Jonathan Ross makes his television comeback this Friday, but is he facing a PR nightmare or a warm welcome back as the leading light of Friday night entertainment?
IN NOVEMBER, The Late Late Show’s guests included the burlesque troupe Satanic Sluts. Ordinarily, the Satanic Sluts wouldn’t have been allowed past the front gates of RTÉ, never mind within feet of Pat Kenny, but they were there only because one of them – Georgina Baillie – had recently had her dignity sullied by the prank phone calls of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross.
After telling Kenny about the puerile messages left on her grandfather Andrew Sach’s answerphone, Baillie and the other Satanic Sluts performed a routine that was racy, techno-erotic and utterly, utterly terrible. By the end of it, everyone – the other Sluts, Pat Kenny, audience, public – had a sense of just what it’s like to have one’s dignity sullied.
It was, of course, gripping, in the watch-from-behind-a-cushion way that the Late Late so often is. But it would never have happened without “Sachsgate” – and many Irish viewers wouldn’t have been watching The Late Late Show that night if Jonathan Ross hadn’t been serving a three-month suspension from his Friday night chat show as a result of the scandal.
That storm led to thousands of complaints, newspaper outrage, and the resignations of two senior BBC executives and rising star Russell Brand. Ross apologised and decided to take his medicine. Now that he’s finally returning from that enforced break, there’s been discussion in the UK over whether he’s been missed all that much. However, for some Irish viewers, his role as an alternative to the Late Late Show had made him a regular saviour of their Friday nights in.
Ross returns to his chat show on Friday night, meaning that at 10.35pm he will attract huge ratings in Britain, while in Ireland, The Late Late Show will notice a sudden and perceptible dip in its own ratings. For many viewers, Ross’s lechery can be tiresome; his showbiz mates visit too often; and his penchant for wittering on until his guests just shut up can be infuriating. Ross may have attracted average ratings of 3.7 million, but Live at the Apollo, one of the programmes that temporarily replaced his show, attracted 3.5 million viewers each week.
However, his comic arrogance and quick wit has been enough to see him through 15 series. And at least one of his guests each week will be a proper, big name, bona- fide star, in contrast with The Late Late’s reliance on self-help authors, reality-show refugees and RTÉ presenters.
While he’s been away, Ross appears to have enjoyed the chance to lounge around and do very little. He has become a prolific poster on Twitter, keeping the public updated on his current mood, whereabouts and activities. He has posted pictures of his office – lined with classic comic books – chatted about his showbiz chums and announced his intention to get Russell Brand on his show. This week, he used it to let the public know that he’d be presenting the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (Bafta) awards next month.
“Here’s a game you’ll like,” he wrote on Tuesday. “Suggest an improbable word that I have to slip into the Baftas when I host them in February.”
He clearly has a lot of time on his hands. In December, he said he was “smoking a Cohiba and watching Sex and the City. Suspension is fun” – he appears to be treating his punishment with the insolence that some commentators feel it deserves.
It means that his opening monologue next Friday will be worth watching, and if viewers want to play a drinking game based on how many times he mentions the Sachs scandal, they might be in a rum state by the time the guest band strikes up.
Whether the BBC will attempt to rein him in remains to be seen. Journalist and broadcaster Mark Lawson recently told the Radio Times that Ross could find his return to the BBC “unbearable”.
“I think he has probably the biggest PR problem any TV person has ever had,” said Lawson. “The controversy doesn’t revolve around one particular remark he made, but his whole act. I don’t see how he can win this. Anyone who’s been through even a minor scare over matters of taste at the BBC knows it’s pretty horrible.”
In response, Ross posted on Twitter: “Mark Lawson knows nothing. BBC 100 % supportive.”
The weeks ahead will tell if the whole affair did mark the moment when the public tired of his comic self-obsession (and the sales of his book Why Do I Say These Things? appear to have suffered as a result) or if it was merely another brief and irrelevant outbreak of Daily Mail-led hysteria.
His partner in the misfiring jape, Russell Brand, made his TV comeback almost immediately after the affair blew up, but it was on Channel 4 and was pre-recorded. He made sideways references to the fuss in his quirky Guardian football column and then gave an interview to the Observer in which he said that they had “cut the really bad stuff” from the recordings left on Sachs’s phone. Brand, though, is busy carving a career in the US. He didn’t need the BBC. He didn’t even need to stay around in Britain. By the time the Observer spoke to him, he was in Los Angeles.
It hasn’t been so simple for Ross. However, in booking Tom Cruise as a guest on Friday night, his show has at least ensured it will have someone whose career meltdown was even greater than Ross’s. They will, at least, have some common ground to talk about.
Since bouncing around Oprah Winfrey’s couch like a burning chimp, Cruise has been a punchline to chat-show hosts’ jokes. Friday will mark the point at which both of them will take the first steps towards having the last laugh.
