Champagne, tears and weird riders: Behind the scenes of the UK’s greatest chat reveals

The television landscape has been constantly evolving over the past few decades, but there’s always been one glittering constant: the great British chat show.

Whether it’s Michael Parkinson in tears of laughter with Billy Connolly in the Seventies, or Taylor Swift recently inviting Graham Norton to her wedding on-air, the light entertainment format has generated TV gold for years – with hosts charming audiences by coaxing out candid celebrity anecdotes and sparking viral moments.

Behind the curtain however, there are countless producers and crew members working to make it all look effortless. “It’s the swan with its flapping legs under the water,” former Chatty Man exec producer Richard Ackerman, who has worked in TV for three decades, tells me.

“What looks like a conversation between Graham Norton and three or four guests will actually have required a week of people doing pre-interview chats and huge amounts of research to find common strands between them – and those things don’t happen easily.”

With Claudia Winkleman now joining the ranks of presenters with a chat show on British TV, the format appears to still be going strong today. “Let’s not forget that they are actually relatively inexpensive to make for a broadcaster, compared to other entertainment shows,” Bea Ballard, an executive producer on The Jonathan Ross Show, says. The TV titan also produced Saturday Night Clive and re-launched Parkinson in 1998. “And there’s always going to be an audience for celebrities and seeing them talk about their latest project.”

Ahead of Winkleman’s debut tonight, here’s everything you don’t see on camera – from the politics of the guest positioning to tipsy TV stars and a pop icon’s odd request.

The Graham Norton Show’s producer Graham Stuart made headlines earlier this year after revealing the “hierarchy” of where celebrities are seated on the BBC show – with the spot on the sofa closest to Norton being the “primary aim” of all guests’ publicists.

However, each show has its own formula for the perfect seating plan, with Ballard saying that there’s a method to making “the ideal club sandwich” of guests on The Jonathan Ross Show.

“Having a comedian is really crucial and we always make sure we book one every show,” she says. “We usually have at least one actor, could be two, and then someone from a different world who brings something else – it could be a sports person or someone very notable like space scientist Dame Maggie Aderin.

“In terms of running order, I always think it’s good to start with a comedian because they have energy and get the show off to a good start. The only exception is where you want a more personal interview, like with Lewis Capaldi in 2022. He came on and spoke about suffering with Tourette syndrome – it was a very moving interview and he was incredibly honest and open.”

She adds that Parkinson wanted to put together the “ideal dinner party line-up” for his show. “You start to think, ‘If you were going to have a group of people over for the evening and you could have anyone, who would you choose?’”

With a different format to Norton and Ross’s shows, Chatty Man would often have the biggest guest on first to ensure that they were on screen for the entire show. “They would be joined after the break by the next guest so by the end we had everybody on the sofa,” says Ackerman.

“We had to be conscious that some people wouldn’t want to stay for the whole show, some people wouldn’t want to sit with a particular person – we were always conscious of those conversations, which had to be had with the celebrity’s publicist.”

With big egos at play, there’s always a chance that an interview could turn sour – whether it’s Bee Gees star Barry Gibb storming off the set of Clive Anderson All Talk or a reportedly drunk Mark Wahlberg interrupting other guests (and literally falling asleep) on The Graham Norton Show.

For Ballard, the interview she’s still asked about to this day is the famously uncomfortable 2003 chat between Meg Ryan and Parkinson. The American actor notoriously told Parkinson to “wrap it up” following a tense discussion about her career – she later said she felt like he was judging her for being naked in her film In the Cut. “When she came on Parkinson, they didn’t get on, we saw it and it was really compelling television,” Ballard says.

“I certainly wasn’t going to edit that. It was great because it was so real. There were discussions after the show and we held firm that we would be transmitting the interview as it was recorded.”

Alan Carr also had his fair share of tricky chats, with Ackerman recalling the “long and awkward” recording with David Hasselhoff in 2011. The Baywatch star, who appeared on the show with his grown-up daughters, had previously spoken about his struggles with alcohol. “He came on Chatty Man quite drunk unfortunately, and you could clearly tell,” he says.

“Alan had to cope with that whole issue – it resulted in a lot of phone calls between me and David’s agent, who quite rightly was very worried. He was asking for the whole thing to be taken out of the show but we’d lose the show, and it obviously had been publicised already that he was appearing.

“What we put out was not too bad, it was pretty sanitised and I don’t remember there being any terrible press around how drunk David was, but it required a lot of work in the edits from us to help him out.”

The Independent has contacted David Hasselhoff for comment.

It’s not uncommon for celebs to ask for specific items in their dressing rooms when appearing on TV shows of any kind – be it certain snacks, drinks, furniture or, in George Michael’s case, black towels.

“George Michael was such a lovely man and I do remember when he came on Parkinson, he wanted black towels in the dressing room,” Ballard says. “The instruction was that they had to be washed once. I thought that was quite amusing – but we did it, it wasn’t a problem.”

However, the Chatty Man production’s gift to Cilla Black did cause chaos on set. “I would put gifts and bouquets of flowers in the room as a nice gesture to welcome the person when they came down – we were trying to make everybody feel as relaxed and welcome as possible,” says Ackerman.

“Cilla, may she rest in peace, liked champagne and we provided a box of it. She was a bit merry on the show.” Black appeared in the 2009 Christmas special with comedian David Walliams, but became “teary” during the recording.

“It was probably down to the champagne. I think she thought David Walliams was teasing her too much,” he adds. “We had to stop the record to ask David [to stop]. I think it started out as fun – David’s not at school anymore but when you’re at school, perhaps it goes too far and gets out of hand and I think it got a bit too much for Cilla.”

The Independent has contacted David Walliams for comment.

It takes a lot of work behind the scenes to actually get guests on the sofa.

“With publicists and agents now, it’s much more driven around making their artists available when they have something to promote,” Ballard says. “In the era when I was producing Parkinson, a lot of the time you were just going to artists who you thought would make a good guest, and offer them a fee – and those fees varied enormously.

“It’s shifted now where you’re more at the mercy of the promotional cycle, which is understandable. On The Jonathan Ross Show, we always have more guests on offer to us than we can fit in, which is a nice position to be in and Jonathan gets very involved in that too, once we know who is on offer to us.”

For Ackerman on Chatty Man, booking big guests often depended on who rival Graham Norton was getting on his show. “We had to accept that we were the junior partner behind Graham and Jonathan [Ross],” he says.

“Film junkets and premieres are often on a Wednesday or Thursday afternoon and then they will go to Graham’s recording after the premiere. Graham’s recording is part of that schedule for the big movies and we would often try to get the secondary member of the cast that Graham’s show wouldn’t.”

And there was always a chance you would need a last-minute replacement. “People pulling out is also part of the game and that’s not because of the people themselves – flights get cancelled, people get ill. The broadcaster may not be happy with the line-up because they have a large say in who they want on the show each week.

“I remember Channel 4 being very involved – a month before the show started, I would be going into Channel 4 on a weekly basis to present them with lists of people who we thought were in town and had movies or books out. We would have to get their sign-off to create shortlists of guests.”

Winkleman has done the seemingly impossible in securing a new chat show on primetime TV – there have been hardly any to launch in recent years, and on the rare occasion they do, they often fail (Davina McCall’s ill-fated series – Davina – aired for just eight episodes in 2006 before being canned by the BBC due to low ratings).

“Channel 4 doesn’t have one anymore – they have The Last Leg but that’s a topical news satirical show,” Ackerman says. “The BBC have Graham Norton and Claudia, but there’s nothing on BBC Two anymore. I don’t think any of them quite get the numbers of success that Parkinson or Terry Wogan would have got many years ago.

“There has been a movement towards podcasts, and podcasts on YouTube, where people still want to watch those formats. People are still interested in watching brilliantly, funny interviewers get unfiltered anecdotes out of celebrities.”

He points to shows like Diary of a CEO and Chicken Shop Date, explaining that, increasingly, “celebrities quite like going on these things because they’re showing a different side to themselves and there’s a novelty value”.

“I’m always thinking about the next five minutes,” Ballard says. “And the landscape is really changing.”