CULTURE SHOCK:In their heydey, chat shows like the 'Late Late' survived on suspense. These days, audiences are too impatient to care, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
PAT KENNY may not be everyone's idea of Mr Zeitgeist, but he had his finger on the pulse when he decided the time had come to move away from The Late Late Showand back towards current affairs. It remains to be seen whether Ryan Tubridy can succeed in reinventing the Late Late, but if he does so it will be against the odds. Both in terms of content and of form, the big, national chat show is a format on the wane.
Chat shows took off initially (on American TV) because they’re relatively cheap and easy to format for ad breaks. They use one set. The guests are paid little or nothing.
In the UK and Ireland, they became even cheaper, generally dropping the skits and house bands that cost money and going for pure talk. For commercial stations, the ratio of costs to audience figures, and thus to ad revenue, was truly wonderful.
But in the media market we inhabit, the high tide of the chat show was from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. The BBC was running Woganthree times a week, 156 shows a year – at a
time slot that pitched the format alongside the most popular soaps. The Beeb also had Parkinsononce a week. At home, The Late Late Showwas in its prime and Kenny Liveshowed there was an appetite for still more chat.
Since then, the format has been on the slide. Parody gradually occupied the leading edge: Larry Sanders, Dame Edna, Mrs Merton, Alan Partridge, to some extent the original Graham Norton show on Channel 4.
By far the best US chat show now is Jon Stewart's satiric The Daily Show. What is striking is not that its biting irreverence makes it vastly more entertaining than its rivals, but that it is also one of the most serious current-affairs shows on American TV. The old Late Late Showethic of mixing the light and the serious has been taken to its logical conclusion.
But no station in Ireland or the UK could really do what Stewart is doing, leaving the whole chat show format here looking like Dixon of Dock Green after The Wire.
Is there, indeed, even such a thing as the chat show anymore? The format has splintered. There's the old Late Late Showstyle, based on the American template perfected by Johnny Carson in the 1960s. There's the melodramatic daytime genre, pioneered by Phil Donahue in the US in the late 1960s, that led to shows from Oprah Winfrey, Jerry Springer and their British imitators. There's the more newsy, reactive Larry King Live, which has no real equivalent on this side of the Atlantic. There's the mildly satiric (David Letterman, Conan O'Brien) late-night mix of gags and celebs.
In all of this, what has almost disappeared is the original focus of the chat show: the guest. There’s a certain paradox here. On the one hand, the profusion of TV stations shifted the balance of power towards celebrities. (If you don’t give me a fawning 15 minutes to promote my movie, someone else will.)
On the other, the overuse of that power (and the resulting blandness) has forced chat shows to respond by focusing ever more on the host. Increasingly, chat shows are about the host using the guest as an opportunity to display the host’s brilliance. Gay Byrne or Michael Parkinson were certainly not lacking in ego, but if you watch old interviews of theirs now, what’s striking is how modest they seem, how content they are to act as a foil for the guest. Now, it’s the other way around.
I think there's also a deeper loss. Arguably the chat show ultimately needs a theatrical culture in which to survive. It is a very theatrical form, after all, with a set, a stage and a live audience. The old Late Latedepended, to a large extent, on an audience familiar with theatre. I don't mean that it knew Shakespeare backwards or sat around discussing Brecht and Beckett. I mean simply that the underlying conditions of the show were theatrical. This was true in two crucial respects. One was that, as in the theatre, the audience was pretty much stuck. It's hard to walk out of a theatre and it was hard, for much of the life of the Late Late, to switch over: for the majority in single-channel land, there was nothing to switch to.
This helped to create the second condition: the audience is in the dark.
The classic Late Lateformat completely reversed what now seems essential to keep people watching. In Jonathan Ross's BBC show, for example, the menu of guests is presented to the audience at the start, as we see them waiting in the green room. The audience has to be continually reminded what's coming next, lest its collective trigger-finger gets itchy. Next week's star guests are heavily promoted.
On the Late Latein its heyday, it was a rule never to tell the audience what was coming, not just before the show, but usually during it as well. The simple question that has kept audiences engaged since the first story was told around a fire – what happens next? – was always on our lips. Now, we have no patience with such teasing. If we don't know what's coming, we'll flick the channel and maybe (or maybe not) check in later.
Chat shows can't do suspense any more. They can't afford not to keep telling us what's coming up next and they can't pretend guests are likely to reveal anything we don't already know. If you want TV that has you on the edge of your seat wondering what they hell is about to happen, you're better off these days with the news and Prime Time.