The first job I got on telly was a strand on a Tyne Tees show, Tonight, embarrassingly titled “Gabbing with Gabby”. The premise was that I would catch up with the great and the good of the North East over dinner. My qualifications seemed to be a penchant for nattering (all my school reports said “talks too much”) and pretty good alliteration within the title. The guest would choose their favourite restaurant and we'd chat away with a camera rolling. Try talking with your mouth full of monkfish and mangetout to experience the main problem with this type of telly.

In the beginning the editor of my strand was quite strict that the guests had to have a strong connection with the area: Billy Hardy, the boxer who was once beaten by Naseem Hamed, was our first guest, followed by the likes of Steve Cram, Tim Healy, the actor, Jack Charlton and Ant and Dec. Then we started to stretch the remit: Les Ferdinand may have been a Londoner but he was Newcastle United's top goalscorer at the time and Alan Ayckbourn had a play on in Scarborough.

It was starting to get tenuous but when Mick Hucknall was available because he had a concert at the Metro Arena in Newcastle I knew anyone was fair game. Aside from the big hair and bad clothes, the most cringe-making memory of this job was that at the end of the interview I presented the celebrity with a medal that had been engraved with “I've Gabbed with Gabby”.

Thirteen years after Hucknall, I interviewed Gordon Brown, who was a live guest this week on my Sunday morning show on BBC Radio 5 Live. I learnt that we would have the Prime Minister on the show over Christmas, although our editor has been working on “getting him” for a while. Because radio is so immediate, sealing the deal with a guest can be a quicker process, maybe because they don't feel as exposed or as easily judged on radio.

Which is ironic because in a way radio exposes you more than TV. As the guest you have no mask to hide behind, no fabulous outfit to deflect attention and it's harder to make your body language work. If somebody is thinking about their answer, there is no way to illustrate that. On TV, the camera can see them mulling it over, on radio it sounds like dead air. Judging when to jump in can be crucial.

However, just because someone has agreed to appear it doesn't mean that they'll turn up. David Ginola once left me and a camera crew waiting for four hours in a restaurant before we gave up and went home. Clearly I've never forgotten and he's never apologised.

When I interviewed Ronnie O'Sullivan before Christmas for Inside Sport, the producer said that he wouldn't relax until he saw Ronnie sitting in front of the camera. We had been trying to get an interview for more than a year, which is longer than normal, but if I told you we have been working on getting Roy Keane on Inside Sport for nearly two years, you'll understand that there are some guests who are harder to nail.

O'Sullivan, as keen as mustard, roared up in his sports car 20 minutes early, which tells you all you need to know about having preconceptions about people before you meet them. Ronnie was the model interviewee. He opened up like a beautiful flower.

In fact he was worried that the hour that we said we would need was not enough, because he had seen the show the week before. “You seemed to spend a lot more time with Nick Faldo,” he said. We always say an hour at the least and we hope for at least a day, and usually we get somewhere in the middle. If we are told we can have ten minutes, then I usually say it's not worth it.

We did agree to just “half an hour” with David Beckham and he was, of course, charm personified, telling me I looked great when he saw me. He's a lot cleverer than he is given credit for - you try being all hard-nosed and steely when Beckham has just paid you a blush-inducing compliment. Of course, it's never the subject of the interview who makes these time demands, it's their “people”.

The number and type of “people” can range from one manager in the case of Ronnie to an agent and a girlfriend in the case of Andy Murray, two security men, a personal assistant and a few others for the PM, and in the case of Dean Macey, the former decathlete and keen angler, just a fishing rod and a stool.

I don't approach TV and radio interviews any differently apart from wearing less make-up for radio. We respect if somebody doesn't want to talk about a personal tragedy or if something is legally complicated but otherwise we won't give advance notice of our questions. Steve McClaren got upset when I asked him if he regretted having a brolly at the match against Croatia at Wembley, but if I hadn't asked him, I wouldn't be doing my job.

The PM knew we'd be talking Gaza, Iraq, the economy and big stuff first and not surprisingly he was utterly brilliant at directing the chat where he wanted it to go in those areas. But after half an hour we were able to go off-piste. I teased him that, because he had written to almost the entire cast of The X Factor, he seemed to have a bias against Strictly Come Dancing.

I wondered if he'd written to Tom Chambers when he won the series and where my letter of support had been when I got booted off the show in 2007. When we were off air he said: “I am sorry, I should have written to you.”

“I was joking,” I said.

Ultimately what thrills me is finding out how the person sitting in front of me ticks, what makes them work, even if how they work is not very well, in the case of someone such as Joey Barton or Gazza. But editors want big news lines, too, so questions that may deliver them are well thought out by the team. But the best lines often come from the most innocuous questions.

The first interview on Inside Sport was with John Terry, who randomly revealed in the back of the car at the end of the interview that he was looking for a nine-year contract and guarantee of a coaching job at Chelsea at the end of his playing days. It was one of the most outrageous demands admitted to by a modern footballer in a sea of outrageously demanding players.

When Parky hung up his microphone some suggested that it was the end of the chat-show genre. I hope that it isn't dead because as entertaining as Jonathan Ross's style is, there is something now about letting people tell their tale. But if I got the chance, I promise I wouldn't put a medal around their neck at the end of it. Some things are best left in the past.