The face on my entryphone screen belongs to Germaine Greer. I buzz her in and 20 minutes later I'm talking to her on camera in my living room. She talks brilliantly. If we had been in a TV studio, she would have already been on the premises for two hours and be mightily impatient. This DIY approach is the way to do it.

Two thirds of the way through taping the latest batch of face-to-face interviews for the Talking in the Library feature on my website, clivejames.com, I find that the differences between webcasting and ordinary television become ever more clear. The main one is that there is a lot less hoo-ha.

Done in collaboration with Times Online, which is putting out the results in podcast form, this new series leads off with Tom Stoppard, Germaine Greer, Salman Rushdie and Will Self. There are a couple more to come, but I have to keep their names under wraps until the shows are done. I didn't take the job lightly and neither did my guests, but I think they would agree that it was a lot more like a real conversation than anything that happens on ordinary television. The absence of hoo-ha translates directly into natural ease. No demoralising facial rebuild in the make-up department, no alienating hour's wait in the dressing-room. Bright people get cheesed off by all that fuss. Catch them on the wing, and you see how smart they really are.

Tom Stoppard is the ideal case in point. At the moment he is much in the cultural news because the production of his translation of Ivanov, starring Kenneth Branagh, is the hottest ticket in the theatrical world. But Stoppard has always been in the cultural news. That's just what makes him wary, and therefore very hard to interview on ordinary television. I tried it once, and felt afterwards that I'd sold him short. Our conversation was fine, but unfortunately, a researcher had been at him the previous day. Television producers call this preliminary grilling the “pre-interview” and there are usually excellent reasons for doing it, because on a mainstream channel you want mainly anecdotes, and to get those on screen the interviewer has to know what they are in advance, or he won't know how to light the fuse.

But for someone such as Stoppard a pre-interview is a downer: he is so fastidious about language that he won't say the same thing twice in the same way. Thus it was that he gave me, on ordinary television, the responses of an ordinary, if unusually bright, human being. But at my place, with just a couple of webcams and their teenage operators around us, he revealed himself in his full glory as the ambassador plenipotentiary from beyond the galaxy. Everyone who knows him is well aware that Stoppard's powers of expression and reasoning are interstellar. The trick is to catch him in action, when really he would rather not be pinned down at all. Times Online is running a full hour of what he sounds like with the brakes off.

The same was true for Germaine Greer. She was already flying when she walked in the door. Germaine will give the full blast of her opinions to anyone at all: waiters, cab drivers, the man delivering the Fedex parcel. All you have to do is not interrupt her - but that's exactly what ordinary television does. We websters had only to attach a microphone to her frock and we were in business. I have always thought that one of Germaine's deep secrets is that she falls in love via time travel with dangerously poetic noblemen such as Lord Rochester and Lord Byron, so I steered the conversation into that area.

Glad to be talking about high art instead of feminism, she threw in a lot about feminism, too, thereby helping me to prove that indirection works better than direct interrogation. As to her thesis that the whole of Australian society needs to copy the Aborigines, I heard enough to take it seriously, and I hope that we talk again. I will have to persuade my collaborators to let me take a second crack at some of the guests. I have a business lunch scheduled with the Times Online executives where we will nut out what happens next. So far it's the perfect joint venture: they think I'm working for them and I think they're working for me.

Only the results matter. Salman Rushdie was on top form, glad to be asked more about his work than about his prospects of being murdered by madmen. If I hadn't brushed up on Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses, he might have been less forthcoming, but preparation is still part of the job, even on the web. Especially on the web - where content matters more than gloss, you have to be up to speed with the info.

Will Self hasn't been around for long, but he's written a lot, and you need to be acquainted with his volumes of collected journalism before you realise that his creativity isn't confined to his novels. Pleased to be able to talk about anything that came into his head or mine, the gangling Self revelled in the informality. Having arrived early on a bicycle, he showed every sign of wanting to go home as late as possible, because the post-show takeaway feast was a hit.

Each of my guests enjoyed tucking into the cardboard boxes along with the crew, and I had invited a few of the Times Online executives to grace the table. As the conversation raged, we all had the same idea: we should be shooting this too. Webcasting is so hungry for its own future you can hear its stomach rumble.

© Clive James 2008

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