Comic Relief's Big Chat with Graham Norton

Well they needed to show something whilst they change audiences, I guess that was the most appropriate thing to show even if it dates back a few years.

I don't see why. Why couldn't the change in audience be part of the programme? I'd rather watch that than James Cordon.

Pretty stupid that they keep going on about it being 6 hours long. So what? Steve McDonald did 7 hours straight on Price Drop last week and he wasn't doing a scripted show with musical guests and long breaks either. Lisa Brash also recently did 7 hours, but hers was a split shift (2x 3.5 hours).

The point of Comic Relief is not to kill comedians. Similarly it's pointless arguing there are pre-recorded bits in it, the main point of the show is to raise money for Comic Relief. Whatever it achieves artistically comes second place to what it achieves financially. Graham said at the start that it clearly wasn't in the same league as the endurance challenges otehrs have done and it's not supposed to be.

And I am enjoying it very much. Most chat shows are not six hours long and they're not live. Twenty minutes in Graham was dicussing the concept of Tipping Point with Little Mix. You don't get that on a normal chat show. The BBC1/BBC3 simulcast was hilarious as well. Graham is one of our best presenters and this is a brilliant vehicle for him.

Presumably it gave everyone a bit of a break too. It's not exactly a smooth or television-friendly process getting one audience out and another in, I'm not really sure what you have in mind

Ant & Dec used to do quite a great job of this on SM:TV; getting a load of kids out and about a hundred teens in for CD:UK. In three minutes.

Was that the same studio and a different set of kids? I never watched it enough.

But yes, if they did do that the that's the reason they did it during an ad break.... it's not good telly!

Yep same studio and different set of kids. It was an awesome three minutes, changing lots of things into almost a different show.

For anyone wondering it was in TC3.

I agree completely. As much I was against the BBC watering him down from his days at Channel 4, he's still one of the best faces the BBC has.

A Benny Hill style chase?

Seriously, there are safety procedures that need to be adhered to when a new studio audience comes in, certain things explained etc so it really wouldn't have been viable to have made a feature of it.

I think that was mostly down to him, he supposedly wanted to move on and do more mainstream stuff including big his Saturday night shows. If he'd wanted to continue with the more like the sort of stuff he did on Channel 4 I'm sure he could have at the BBC, though of course there would have been no point in making the move

I was under the impression that the BBC wouldn't dream of letting Norton do what he did on Channel 4. Imagine the licence fee funding Betty's Tongue...