Claudia Winkleman has a chat show on the BBC. I’m struggling to understand why this is a story but I listened to an entertainment-industry podcast recently which tried to explain. Apparently, chat shows are ratings death; hardly anyone watches them, so TV execs are very reluctant to launch new ones. But because of Traitors, Winkleman is now huge, bigger even than Ant and Dec, so against their better judgment they decided to give her a shot.
They’re probably regretting it, though. Everyone wants Claudia to do well because she seems nice. But goodwill and niceness aren’t enough to carry a new chat show, as we could have gleaned right from the beginning of her second show, when Claudia engaged in some completely unarranged-in-advance, ad-libbed audience bonhomie with a gay couple near the front who were there on their first date.
If Winkleman’s chat show flops and doesn’t get recommissioned she shouldn’t blame herself, just the genre
Imagine! An actual gay couple on their first date! Was there EVER a rarer and more wonderful thing in the world? Well, the audience couldn’t immediately think of one and whooped and clapped for all they were worth, as Claudia teased out the gorgeous details. It had started on a run for gay men and despite the one chap being all red-faced and sweaty, the other one still found him attractive enough to ask out, and well, here they both were. Amazing!
But even greater excitement was to come. Not only was there a gay couple on a first date in their midst but on stage, in front of them, sitting on the curved sofa right next to kohl-eyed Claudia and her allegedly-not-a-wig Cleopatra haircut, was an actual member of the pop band One Direction. No, not Harry Styles – then everyone’s heads really would literally have exploded and that would have been the end of the show. But still, a bona fide 1D member: Niall Horan, no less.
Boringly – though not for the audience, nor for the fellow guests who all feigned enthusiasm – nice Niall had an incredibly dull song to promote about meeting his girlfriend at a dinner party. Once everyone had enthused dutifully about the song, nice Claudia followed up with some tough questions about how her guests felt about dinner parties. Some of them quite enjoyed them; some of them didn’t.
It’s probably a sign of my age but I didn’t know who any of these people were. Joanne McNally? Guz Khan? Rachel Zegler? Somebody must know who Rachel Zegler is because when she was in Evita in London recently she got the longest standing ovation there has ever been in England (though not in Russia, I’m guessing), a whopping 12 minutes, most of which she spent mouthing at her co-stars ‘Help! What am I supposed to do?’ and bursting for a pee. Anyway, she seemed nice. They all did. But isn’t that the point when you’re in showbiz and on a chat show: you reveal to the pond life on whose worship your income depends what a lovely, modest but deserving person you are?
To remind myself how it should be done I checked out a recent-ish episode of The Jonathan Ross Show, which I’d recorded at the time of his stupid handcuff series. The guest list was marginally starrier (a bona fide Hollywood star, Neve Campbell, from the Scream franchise), but what really gives Wossy his enduring edge is his nearly 40 years’ worth of honed impishness.
Ross isn’t so grand or as naive as to imagine that chat shows are anything other than product promo for mostly shallow, soulless system creatures. But he doesn’t fawn, as poor Claudia feels she has to fawn because she’s new to the game and doesn’t want to ruffle feathers.
So, for example, when his guest Alan Carr announces that he wants to introduce wolves to this Scottish estate he’s buying for his next TV series, Ross doesn’t applaud him for rewilding as all the chattering classes have been trained to do because that is the wearisome on dit. No. He tells Carr it is a silly idea, and how would the locals feel about having their livestock eaten? And Carr swiftly retreats. Ross makes it look easy. But it’s really not. If Winkleman’s chat show flops and doesn’t get recommissioned she shouldn’t blame herself, just the genre.
The Madison is the latest spin-off from Taylor Sheridan’s ever-expanding Yellowstone franchise. This one is about a recently widowed, rich New York socialite Stacy Clyburn (Michelle Pfeiffer) who only discovers just how magnificent the great outdoors of southwest Montana are when her husband Preston (Kurt Russell) is no longer there to enjoy them with her.
Critics have panned it for being slow and schematic, which it is rather. But I think there’s also an element, here, of Caliban’s rage on seeing himself reflected in the glass. Sheridan loves to wind up metropolitan liberal types by contrasting their meretricious, impeccably woke, iPhone-addicted urban existence with the rugged honesty of plain-talking country folk. I love the scene when a friendly cowboy local spies the grieving Clyburns struggling somewhat at the late Preston’s remote fishing lodge – and trucks over a hamper of food prepared by his wife. The snooty Clyburns recoil at the cowboy’s overfamiliarity, sneer at the unhealthy ingredients and pick him up on his outmoded and offensive use of the term ‘Indian’ to describe Native Americans. Outrageous caricature, the critics are complaining. Rings true to me, though.
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