My advice to Claudia Winkleman: it’s not you, it’s the giant sofa – try a different kind of chatshow | Fiona Sturges

You might think the TV chatshow is an easy format to get right. Hire a well-liked host with comic chops and some successful shows under their belt. Build a cheerful set with a big sofa in the middle. Book some A-list celebs plus the obligatory comedian, invite a live audience et voilà! A prime-time hit is surely born.

Except that time and time again, it has proved not to be that simple. Just ask Claudia Winkleman, who revealed last week that she won’t be returning to do a second season of The Claudia Winkleman Show on the BBC. The series, which launched in March, filling the gap while The Graham Norton Show was on hiatus, was received with lukewarm reviews and so-so ratings. The decision to call time on it is reported to be Winkleman’s – “I was just too nervous to enjoy it,” she admitted – though, given the cuts rippling through the corporation, she may have opted to jump before being pushed.

Part of the problem is that Winkleman was never going to match Norton’s impeccable hosting style, honed over nearly two decades. As well as approaching his A-list guests with warmth and cheeky irreverence, Norton is also a sharp conversational steward, adept at keeping everyone engaged and, thanks to a well-stocked bar, gently lubricated. It isn’t as easy as it looks.

By contrast, stuck on a gloomy set and with the audience positioned weirdly close to the talent, Winkleman allowed conversations to drift and indulged in silly hyperbole – “That’s the best thing anybody’s ever said,” she yelped at Tom Allen after a mildly funny gag about his fellow guests’ blathering. It may be that, following rigorous analysis of the first series, Winkleman would have found her rhythm in a second. But for a presenter still riding high on the success of The Traitors, and who has shown herself to be sparky, spontaneous and funny fronting other shows, it wasn’t worth risking another critical drubbing.

Winkleman is by no means the first presenter to come a cropper hosting a chatshow. In 2006, Davina McCall, then the boisterous host of Big Brother, was roundly panned for her self-titled chatshow which was dumped after one series. The same decade also brought the short-lived Lily Allen and Friends and Channel 4’s sub-par The Charlotte Church Show, where both hosts’ lack of experience left them looking uncomfortable and out of their depth.

The depressing common denominator in these cancelled shows is female hosts. Allen and Church were badly miscast but, like Winkleman, McCall seemed an ideal candidate. Yet, for reasons that are hard to fathom, the late-night chatshow has always been a male stronghold. Johnny Carson, Larry King, David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart and the Jimmys Fallon and Kimmel all ruled the chatshow roost in the US, while Michael Parkinson, Russell Harty, Terry Wogan, Jonathan Ross, Alan Carr and Graham Norton have done the same here. Comedians, it would appear, seem to land best with audiences. The only woman to have flourished in the format in the UK was under cover of a comic character: Mrs Merton, the creation of the late Caroline Aherne, brilliantly roasted her guests in faux-naif style, asking Bernard Manning: “Who do you vote for now that Hitler’s dead?”

But there is another more existential threat currently facing the chatshow that goes beyond a resistance to female hosts. Until recently, an A-lister with a new film/TV show/album to promote in the UK would make a beeline for either The Graham Norton Show or its ITV equivalent, The Jonathan Ross Show. But now there are scores of podcasts, most of them operating in video as well as audio, that offer not only easy exposure and a chance to plug their latest masterwork but longer and more in-depth conversations.

Not all these podcasts are made equal – many are hosted by celebrities patently ill-suited to the job of listening and asking probing questions – but the public appetite for them remains undimmed. Once again, male hosts dominate, among them Joe Rogan, Steven Bartlett, Louis Theroux and Romesh Ranganathan, though women are getting more of a look-in. Take Begin Again, the hit interview series about midlife reinvention launched in 2024 that has featured Fatboy Slim, Gisèle Pelicot, Richard E Grant and Gillian Anderson as guests. The host? That would be former chatshow kryptonite Davina McCall.

All of which would suggest a Winkleman-fronted interview series is by no means dead in the water. Should she wish to have another crack at it, her best bet would be to dispense with the live audience and the giant sofa, and bypass traditional telly altogether.