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This contribution deals with the effects of the increasing use of video clips on television interviews with politicians, in particular concerning the realisation of question-answer sequences after the screening of a video clip. It investigates how these clips support interviewers to achieve their main goal: to solicit newsworthy information in a manner that is comprehensible and attractive to TV viewers. A corpus of interview excerpts with video clips in a Dutch daily late-night talk show demonstrates that video clips can be an addition to or even a substitution of verbal options to fulfil five functions of political interviewer talk. It is shown how video clips are able to establish and disclose shared knowledge (common ground), secure topical focus, help maintain interviewer-neutralism, amplify the ‘liveliness' of the interview and prevent politicians from being evasive in adversarial cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]