Dimbleby gave his own views on the technique of interviewing, whether on television or radio, when he was the guest of Asian Club:
You must be interested in people. You must want to get out of them the information you’re trying to get and you must be, I think, good at listening to people.
There’s one other thing I think which an interviewer needs to be able to do, and that is to control an interview without it being apparent to the other person that he’s doing so. That is to say, if you have an interview which is going to last five minutes, and you know the various things you’re thinking of asking, the person whom you’re interviewing probably doesn’t realise as well as you do, if you’re a professional broadcaster, how long five minutes is. You know, after years you get to know exactly, how long a certain time is, just in your head. If they don’t know, and they may go off into some long, long story which takes much longer than it ought to take, you have got to be able to get them off this story, bring them on to the next thing you want to ask them, get them quickly through that and stop the whole thing in the right time without anybody noticing that you’ve been pushing and pulling the person to whom you’re talking. This is a small thing but it’s quite important.