I have seen enough of ITV’s miserable Nightly Show to convince me that it is a very bad idea. I watched five minutes of David Walliams as host and Walliams did what he always does, which was to be very camp and desperately unfunny. I couldn’t think of a more appropriate host for such a terrible show.
It comes down to the desire of TV companies to produce the kind of late shows that continue to be so successful in the USA. And there are loads of them: Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, James Corden, Jimmy Fallon and the great Bill Maher to name but a few. All the ones I have seen are really, really good, but we don’t seem to get it over here.
We have had our great chat show hosts like Michael Parkinson and our dreadful ones like Davina McCall. More often than not, British shows fail. They are contrived, forced, awkward and worst of all just boring. The excellent Graham Norton is the best of our current bunch whilst Jonathan Ross continues to play the same broken record that was old fashioned when he started doing it. And now ITV has tried to ape the American style.
If you thought Walliams was bad (and I am biased: I think he is bad at everything he does), then just wait for tonight when the host is a bloke who cooks things on telly and swears a lot. Yes, the strangely now smooth-faced with extra new hair, Gordon Ramsay is the new host.
Now I am not an expert with the talk show genre, but I would have thought that Britain must be suffering from a serious lack of presenting talent of Ramsay is the best the producers can come up with. I know that a lot of people watch him losing his temper and being abusive to other people who cook things – this is what he does for a living, after all – but I struggle to see the justification in promoting him to present a chat show. Whatever next? Katie Price presenting Question Time? Wayne Rooney to present the Proms? Alan Carr to present BBC’s Six Nations coverage?
