fri 29/03/2024

The Jonathan Ross Show, ITV1 | reviews, news & interviews

The Jonathan Ross Show, ITV1

The Jonathan Ross Show, ITV1

The chat-show host still wants to know what his guests get up to in the bedroom

When Michael Parkinson voluntarily took his talk shows off-air, he stayed away for rather more than a decade. Eventually he returned from the wilderness to his natural home on Saturday night and was rightly greeted as the prodigal son of chat. Jonathan Ross has unwillingly been away for a 10th of the time, having left under a storm cloud, but from the wall of squeals which welcomed him back to his regular gig you might have mistaken him for the Second Coming. Either that or those floor managers who encourage the audience to clap like stink are on double pay.

It’s business pretty much as usual on The Jonathan Ross Show. The guests still wait out back, although the spacier green room has been cleared of hangers-on. They come out to a pointlessly large sofa while Ross awaits behind a desk. The set, unusually for ITV, looks more teaky than tacky. The Four Poufs and a Piano have been dumped to make way for the ads, which come along like London buses. A theme tune by Mark Ronson leaves no trace. What about the host? Has he matured during his time in the doghouse?

 

The runes on Radio 4’s Front Row the night before read promisingly. Ross was an engaging guest. You wish he could bring some of his ingenuous charm out before the cameras. “Behave yourselves,” he admonished as he came on at the start to those orgiastic whoops, and it briefly looked as if he was going to behave himself too as he inherited The X Factor's family audience. His opening riff was all about peace, love and looting (and Sir Alan Sugar’s scrotum), safe pre-watershed topics. By the time he brandished a mock-up of an Adele album cover advertising his advanced age all too clearly, you were wondering whether a man of 50 really should be doing a long and carefully scripted food routine with multiple props just so he could lead up to a joke about Sarah Jessica Parker and fellatio. If he’d cracked that one in the office he’d now be on a warning.

But then Ross’s shtick – when he’s not obsessing about manga or Marvel comics - has always been about twinklingly getting away with stuff. “By the way, we don’t encourage speeding,” he said as he asked Lewis Hamilton about speeding, “and we especially don't encourage getting caught.” He proceeded to down a bottle of pretend whisky. He also continues to serve up pretend questions. Would SJP much rather film in New York? Did she watch the royal wedding? Please would she make another SATC? (Please would she in fact not?) Out came the vacuum-packed answers, carefully shrink-wrapped in readiness for their journey into the Twittersphere and thence into the incontinent sleb rags. In the mean time Ross might want to hire himself a researcher. SJP’s twins were converted from girls to boys, while he put it to a baffled Lewis Hamilton that he was engaged to be married.

Maybe Ross just wasn’t interested in them. “The best is yet to come,” he advised with the first two interviews in the bag. A startled SJP didn’t know how to greet this discourtesy but, sure enough, Adele made her predecessors sound like so much processed sofa meat. If only all talk-show guests could talk with such natural flair, and cackle and keep the bleep-out technicians on their toes.

There’s a part of Ross that knows he must one day morph into an old-fashioned fromagey US chat-show host channelling Frankie Howerd, but the thinner kid inside who once presented Channel 4’s punky walk on the wild side The Last Resort is still rebelling against his manifest destiny. There will come a time when he stops asking superstars about what they get up to in the bedroom. But the Damascene conversion doesn’t seem to have happened in the brief and eventless journey to ITV1.

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