Beguiling chatterbox

Spectator, The, Sep 9, 2006 by Hoggart, Simon

Chat shows are much harder to host than you might think, which is why people who do it well command such enormous fees. Eons ago I was one of a group of people tested by the BBC on a programme called Friday Night, Saturday Morning. In those days the nation had not yet run out of stars to shovel into the voracious chat-show maw, so we got some good people: Kenneth Williams, Malcolm Bradbury, Kiri Te Kanawa. It was still a terrifying experience. The researcher told me that Dame Kiri had a wonderful story to tell about her first performance at the Met in New York. She wouldn't tell me what it was because they wanted to catch the look of astonished delight on my face when she told the anecdote. This resulted in the following exchange:

Me: And then you appeared for the first time at the Met.

Dame Kiri: I certainly did.

Me: And something amazing happened to you there.

Dame Kiri: It certainly did.

Me: Er, um. . .

At this point the diva smiled and changed the subject. I was entirely flummoxed, which is one reason why I am not now on a £6 million contract with the Corporation. They had me on twice and I was pretty terrible both times, though not quite as bad as Harold Wilson, who may have been in the early stages of Alzheimer's, and who devoted large parts of his show to long, enigmatic silences.

This is not encouraged by producers.

No danger of that in The Charlotte Church Show (Channel 4, Fridays).

'Enigmatic' and 'silent' are not words often used to describe the 20-year-old part-time singer and full-time celebrity. She got round the problem of guests with little to say (Denise van Outen was just sad, describing sitting alone in Los Angeles) by doing nearly all the talking herself. She emerged as quite a beguiling personality in the way that many self-obsessed people do;

they want us to love them as much as they love themselves, hence her line, winsomely delivered: 'I think I'm a bit of a hottie and I have managed to bag myself a rather fit bloke!' She read the pre-scripted jokes with flair and timing.

The show's failure is its obsession with Welshness. There were Welsh flags, cheers every time someone said 'Wales', stupid, pointless sketches meant to show how funny and clever the Welsh are. They even persuaded Eric McCormack, from Will & Grace, to appear in a sketch as an unemployed gay Welsh coal miner (he was offered work as a 'fudge-packer'; that was the level of humour). It is not remotely anti-Welsh to say that we non-Welsh people are slightly less fascinated by the sheer Welshness of Wales than the Welsh are. And the dim sketch in which Charlotte went to a speeddating agency disguised as a young black male DJ (with a bewilderingly high-pitched voice) merely showed that levels of racial awareness appear to be 30 years behind the times, at least in the parts of Wales where they make television programmes.

Life Begins, returning to ITV on Mondays, and the one-off drama Aftersun (BBC 1, Friday) were both sit-traj shows (a sit-traj is a situation tragedy) about coping with middle age and with marriages that are not quite as perfect as they once seemed.

Life Begins has much in common with Cold Feet, the third series of which was written by David Nicholls, who also wrote Aftersun.

(Like chat-show hosting, television scriptwriting is a difficult business and those who do it well get plenty of work. ) Both shows dance on the defile between reality on the one hand and farce on the other, and Life Begins does it better. For one thing even the unsympathetic characters are interesting and engaging, like Caroline Quentin's dreadful boss in the travel agency, a man who makes David Brent seem sympathetic and self-aware. His catastrophic Spanish evening was one of the lowlights such shows require a lot of. The series is packed with people and events, keeping at least half-a-dozen plot strands twining and spinning around each other.

Aftersun was much simpler and as a consequence rather duller. The plot was familiar: middle-aged couple on holiday encounter young, newly engaged and sexcrazed lovers and realise what a dull, dreary ditch they are stuck in. But in the end it's the young people who fly apart and the oldies who discover the virtues of continuity, family and just rubbing along. Sarah Parish was wonderful as the married woman teetering on the edge of her reason. Anna Madeley somehow managed to play a girl who was meant to be an Oxford graduate, who read The Idiot by the pool, and yet seemed to have a head stuffed with lava bread. But too slow, and neither funny enough nor tragic enough.

Intervention: We're coming to get you (Channel 4, Thursday) fascinated me, because on holiday in the States we had met people who'd taken part in one. This is the technique by which someone in the grip of drink or drugs is ambushed and confronted by family, friends and colleagues and warned that if he or she doesn't go into rehab they will be abandoned.

Our American friends succeeded, and so did the Yorkshire folk who ripped into a young professional couple who were spending £1,000 a week on heroin and crack cocaine. The climax, at which both junkies crumpled in tears, was horribly intrusive but utterly exhilarating. There is a way out, people really can be saved.