No late-night chat please – we’re British
It’s an unfashionable stance to take, but I still believe that British television is the best in the world. Nowhere else will you find documentaries of such erudition, drama of such cultural worth or comedy that genuinely pushes boundaries. For more than a decade we have carped on about how inferior we are to the Americans, with their glossy, slickly produced shows, to the point at which it has become a cliché (albeit one with only a grain of truth).
However, there is one small corner of the schedules in which America is unrivalled, and that is late-night TV and, in particular, the late-night chat show. Think David Letterman and Johnny Carson – giants of topical chat – smart, incisive, funny and relevant.
James Corden, a Briton beloved of Americans because of his Late Late Show, has fitted into the format like a glove, his Carpool Karaoke becoming one of the most talked-about formulas of recent times. When he transported his show to Blighty last week, he brought the boldness and budget with him, and it worked reasonably well.
But he looked like a fish out of water. Such jazz-hands showmanship seems odd here – like a circus ringmaster bursting into a seminary and pushing nuns through a hoop. In Britain, we used to call late-night television the graveyard slot, a place where you would find obscure foreign films, earnest documentaries and discussion shows on Hungarian art and harmonium playing. I have an affection for these sorts of things, but I can’t help thinking that we should aim higher.
Yet when we have ramped up the razzmatazz, things go wrong. The most obvious example is The Nightly Show, ITV’s wretched attempt. The series, which aired in early 2017, had a rota of increasingly inept hosts – David Walliams, Davina McCall, Gordon Ramsay – all uncomfortable with the fast-paced, personality-driven format required, and came across as a sort of end of the pier show for mid-noughties celebs. The one honourable example is The Jack Docherty Show, which aired in the early days of Channel 5, and managed, thanks to Docherty’s fleet-footed abrasiveness, something provocative and rather smart.
Certainly we are not lacking in talented hosts. Graham Norton still reigns supreme – he’s clever, warm and ever-so-slightly subversive, and he comes from a long tradition that includes Michael Parkinson, Terry Wogan and, in his heyday, Jonathan Ross. And yet experience proves they don’t work in a nightly format. When Norton tried it in 2002, he failed to have the same edge or pulling power.
There are several reasons why we can’t replicate a Letterman or a Jay Leno (who presented NBC’s The Tonight Show from 1992 to 2009). Firstly it is cultural. Many Americans use these shows as a news source, whereas we consume our current affairs differently. But more importantly, it is financial.
These shows are a mammoth undertaking and demand a terrific amount of resources, with enormous pay cheques for hosts (Letterman was said to earn $20million a year before he retired). British broadcasters, with squeezed budgets, can only dream of such offerings.
The odd thing is that these shows, which don’t start until 11pm, have relatively small audiences. The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert together only attract about 7 million viewers, a tiny figure in a population of around 325 million, but most of them are between 18 and 49, a demographic advertisers love and for which they will pay top dollar. The shows also have a huge reach online. Corden’s Carpool Karaoke, which featured Paul McCartney on Friday night and has starred everyone from Adele to Michelle Obama in the past, regularly receives tens of millions of views on YouTube.
And, even though Corden is pretty saccharine, other hosts are not afraid to send-up their guests. By contrast, UK hosts often find themselves in hock to the PR machine. Part of the disaster of The Nightly Show was its desire to promote and not to challenge guests.
So is it even worth attempting our own late-night show? The trick, I think, is to make a star, rather than find one. Any success is likely to come from a slow burn, rather than to promote a programme with a marquee name. We can’t expect a shiny floor show, but we can aim to produce something rackety, with a chaotic charm – something that Channel 4’s The Last Leg has managed. With Newsnight in terminal decline and Question Time on the brink of change, as David Dimbleby retires after a quarter of a century, the thin end of the schedules are in need of a radical facelift. Maybe it’s time we get our own Carpool Karaoke.
‘When he transferred his show to Blighty, Corden looked like a fish out of water. Such jazz-hands showmanship seems odd here’