Читать книгу Grumpy Old Men: New Year, Same Old Crap - David Quantick - Страница 55

They’re not what they were, you know. Mind you, what they were was pretty bad, so in a sense chat shows have gone from bad to still bad. What happened was that in America chat shows were evolving in the sense that they were getting smarter. Possibly fed up with the solid wall of gammy gloss and sponsorship horror, the newer chat shows were more cynical, looser and more inclined to send up their guests. This was a good thing, for a while. Unfortunately, they’re still doing it, and some of the hosts have been doing it for so long – sending up guests, mocking the format, and so forth – that the viewer just wonders why they’re still doing it if they hate it that much, and changes channels.

In Britain, as ever, the format was adapted. The new chat shows here had the same mixture of irony and mockery but, with few exceptions, what they also had was a lethal combination of rubbish hosts and worse guests. So instead of the biggest stars in Hollywood being ribbed by the best stand-ups in the world, here you had a ‘star’ you’d never heard of – being mildly insulted by the bloke who’d come fourth in the Perrier Awards three years ago. It wasn’t the same.

And yet, instead of shooting the format and hurriedly kicking it under the carpet, TV bosses stuck with it, believing (wrongly) that they could put any old TV presenter (see TV PRESENTERS) or useless comic or radio DJ into the host’s chair and it would be fine. It’s not fine. It’s never fine.