for the delay.
A UK taxi driver man at the BBC for a job interview found himself being interviewed live in a BBC TV studio recently, after an employee mistook him for Guy Kewney, editor of newswireless.net. UPDATE/CORRECTION: It was initially reported in the UK press that the man was a taxi driver, but it turns out that he was at the BBC for a job interview in the IT department. His first name is also Guy, so that makes the mistake a bit more understandable (but not less hilarious, if we do say so ourselves).
The video is online here, and it’s worth a view. The Times has a story on the mistake (though it includes the wrong information about the man who was interviewed):
IT WAS not until midway through the live television interview that the BBC interviewer started to grow suspicious. The man whom she believed to be an expert on internet music downloads seemed to know precious little about his subject.
Not only that, but the stocky black man with the strong French accent bore little resemblance to the picture on the expert’s website, which showed a slim white man with blue eyes and blond hair.
The corporation’s News 24 channel apologised to its viewers yesterday and admitted that its interviewee was not Guy Kewney, the respected editor of Newswireless.net, but a local taxi driver. The cabbie, who is better qualified to talk about traffic jams in Shepherds Bush, answered questions for several minutes on Apple Computer’s victory at the High Court against Apple Corps, the record label for the Beatles, The Times has learnt…
Guy Kewney, the real one, also wrote about the mishap here (and he corrected the man’s identity here):
…It is at this point, just about a minute before I’m due to go on, that anybody watching the channel would have been fascinated to see me introduced live on air, as the expert witness in the studio. Me? Not fascinated; astonished!
What would you feel, if while you were sitting in that rather chilly reception area, you suddenly saw yourself – not sitting in reception, but live, on TV? “A bit surprised?”
There were several surprising things about my interview. We’ll ignore the fact that I wasn’t giving it, and had not given it. We’ll even gloss over the fact that, judging by my performance, English wasn’t my first language, and that I didn’t seem to know much about
Apple Computer, online music, or the Beatles. People have accused me of all those things, at various stages of my career…
