Late Night Chat Shows

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One thing I've noticed that seems to be pretty big over there are late night chatshows in the David Letterman style, hosted by a comedian (or in some cases James Corden) with a band and fairly important guests, at times politicians as well as other A list celebrities.

Sometimes what a guest on one of these shows says or does makes headlines the next day. From where I'm standing they appear to be a significant part of the American zeitgeist. (I may well be wrong, I'm no expert after all.)

The thing is we don't have anything like that at all. Danny Baker had a go by stealing the David Letterman format wholesale, and I mean completely. He was criticised straight away for lack of originality although the argued that the script was original even though the format was stolen.

It didn't do him any good the show lasted for one season and that was it.

Back in the 70s, 80s and 90s we had Parkinson he interviewed a lot of people, as did Russell Harty, but they were interviewers, not comedians, and it tended to be on a Saturday night and that was it.

There are chat shows but nothing like Letterman, the closest is The One Show but it's early evening, 7pm, family friendly and not hosted by comics.

There's The Last Leg which is hosted by comedians and does have celebrities shown late Friday Night, but it's not every Friday Night, and its focus is on disability issues, two of the comics are disabled.

There's also Frankie Boyle, but he's about ten weeks a year if that, and he tends to have the same people on.

It's strange that a format that is so popular over there has nothing comparable over here.

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@izzythepush,

I could never stand watching Letterman, Jay Leno, and their spiritual replacements - Cordon, Conan Obrien, Seth Myers, and Jimmy Fallon.

But I love a lot about the more news centric Stephen Colbert as well as all of the Daily Show editions. Then again, when it comes to even their celebrity interviews? I usually skip that dreck.

You may not have a wild bloom of these style late night shows (though I might be misremembering this) but when Peter Sagal was interviewing Stephen Fry for Wait Wait Don't Tell Me (NPR's weekly comedy/news quiz), Peter was quasilamenting on how popular trivia shows are in the UK and not so much here in the US. So, you have that over us. Then again, I probably wouldn't consume a weekly trivia show either. So? #shrugs

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@izzythepush,

You have Graham Norton.

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@Mame,

That's right, I'd forgoten about him, but he's not on every night either.

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@izzythepush,

1. Over here, Late Night talk shows have been around for a very long time. Over here, I think the first
late night talk shows started airing on television in the 1950s. My first exposure to late night talk shows
was somewhere around 1978 or 1979.

2. The first late night talk show I saw was Johnny Carson. I vaguely remember (first) started watching
Johnny Carson around 1978 or 1979 all the way to his last episode in 1992.

3. The second late night talk show I saw was David Letterman. I remember watching David Letterman
from 1982 all the way to his last episode in 2015.

4. The third late night talk show I saw was Arsenio Hall. I remember watching Arsenio Hall from 1989
all the way to his last episode in 1994.

5. Later on through the years, I've (occasionally) watched Jay Leno, Craig Ferguson, Conan O'Brien,
Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and James Corden.

6. Although I really wasn't much of a fan of Jimmy Fallon, I generally enjoyed all of the ones I've listed.

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@Real Music,

When my eldest was a teenager most of the girls fancied Jared Leto.

He thought they'd said Jay Leno and couldn't see the attraction.

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@tsarstepan,

I've taken a while to respond because I wanted to give a more considered response.

At first thought that it was just QI which is a panel show he used to host, now hosted by Sandi Toksvig that does look at obscure stuff nobody is aware of.

Then, on reflection, I noticed that a lot of our quiz shows could be considered such.

The most popular one is Pointless which is the polar opposite of Family Fortunes, which I believe is called Family Feud over there.

The premis is the same, 100 people are asked the same questions or asked to list as many things as possible in a category.

It's not the most popular answers that they have to go for, but the most obscure, and the aim is to get a pointless answer that nobody had said.

The other day one category was capital cities ending in a vowel, so the best answers were African capitals like Ouagadougou while Europpean capitals like Riga scored points.

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@izzythepush,

I remember watching Pointless when I was in Britain - thanks for the reminder. It took us a while to figure out the point, but we finally got it.

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@Mame,

It took over from the Weakest Link. Alexander Armstrong is very nice to people, it's a deliberate contrast to what came before.

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