Tubridy faces tough task on tired format
The audience accepts that star guests show up to hawk their latest movie, book or record. But the conversations are engineered beforehand and this is grating.
Watch the way a Ryan Tubridy or Piers Morgan ‘dances’ with his guests — half of it is pre-ordained blather. They feed their guests, particularly comedians, with cues, so they can unfold long, boring anecdotes or material from their stage show.
These hosts don’t have conversations with guests. There’s no spark to the exchanges, not like the untethered course a normal, freewheeling chat takes. They’re like caddies at a golfing range teeing up golf balls for their master to blaze off into the horizon.
They’re not alone. During the fallout from actor Robin Williams’s sad death a few weeks ago, an interview he did in 2002 with Michael Parkinson, who is often lauded as a good interviewer, did the rounds on social media.
The interview opens with Parkinson glancing downwards at his notes for a prepared question about the problems of travelling in a world with heightened airport security. This was shortly after 9/11. Williams takes his cue and riffs with material from his stand-up show about Homeland Security, full of his trademark jumping, funny voices and crazed eyes.
Then, he moves onto his famous routine about how the Scots invented golf. Poor Parkinson laughs gamely for a while, before running out of gas at the pretence. Amid the overenthusiastic guffaws, he can’t help himself from sighing, and purses his lips to ask the next question. It’s all a charade.
PR handlers orchestrate matters before going on air. They tell TV presenters that their client can talk about this and this, but that and that are out of bounds. There’s a trade-off about what can and can’t be discussed — he can talk about his mother dying, for example, but not about his divorce, and so on.
Funnily, Williams’s 2002 appearance on Parkinson came to life once Stephen Fry, the show’s next guest, joined him. When Fry, who is a natural conversationalist and wit, wasn’t comparing bears with Englanders (“they’re both rather stout and dignified and slightly raffish, a little bit rumpled and slightly angry at things”), he provided a foil for Williams’s ridiculous flights of fancy. He even had a calming affect on Williams, rendering him more reflective.
One of the reasons The Graham Norton Show is so good is that its three/four-guests-on-a-couch set-up, with Norton giddily conducting matters, keeps things fresh and moving. It doesn’t feel choreographed. The show always seems to be on the verge of careering somewhere unexpectedly. It doesn’t suffer from being formulaic, even though it’s the most rehearsed talk show: researchers stand in for guests in dress rehearsals telling their stories; it’s heavily edited; and is filmed the night before its Friday night broadcast.
It helps that Norton is so unflappable, which is a useful skill for a presenter. He can’t be shocked, except occasionally in a feigned, over-the-top way. He can keep a lid on things, and it’s rare that a guest is more outlandish then he is himself, although he doesn’t try to hog the limelight in the way Jonathan Ross did. And Norton’s childish glee at the antics of his guests is infectious.
Obviously, Norton’s show benefits from its considerable budget, and its primetime, Friday night BBC One slot is a magnet for the kind of A-list guests that a vehicle such as the Late Late Show could only muster back in the 1970s, when, for example, it had the likes of Fred Astaire and Peter Ustinov on the same night.
Perhaps the Late Late Show is constrained by the weight of tradition, as the self-proclaimed ‘longest-running chat show in the world’. Tubridy has complained that it’s too long, at more than two hours an episode, but radically changing its format at this stage — by letting a bit of air in, so it’s not too controlled — would be like trying to get your father to alter his Sunday morning routine.
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