Chatshow magic isn’t easy. Can Claudia Winkleman conjure a sparkling interview show?

Creating a brilliant interview show is no mean feat, no matter how amazing the host. So will Claudia Winkleman’s new series succeed? Seasoned pros from Esther Rantzen to Kirsty Wark for the tips and tricks of creating interview gold

Claudia Winkleman’s new chatshow will land next month, and its enthusiast army are already excited. Winkleman herself, who doesn’t come off at all breathy, said: “I can’t quite believe it and I’m incredibly grateful to the BBC for this amazing opportunity.” Kalpna Patel-Knight, who commissioned The Claudia Winkleman Show, observed: “Claudia is a true national treasure – warm, witty and endlessly entertaining.” Graham Stuart, long-term producer/buddy of Graham Norton, who runs So Television, which produces both, said of his new venture: “How can you possibly follow [Graham Norton]? By booking a host equally as brilliant. So we have.”

And if anything proves how hard it is to create great chat, it’s those quotes. If anyone was ever that bland and blow-hard on one of their chatshow sofas, most TV people would punch themselves in the head. No wonder so many chatshows struggle when they first come out – it’s not that the expectation is too high, exactly, so much as the fanfare is too boasty. Brilliant as she is, then, the success of Claudia’s new series is far from given. But how exactly do you go about creating chatshow magic?

One tricky balancing act is getting the guests right. An awesome amount of energy goes into securing A-listers, but the bigger the name, the less they’ll say. Some host-guest magic needs to occur to leaven the stories, which pray God are not retreads. Graham Norton’s multiply populated sofa – which has its own formula, big ticket guest at the seat nearest Norton, a good mixer who is nice in the middle, and someone who is funny and can hold their own in seat three – is the show’s secret weapon. That’s even according to Norton, who told the Radio Times in 2010 (when his show was but three years old) that: “I’m really bad at actually interviewing people.” In an ideal world, the guests make their own magic (go watch Lady Gaga and June Brown, AKA Dot Cotton), creating TV that’s lively and chaotic like a circus.

Then there’s the interview itself. In the same issue of Radio Times, Michael Parkinson, who’d hung up his mic in 2007, had a moan about chatshow formats where “television executives who really ought to know better … entrust the job to people who, more often than not, neither know how to ask a question nor listen to the answer.” But those days are long over; nobody really wants to watch people be interviewed any more. The question-answer format belongs to a more civil century, when you’d approach a celebrity the same way as a politician: searching, polite.

Kirsty Wark, the Bafta-winning interviewer and ex-Newsnight host, who speaks to me over the phone while she babysits her brand new granddaughter, says that nowadays “entertainment interviews are a totally different kettle of fish from current affairs ones. Scratchiness is OK for political interviews, it’s a bit tricky for sofa interviews.” You could actually imagine Claudia Winkleman revivifying the old art of asking genuinely difficult things. She has a lot of natural authority, either caused or signified by the eyeliner, nobody knows which. But you can also imagine that going really wrong on contact with a thin-skinned Hollywood A-lister whose most significant disclosure that year was how he felt about lactose. The norms of celebrity interrupt human connection at every stage. Even the entourage a star walks in with creates some artificial power imbalance that chatshow hosts either kick against or cave into. Kirsty Wark still remembers the time she interviewed George Clooney: “He just sauntered in on his own and it was so much nicer.”

If the chatshow isn’t really about interviewing, though, what the hell is it about? Jonathan Ross doesn’t love talking about his work because he gets into trouble running his mouth, but told the Guardian in 2010: “My talkshow is not an interview show as such, which is why I’m always bemused when critics say the interview wasn’t very good. And I think, but I’m not doing an interview! What I’m trying to do is make a comedy show. And that, trust me, is a fuck of a lot harder.” But is it? Seems like comedy, if you’re funny, is not as hard as the white-knuckle ride of creating a chemical reaction between people who are each flogging something (generally speaking) and have never met. Very often, and surely in Claudia Winkleman’s case, the question is: we have this gold-dust host whom everyone wants to watch – how on earth do we maximise that?

In 1973, that person was Esther Rantzen. She didn’t say that, by the way, she’s way too modest: she tells the story of That’s Life as a magpie pilfer of the consumer show that went before it, from the Canadian actor Bernard Braden (Braden’s Week). She was a researcher on that and, when he went back to Canada, turned it into something that people definitely watched for Rantzen herself, and it was massive.

“In those pre-fragmented days, we had audiences, regularly, of around 15 million, at its height, 22 million. Mrs Thatcher and John Major watched it, because they knew that their voters watched it,” she tells me on the phone while her daughter makes her some lunch. She can’t watch herself now, she says, “like actors sometimes say they don’t like watching themselves on film, because there’s nothing you can do to improve it. I do shudder when I watch it, and I’m sure there would have been viewers that felt the same.”

It is just a fact that you can’t be that person – that national treasure, that water-cooler main character – if you don’t excite strong feelings in the audience, which means you have to split the crowd a bit. The Princess of Wales, for instance, could not host a chatshow. Claudia Winkleman comes off as someone who has the backbone to be 90% loved and 10% loathed, which matters, because it’s not fun loathing people unless they seem as if they’ll brush it off with casual self-deprecation. (Rantzen sat in for Terry Wogan once in 1986, and interviewed Anthony Perkins, who took umbrage at one of her questions: “He had a fantastic go at me, and said: ‘All the aficionados know that that’s the truth,’ and I said: ‘With my teeth, I can’t even say aficionados.’”)

Part of That’s Life’s success was that it was about a thing. The key to its longevity (it ran for 21 years – and led to Rantzen getting her own spin-off chatshow, Esther) was that it evolved, from low-stakes outrages (people selling fake slimming tea) or things that were funny (a dog that could say sausages) to campaigns. The first, in 1984, about Ben Hardwick, a toddler who needed a liver transplant, doubled the number of transplants in the immediate aftermath. In this more cynical age – and given how difficult it would be to keep it apolitical – pioneering social affairs content like that would be impossible to pull off.

If sofa magic is hard to conjure, some dynamics are pretty failsafe. Norton said once (when he himself was a guest, on Late Night With Seth Meyers): “I think what’s good about actors is sometimes they don’t care about the audience but they care about each other. So if an actor tells a funny story, you can see someone seething, like: ‘I have a funny story! I shat myself!’ So the stakes get higher and higher.” Winkleman brings something extra to the baseline of competitiveness, which is that people want to show off in front of her. You can see it in The Traitors better than on Strictly, where everyone is showing off already – the way the Traitors, celebrity and regular, stand up straighter, mugging not for the cameras but for her twinkly approval. If you could bottle chatshow chemistry, that would be a big part of it – but sadly we’ve established that you can’t.

Ultimately, the key is to make TV that’s memorable. Hosts and audiences remember discord on a chatshow word for word (Michael Parkinson and Meg Ryan; Terry Wogan and George Best) and they remember when things were funny, even if they can’t recall what anyone said. Moments of spontaneous connection and openness (Freddie Flintoff on Jonathan Ross, Hugh Grant’s mea culpa about that blowjob on Jay Leno – look it up, young’uns) are also extremely watchable, they’re just quite rare; if you could turn it on and off like a tap, it wouldn’t be authentic.

“You’ve got to do your homework but, in a sense, throw it all away,” Kirsty Wark says, “and follow the conversation. I did the last interview with Harold Pinter before he died. I think he knew that he wasn’t well. People who are less well known and perhaps less practised, that conversation sometimes flows more naturally. But I also feel that people who are comfortable in their skin give better interviews.” They also make better interviewers, on which terms, Claudia Winkleman should absolutely smash this. But what do I know? I said The Celebrity Traitors was going to be rubbish.

The Claudia Winkleman Show starts on BBC One in March.