Some poor production assistant at the BBC put the wrong guy on the air. Rather than Guy Kewney, tech pundit, they grabbed an IT interviewee who was waiting at the Reception desk and put him on a live program instead.
After something of a rocky start, he apparently did quite well — which kind of underlines how low the bar is for punditry.
Kewney himself, waiting in the green room, had no idea this was going on until he looked at a monitor and saw someone who was not himself.
From the AP, via the NYTimes:
In fact the man was Guy Goma, a Congolese man applying for a technology-related job with the British Broadcasting Corp. Goma followed an employee to the studio after a mistake at a reception desk, the corporation said late Monday.
*snip*
Producers apparently realized by the end of the interview that something had gone wrong — and, after they had gone off the air, asked their ”expert” if there was a problem.
”He said: ‘Well, it was OK, but I was a bit rushed,’ Kewney wrote on his blog.
Goma told the BBC his interview was stressful, but added he was prepared to return to the airwaves. He said he was ”happy to speak about any situation,” the BBC reported. Officials at BBC declined to comment on whether he would get the job he was applying for.
