The magic of Chatshow isn’t easy. Can Claudia Winkelmann conjure up a sparkling interview programme? | television

Claudia Winkleman’s new chat show launches next month, and her army of enthusiasts are already excited. “I can’t quite believe it and I’m so grateful to the BBC for this amazing opportunity,” Winkleman herself said, barely catching her breath. “Claudia is a true national treasure – warm, witty and endlessly entertaining,” noted Kalbana Battle Knight, who was commissioned to showcase Claudia Winkleman. Graham Norton’s long-term friend/producer Graham Stewart, who runs So Television, which produces both, said of his new venture: “How do you follow [Graham Norton]? By booking an equally wonderful host. So we have.

And if there’s anything that proves how difficult it is to create a great chat, it’s these quotes. If anyone was being nice and cruel on one of their chat show sofas, most TV viewers would smack themselves over the head. It’s no wonder so many chatbots have a hard time when they debut – it’s not that expectations are too high, so much as the hype they generate is too ostentatious. Despite her brilliance, the success of Claudia’s new series is elusive. But how exactly do you create a magical chatbot?

One difficult balancing act is getting the guests right. An enormous amount of energy goes into securing celebrities, but the bigger the name, the less they have to say. Some magic must happen between host and guest to brew the stories, which we pray will never be retold. The densely populated Graham Norton sofa – which has its own set-up, a big-ticket guest in the seat closest to Norton, a nice good mixer in the middle, and a funny person who can sit in the third seat – is the show’s secret weapon. This is even according to Norton, who told the Radio Times in 2010 (when his show was only three years old): “I’m really bad at interviewing people.” In an ideal world, guests would create their own magic (see Lady Gaga, June Brown, AKA Dot Cotton), creating television as lively and chaotic as a circus.

Then there’s the interview itself. In the same issue of the Radio Times, Michael Parkinson, who had hung up his microphone in 2007, grumbled about formats of chat shows where “TV executives who really ought to know better… entrust the task to people who, more often than not, neither know how to ask a question nor listen to the answer.” But those days are long gone. No one really wants to watch people being interviewed anymore. The question-and-answer format belongs to a more civilized century, when you approach a celebrity the same way you would a politician: researched and polite.

“Entertainment interviews nowadays are very different from current affairs ones,” says Kirsty Wark, the Bafta-award-winning interviewer and former Newsnight presenter, who spoke to me on the phone while babysitting her new granddaughter. “Getting lost is fine in political interviews, but it’s a bit difficult for sofa interviews.” You can actually imagine Claudia Winkelmann reviving the ancient art of asking really difficult things. She has so much natural power, either because of it or because of the eyeliner, no one knows it. But you can also imagine something really going wrong when you call a thin-skinned Hollywood star whose biggest revelation that year was how he felt about lactose. Celebrity standards cut off human connection at every stage. Even the entourage the star enters with creates some artificial balance of power that the chat show hosts either attack or succumb to. Kirsty Wark still remembers the time she interviewed George Clooney: “He was hanging out by himself and it was so much nicer.”

If a chat show isn’t about interviewing, what the hell is it about? Jonathan Ross doesn’t like to talk about his work because he has trouble speaking, but he told The Guardian in 2010: “My talk show is not an interview show per se, which is why I’m always confused when critics say the interview wasn’t very good. And I think, but I don’t do an interview! What I’m trying to do is do a comedy show. And that, believe me, is much harder.” But is it so? It seems that comedy, if you’re funny, isn’t as difficult as the difficult journey of creating a chemical reaction between people who are each flogging something (generally) and have never met. Often times, certainly in the case of Claudia Winkelmann, the question is: we have a gold dust host that everyone wants to watch – how can we maximize that?

In 1973, that person was Esther Rantzen. She didn’t say that, by the way, she’s very modest: she tells the story of “That’s Life” as a rip-off of the consumer show that preceded it, from Canadian actor Bernard Braden (Braden Week). She was a researcher on it, and when he got back to Canada, she turned it into something that people had definitely seen Rantzen herself, and it was phenomenal.

“In those pre-fragmentation days, we regularly had audiences of around 15 million, and at its peak 22 million,” she told me over the phone as her daughter made her some lunch. “Mrs Thatcher and John Major watched it, because they knew their constituents watched it.”. She can’t watch herself now, she says. “As actors sometimes say they don’t like watching themselves in film, because there’s nothing you can do to make it better. I get goosebumps when I watch it, and I’m sure there were viewers who felt the same way.”

It’s just the fact that you can’t be that person – that national treasure, that main character at the water cooler – if you don’t evoke strong emotions in the audience, which means you have to segment the audience a little bit. For example, the Princess of Wales was unable to host a talk show. Claudia Winkleman comes across as someone with the ability to be 90% likable and 10% hated, and that’s important, because it’s no fun to hate people unless they seem like they’re going to get out of it with casual self-deprecation. (Rantzen sat in for Terry Wogan once in 1986, interviewing Anthony Perkins, who took umbrage at one of her questions: “He got along wonderfully with me, and said, ‘All the enthusiasts know this is the truth,’ and I said, ‘With my teeth, I can’t even say enthusiastic.’”)

Part of the success of “This Life” was that it was About something. The key to its longevity (it ran for 21 years — and led to Rantzen getting her own talk show, Esther) was that it evolved, from low-stakes assaults (people selling fake slimming tea) or funny stuff (a dog that can pronounce hot dogs) to campaigns. The first, in 1984, was about Ben Hardwick, a young boy who needed a liver transplant, which led to a doubling of the number of liver transplants in the immediate aftermath. In this more pessimistic age – and given how difficult it is to stay out of politics – such pioneering social content would be impossible to pull off.

If the magic of a couch is difficult to conjure, some dynamics are too fail-safe. Norton once said (when he himself was a guest on Late Night With Seth Meyers): “I think the good thing about actors is that sometimes they don’t care about the audience but they care about each other. So if an actor is telling a funny story, you can see someone seething, like: ‘I have a funny story!’ I’m bothering myself!” So the risks are getting higher and higher.” Winkelman adds something extra to the baseline of competitiveness: People want to show off to her. You can see it better in The Traitors than in Strictly, where everyone actually shows off – in the way the traitors, famous and ordinary, stand up straighter, not attacking the cameras but for their glowering approval. If you could incorporate chatbot chemistry, that would be a big part of it – but unfortunately we’ve proven you can’t.

Ultimately, the key is to make television memorable. The hosts and audience remember the disagreement on a chat show word for word (Michael Parkinson and Meg Ryan, Terry Wogan and George Best) and remember when things were funny, even if they can’t remember what anyone said. Moments of spontaneous connection and openness (Freddie Flintoff on Jonathan Ross, Hugh Grant’s guilty plea about that fellatio on Jay Leno – look it up guys) It’s also very watchable, but very rare; If you can turn it on and off like a faucet, it won’t be original.

“You have to do your homework, but, in a sense, you have to get it all out, and get on with the conversation,” says Kirsty Wark. “I did the last interview with Harold Pinter before he died. I think he knew he wasn’t feeling well. And with people who are less well-known and perhaps less practiced, sometimes that conversation flows more naturally. But I also feel that people who are comfortable in their own skin give better interviews.” They also give better interviews, and on those terms Claudia Winkelmann should absolutely smash this. But what do I know? You said “celebrity traitors” would be trash.

The Claudia Winkleman Show starts on BBC One in March.