I enjoyed the Jack Docherty Show, sadly Jack got lazy and lazy, to the point he only did two nights a week. He also took large weeks off. Guest hosts would do it, and it allowed Graham Norton to shine, indeed he outshone Jack which led to Channel 4 poaching him for their own talk show, and look how successful that has been for Graham.
It wasn't a case of Jack being "lazy", he did everything he was contracted to do, it was quite a relentless role. It only looked like he was never there because I think he saved up all his holiday and took it in one go, so he was absent for about seven weeks in the summer of 1997, but that's also because he was making his short-lived BBC sitcom The Creatives at the time (I remember the article in the short-lived The Box magazine about it when it started mentioning that).
Of course, you could argue that it was a mistake to do that because it meant Graham Norton did loads of shows and totally overshadowed him, but it's easy to say that in hindsight. It is sometimes the case that you can get overshadowed on your own show - Rob Brydon was a guest on the second series of Would I Lie To You, when Angus was still presenting it, and was so funny and worked so well with Lee and David that clearly they decided they wanted him on all the time, and got rid of Angus. Bob Monkhouse on The Golden Shot is a famous example - under original host Jackie Rae it was dying on its arse, and then Bob appeared as a guest and went down so well they immediately kicked Rae off it and got Bob in full time.
Bless Jack, he was a BBC2 chat show host when Channel 5 needed a BBC1 one. A bit like Mark and Lard on Radio 1 breakfast.
That's one way of looking at it, certainly. Of course later on they got Melinda Messenger to stand in for him and, funnily enough, a blonde saucepot was considered more appealing than a balding middle-aged bloke, so then he lost another night of his show for Melinda's Big Night In. Actually despite that being a pre-recorded weekly show, Melinda missed several episodes of that show and Gail Porter did it for a few weeks, because she was getting in the papers and becoming quite famous. Seemingly it was just an excuse to get her on the channel.
When it began Jack seemed quite hopeful about it, he said he didn't really mind who the guests were and "if you've been in Neighbours for one episode, that's OK, there'll still be funny things to talk about", and that he liked the idea that we could have a chat show like in America with a presenter doing it for years. But he said it wouldn't be him.
The decline of The Jack Docherty Show summed up quite a lot of C5's programming in those days, in that shows would seemingly never be axed, presumably as they'd been commissioned for X length of time, so they would just get increasingly infrequent and just wither away. So Jack went from five shows a week to four to three to two to one, and Exclusive moved from a daily show to a weekly show, and Mariella Frostrup's show would keep on being rebranded and shuffled around all over the place. Presumably they had to carry on in some form for contractual reasons, but it just looked bizarre.