The death of British TV

We don’t have enough celebrities so we create them with reality shows and then complain that they have no talent.

British television has never been able to sustain for any length of time a 5-nights-a-week chat show and the reason is simple – there are not enough celebrities. The nearest we have come was the long-forgotten Jack Docherty who was on Channel 5 when it first launched. (One of his stand-in hosts was Graham Norton. Norton’s own show on Channel 4 could not really be described as a chatshow since it was more a vehicle for Norton’s own sense of humour and obsessions. The celebrity guests were mere catalysts for the fun.) Even the genial Terry Wogan, one of our brighter broadcasters, struggled after a while with a primetime show broadcast three times a week. His show is now probably best remembered for George Best’s incoherent rant about sex and drinking.

In the United States things are very different. The late Johnny Carson reigned supreme on The Tonight Show for 30 years and his replacement Jay Leno has been in the chair for the past 15 although he has announced that he will stand down in 2009. David Letterman has hosted his own show for a dozen years, as has Conan O’Brien who will take over when Leno retires. Usually in the UK chatshows are weekly affairs and a veritable who’s who of showbusiness have at one time or another tried their hands at hosting duties including Simon Dee, Michael Parkinson, Jonathan Ross, Michael Aspel, Clive Anderson, Clive James, Graham Norton, Frank Skinner, et al. Some of these suffered because the host was more interesting than many of his guests – or more egotistical.

American visitors to these televisual shores only grace the sofas when they have a new book/film/TV show to plug and are usually so tiresome and uninteresting that viewers quickly tire of these incessant plugs. We are not so deferential to celebrities in this country as America. When did you last see a sitcom star receive a round of applause for just walking onto the set?

So what do we do to combat this dearth of celebrity? We promote and publicise people with little talent and/or no brains and bestow fame and riches upon them. This is how someone like Jade Goody comes to be on the cover of showbusiness magazines and how Rebecca Loos ends up giving a pig a masturbating a pig.