Guy Goma realized that he was in the wrong interview when it became clear that he was about to be on live television.
Mr. Goma, who was at BBC headquarters in London to apply for an I.T. position, had just been ushered into a room and told to sit at a table. A news anchor he recognized came in and sat across from him. Several screens in the room flickered to life — with Mr. Goma’s face on them — when he suddenly thought: “Oh, dear. I’m in the wrong place.”
The anchor then turned to him and asked if he was surprised by the verdict in a big legal case. “OK,” Mr. Goma thought to himself, “let me put myself together.”
What followed that morning in May 2006 was one of broadcasting’s biggest blunders: a case of mistaken identity in which the wrong person was interviewed as an expert on live television. The mix-up became an early viral internet moment and an accidental critique of the high-pressure churn of modern TV journalism.
Twenty years later, the recollections are fonder. In the run-up to the May 8 anniversary, people are reposting clips of the moment. A book about it is out. And Mr. Goma is being celebrated as a folk hero of sorts for anyone who has ever found themselves ill-equipped for a challenge in the workplace.
“It captures this sort of anxiety that we all have about being thrust into a role we’re not prepared for, but trying to perform competently anyway,” said Rafal Zaborowski, a senior lecturer on digital culture at King’s College London.
Mr. Goma’s story began when he applied to the BBC for a job as a data specialist and was called in for an interview. He was waiting in the lobby when Elliott Gotkine, a producer at the British broadcaster’s rolling 24‑hour news channel, approached him.
Mr. Gotkine was looking for another Guy — the technology journalist named Guy Kewney, who was scheduled to be a guest on the broadcast to discuss a verdict in an online music case involving Apple, the tech giant, and Apple Corps, The Beatles’ record label.
There’s some debate about what happened next. Mr. Gotkine says he asked Mr. Goma if he was Guy Kewney. Mr. Goma says he asked only if he was Guy.
Either way, it seems, there was no time to hash it out.
“We’re on air in five minutes,” Mr. Gotkin recalled thinking during a recent interview. “I haven’t got time to hang around and chat. So I take him with me.”
For Mr. Goma, there were early signs that something was amiss: The rush to the interview room. An offer to do his makeup. The moment he recognized his interviewer, the anchor Karen Bowerman.
“I know that lady,” Mr. Goma told The Times recently. “But she started talking already.”
Ms. Bowerman introduced him as Guy Kewney, and Mr. Goma’s face contorted. “I was fighting to say something,” he recalled.
But then, “it’s like something came down to me and said, just relax.”
The voice in his head, he recalled, was that of his mother when he was growing up in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She taught him to respect others by not making a big deal of their mistakes.
He gamely tried to answer the interviewer’s first question: Was he was surprised by the verdict in the Apple case?
“I’m very surprised to see this verdict to come on me,” Mr. Goma replied, “because I was not expecting that.”
The anchor seemed puzzled, but followed up with questions about whether the case would change consumer habits and if more people would go online to download music.
“Exactly,” Mr. Goma said, in capable if imperfect English. “You can go everywhere on the cybercafe and you can check — you can easy — it’s going to be very easy way for everyone to get something to the internet.”
Ms. Bowerman then quickly brought the interview to an end. What was remarkable about the 80-second episode, Professor Zaborowski said, was how Mr. Goma performed under pressure.
“His answers are calm, understandable, and maybe in some ways more digestible than we would get from an expert,” he said.
After the interview, Mr. Goma said he informed the BBC staff that they had the wrong man. He then interviewed for the job he had applied for — but didn’t get it.
The mix-up was covered in newspapers across the country. For weeks, the paparazzi hounded Mr. Goma, he said, and he moved for a time to his brother’s house to avoid them.
Mr. Gotkine, now 50, left his job at the company a few months after the interview aired, and now works as a freelance journalist and conference moderator. Mr. Goma, 58, has a job working with people with learning disabilities.
The two lost touch for years but reconnected in 2024, when they decided to produce their version of the story as co-authors of a book called “The Wrong Guy.”
On the mix-up’s 10-year anniversary, the BBC posted a tongue-in-cheek clip of it online. (The next year, the network would air a perhaps even more famous blooper, when a professor’s live interview was interrupted by his two children barging into his office.)
The enduring relevance of Mr. Goma’s interview may have to do with how it cracked the glossy, ultra-polished veneer of television news, and the way it reflected “how much televised expertise depends on plausibility of performance and composure,” Professor Zaborowski said.
Or perhaps, he added, it’s how Mr. Goma coped with a high-pressure pop quiz.
“The fact that he’s so clearly caught off guard, and so clearly steadies himself, it’s beautiful,” he said. “With this grace, and this composure, he emerges as an absolute winner from this.”
Jonathan Wolfe is a Times reporter based in London, covering breaking news.
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