When the BBC decided to re-screen classic interviews from the Parkinson chat show two years ago, the presenter specially requested that they show his interview with Professor Jacob Bronowski, the eminent academic, famous for the TV series The Ascent Of Man. The Bronowski interview was a brilliant piece of conversational television - the professor talked eloquently and elegantly about life, love and philosophy. The producer of the re-runs told Parkinson that he wasn't planning on showing the Bronowski interview, he wanted to show the Rod Hull and Emu interview instead.
That a ventriloquist's dummy took precedence over one of the great thinkers of the latter part of this century tells you everything you need to know, and maybe some things you don't, about the chat show. Consider: Russell Harty did more chat shows than Michael Parkinson and once won an Emmy award for his documentary about Salvador Dali, but he's only remembered because one of his chat show guests, the singer Grace Jones, punched him live on air.
Similarly Terry Wogan: despite clocking up over 3,000 guests over seven years, one of the only things people remember about his chat show is the time when George Best appeared blind drunk.
While the chat show was never formatted to enable "nation to speak unto nation", it certainly never aspired to the situation where the biggest television ratings war of all time - between rival US chat show hosts Jay Leno and David Letterman - was settled when Leno convinced a mediocre English actor to come on his show and tell the viewers about how he paid a prostitute for oral sex. However, Leno's Hugh Grant interview was watched by more people than the 1969 lunar landing, which reinforced the myth that not only does the public want what the public gets, but also that it gets what it wants.
Such one-off spectaculars aside though, the chat show has now been declared dead. First it was mugged by a viewing public tired of the same old faces lamely telling the same old anecdotes as an excuse to flog their new book/ film/show. Second it was stabbed by a PR machine that only allows "celeb" guests to answer questions of their own choosing in a visual counterpart of Hello! magazine, and third, it's been buried by the advertising people who no longer see "the right revenue demographics". Late last year, arch satirist Chris Morris effectively burnt the corpse with his work on Brass Eye.
In April 1995, Channel 4 issued a press release that doubled as the chat show's obituary. After the critical mauling of the station's Gaby Roslin chat show, the channel declared the two-chairs-and-a-microphone format to be outdated, creatively redundant and out of synch with the viewing public's demands. The BBC went one better and got the chat show to kill itself off live on air - both Mrs Merton and Alan Partridge parodied the format into the grave. After all, who wants Pat Kenny when you can have Lily Savage?
Fear not though, the future of the new, improved chat show will not lie with the booze 'n' birds laddish antics of Chris Evans (despite his massive ratings, it's all been done before on American television), it will lie in the hands of four people: namely Gayle Tuesday, Lenny Beige, John Shuttleworth and Bob Downe. Never heard of them? You soon will.
These four names figure prominently in the plans of the BBC's director general, John Birt, who 10 days ago in a speech at the corporation's annual review heaped thrilling superlatives onto the likes of Mrs Merton (played by Irish-Manchester comedian Caroline Ahearne) and Alan Partridge (played by comic Steve Coogan) for "saving" the chat show.
He went on to astonish his minnows by declaring that the corporation would be diving head first into the groovy, post-modern, ironically correct spirit of the times: "Traditional entertainment genres," said Birt, "have been given a fillip with ingenious formats that breathe new life into tried and tested approaches. We now need to apply the same principle to other popular formats."
Irony, kitsch and camp are the new talismen to ward off the evil spirits of falling ratings. This may come as a shock to some middle-aged television types who think that irony is something the maid does to your trousers.
Citing the fact that Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer have brilliantly re-invented the moribund quiz show format with the hit series Shooting Stars, he's looking to his four new stars-in-waiting. Like Merton and Partridge, all four are comedians from the stand-up circuit who perform as characters. Gayle Tuesday is a self-confessed "Page 3 stunna" - a natural for the new, irony-enriched chat show - played by the comedian Brenda Gilhooly, and she's very, very funny. Lenny Beige is a Las Vegas-style crooner (but he's really from Norwich) who regards Englebert Humperdink as the peak of cultural sophistication; John Shuttleworth is a sad loser of a man who composes terrible songs on his Casio organ and wants a taste of "showbiz" life; and Bob Downe is the ultra-camp Australian who finds it hard to talk about anybody besides Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand.
Like Merton and Partridge, all four will be expected to develop a cult based around their own personalities, thereby ensuring that the chat show will never again be left to the mercy of how the celebrity guests perform on the night. If ever Gayle Tuesday found herself stranded with a guest, the way Wogan famously was with Anne Bancroft and John Malkovitz (both gave only yes and no answers), at least she'd be able to do five minutes of hilarious material straight to camera. In a sense, the medium will become the message.
If in historical terms all this seems a bit too much Dame Edna Everage and a bit too little David Frost, that is to ignore that the chat show was originally a "luvvy" invention, and now that the luvvies can take a joke and throw it back with a better punchline, there is a certain historic inevitability about the direction of the chat show.
The chat show was born on May 29th, 1950 in the US when Broadway Open House first aired on the NBC network. The concept was simple: when actors and variety stars finished their shows on Broadway, they "informally" dropped into a TV studio and dressed up their Green Room gossip as wit and wisdom for the viewing millions. The network loved the idea that such a cheap form of television could generate immense amounts of advertising money - in those days the chat show was a 90-minute show, five days a week and in those cable and satellite-free days, the audience was very much captive.
Content wise, it was no great shakes - in the words of Quentin Crisp "it didn't matter what you said, you just had to look pleased to be there".
The first real chat show star in the US was the peerless Johnny Carson, whose Tonight show ran for 30 years. Carson's cool, reserved style allowed him to remain cynically aloof from the endless plugging of product that his guests over-indulged in. His method - appear to applause, deliver stand-up monologue, move to desk and introduce guest - has remained the template for chat shows almost to this day. As some measure of Carson's brilliance, consider that he had to take over the Tonight slot from none other than Groucho Marx, and during his tenure he saw off rivals such as Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett, Gary Shandling (who went on to become Larry Sanders) and most latterly, Joan Rivers.
One of the keys to Carson's success is that he was a stand-up comic who had plenty of experience playing the clubs - adlibbing, working an audience and quipping ad infinitum were already his stock in trade. As much of an American icon as Babe Ruth - he was to the US what Gay Byrne is to Ireland - at one stage in the 1980s he was being paid $10 million a year for working three nights a week, with 15 weeks of holidays guaranteed.
Because of his charm, Carson got away with things others got sacked for: when Zsa Zsa Gabor appeared on his show with a Persian cat on her lap she asked "Johnny, would you like to pet my pussy?" Carson replied "Sure, if you move the damn cat out of the way."
In 1982 the young pretender David Letterman began his own chat show that followed directly on NBC after Carson's. In the same way that Carson's relatively orthodox approach to the format influenced the 1960s and 1970s generation of hosts, Letterman's unorthodox, anarchic approach is a blue-print for the 1990s host.
This is the man that Jonathan Ross (in The Last Resort) and Chris Evans (in TFI Friday) freely admit to ripping off. When Carson retired in 1992, Letterman should have walked into the prestigious Tonight slot (he had frequently guest hosted for Carson) but the network bosses thought he was a bit too "out there" for mainstream tastes and instead gave the job to stand-up comic Jay Leno, who effortlessly mixes hip urbanity with old-fashioned showbiz anecdotage.
In Ireland the chat show was born on July 6th 1962 when Gay Byrne first presented The Late Late Show and virtually wrote his own blue-print for the who, what, why and where of the Irish talk experience. The programme has been deconstructed almost as many times as the State itself and Byrne's iconic status says as much about the content of the show as it does of its host. His longevity (even Johnny Carson quit after 30 years of chat) is almost as impressive as his ability to switch from topics like breast cancer to a postal quiz without missing a beat.
When he retires, the format will necessarily retire with him and RTE will be left in the same position the BBC and ITV found themselves in when Michael Parkinson and David Frost moved on. Only more so. The Irish response to the chat question has traditionally been to empathise with the culture rather than to re-shape it. They've always been far more comfortable playing to their strengths - from Bibi Baskin's bi-lingual, rural friendly show to Liam O Murchu's "up for the cup" specials - than going after anything with a hip, urban appeal.
The station would undoubtedly argue that they can't compete in terms of budgets and resources with corresponding choices on Channel 4, BBC2 and the satellites, but that still doesn't answer the question why, when they do find themselves with a success on their hands - as in Nighthawks - they are prone to do a Scrap Saturday on it and abandon it. Little wonder that someone like Gerry Ryan, who works well on radio, has yet to successfully transfer his abilities to television - a flick through the file marked "Progressive Things That Worked" in the RTE library would be enough to make anyone seriously re-consider their career.
There was a lot of needless fuss made last summer when Sean Moncrieff took over the Pat Kenny Saturday night chat slot. The orthodox, professional, could-be-on-any-station Kenny Live was replaced with the quicker paced, glossy magazine, youthish Good Grief Moncrieff. From the show's opening five minutes, where a transvestite-type singer was doing strange things to his microphone stand, the RTE switchboard was lit up with "disgusted" and "outraged" types. As the series progressed, the show was yellow carded so much it just wasn't worth the effort for anybody concerned. It's very much radical vs. redundant time.
In Britain, the chat show was born in 1964 when The Eamonn Andrews Show was launched. The first night guests were Sugar Ray Robinson, William Rushton, TerryThomas, Honor Blackman, The Nocturnes and Sandie Shaw, but Andrew's presentation was derided for being too anodyne, or as the TV critic Peter Black put it in the next day's paper: "He is so immaculately low-brow that if he had Shakespeare on, he would get him talking about the time he caught Ben Jonson trying to put his left foot into his right boot, and would change the subject if William began to explain what he was getting at in his sonnets."
The higher brow David Frost followed in Andrews's wake and now warrants a chapter in the history of the chat show for pioneering the use of the studio audience in debate - a stunt that not only predominates on all daytime chat shows up to now, but also singularly influenced the US chat show host Phil Donahue, who presents his show from the audience.
Such a tactic has augured in the distressing trend of the chat show as the modern day confessional. The tabloid TV chat show, as personified in the US by Oprah Winfrey, Ricki Lake, Montel Williams and Sally Jessy Raphael, deals in tearful tales of rape, incest and murder, and latterly this trend has been taken to an even more garish, freak show level by Richard Rey and Jerry Springer.
If you want to hear about "women who married the men who raped them" (an actual show title) look no further than the newer crop of American daytime shows. Curiously enough, the freak show format never translated to Britain where daytimers like Kilroy, Esther and Vanessa stick to the comparatively safer staples of bulimia, underage sex and the dangers of E.
If you consider that the first ever guest on Phil Donahue's show in 1967 was an atheist - and this was considered enough of a talking point in itself - the difficulty for today's chat show, now that lesbian mothers and penis enlargements have been done, is where to go now?
We have tested and tasted too much - whether that be crying it all up on Oprah, exchanging limp witticisms with Clive Anderson or smiling inanely on the couch with Richard and Judy. Irony, as John Birt has just discovered, is all well and good, but isn't it ever so 1996? What to do? Dig Michael Parkinson up or let Gayle Tuesday run riot? In the words of Mrs Merton: Let's have a heated debate. Just keep Rod Hull and Emu well out of it.