I don’t expect stone-cold truths from a chatshow, but Saoirse Ronan delivered one

The men on Graham Norton’s sofa found self-defence a hoot. I’m sure most women have found ourselves in that conversation

Saoirse Ronan's gender inequality comment leaves male panel speechless. Picture: Matt Crossick/PA Media Assignments

In a development that absolutely must not catch on, something interesting has happened on a TV chatshow. What a precedent: I’m desperately hoping the entertainment industry rallies around to prevent it ever happening again. We can probably count on it. The dance of all chatshows these days is almost entirely mechanised. You go on. You do your rehearsed anecdotes. The news that the late Michael Parkinson is being relaunched as an AI barely raises an eyebrow because it’s all so synthetic anyway.

Therefore the moments when it isn’t take on outsize significance. As you may have guessed, we are talking about last Friday’s episode of The Graham Norton Show, on which the Blitz star Saoirse Ronan appeared as a guest alongside Gladiator II actors Denzel Washington and Paul Mescal and Day of the Jackal leading man Eddie Redmayne. We join the sofa as Redmayne is doing an anecdote about how his Jackal preparation involved being trained in self-defence, in order to do what Team America would call “his acting”. (Not how Eddie put it, obviously. And yet, the reality.)