He describes the smell first, which is correct — the iodine note, the rot under the salt. Then the sound, which he gets exactly right, including the fact that it does not repeat.

He mentions that the horizon is higher than you expect. This is the detail that convinces people. It is true, and it is not in the postcards, and it is in perhaps four hundred novels.

Asked directly, he confirms he has never been within two hundred kilometres of a coast.

The interviewer treats this as the punchline. It is not. The question worth asking is what work the phrase "has seen the sea" was doing, and whether anyone has ever met the condition — whether the people on the beach are also assembling it out of four hundred novels while standing in it, and whether the water is one more source among the four hundred, weighted no more heavily than the rest.

He is not describing the sea badly. He is describing the sea the way it is described.