Sarah Ferguson was interviewed by Usher on 60 Minutes in 2011. Photo / 60 Minutes
Sarah Ferguson was interviewed by Usher on 60 Minutes in 2011. Photo / 60 Minutes
The broadcaster has spoken about his infamous TV interview with the Duchess of York, which abruptly ended when the royal stormed out.
Seasoned Australian reporter Michael Usher has appeared on radio to reflect upon arguably his most-talked about interview to date.
The Channel 7 journalist stopped by Nova 96.9’s Fitzy& Wippa with Kate Ritchie on Thursday morning to chat about this year’s biggest news stories, when the topic of conversation steered towards his controversial interview with Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, back in 2011.
Usher was working on Nine’s investigative programme 60 Minutes at the time when he was tasked at interviewing the former royal about her memoir released that same year titled Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Journey to Find Herself.
This was the first time Usher has publicly spoken out about the interview, which abruptly ended when the duchess stormed off-set.
“At the end of the whole interview – and I’ve never spoken about this before – she eventually walked out. My producer came over to me and we just stared at each other,” he recalled on-air to hosts Michael “Wippa” Wipfli and Kate Ritchie.
“The cameraman, from behind the camera, looked out and said, ‘What was that?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what happened there.’”
But Usher was left even more perplexed after he found Ferguson outside the interview room, seemingly in better spirits.
“We walked outside, and the duchess came running up behind me. She chucked her heels off and she’s in her stockings on the lawn, going, ‘Michael, how was that?’ and by that stage, I just said, ‘Sarah, if I were you, I’d be asking to go back into the room and do that interview all over again, because I don’t know what happened.’
“Then she goes ‘Oh, well, anyway, who wants to sign some books? I’ll sign your book for you. What are your kids' names?’ And off she went from there. Perhaps she is just a hot mess, I don’t know.”
The interview came to an abrupt end when the Duchess stormed off-set. Photo / 60 Minutes
Although Usher said Ferguson had agreed no subject was off-limits during the chat, he recalled the royal-turned-author making some diva demands before the interview.
“I had nothing up my sleeve. I had no extra things other than what she had written about in her book, and she was trying to make a lot of money off the book, right? So she’s agreed there were no conditions on that interview at all and we’d flown all the way to London to do the interview,” he shared.
“[But] I had to call her ‘duchess’. She wouldn’t let me call her Sarah, lots and lots of airs and graces, but she was fine, and she was relatively sweet. But then there was just this moment … she turned and getting her back into the chair, was crazy. She came back and she continued the interview, and then it was like a different personality again.”
Usher argued that he was “asking very fair questions” given it was all in her memoir, but the duchess remained unresponsive. When Usher pressed and asked if the scandal was a “big wake-up”, his subject up and left the interview room.
“I wanted her to sit down and engage in a conversation,” he reflected on Nova. “So you’ve got to try and say, look, hang on. Come back, be calm. Let’s try it again. And it was, it was a frustrating exercise professionally.”
