Re: Gaby. I wonder if the chat show was offered after she quit or was offered in order to try and force her out and freshen up the show. She was probably far more suited to interviewing the general public than celebs and would have been better off with a show based around that.
I remember William Phillips in Broadcast saying it was baffling that it was full of celebrities when everyone said her skill was working with normal humans. I don't think they were desperate to get her off The Big Breakfast, given she'd been about the one stable element in the previous twelve months after the revolving door of other presenters, and also given what Zoe Ball has said since about how much they tried to mould her in to Gaby II.
I think C4 wanted to keep hold of her when she left The Big Breakfast, because she was also doing The Real Holiday Show which was a big series for them at the time, and I seem to recall she'd signed a two year contract with C4. After the disaster that was her chat show, she did that special with the cast of Friends which was probably more her kind of thing - although critically just as unsuccessful - but then I remember reading that C4 had "loaned" her to the Beeb to do Whatever You Want in early 1997 cos she was still under contract to them. I can't remember her doing anything else for C4 after that.
Gaby’s show reminds you of the chat wasteland of the mid-90s where Wogan and Aspel had finished and the only replacements were either parodies (Mrs Merton) or sarcastic (Clive Anderson). There only seems to be one clip of Gaby’s show on YouTube. It doesn’t even feel or look like a C4-style chat show in the way that The Last Resort did before, and So Graham Norton would after.
True enough, there were a load of articles around the time debating the future of the chat show. Of course Johnny Vaughan very briefly had a chat show on C4 in early 1997, I remember reading at the time he wanted to call it The Bog-Standard Chat Show to emphasise that, but in the end it became Here's Johnny. It was an OK show, pretty Letterman-esque and very much a trial run for Johnny's Big Breakfast bits of business, as he did investigations into things like mullets and "the pub shoe", but it didn't much ratings-wise, he has always been a bit of an acquired taste. It was OK it didn't get another series, though, as he joined The Big Breakfast six months later.
When they did the TFI Friday revival a few years ago, I was reminded of the Last Resort revival they did in 1997, which everyone's forgotten about. They did a clip show to mark its tenth anniversay - which was the first I'd ever seen of it, being too young to watch it the first time round - and then on Christmas Eve, as part of C4's fifteenth anniversary celebrations, they did a whole new episode. I enjoyed it but it got a bit ignored among the big shows on other channels, and Jonathan Ross' career was probably at its lowest ebb at the time, so seemingly hardly anyone even knew it was happening.
Did Gaby start on Children in Need whilst she was on The Big Breakfast or afterwards? She did have Whatever You Want on Saturday nights on the BBC which ran for a couple of series at least, and again was her interacting more with the public than celebrities, and I think did City Hospital live for BBC daytime too which woud have played on her strengths. IIRC she did a few things for EastEnders theme weeks too and didn't she present from Wimbledon for Breakfast one year?
As mentioned, her first Children in Need was in 1995, that year she did it with Tel and the regular co-host Sue Cook, then Cook left and Terry and Gaby did it together. As suggested, she was pretty much entirely on the Beeb after Whatever You Want, she did quite a lot of shows for them, including Television's Greatest Hits, the light-as-a-feather archive clip show.
The 'stEnders stuff was a bit interesting, as you say she did a couple of weeks of live shows on daytimes around the turn of the century. That then spun off into something called TV Revealed, which I can see from Genome had two runs in 2000 -
https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbcone/london/2000-05-30#at-10.00
This was a live show where Gaby (and Nick Knowles, who I'd forgotten was on it) would be in Elstree nosing around what was going on and introducing a few clip packages, as you can see there was a phone-in as well, it was all a bit ragged but they something found some interesting archive stuff, and you had to get your archive kicks where you could find them those days. They would usually be somewhere on the 'stEnders set but I do remember at least one show they did on the Kilroy set as that was also filmed in Elstree. It was quite a pleasingly ragged show in terms of its production.
