The creator of content is always looking for funding sources and since the dawn of soap operas, which were funded by soap powder manufacturers, there are increasing occurrences of content being supported by brands. Brands on the other hand are always looking to increase awareness of a product with a view to a sale somewhere further down the transaction chain, not necessarily immediately. Content can also be used well to help position or reposition a brand in its market place. A consumer’s brand sentiment can be massaged through the brands partnering with appropriate content. Think of all the brands now that need an image change and want to look greener, more philanthropic and ethical. Greenwashing can be achieved through clever content marketing.

Prepare, prepare, prepare. Know where people are going to sit, the order they come on stage, the background colour of the set, the music you will use to ‘play them on’, whether they might have trouble climbing stage steps, whether they are hard of hearing or need a lapel mic instead of a handheld mic. Those are the basics. After that, it’s all about the interview and knowing how to extemporise, and knowing the subject. Always add humour as it calms people down, always smile, rarely look at your notes and be self deprecating. Always be more interested in them than yourself. Years of writing interviews for David Frost and working with chat show host Michael Parkinson stood me in good stead for taking on Hollywood’s finest.

Crikey – it would take me a ton of time to find the best – there have been so many.

Losing Joe Cocker for three days before the Lennon concert in Liverpool, not recognising Lenny Kravitz when he walked on set, organising phone calls from the White House which ended in disaster, waiting three infuriating hours for an Oscar winner and then not even mentioning she was late, forgetting to book an audience of 300 people for a show with two hours’ notice, being hexed by a white witch we had just interviewed, seeing spoons bend in my own hands after Uri Geller handed them to me, losing all lighting live on air and completing the show on a couple of torches and one lamp. I have many more!

I will probably never go to Mexico and stand on the border at night as a refugee trying to enter the USA, but for anyone who saw the VR exhibition at LACMA by Alejandro Inarritu of the extraordinary Carne y Arena you will have been left in no doubt about the power of VR to persuade, cajole, move, mesmerise and shock. As for cause related issues, it really moves the needle.

Having no idea what to expect, I experienced Inarritu’s story of migrants on the Mexican border both clueless and shoeless; after removing my footwear and donning my headset I found myself tiptoeing across a midnight landscape of sand and rocks, while the ‘wind’ from Border Patrol helicopters tousled my hair and whipped around my ankles, accompanied by the din from the thunderous flying engines which thumped in my chest. My fellow VR travellers, parents and children alike, cowered behind boulders bringing the all-too-real awfulness of the scene up far too close and far too personal. Guns were brandished, people shouted, children cried and it all simply broke my heart; if there had been anyone at the end of the experience asking for money to support displaced and dispossessed peoples I would have emptied my purse there and then. But how wonderful to have been fully transported to another time and place; the power of VR is not to be underestimated.

Hollywood is a behemoth – it’s ‘deal town’, and finding one’s way around takes years, if only because people sit in their cars for an inordinate amount of wasted time driving from one side of the 405 to the other or from the West Side to the Valley. I managed four years with a bicycle and an Uber account and people thought I was crazy. Hollywood has changed dramatically since my arrival, with the rise of the importance of diversity to the MeToo campaign. Both needed to happen but they rocked Hollywood to its core. The changes in career opportunities and recognition for women, people of colour, the LGBTQ+, and other under-represented communities is immense.

Hollywood, which may have seemed like a concept stuck in the Golden Age of yesteryear for some decades, has evolved at an ever increasing rate in recent years. The pace of change has accelerated as technological change pushes us harder towards a place where the future is now. What we can conceive can be created seemingly which makes me worried for our ability to form new types of creative expression quickly enough. But with VR we have found a device, a concept and art form all rolled into one that is on the cutting edge of technology yet pushes emotional boundaries in vital and visceral ways.