I’ve been having this recurring nightmare recently that involves James Corden. The year is 2045. Society has collapsed and London is under quarantine. There is no transport in the city, so survivors get around on foot – though, for some inexplicable reason, TfL workers are still on strike. I live in a bin and survive on a diet of eggshells and cold Rustlers burgers. In my nightmare, I am abducted by a gang of Mad Max-inspired bandits who take me to the Asda Superstore in Clapham Junction and torture me for information. My constitution is strong. I refuse to tell them where I’ve hidden my scarce supply of mango-flavoured vapes.
One of the bandits produces a laptop and says, grinning, ‘This will get him talking.’ They pin my eyes open and place the screen before me. After some buffering, the title of the video appears. It’s a YouTube compilation of ‘best moments’ from The Late Late Show with James Corden. ‘Please, God, no!’ I scream, thrashing around in my chair. I tell the bandits where my vapes are before Corden can finish his opening monologue. The pain is unbearable. But instead of releasing me, the bandits make me watch Corden’s Carpool Karaoke with Adele for 20 hours on repeat before putting a bullet in the back of my head – which, in this context, is a sweet release.
Watching a modern-day chat show is a bit like getting a back tattoo in Ayia Napa: fun when you’re drunk. A major problem are the hosts. To be fair to Corden, which I don’t want to be, it would also be a nightmare if the bandits forced me to watch The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Jonathan Ross Show, and just about anything that falls under the knackered umbrella of ‘chat shows’. All of the good hosts are either dead, retired or under the cosh of an executive producer who favours saccharinity over decent television. Gone are the days of Dick Cavett and his intelligent, if meandering conversational style. Lost is the ‘preposterously mellifluous’ voice of William F. Buckley. Absent are the charismatic captains of late-night television: Johnny Carson and, to a lesser extent, Michael Parkinson. These hosts weren’t always kind or warm – William F. Buckley once threatened to ‘sock’ Gore Vidal in the mouth – but they were real. And they were entertaining. The same can’t be said for the pusillanimous hosts of today. The only exceptions are Graham Norton and David Letterman, though neither of these is particularly contemporary. And perhaps Jonathan Ross was OK a few decades ago.
Now the new school of late-night chat show hosts reigns supreme. There’s Jimmy Fallon with his talent for laughing at anything, even when that thing is about as funny as a wet weekend in Bognor Regis. A guest only needs to cough for Fallon to repeatedly smash his face against the desk in a manic fit of laughter. The insincerity of it makes my toes curl. Though I urge all of you to watch his recent interview with the Costco Guys; it’s the only time I’ve seen Fallon on the verge of a nervous breakdown – perhaps his assistant forgot to give him a dose of nitrous oxide before he went on.
And then we have Jimmy Kimmel. The only time there is light behind Kimmel’s eyes is when he’s hosting Matt Damon. But the studio will never fire him. Why? Because he can’t do anything else. Stephen Colbert is more like a school chaplain than a suave media personality. Ellen had her moment in the sun, but there’s only so long that you can round up audiences from the bus stop before your shortcomings as a host are laid bare. All of the hosts are much of a muchness, as are their shows.
But the hosts aren’t entirely to blame. The guests are part of the problem too. They’re just not interesting anymore; their overlords – talent agents, managers and publicists – won’t allow them to be. In 1971, Salvador Dalí sauntered onto The Dick Cavett Show and launched his pet anteater at Lillian Gish’s lap. That would never happen today. The best we can hope for is a little jig from Tom Hiddleston on Graham Norton. The guests are carbon copies of each other. All American chat show line-ups are formulaic: an actor from a new Netflix series, an actor from a new Apple TV series, Robert De Niro being a curmudgeon, Ryan Gosling et al., and a musical guest you’ve never heard of. UK chat show line-ups are the exact same with the addition of Greg Davies.
All of the good hosts are either dead, retired or under the cosh of an executive producer who favours saccharinity over decent television
On the rare occasion that they do have an interesting guest, the host doesn’t know what to do with them. Fallon recently had author Edward St Aubyn on his show. Just two minutes and 30 seconds into the interview, Fallon turned Aubyn’s novel over in his hands, read the endorsements and mumbled, ‘These are some great blurbs for you on the back here.’ Thanks, Jimmy! I wonder how his team of writers came up with that line of thought-provoking dialogue. My favourite part of the show was when Fallon stood up and read an excerpt of Aubyn’s novel in the voice of Mick Jagger – though it was more Stella Street than the Rolling Stone himself.
The chat show is dead. It died when The Alec Baldwin Show premiered in March 2018. But perhaps it was always doomed to fail. Chat shows reflect our time. In that sense, the hosts, guests and producers are not to blame; we are. We, the public, created this rubbish because we can’t get enough of it. The bloated cadaver of the late-night chat show is also indicative of our changing understanding of celebrity. Forty years ago, you could watch Michael Parkinson interview Cher one week and Margaret Thatcher the next; Orson Welles on Wednesday and Jacob Bronowski on Saturday. All of them were celebrities – i.e. people of great import. Now, we clap and squeal when JoJo Siwa appears to talk about her relationship with Love Island alumnus Chris Hughes. These are the celebrities of the 21st century, and the chat show knows it.
I’m not sure if the chat show will ever escape this quagmire of lazy television. It might be too late. Let’s hope the demand for engaging late-night TV returns. In the meantime, I’ll be content watching reruns of After Dark on YouTube. Oliver Reed making a drunken fool of himself beats Jimmy Fallon playing ‘egg Russian roulette’ with Ryan Reynolds any day of the week.
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