Читать книгу Grumpy Old Men: New Year, Same Old Crap - David Quantick - Страница 54

The Americans seem to have started them. They were always the same. After some gabbling from an invisible man, a bloke in a 70s suit (well, it was the 1970s, fair enough) would come on to the set to the kind of applause that surely only the Second Coming would merit, tell some ‘jokes’ that were really just newspaper headlines rejigged, and then talk to the band leader, who was sycophantic in a way that would have worried Uriah Heep. Then he would interview three famous people, one at a time. (‘Interview’ in this context does not mean grill, debrief or even extract useful information from. It means ‘praise excessively and encourage to promote their latest project’.) Sometimes there would be a band. Always there would be a commercial break.

In Britain – and presumably other countries – this model was not taken up, because in them days all chat shows were on the BBC and the BBC was not the kind of place where you came on and told jokes (see THE BBC VERSUS ITV). The British chat show was therefore a reverential affair, with frequent apologies for being too personal and lots of pauses for the host to laugh his face off at some God-awful showbiz anecdote.

It was horrible, but what replaced it, amazingly, was worse.