Talking heads ... Jamie Campbell with Bobby Brown. Photograph: ITV
It's not often the words "chat show" and "compelling viewing" go together, but last night's 24 Hours With ... seemed to bring something new to the party. In a landscape where Norton, Ross and Parkinson are distinguishable more by their monologues than anything wheedled out of the guests, the idea of locking up Bobby Brown with an interviewer for the day was always likely to produce fireworks, and when they finally arrived the tension was first hilarious and then unnervingly palpable.
Would ex-New Statesman journalist Jamie Campbell really get "fucked up all over the room" as his subject threatened? Would the producers intervene? Would Bobby walk before the clock ticked down? For a moment nobody knew the answers, or indeed understood why the confrontation had arisen in the first place.
All was going well for the first half hour (edited down from around 12 hours footage.) with Bobby revealing himself to be surprisingly undamaged but still in denial about his career, public perception and marriage to Whitney Houston. And although the star seemed hurt that his own sister had joined in his public condemnation, it was hard not to sympathise with him being blamed for destroying Whitney's career when it could be claimed that she had done the very same thing to his.
And then, in an instant, an innocuous if clumsy jibe about trying "sex moves" on a cellmate backfired. The subsequent 10-minute standoff seemed to revolve around two questions: had Bobby been exposed as a rampant homophobe and was Campbell himself gay? And although neither question was adequately answered, the rest of the show proved anticlimactic by comparison, with tall tales of a jealous Osama Bin Laden putting out a contract on Brown's life and Campbell's excruciating attempts at "running man" dance moves.
In truth, ITV was smart to start the series with the strongest guest, as it's unlikely David Gest or Stan Collymore will produce anything as interesting. It also raises the stakes for future chat shows.
Of course, the real winner in all this is Campbell. Brown will laugh this one off and move on, Campbell meanwhile will be judged by his first interview, and forced into engineering new controversy with every show. It's a trick Louis Theroux pulled a while back, albeit with considerably more charm, but it remains to be seen if there are enough celebrities around to risk their careers on building his or, indeed, reviving the chatshow format. Either way, Parky suddenly looks about 300 years older today.
