TERRY WOGAN’S BACK! He has a new chat show and he’s BACK, BACK, BACK on our lucky televisions! I don’t know about you, but my set has been sitting next to the front door for a week now, eagerly anticipating Wogan’s return to her life. Whenever she sees Eammon Holmes she leaps to her feet, all excited — only to flop down dejectedly when she realises she made a mistake, and it isn’t the big T. W. after all.
It has been 13 years since Wogan had his own chat show. Thirteen years. I can’t believe that there are kids out there old enough to break into and drive away a car who have lived lives entirely without Wogan’s rogueish probing. Maybe that’s why they break into and drive away cars. I can’t imagine how I would have learnt to deal with the pain.
But, hang on a minute. Wogan Now and Then appears to be running on UKTV Gold. What in the name of scheduling is Wogers doing on UKTV Gold? This is TERRY WOGAN we are talking about here, not some trifling re-run of Under the Hammer. Terry Wogan has no place on UKTV Gold. The Wogan don’t drop below channel one-zero-four. Not on my beat. The most Terry Wogan should be doing for UKTV Gold is flicking past it, on his way to the Dedicated Terry Wogan 24/7 Channel. Wogan on UKTV Gold, indeed. It’s like using the Grail to keep scourers in.
Of course, while my love for Wogan could scarcely be more intense — I would cut my face open for Wogan — I haven’t really got the faintest clue if he is any good as a chat-show host or not. Let’s admit it — 13 years ago, our standards of everything were so much poorer; and it’s not as if we remember any actual incidents on Wogan anyway. It never gets repeated. For all we know, Wogan could have been sitting uninterest- edly on the sofa, silently reading the sports news off the autocue, while B-list cast-members of Knots Landing were busy interviewing themselves. Chat shows were a lot easier in those days. With no celebrity magazines or satellite channels, just looking at a celebrity was exciting enough. Radio Times, in its listings for Wogan, always used to say “On the sofa tonight”, rather than “Saying fascinating, revealing and entertainingly self-appraising things tonight”. I always thought that was quite pointed of Radio Times.
However, as the main conceit of Now and Then is showing clips of “classic” Wogan interviews, and then catching up with the interviewees again in 2006 to see how their lives have changed, I guess we’ll soon be getting ample opportunity to settle any query over Wogan’s classic interviewer status. But, let’s face it, we won’t be. We’ll just be saying “God, they’ve got so fat since then! And what was going on with that hair? Jeese Louise — that jacket in an outsized monochrome dog’s tooth is making my eyes strobe!”
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Wogan’s first guest is David Icke. That’s going to go well. “So, David, what have you been doing since 1986?”
“I went mad, Terry.”
Let’s concentrate on the good points of The Virgin Queen. There’s some pretty visceral martyr-burning scenes — good news for anyone who likes watching screaming fat-faced extras with their heads on fire, clearly wondering just how this is going to lead to further employment. And Tom Hardy, as Robert Dudley, is a right piece — 10 per cent sexual petulance, 90 per cent straining hose, 100 per cent likely to provoke the Google search “Tom Hardy” “early art film” “nude scene”. But as for the rest, it’s the usual medieval TV guffery: pigs on spits, red-faced wenches, and the sound of heads being chopped off while aristocrats in the Tower look pensive.
The ground-level conceit of The Virgin Queen is that, rather than get the usual, declamatory RSC crew in, this is a period drama in which the “edgy Channel 4 drama” generation get a go, instead. Ian Hart, Ann-Marie Duff, Joanne Whalley, Emilia Fox, Sienna Guillory, etc, etc. The upshot of this, however, is that it is a drama series in which Dexter Fletcher plays an evil retainer. I don’t know about you, and God bless him, but Dexter Fletcher is my deal-breaker for believing that we’re in 1553.
Dancing On Ice, in a nutshell, is Strictly Come Dancing — but with the added frisson that, if the celebrities screw up, they could have their fingers cut off in an icy swish of blade. Really, this has a potential for gigantic head wounds — if Martin Platt loses it on the Triple Salko, and goes spinning off across the ice, face-down, it’s going to be the greatest test of his triple gold medal-winning partner not to plough inexorably straight through his skull, slicing him open like a Cadbury’s Cream Egg.
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As it is, Bonnie Langford hit the decks in the first episode, her head bouncing off the ice like a squirrel falling from a tree. The audiences screamed “Ooh!” in satisfied pleasure — clearly thinking “This is better than the odd sequin-chafing incident in Strictly Come Dancing! MORE BLOOD!”
While many berate these celebrity-baiting shows as a sign of something — although they’re never terribly specific what — personally, I’m surprised at how slowly they are growing in number. The first Celebrity Big Brother was 2001. It has subsequently taken them five years to consider putting the B-list on ice? At this rate I’ll be in my bathchair before they run Celebrity Hair Burning.