{"id":488131,"date":"2026-02-20T17:50:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T17:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/488131\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T17:50:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T17:50:07","slug":"chatshow-magic-isnt-easy-can-claudia-winkleman-conjure-a-sparkling-interview-show-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/488131\/","title":{"rendered":"Chatshow magic isn\u2019t easy. Can Claudia Winkleman conjure a sparkling interview show? | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

Claudia Winkleman\u2019s new chatshow will land next month, and its enthusiast army are already excited. Winkleman herself, who doesn\u2019t come off at all breathy, said: \u201cI can\u2019t quite believe it and I\u2019m incredibly grateful to the BBC for this amazing opportunity.\u201d Kalpna Patel-Knight, who commissioned The Claudia Winkleman<\/a> Show, observed: \u201cClaudia is a true national treasure \u2013 warm, witty and endlessly entertaining.\u201d Graham Stuart, long-term producer\/buddy of Graham Norton, who runs So Television, which produces both, said of his new venture: \u201cHow can you possibly follow [Graham Norton]? By booking a host equally as brilliant. So we have.\u201d<\/p>\n

And if anything proves how hard it is to create great chat, it\u2019s those quotes. If anyone was ever that bland and blow-hard on one of their chatshow sofas, most TV people would punch themselves in the head. No wonder so many chatshows struggle when they first come out \u2013 it\u2019s not that the expectation is too high, exactly, so much as the fanfare is too boasty. Brilliant as she is, then, the success of Claudia\u2019s new series is far from given. But how exactly do you go about creating chatshow magic?<\/p>\n

One tricky balancing act is getting the guests right. An awesome amount of energy goes into securing A-listers, but the bigger the name, the less they\u2019ll say. Some host-guest magic needs to occur to leaven the stories, which pray God are not retreads. Graham Norton\u2019s multiply populated sofa \u2013 which has its own formula, big ticket guest at the seat nearest Norton, a good mixer who is nice in the middle, and someone who is funny and can hold their own in seat three \u2013 is the show\u2019s secret weapon. That\u2019s even according to Norton, who told the Radio Times in 2010 (when his show was but three years old) that: \u201cI\u2019m really bad at actually interviewing people.\u201d In an ideal world, the guests make their own magic (go watch Lady Gaga and June Brown<\/a>, AKA Dot Cotton), creating TV that\u2019s lively and chaotic like a circus.<\/p>\n

Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Matthew McConaughey, Graham Norton, James Norton, Raye on The Graham Norton Show. Photograph: Matt Crossick\/So Television\/PA Media\/<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the interview itself. In the same issue of Radio Times, Michael Parkinson, who\u2019d hung up his mic in 2007, had a moan about chatshow formats where \u201ctelevision executives who really ought to know better \u2026 entrust the job to people who, more often than not, neither know how to ask a question nor listen to the answer.\u201d But those days are long over; nobody really wants to watch people be interviewed any more. The question-answer format belongs to a more civil century, when you\u2019d approach a celebrity the same way as a politician: searching, polite.<\/p>\n

Kirsty Wark, the Bafta-winning interviewer and ex-Newsnight host, who speaks to me over the phone while she babysits her brand new granddaughter, says that nowadays \u201centertainment interviews are a totally different kettle of fish from current affairs ones. Scratchiness is OK for political interviews, it\u2019s a bit tricky for sofa interviews.\u201d You could actually imagine Claudia Winkleman revivifying the old art of asking genuinely difficult things. She has a lot of natural authority, either caused or signified by the eyeliner, nobody knows which. But you can also imagine that going really wrong on contact with a thin-skinned Hollywood A-lister whose most significant disclosure that year was how he felt about lactose. The norms of celebrity interrupt human connection at every stage. Even the entourage a star walks in with creates some artificial power imbalance that chatshow hosts either kick against or cave into. Kirsty Wark<\/a> still remembers the time she interviewed George Clooney: \u201cHe just sauntered in on his own and it was so much nicer.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Entertainment interviews are a totally different kettle of fish\u2019, says Kirsty Wark. Photograph: Mike Marsland\/WireImage<\/p>\n

If the chatshow isn\u2019t really about interviewing, though, what the hell is it about? Jonathan Ross doesn\u2019t love talking about his work because he gets into trouble running his mouth, but told the Guardian in 2010: \u201cMy talkshow is not an interview show as such, which is why I\u2019m always bemused when critics say the interview wasn\u2019t very good. And I think, but I\u2019m not doing an interview! What I\u2019m trying to do is make a comedy show. And that, trust me, is a fuck of a lot harder.\u201d But is it? Seems like comedy, if you\u2019re funny, is not as hard as the white-knuckle ride of creating a chemical reaction between people who are each flogging something (generally speaking) and have never met. Very often, and surely in Claudia Winkleman\u2019s case, the question is: we have this gold-dust host whom everyone wants to watch \u2013 how on earth do we maximise that?<\/p>\n

In 1973, that person was Esther Rantzen. She didn\u2019t say that, by the way, she\u2019s way too modest: she tells the story of That\u2019s Life<\/a> as a magpie pilfer of the consumer show that went before it, from the Canadian actor Bernard Braden (Braden\u2019s Week). She was a researcher on that and, when he went back to Canada, turned it into something that people definitely watched for Rantzen herself, and it was massive.<\/p>\n

\u2018Mrs Thatcher and John Major watched it [That\u2019s Life], because they knew that their voters watched it\u2019, says Esther Rantzen. Photograph: David McHugh\/Brighton Pictures\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

\u201cIn those pre-fragmented days, we had audiences, regularly, of around 15 million, at its height, 22\u00a0million. Mrs Thatcher and John Major watched it, because they knew that their voters watched it,\u201d she tells me on the phone while her daughter makes her some lunch. She can\u2019t watch herself now, she says, \u201clike actors sometimes say they don\u2019t like watching themselves on film, because there\u2019s nothing you can do to improve it. I\u00a0do shudder when I watch it, and I\u2019m sure there would have been viewers that felt the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is just a fact that you can\u2019t be that person \u2013 that national treasure, that water-cooler main character \u2013 if you don\u2019t excite strong feelings in the audience, which means you have to split the crowd a bit. The Princess of Wales, for instance, could not host a chatshow. Claudia Winkleman comes off as someone who has the backbone to be 90% loved and 10% loathed, which matters, because it\u2019s not fun loathing people unless they seem as if they\u2019ll brush it off with casual self-deprecation. (Rantzen sat in for Terry Wogan once in 1986, and interviewed Anthony Perkins, who took umbrage at one of her questions: \u201cHe had a fantastic go at me, and said: \u2018All the aficionados know that that\u2019s the truth,\u2019 and I said: \u2018With my teeth, I can\u2019t even say aficionados.\u2019\u201d)<\/p>\n

Part of That\u2019s Life\u2019s success was that it was about a thing. The key to its longevity (it ran for 21 years \u2013 and led to Rantzen getting her own spin-off chatshow, Esther) was that it evolved, from low-stakes outrages (people selling fake slimming tea) or things that were funny (a dog that could say sausages) to campaigns. The first, in 1984, about Ben Hardwick, a toddler who needed a liver transplant, doubled the number of transplants in the immediate aftermath. In this more cynical age \u2013 and given how difficult it would be to keep it apolitical \u2013 pioneering social affairs content like that would be impossible to pull off.<\/p>\n

Hugh Grant during an interview on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, 1995. Photograph: Margaret Norton\/NBC\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

If sofa magic is hard to conjure, some dynamics are pretty failsafe. Norton said once (when he himself was a guest, on Late Night With Seth Meyers): \u201cI think what\u2019s good about actors is sometimes they don\u2019t care about the audience but they care about each other. So if an actor tells a funny story, you can see someone seething, like: \u2018I have a funny story! I shat myself!\u2019 So the stakes get higher and higher.\u201d Winkleman brings something extra to the baseline of competitiveness, which is that people want to show off in front of her. You can see it in The Traitors<\/a> better than on Strictly<\/a>, where everyone is showing off already \u2013 the way the Traitors, celebrity and regular, stand up straighter, mugging not for the cameras but for her twinkly approval. If you could bottle chatshow chemistry, that would be a big part of it \u2013 but sadly we\u2019ve established that you can\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the key is to make TV that\u2019s memorable. Hosts and audiences remember discord on a chatshow word for word (Michael Parkinson and Meg Ryan<\/a>; Terry Wogan and George Best) and they remember when things were funny, even if they can\u2019t recall what anyone said. Moments of spontaneous connection and openness (Freddie Flintoff on Jonathan Ross, Hugh Grant\u2019s mea culpa about that blowjob on Jay Leno \u2013 look it up, young\u2019uns) are also extremely watchable, they\u2019re just quite rare; if you could turn it on and off like a tap, it wouldn\u2019t be authentic.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve got to do your homework but, in a sense, throw it all away,\u201d Kirsty Wark says, \u201cand follow the conversation. I did the last interview with Harold Pinter before he died. I think he knew that he wasn\u2019t well. People who are less well known and perhaps less practised, that conversation sometimes flows more naturally. But I also feel that people who are comfortable in their skin give better interviews.\u201d They also make better interviewers, on which terms, Claudia Winkleman should absolutely smash this. But what do I know? I said The Celebrity Traitors was going to be rubbish.<\/p>\n

The Claudia Winkleman Show starts on BBC One in March.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Claudia Winkleman\u2019s new chatshow will land next month, and its enthusiast army are already excited. Winkleman herself, who…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":488132,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[49,48,75,348],"class_list":["post-488131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488131\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/488132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}