I had a rare experience for a journalist today - on the receiving end of an interview instead of asking the questions.
And as if that wasn't scary enough, it was for television, and the interviewer was that larger-than-life son of Liverpool Alexei Sayle.

I must admit I didn't know quite what to expect in advance of the interview. Alexei is in the city working on a three part documentary series for BBC 2, which will be televised in January, talking about the city and what it has been through, for the start of Capital of Culture year.
He singled us out for a visit because the Liverpool Daily Post broke the story of his criticism of Liverpool as a "philistine" city, at the Edinburgh Book Fair in August 2003. It came just a couple of months after we had won Capital of Culture, and felt like a real betrayal from such a high-profile Liverpudlian, particularly amidst all the initial euphoria over our victory.
In these circumstances, and from the man who gave us "Dr Martens Boots", it is fair to say that I was expecting our exchange this afternoon to be, shall we say, a tad confrontational.
Happily, it was nothing of the sort. Alexei turns out to be a thoroughly likeable chap, and the dry wit is never far from the surface. He devotes most of his energies to his very successful career as an author these days, and the man behind the "in your face" stage persona turns out to be much more gently humorous and thoughtful than the character we remember from shows like The Young Ones. Probably just as well!
He was genuinely hurt by the coverage we had given him in 2003, and I discussed with him the reasons why it had provoked so much outrage here, and why we felt it was legitimate to report it. While we rise above most of the ill-considered criticism that Liverpool seems to attract in disproportionate quantities from some quarters, it was the fact that he was so clearly identified in the public's minds as a Liverpool personality that made this incident stand out for us. It just seemed so pointlessly negative for a city that was by then making huge strides towards recovering from the despair that had gripped it for so long in the seventies and eighties.
There is no doubt that he genuinely regrets what the TV crew are jokingly referring to as his "transgression", and was taken aback by the vehemence of the response it generated at the time.
Alexei left Liverpool when he was 18, but still has strong familiy ties to the region and visits Liverpool every few weeks, so he still has a pretty good grasp of what is going on here. He is clearly a very perceptive man, and his research is quite thorough and diverse. Yesterday, he was interviewing Derek Hatton, and recently he did an interview with our arts editor Phil Key. Fairly disparate voices there, for a start.
He asked me some searching questions about the Liverpool psyche, and whether we as a people are uniquely defensive or self-pitying. I said that we like a good argument (just check out some of the comments on my Everton blog entries over the last few days!), but we are a lot less defensive than we were as a community 20 years ago. What he suggested might have been self pity, I think was despair, at a time when Liverpool was on its knees. Things are better here now, and the world has moved on. While we still have major deprivation problems to overcome, we have more things to be positive and optimistic about than at any time since Alexei was leaving the city at the end of the 1960s.
I hope his message to the nation in January about Liverpool is going to be significantly more positive than the one he gave to that book fair audience in Edinburgh, and I have a feeling that it will be. But whatever he comes up with, it promises to be fascinating TV. I for one will be watching with great interest.

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