Sally Jessy Raphael, who hosted the tabloid talk show “Sally” from 1983 to 2002, believes entertainers have no business conducting interviews. “You know, we have a thing in America. If you’ve done well at one thing, you can do well at anything,” the former host said on the “Behind the Velvet Rope” podcast (via the Daily Mail). Raphael cited Drew Barrymore and Kelly Clarkson specifically to make her case. “So the problem is you’ve got an actress and you’ve got a person who sings, and they take the people and they go,” she told host David Yontef.
In Raphael’s view, talk show hosts require skills that are developed over a lifetime of working in journalism. “Kelly Clarkson is not an interviewer … broadcasters insist on using people who haven’t come up through the ranks,” argued Raphael, who graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in broadcasting and went on to work in both radio and television, according to The New York Times.
What Raphael sees as a flaw, Barrymore sees as a strength. As a talk-show host, Barrymore is less concerned with pre-written questions than with finding genuine moments, something she learned being a guest herself. “I would love to go in the back door of conversations and talk more about your life experience or your upbringing rather than the thing you’re working on now and promoting,” she said during a press conference in 2020 (via Collider).
Nicki
