Caroline Frost: Do viewers just prefer male chat show hosts?
If Claudia Winkleman can’t do it, what hope is there that a woman will ever host a hit primetime chat show?
BBC
- Caroline Frost
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In the weeks since Claudia Winkleman caught the TV press on the hop, pulling the plug on her barely arrived chat show, I’ve been chewing on what it all means for women on TV mostly, and entertainment shows generally.
Following her revelation that she felt “too nervous to enjoy” a second series, which was probably not helped by the tepid reviews and merely respectable ratings that greeted her first, I went back for another look.
It really wasn’t bad; highlights included Claudia and her guests trying to explain Mr Blobby to confused US actor Dan Levy – “he’s our Mickey Mouse” – nevertheless, her swift exit does mean that Claudia has proved the rule, not the exception, to one of the mantras of light entertainment: that a woman cannot successfully pull off hosting a primetime TV chat show. To wit: if Claudia can’t do it, who possibly can?
I have my own theory, but first a flick through the history books to see who has tried and failed. Charlotte Church and Lily Allen can surely be forgiven for not translating their musical skills to the art of the sit-down interview, but it should have been a walk in the park for Davina McCall after the dance of hosting Big Brother. But no, she too crashed and burned.
Sue Lawley, an adept sit-in for Terry Wogan, proved a far wobblier driver of her own show. Before Lorraine Kelly’s effortless morning cuppas with the stars on ITV, Mavis Nicholson grilled them over teatime on Channel 4, but none has managed it in primetime. Have there been any exceptions?
In the 1990s there was Caroline Aherne’s Mrs Merton, whose smiling inquiry of an unsuspecting Debbie McGee – “What attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?” – earned her a permanent crown not just in TV archives, but in socio-cultural lore.
Claudia Winkleman with some of her guests Dan Levy, Cush Jumbo, Phil Dunster and Josh Widdicombe. BBC/So Television/PA Media
A decade later came the redoubtable Dame Edna Everage, who made effortless work of roasting everyone from Boris Johnson to Shane Warne. Both hosts displayed Joan Rivers-esque steel-plated cojones in out-gunning any guests, but both were armour-plated by costume and performing in alter ego (and one not actually a woman). Even so, the club remains a small one against the long list of male counterparts: Michael Parkinson through Michael Aspel to the still standing behemoths Jonathan Ross and Graham Norton.
Such gigs inevitably went more often to men in the past, but surely, in 2026, viewers don’t just prefer blokes at the helm, do they?
Other forces are afoot. Now podcasts offer an intimate sit-down-and-plug for passing celebs, the TV sofa demands something else of them: a fluffing of the feathers, to shine among fellow travellers. Any host must ride these self-regarding horses, herd these solipsistic sheep. We don’t need to see a host put the boot into a superstar, but we need to know they could.
After a combined half-century at the helm, Messrs Ross and Norton both still have that glint in their eye. Do viewers really want to see a woman this self-assured? I’m not sure. Certainly, Claudia, with her self-deprecation and maternal urges even on Traitors, offers something different.
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The funniest thing she said all series – “I think people who believe in star signs are thick” – was a line she assumed would be cut. And it was funny precisely because it was so un-Claudia. Ultimately, she decided she didn’t have the chops for such a battlefield. It’s no bad thing to admit that, when it comes to a rare defeat in your TV career, the problem was that you’re simply too nice.
Authors
Caroline Frost
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