Claudia Winklemans Show: Proof of Coarsening Public Life

Is it me, is it her, is it them, is it you? Something is very wrong with The Show on One, but whether that is just a sign of the celebrity times or a reflection of her muted skills as a chat show hostess remains to be seen.

Three weeks in, and how is the former presenter faring in her new role as queen of the sofa?

Already she has fallen into that arrogant social media trap of believing that if she is ‘obsessed’ with something, then it is instantly interesting to other people. Quite often, as we all know, the opposite is true.

Yet it is telling that Claudia, along with a million brainless influencers out there in the stupidsphere, believes this to be the case. ‘I am obsessed with you,’ she told an audience member who looks after baby owls in an aviary, in a rather desultory opening sequence that went nowhere. Her interest was supposed to be enough. It wasn’t. And proceedings went downhill from there.

If I tell you that the first episode also featured a discussion between Claudia and her guests as to what precise colour the studio sofa is – bottle green, emerald green or dark teal they debated, to the delight and amusement of no one – that gives you some idea of the quality of the discourse on offer.

We’re down in the hellish depths here, not ringing from the golden rafters in the sacred church of heavenly showbiz. Indeed, the torrent of drivel is enough to make your soul shrivel – and often it’s not even civil.

‘I can’t cook s**t,’ said someone called Guz Khan on episode two, explaining why he ordered takeaway Nando’s for his dinner.

Oh really, do you Guz, how absolutely fascinating, I don’t think. This would not have been an interesting conversation if overheard on a no. 17 bus, let alone on Friday night television.

A nd there was worse to come. ‘I want my arse on my back,’ said Irish comedienne Joanne McNally, explaining how far she wanted to go with plastic surgery.

At one point Claudia wondered if singer and actress Rachel Zegler ‘wore a nappy’ to cope with the lack of loo breaks when performing onstage in Evita, and comedian Tom Allen objected to furniture shops putting plastic covers on mattresses ‘as if I am going to instantly p**s myself’ when lying down to test them.

That was before Guz explained that when his wife inspected the blackhead strips after she tore them off his nose, she found them ‘disgusting’. Disgusting? I think that is exactly the word.

Dear God. If you , look no further than The Claudia Winkleman Show, a high-stakes, flagship, multi-million-pound venture launched by the BBC to capitalise on Winkleman’s popularity and success in both The Traitors and Strictly Come Dancing.

Instead, all the show has done so far is to accentuate the cratering of modern celebrity; a levelling down of entertainment values, which in this instance comes with a ‘this programme contains strong language’ warning.

But why? Can’t these people tell an anecdote without resulting to swearing? Or speak for three minutes without talking with reverence about their body fluids?

It makes one yearn for the old-school chat show greats, guests such as David Niven, Billy Connolly or Robin Williams; stars who knew they had to get on the sofa and work hard to entertain a family television audience. They also knew it wasn’t enough to sit there and bask in your own glory while telling everyone, as Jamie Dornan did, about his snack preferences.

‘I read once that you love meat,’ prompted Claudia, sounding like Adolf Hitler interrogating potential girlfriends in his Berlin bunker. Jamie went on to admit, hold the front page, that he liked eating biltong on planes. ‘Does it smell?’ wondered horrified fellow guest Lisa Kudrow.

All the guests went on to agree that the food on planes is terrible and jet lag is a nuisance. Really, there’s nothing British audiences love more than rich, successful, jet-setting celebrities moaning about being rich, successful jet-setters. More of this please, said absolutely no one.

And Claudia is such a big star herself – bigger than some of her guests! – that there is little she can do to puncture the hot air balloon of elitism that pervades this mess of a show, sucking up all the gilded oxygen.

Navigating her fringe like a musk ox peering through a sooty chimney, Claudia is quirky, witty and sometimes even endearing, but she is too much of a luvvie herself to ever engage fellow luvvies in combat. Or even gently poke fun at them, like Graham Norton and Jonathan Ross do to great effect.

Indeed, I doubt if Norton would have allowed Rachel Zegler – so talented, but so full of herself! – to witter on about getting ‘a standing O’ without taking the mickey. Or at least asking her to explain to the civilians what she meant. (It’s a standing ovation, for the uninitiated.) Instead, glutinous Claudia just nodded and carried on serving her drinks in Soho House glasses and gush, gush, gushing to her Niagara of nonentities.

Never mind Iran, Donald Trump remains obsessed with Bruce Springsteen, currently on a tour of America protesting about the Prez. The Boss has clearly struck a nerve.

‘Bad, and very boring singer, Bruce Springsteen, who looks like a dried-up prune who has suffered greatly from the work of a really bad plastic surgeon,’ the commander-in-chief raged on social media yesterday. ‘This guy is a total loser.’ Trump sounds like a high school mean girl caught up in a whirlwind of pique and jealousy.

And should someone with a ginger combover and a complexion daubed in orange varnish really critique the looks of others? His obsession with Springsteen at this moment of international peril is terrifying. I say this more in fear than fun – has he gone completely mad?

Don’t drag King into this mess

A US lawmaker is calling on King Charles to when the monarch visits the States at the end of this month. What utter nonsense.

Why should Charles be forced to atone and grovel for the sins of his disgraced brother and sundry others? He has done nothing wrong. In fact, he has done everything right, including exiling Andrew and unceremoniously booting him out of royal life for now and evermore.

But this is not enough for Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna, who co-sponsored a law that compelled the US Justice Department to release the Epstein files last year. He’s now calling on the King to privately meet victims to hear from them directly about ‘how powerful individuals and institutions failed them’.

Why? What good would that do? It has been seven years since Epstein’s death and more than a decade since most survivors escaped his terrible clutches. If the American President is not going to personally listen to their concerns, why should a British monarch?

Look, I could not be more pleased for these women that their ordeal is over and that many of their tormenters have been exposed, punished, named and shamed. And also that many of them have been generously compensated for their suffering. It is the least they deserve.

Yet I also feel, perhaps cynically, that it’s all about the money now. And that dragging the King into this fetid orbit is only a means to boost their cause and gain further financial pay-offs.

‘As you are aware, this is not solely an American matter,’ Khanna wrote in a greasy letter to the King on Monday, a missive which I found both threatening and yet somehow pathetic. I do hope Charles and Camilla resist this manipulative nonsense.