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Six weeks ago, before Claudia Winkleman launched her BBC One Friday night chatshow, media profiles regularly referenced her “Midas touch” with TV formats. She had left one golden programme, sashaying away from Strictly Come Dancing, but her portfolio still included three other winners: the mega hit The Traitors, its celebrity spin-off for the BBC, and Channel 4’s The Piano.
Half a dozen sofa chats later, Winkleman hasn’t exactly suffered the fate of the mythic King Midas, but The Claudia Winkleman Show can fairly be seen as her least glittering work for several years.
Ratings are reasonable. Her debut edition on 13 March drew slightly more viewers (1.5 million) than the last show of the 33rd series of The Graham Norton Show, the granddaddy of the genre. Catch-up viewing – generally considered at least as important as “overnights” in the industry – added another 700,000.
Even so – and although Winkleman has visibly relaxed into a format where she understandably seemed nervous at first – there remains a sense that this series is a slightly dubious career move. Her problems are, in various ways, Graham Norton and Timothée Chalamet.
Norton poses a problem because starting a Friday night celebrity chatshow at this stage is rather like a young Northern Irish golfer setting out on the circuit in 2026. However successful, they will be compared at every turn with Rory McIlroy.
Following Norton on to his champion course, Winkleman’s difficulties were perhaps increased by the BBC’s decision to make Norton’s So Television a co-producer. It felt as if Winkleman was always trying to evade Norton’s massive shadow, despite her sofa being a different colour and starting each show with a pre-credits “cold open” out in the studio – a habit Norton has largely abandoned.
Winkleman’s main innovation has been audience participation. Starting with her ambushing a man who talks to birds on social media, these encounters with the public have also included identical twin opera singers and two men on their first date. When Winkleman went back to that couple at the end of the show, she asked what they planned for a second night out. One of the daters said they may try a Graham Norton recording. The elephant was in the room again.
As for Chalamet, he had been a guest on a December edition of Norton’s show, one of a blizzard of A-listers in that series that also included Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Ben Stiller and Kate Hudson. They were promoting their latest films, Norton’s annual run deliberately scheduled to coincide with Hollywood’s red carpet season.
As a result, standing in while Norton was taking a break, Winkleman found that most of the movie world’s heavy hitters were away as well. Her show’s website promises guests from the “world of film, TV and beyond”, but they have generally come from the second and third categories, especially theatre and standup comedy.
Perhaps suggesting frantic late wrangling to secure the biggest names, Winkleman, closing last week’s show, didn’t tease any celebrities for Friday night’s. (They turned out to be the actors Phil Dunster, Cush Jumbo and Dan Levy, plugging TV work, and the comedian Josh Widdicombe.)
Chalamet encapsulates another problem for Winkleman as well as Norton. The actor’s disparagement of ballet and opera, which became an international news story, came not on a chatshow – in the past, the biggest supplier of celebrity comment and gossip – but during a public appearance with another actor, Matthew McConaughey, at the University of Texas. Possibly because performers are less guarded with members of their own profession, celeb-to-celeb live streams and podcasts have become the new chatshows.
The Claudia Winkleman Show will surely get a second series, thanks to its viewing figures and the damage to the broadcaster’s brand that would come from an axing. But few would bet heavily on a third.
Before the series began, I expressed fears that Winkleman, though a superb presenter, is too nice and modest for the showoff sofa – Norton has some snark beneath his twinkle. Another problem is that the talk format is declining in broadcasting importance, with Norton perhaps its last star.
These concerns seem more than justified. In another copying of the Norton format, the six studio shows will be followed next week by an end-of-series compilation of best bits. While editing that, Winkleman’s producers may be encouraged to reflect on the scale of the challenge they have given her.
