Lack of stars in quiet weekend on chatshow front

The celebs must have gone into hiding last weekend. In fact there were very few of them around to even flog a book as the chat shows on TV were devoid of anyone that is particularly famous. Maybe it was one of these weekends when they just vanish into thin air.

Now, it could be argued that both Tubridy and Brendan O’Connor do not have any celebrities on their shows anyway, and while this is largely true, even their shows were actually worse than normal if that is possible.

The Graham Norton Show is always a good yardstick to see who is around and even he seemed to be struggling. He had singer Lily Allen, an actor whose name I can’t think of, and legendary actress Miriam Margolyes. Not the best line-up you will ever come across.

Lily Allen has zilch personality even though she is a fine singer; the male actor just kept laughing at everything and made damn all sense; while Miriam Margolyes tried to be funny but it just did not work out that way. It was definitely one of the worst I have come across.

Graham Norton tried to make the best of a bad lot but even he found it difficult to enliven the audience or the viewer. Things were so bad that he had about half a dozen victims for the famous chair at the end when it is normally two or three at the most. It shows that he had a lot of time to kill and this was reflective of the quality of guests.

Earlier, Ryan Tubridy had something on about dogs and how they help people. There is no doubt that doggies are a great asset to some people, but why this subject appears on a chat show is anybody’s guess. And not alone that, but the mutts were lined-up in the studio.

He then proceeded to carry out rather depressing interviews with people he had chatted to several months ago. Daniel O’Donnell’s wife was chatting about her battle with cancer, while the family of the late Marie Fleming – who sought an assisted suicide and failed – were on to talk about the aftermath of her death.

I don’t want to sound cruel but The Late Late Show is considered ‘light entertainment’ but these two laborious interviews certainly did not fall within that category. There are times and places for interviews of this nature but a Friday at 9.30pm is not one of them.

For more, read this week's Connacht Sentinel.