Post by Teddy Bear on Mar 21, 2014 15:15:20 GMT
With the exception of David Frost, the only chat shows I've ever enjoyed were those in America, with Jay Leno being the funniest.
Something about UK personalities that doesn't create the right chemistry. Either they are too dour, like Michael Parkinson, or else they think they are better than those they are interviewing, like Jonathan Ross.
We have too many that are like Ross, not that talented, and not that intelligent to make it interesting.
I hope the latest failure described below worries the BBC even more about what will happen if they're privatised and have to earn their crust.
Something about UK personalities that doesn't create the right chemistry. Either they are too dour, like Michael Parkinson, or else they think they are better than those they are interviewing, like Jonathan Ross.
We have too many that are like Ross, not that talented, and not that intelligent to make it interesting.
I hope the latest failure described below worries the BBC even more about what will happen if they're privatised and have to earn their crust.
Is this proof the TV chat show is dead? As Michael McIntyre's new show loses 400,000 viewers in a week, CHRISTOPHER STEVENS laments the butchering of a telly tradition
By Christopher Stevens
Trade Descriptions inspectors should be alerted. To call comedian Michael McIntyre’s new TV venture a chat show is verging on criminal.
It’s like a London estate agent describing a broom cupboard in Fulham as ‘a compact, self-contained hideaway on the Chelsea border’.
Viewers are not fools and 400,000 — about one-sixth of his debut audience — failed to tune in for the second programme of the series on Monday.
The truth is that the Michael McIntyre Chat Show on BBC1 — 45 minutes of stand-up comedy, special guests and comic monologues, punctuated by a little bit of banter and product placement — is pretty lame.
Whoever dreamed up the idea doesn’t seem sure what the audience wants — either non-stop jokes, or revealing conversation.
The result from McIntyre, who, admittedly, can be extremely funny, is that we get neither. Clearly, there are some managers at Broadcasting House who would like to see McIntyre as the British equivalent to U.S. talk show titans, such as Jay Leno or David Letterman.
But his supporters do not include the people who set the schedules. For Monday at 10.35pm is something of a graveyard slot.
The BBC, after all, already has one comedian doing star chit-chat on the sofa before a live audience: Graham Norton, whose Friday night audiences are more than double McIntyre’s.
To make it worse, his guests are hardly Hollywood calibre. For his grand opening, they included singer Lily Allen and a truculent Alan Sugar. This week, he featured Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson and footballer’s wife Abbey Clancy, best known for winning Strictly Come Dancing. All of them are rent-a-quote merchants — hardly worth staying up for on a Monday.
Not that McIntyre’s interviews involve profound questions: he simply heaps adoration on people. ‘You’re a legend,’ he told his first guest, Terry Wogan (curiously enough, the exact same phrase he used this week to introduce David Jason).
‘You’ve got this very wry, unbelievable sense of humour, you’re hilarious.’ At least Wogan had the good grace to look awkward.
Minutes later, the hyperbole geyser erupted again: ‘She is sensational, I absolutely love her, the wonderful Lily Allen is here.’ This time, the interview did contain a question — ‘Let’s talk about your new album . . . want to talk me through that one?’
Later, Alan Sugar, with all the charm and class we’ve come to expect, took the opportunity to recount a conversation he’d had with Prince Philip during a private meal, and then criticised both the Duke and the Queen.
Such traitorous tittle-tattle used to be called lese-majeste. Transgressors lost their titles and, often, much more. Heaven knows why the BBC broadcast his comments — the show was not live, after all, but had been recorded five days earlier, though the final edit was finished only hours before broadcast.
It takes experience and steel nerves to control a difficult interviewee. Even aggressive sparrers like Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys on Radio 4’s Today programme can struggle to keep bolshy bullies in line.
The problem is, McIntyre is not a journalist. He’s a family comedian, as abrasive as a butterball. Sadly, all the interviewer’s skills — a gift for listening, shrewd insight, patient probing — he lacks.
He must know it; another famously nice comedian, Rob Brydon, attempted a chat show and flopped, on BBC2 in 2012.
To remind yourself what a real chat show looks like, watch Talking Pictures, an occasional series on BBC2, presented by veteran actress Sylvia Syms. It examines Hollywood lives through vintage TV interviews.
One recent subject was actress Shirley MacLaine — articulate, intense and bouncing around like a frog on a trampoline.
Her best encounters were with chat king Michael Parkinson in the early Seventies. The pair obviously fancied each other rotten, and Parky blushed till his shirt collar smouldered, but he did compel her to answer his questions.
In one Parkinson show, Shirley (as famous for her politics and her wild living with Sinatra’s Rat Pack as her movies) delivered a masterclass in outrageous behaviour. She pulled Parky’s hair; she grabbed his hand suggestively; she slipped a finger under his shirt and into his navel — ‘Bet that’s the best poke you’ve had all year,’ she purred.
Like a businessman trying to stop his mistress from causing a scene in a restaurant, Parkinson cosseted and calmed her before sliding one of his trademark questions past her, like a compliment with a razor’s edge.
Stung just enough, Miss MacLaine started talking, and revealed more in three minutes than other journalists could have coaxed from her in an hour.
Parkinson perfected those techniques, but he didn’t invent them. David Frost showed that chat didn’t have to be serious-minded, with his self-titled show in the mid-Sixties: in fact, a relaxed style was more effective than the upright, inquisitorial method that had gone before.
Frost put people at ease. He got them talking and joking and, sometimes, he would let it go at that.
But if he wanted to uncover something deeper, he could plunge in a question like a knife and transfix his victim.
The first time he did it on live TV, fraudster Emil Savundra, who had swindled hundreds of people in an insurance scam, was not so much exposed as skinned alive.
Savundra thought Frost could be cowed with threats and bluster; he was wrong. The headlines the next day called it ‘trial by television’. A real trial followed, and Savundra was jailed for eight years.
The British suddenly could not get enough of chat shows.
The cachet of being star guest on shows hosted by Eamonn Andrews or Simon Dee drew the biggest names in Hollywood — Orson Welles, Richard Burton, Katharine Hepburn and more queued up to be interviewed.
It was what TV was invented for: close-up conversation that brought wit and glamour into living rooms.
The golden era lasted throughout the Seventies: Parkinson arrived in 1971, and was followed by Russell Harty, so camp and matronly, he could make the cruellest question seem like a bit of gossip.
Today, the best of a poor bunch is Graham Norton, hosting chat since his first Channel 4 shows in the late-Nineties. He isn’t content to let guests advertise their film or CD without a little humiliation in return: there is banter, but no scrutiny, just party games and teasing.
Norton’s ITV rival, Jonathan Ross, has been in the interviewer’s chair since his debut, also on Channel 4, in 1987 — and has long seemed fed up with the set-up. Everything he does looks cynical, everything he says sounds jaded. His guests are encouraged to treat it like free advertising: he couldn’t care how dull they are, so long as he can say they were on his show.
The first episode of his latest series opened with Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, promoting two of last year’s biggest movies — Captain Phillips and Gravity.
The result was some of the most anodyne TV ever broadcast: nothing was asked, nothing was said. It was as formal and empty as a meeting of diplomats at an ambassador’s ball.
Both BBC and ITV executives are aware they have no real chat formats; they just don’t know what to do about it. Their best solutions seem to be dressing up chat as panel shows and parlour games, in shows like Room 101, where guests tell ready-made anecdotes and reveal pre-packed foibles.
Attempts to revive the traditional format with ‘edgy’ presenters have failed: in 2008, for instance, Lily Allen And Friends ran for just eight shows on BBC3. It was so cringingly bad that studio audiences walked out.
Michael McIntyre was far too nice to ask her about that on his show, of course. But then, he didn’t ask anyone about anything.
It used to be said that television was killing the art of conversation. Now, it seems that art is stone dead on TV itself.
By Christopher Stevens
Trade Descriptions inspectors should be alerted. To call comedian Michael McIntyre’s new TV venture a chat show is verging on criminal.
It’s like a London estate agent describing a broom cupboard in Fulham as ‘a compact, self-contained hideaway on the Chelsea border’.
Viewers are not fools and 400,000 — about one-sixth of his debut audience — failed to tune in for the second programme of the series on Monday.
The truth is that the Michael McIntyre Chat Show on BBC1 — 45 minutes of stand-up comedy, special guests and comic monologues, punctuated by a little bit of banter and product placement — is pretty lame.
Whoever dreamed up the idea doesn’t seem sure what the audience wants — either non-stop jokes, or revealing conversation.
The result from McIntyre, who, admittedly, can be extremely funny, is that we get neither. Clearly, there are some managers at Broadcasting House who would like to see McIntyre as the British equivalent to U.S. talk show titans, such as Jay Leno or David Letterman.
But his supporters do not include the people who set the schedules. For Monday at 10.35pm is something of a graveyard slot.
The BBC, after all, already has one comedian doing star chit-chat on the sofa before a live audience: Graham Norton, whose Friday night audiences are more than double McIntyre’s.
To make it worse, his guests are hardly Hollywood calibre. For his grand opening, they included singer Lily Allen and a truculent Alan Sugar. This week, he featured Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson and footballer’s wife Abbey Clancy, best known for winning Strictly Come Dancing. All of them are rent-a-quote merchants — hardly worth staying up for on a Monday.
Not that McIntyre’s interviews involve profound questions: he simply heaps adoration on people. ‘You’re a legend,’ he told his first guest, Terry Wogan (curiously enough, the exact same phrase he used this week to introduce David Jason).
‘You’ve got this very wry, unbelievable sense of humour, you’re hilarious.’ At least Wogan had the good grace to look awkward.
Minutes later, the hyperbole geyser erupted again: ‘She is sensational, I absolutely love her, the wonderful Lily Allen is here.’ This time, the interview did contain a question — ‘Let’s talk about your new album . . . want to talk me through that one?’
Later, Alan Sugar, with all the charm and class we’ve come to expect, took the opportunity to recount a conversation he’d had with Prince Philip during a private meal, and then criticised both the Duke and the Queen.
Such traitorous tittle-tattle used to be called lese-majeste. Transgressors lost their titles and, often, much more. Heaven knows why the BBC broadcast his comments — the show was not live, after all, but had been recorded five days earlier, though the final edit was finished only hours before broadcast.
It takes experience and steel nerves to control a difficult interviewee. Even aggressive sparrers like Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys on Radio 4’s Today programme can struggle to keep bolshy bullies in line.
The problem is, McIntyre is not a journalist. He’s a family comedian, as abrasive as a butterball. Sadly, all the interviewer’s skills — a gift for listening, shrewd insight, patient probing — he lacks.
He must know it; another famously nice comedian, Rob Brydon, attempted a chat show and flopped, on BBC2 in 2012.
To remind yourself what a real chat show looks like, watch Talking Pictures, an occasional series on BBC2, presented by veteran actress Sylvia Syms. It examines Hollywood lives through vintage TV interviews.
One recent subject was actress Shirley MacLaine — articulate, intense and bouncing around like a frog on a trampoline.
Her best encounters were with chat king Michael Parkinson in the early Seventies. The pair obviously fancied each other rotten, and Parky blushed till his shirt collar smouldered, but he did compel her to answer his questions.
In one Parkinson show, Shirley (as famous for her politics and her wild living with Sinatra’s Rat Pack as her movies) delivered a masterclass in outrageous behaviour. She pulled Parky’s hair; she grabbed his hand suggestively; she slipped a finger under his shirt and into his navel — ‘Bet that’s the best poke you’ve had all year,’ she purred.
Like a businessman trying to stop his mistress from causing a scene in a restaurant, Parkinson cosseted and calmed her before sliding one of his trademark questions past her, like a compliment with a razor’s edge.
Stung just enough, Miss MacLaine started talking, and revealed more in three minutes than other journalists could have coaxed from her in an hour.
Parkinson perfected those techniques, but he didn’t invent them. David Frost showed that chat didn’t have to be serious-minded, with his self-titled show in the mid-Sixties: in fact, a relaxed style was more effective than the upright, inquisitorial method that had gone before.
Frost put people at ease. He got them talking and joking and, sometimes, he would let it go at that.
But if he wanted to uncover something deeper, he could plunge in a question like a knife and transfix his victim.
The first time he did it on live TV, fraudster Emil Savundra, who had swindled hundreds of people in an insurance scam, was not so much exposed as skinned alive.
Savundra thought Frost could be cowed with threats and bluster; he was wrong. The headlines the next day called it ‘trial by television’. A real trial followed, and Savundra was jailed for eight years.
The British suddenly could not get enough of chat shows.
The cachet of being star guest on shows hosted by Eamonn Andrews or Simon Dee drew the biggest names in Hollywood — Orson Welles, Richard Burton, Katharine Hepburn and more queued up to be interviewed.
It was what TV was invented for: close-up conversation that brought wit and glamour into living rooms.
The golden era lasted throughout the Seventies: Parkinson arrived in 1971, and was followed by Russell Harty, so camp and matronly, he could make the cruellest question seem like a bit of gossip.
Today, the best of a poor bunch is Graham Norton, hosting chat since his first Channel 4 shows in the late-Nineties. He isn’t content to let guests advertise their film or CD without a little humiliation in return: there is banter, but no scrutiny, just party games and teasing.
Norton’s ITV rival, Jonathan Ross, has been in the interviewer’s chair since his debut, also on Channel 4, in 1987 — and has long seemed fed up with the set-up. Everything he does looks cynical, everything he says sounds jaded. His guests are encouraged to treat it like free advertising: he couldn’t care how dull they are, so long as he can say they were on his show.
The first episode of his latest series opened with Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, promoting two of last year’s biggest movies — Captain Phillips and Gravity.
The result was some of the most anodyne TV ever broadcast: nothing was asked, nothing was said. It was as formal and empty as a meeting of diplomats at an ambassador’s ball.
Both BBC and ITV executives are aware they have no real chat formats; they just don’t know what to do about it. Their best solutions seem to be dressing up chat as panel shows and parlour games, in shows like Room 101, where guests tell ready-made anecdotes and reveal pre-packed foibles.
Attempts to revive the traditional format with ‘edgy’ presenters have failed: in 2008, for instance, Lily Allen And Friends ran for just eight shows on BBC3. It was so cringingly bad that studio audiences walked out.
Michael McIntyre was far too nice to ask her about that on his show, of course. But then, he didn’t ask anyone about anything.
It used to be said that television was killing the art of conversation. Now, it seems that art is stone dead on TV itself.