CBS Late Night Changes

I think at least part of the problem with airing Late Night talk shows in the UK is that the guests are mainly very U.S based. Especially in the 12:30am slot, where you get the more B-class celebs like stand up comedians and cable show stars.

Bizarrely I think of all the shows that could have possibly worked in the UK, Craig Ferguson's was probably the one, as his was very much an anti-talk show that had a very British sense of humour. Plus his guests were often very UK centric, or at the very least were actually interesting to talk to rather than the usual Hollywood dross. I get the feeling that for the first year at least, Corden is going to stick to the tried and tested format and so really won't be worth watching. But that's not an insult to him, most of these talk shows start off trying a bit too hard to be Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, and then after about a year finding what is essentially their niche. I must admit i'm surprised CBS are finally paying for a band for this new show and other late night staples, as that was one of the things that made it stand out from the others.

It's a shame because I am a big fan of late night talk shows, i particularly liked Ferguson and like Conan very much. But even i think a UK based show in the Johnny Carson style wouldn't work. We clearly don't have enough interesting celebrities for a daily show, nor the viewer base. I think a daily show could work, but it would have to be probably topical or have an extremely interesting presenter like Ferguson was that could carry a daily show just doing monologues about the days events or their lives.

The thing is, we had a daily talk show, as it were, in the form of the 5pm shows (i.e. Paul O'Grady). If there were to be a chat show in the style of the US shows, it would have to be in a competitive slot for any chance of success, surely?

I don't think there's a huge difference between the late night chat shows that the US has and the daytime chat shows we have like Paul O'Grady, Mel and Sue and (sort of) The One Show. But as Mr-Stabby indicated, would we have enough "interesting" celebrities? Maybe not for a late night time slot.

Maybe a weekly best-of of Corden's show would work over here? Should be enough guests who are known here and enough left after US-specific references are cut to put a weekly hour show together if any of the channels cared to commission it.

V Graham Norton worked very well for C4 when it aired for a couple of years - both paired with and separate from Big Brother. A few years earlier (and probably up against Doherty actually) The 11 o'clock Show IIRC didn't rate fantastically well but did give a platform to a lot of young emerging talent. And Iain Lee.

If anything that is the sort of show British TV needs again - surely a place for emerging talent to learn their craft and gain some exposure is just as important as ratings.

The way The Jack Docherty Show ended up was hilarious. It was initially scheduled at 11pm every night, but then they realised the films before it were of variable length so they'd often have to stick fillers on at about 10.45 and everyone switched off. So after a few months they decided to start it whenever the film ended, but that meant nobody knew when it was on. The Friday show was dropped in September 1997, then the Monday show in April 1998, then the Wednesday show in October 1998, then finally it went down to Wednesdays only from February 1999. By that point it was almost always on after midnight anyway.

The Wednesday show was initially replaced by Melinda's Big Night In which was exactly the same show but presented by Melinda. The bizarre thing about that was that despite being a pre-recorded weekly show, Melinda missed a load of episodes seemingly because Gail Porter was in the papers and they wanted to get her on the channel so she did it - as Not Melinda's Big Night In - for several weeks.

As mentioned, Jack Docherty really struggled with guests and inspiration soon ran dry, and just generally not enough people were interested. I used to watch it quite a bit in the early days because I liked the idea of it - and of C5 in general because we didn't have Sky so a new channel was big news and I liked how lots of it was quite cheap and homely - but stopped after a while, and I think the only time I wacthed it again was when Dave Pearce on Radio 1 pointed out he'd been watching it the night before and there was clearly nobody in the audience, and all the jokes were being met by silence.

The other thing about a late night chat show here is that in America they're all shown opposite each other, and they're all on at the same time, so people put them in their schedule because channels show the same things every night. That doesn't happen in Britain. If there was a chat show at 11pm every night on C4, for example, I might have watched it on Monday because there's nothing else on, but I wouldn't have watched it last night because I was watching Count Arthur Strong, and I wouldn't have watched it tonight because of the football highlights. And that's the same every night - it's hard to get viewer loyalty because viewers wouldn't be able to commit to it five days a week. They can do that in daytime, because it's always the same programmes every day.

And Graham Norton did alright for a bit, but Graham hated doing it, and I stopped watching it before the end because you went from one brilliant Graham Norton show a week to five pretty average ones.

That's a definite. I remember watching and thinking by about Thursday / Friday Graham looked very tired and wasn't ad libbing with jokes with his guests at all like normal. So Graham Norton was much much better than V Graham Norton just purely on a quality and content perspective.

I struggle to think that a daily live late night talk show would ever work here at all. I generally find once 10pm hits and the news has finished then that's pretty much it for the day, repeats then get shown and people have already switched off and gone to bed. I think ratings wise it would really struggle to take off and I don't think that any network would want to invest in a nightly talk show format when they have nothing to compete with and a low viewership.

Yes - it's strange thinking that in America daily talk shows go out at 11.30 and even 12.30 which over here is really the 'graveyard slot'.

Of course some of the stations give up during the 80s and just shoved out a film instead. What I think might have worked is having a 4 nights aweek show but having clips from one of the US chat shows filling in some of the time, so US plus UK guest.

It's got to have the network wanting it to succeed and the host really wanting to do it. I've said many times that I think ITV would have been better off using Jonathan Ross in the post News at Ten slot Monday to Thursday, but sadly at the moment the idea of companies investing in slots to try and get rewards seems to be a thing of the past. It's how they can fill slots without spending money rather than how they can make money out of these slots which seems to be how TV is run.

C5 is probably the best bet at the moment - Bit on the Side does rather well for them at 11pm and shows if the content is there people will watch at that hour, so I think they're foolish not to look for something to take the slot outside of Big Brother.

Post 11pm Family Guy has been performing well on BBC 3 for years too. There is an audiance out there looking for something...it doesn't specifically have be a big glossy us style chatshow. 7am was considered a graveyard slot until The Big Breakfast came along offering an alternative. So was 5pm until Richard & Judy, and then Paul O'Grady, re-invented what teatime telly could be.

Letterman's comments on Corden which have sparked a minor twitter buzz:
http://youtu.be/NrfUsBgVGnM?t=15m31s
referring to James Corden as "the chubby kid from England"

Either he was drunk or riffing or just being a douche. Can't tell.