Ah, The One Show. Hosted by Matt Baker – so excitable I’m positive he’s actually just a labrador in human costume – and Alex Jones – contractually obliged since 2010 to smile at all times – it has a reputation of being bland, inoffensive and charmingly incompetent, the Hufflepuff of television. This week, during one of its trademark segues from “fun celebrity interview” to “devastating segment about someone losing their family”, guest Mel Brooks could take the show’s inherent stupidity no more.
“What a crazy show this is,” he declared, much to the delight of the guests and crew who have presumably spent the last 11 years internally screaming the exact same thing. Baker looked confused, like someone had pretended to throw a tennis ball but actually kept it in their hand instead, the cruellest trick anyone can play on him.
Jones’s face dropped to a “mildly amused” smile, which for her is the equivalent of bursting into tears. And with good reason: plenty of people have mocked The One Show, but usually out of earshot of the studio. Brooks did it right up close to the grinning faces of Baker and Jones, live on air. It was glorious, horrific and weirdly cathartic for everyone involved – like when someone gets drunk at the office party and tells the boss that there’s a WhatsApp group dedicated to slagging off his comedy ties.
And yet, watching it back, part of me couldn’t help but feel a bit sorry for The One Show. It’s now the go-to punchline for comedy writers around the country (replacing Eggheads and Songs of Praise), and that doesn’t seem fair. Most other shows fall apart because of a lack of ambition: The One Show’s flaw is the opposite – it’s trying to do too much.
Superficially, it’s a chat show. But it’s also a magazine show, a news show, a music show, a review show and a pseudo-political show all at once. Guests are never allowed to leave – as far as I know, no one’s ever successfully escaped – meaning that they must be shoehorned into every segment. That’s how you get Theresa May talking about Eurovision, Owen Wilson talking about oil rigs and Christopher Ecclestone trying to match the tennis player to the grunt. It’s like one of those blenders that says it’s also a dicer, toaster and a fax machine, but when you turn it on it just explodes. Not what it was supposed to do, but surprisingly compelling viewing.
I have many questions about The One Show. Why are there only seven people in the studio audience? Are they the same seven people every week? Are they being held hostage by the production team? Primarily though: who is this show for?
Last Monday’s episode featured an interview with Abba’s Benny Andersson about his solo album, a segment on a robot that helps a girl go to school, and a 10-minute exposé of what kind of metal they’re using in train carriages now. What is the Venn diagram of Abba fans, train fetishists and sociologists on robot-human relationships? Swedish anoraks and Elon Musk?
In some ways it’s the perfect flagship for BBC1 – in trying to be a show for everyone all the time, it ends up being a show for no one. And yet that’s also kind of noble: in a world of division, of targeted advertising, of demographics, here is a show that defies them all – a show that doesn’t care whether you like Andy Hamilton, credit card fraud or nuclear war, you’re going to hear about all of them, all at the same time.
And sometimes, that beautiful, insane alchemy can hide a subversive element. In 2011 Baker ended a fairly humdrum interview with the then prime minister, David Cameron, with the question: “How on earth do you sleep at night?” It was said so earnestly, with the same labrador-esque enthusiasm, that to this day it’s genuinely unclear whether Baker was telling Cameron that he should be ashamed of himself, or was just genuinely curious about the lumbar support in the bed at No 10.
The One Show lulls celebrities into a sense of false security with its banality and chaotic nature, revealing more about them that any regular show could. If it wasn’t for its incoherent format, would we ever have found out about Jeremy Corbyn’s love of decorative manhole covers? Debbie Harry’s adoration of chickens? Richard Osman’s fuse box? Or what kind of Speedos Martin Clunes wears?
So yes, Brooks is right – The One Show is nuts. But it’s endearingly nuts – it’s a dizzying mix of banality, surrealism and just a hint of subversiveness behind the smiling exteriors. The day they stop making those clunky segues and inexplicable links between Hollywood stars and the metamorphosis of dragonflies will be a sad one indeed.
• Jack Bernhardt is a comedy writer and occasional performer. He created the BBC Radio 4 sitcom The Lentil Sorters
