"If television has produced anything worse than the talkshow in its long history of lousy formats and hateful ideas, I'd like to know what it is. As a format, the talkshow actively works to purge everything it touches of sincerity or spontaneity, life or human joy. The tone of engagement is one of mirthless bonhomie, a pantomimed five-minute friendship designed to fool neither guest, nor host, nor audience into imagining that the host has the slightest interest in what the guest is saying, or the guest the faintest interest in the questions.
It's often pointed out, with either ruefulness or weird pride, that the US talkshow doesn't work in Britain. The last attempt to do a wholesale Letterman – with house band and all – was Channel 5's The Jack Docherty Show, and it died a death. I'm not sure even Jack Docherty remembers it very well.
But it's not as if we've been short of awful chatshows of our own. Think of Terry Wogan in the 1980s, bringing his beige guests on to his beige set, twitching his trousers up over his knees as he sat down and prepared to be avuncular. Or Gloria Hunniford, her face an oasis of orange in a desert of pastels. And Parky, a man who never asked a question that ended in a question mark when he could simply cue up a tinned anecdote with a statement: "You worked with Burton in the 60s. And you drank with him, too. Heh heh. Interesting times." Or think of Jonathan Ross, the current king of the format, with his guests looking politely pained as he asks them about what they get up to in bed.
Ross is a talented broadcaster, Wogan a brilliant raconteur, and I'm sure Parky is very nice in person. (Actually, I'm not sure Parky is very nice in person but let that slide; I bet Gloria is lovely.) Chatshows still blow – and if the media landscape in which the chatshow was king is vanishing, that's to the best. If this puts paid to a world in which hardcore punks Hüsker Dü can find themselves being interviewed by Joan Rivers, we can all die that little bit happier."
--Sam Leith , guardian.co.uk
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