Questionable career move: how Claudia Winkelmann’s show ended the presenter’s winning streak | television

SNine weeks ago, before Claudia Winkleman launched her talk show on BBC One on Friday night, media profiles regularly referred to her “Midas touch” in television formats. She has left one gold programme, moving away from Strictly Come Dancing, but her portfolio still includes three other winners: the hugely successful The Traitors, a popular BBC show, and Channel 4’s The Piano.

After six sofa conversations, Winckelmann hasn’t quite suffered the fate of the mythical King Midas, but Claudia Winckelmann’s show could be considered her least brilliant work in many years.

The ratings are reasonable. Its first edition on 13 March attracted slightly more viewers (1.5 million) than the final showing of series 33 of The Graham Norton Show, the grandfather of the genre. Catch-up viewing – generally considered as important as “tonight” in the industry – added another 700,000 views.

And yet – and although Winkleman has clearly relaxed into a format that initially seemed understandably tense – there is still a sense that this series represents a slightly questionable career move. Its problems are, in different ways, Graham Norton and Timothée Chalamet.

Norton poses a problem because starting a Friday night celebrity chat show at this stage is a bit like a young golfer from Northern Ireland taking to the track in 2026. Whatever his success, he will be compared at every turn to Rory McIlroy.

After Norton’s arrival in the hero cycle, Winkleman’s difficulties may have been increased by the BBC’s decision to make Norton’s So Television a co-producer. It was as if Winkleman was always trying to evade Norton’s enormous shadow, even though her couch was a different color and she began each show with a “cold open” of the pre-credits in the studio—a habit that Norton had largely abandoned.

Winkleman’s main innovation was audience participation. Starting with her ambushing a man talking to birds on social media, these audience encounters also included two identical opera singers and two men on their first date. When Winkleman returned to the couple at the end of the show, she asked them what they had planned for their second night out. One statement said they might try to sign Graham Norton. It was the elephant in the room again.

As for Chalamet, he was a guest on the December edition of Norton’s show, one of a large group of celebrities in that series that also included Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Ben Stiller and Kate Hudson. They were promoting their latest film, the annual Norton Show that was deliberately scheduled to coincide with Hollywood red carpet season.

As a result, standing while Norton took a break, Winkleman found that most of the film world’s bigwigs were also absent. Her show’s website counts guests from “the world of film and television and beyond,” but they generally come from the second and third categories, especially theater and stand-up comedy.

Perhaps indicative of a frenetic late scramble to secure the biggest names, as Winkleman, who closed out last week’s show, didn’t heckle any celebrities on Friday night. (They turned out to be TV actors Phil Dunster, Cush Jumbo, and Dan Levy, and comedian Josh Widdecombe.)

Chalamet sums up another problem for Winkleman as well as Norton. The actor’s disparagement of ballet and opera, which became an international news story, came not on a talk show — once the biggest purveyor of celebrity commentary and gossip — but during a public appearance with another actor, Matthew McConaughey, at the University of Texas. Perhaps because performers are less guarded with members of their profession, celebrity-to-celebrity live broadcasts and podcasts have become the new chat shows.

The Claudia Winkleman Show is certain to get a second series, thanks to viewing figures and the damage to the broadcaster’s brand that would come from being axed. But a few would bet too heavily on a third.

Before the series began, I expressed concerns that Winkleman, though a great presenter, would be too bland and down-to-earth for the show-off sofa – Norton has some sneakiness under his flash. The other problem is that the broadcast format is declining in importance in the talk format, and Norton may be its last star.

These fears seem more than justified. In another version of the Norton format, the studio’s six shows will be followed next week by a series-ending compilation of the best bits. While editing this, Winkleman’s producers might be encouraged to reflect on the scale of the challenge they presented her with.