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What do Mike Leigh and Steven Bartlett have in common? Very little, surely. I can’t see the octogenarian auteur behind Bafta-winning films like Secrets & Lies and Vera Drake kicking back after a long day’s shoot with a nourishing glass of Huel and a motivational episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast. Their incongruence is so overwhelming that there’s only one cultural force powerful enough to bring these two men together on the same sofa. And that cultural force is The One Show.
Since 2006, the 7pm weeknight slot on BBC One has belonged to the broadcaster’s premier something-for-everyone-and-no-one grab bag of a magazine show. The delirium-inducing theme tune – trumpet fanfares accompanied by someone shouting “ONE… ONE… ONE!” at increasing volume and pitch – heralds the start of a televisual rollercoaster, presided over by the perma-cheery Alex Jones, alongside whichever reliable BBC stalwart has been rostered in to be her presenting partner.
Each 30-minute episode is an odyssey through current affairs, uplifting local stories and every possible echelon of celebrity. It’s like kids’ TV for adults, an evening show that should by all rights be airing at 10.30am. The tonal shifts are enough to give you whiplash, defying all accepted rules of cohesive broadcasting. The agenda follows the nonsensical logic of a fever dream: unconnected scene follows unconnected scene with zero explanation. And that’s precisely how what should by all rights be one of the BBC’s most boring programmes has instead become unapologetically unhinged viewing. I like to think this is why around 3 million people tune in each night, not just because they’ve forgotten to turn over after News at Six.
Take Thursday (23 January) night’s broadcast, hosted by Roman Kemp and the unflappable Jones, a One Show veteran of 15 years. First up, Bartlett had to sit through a short video of Harry from season two of The Traitors taking part in an immersive Agatha Christie whodunnit. Then, Leigh and longtime collaborator Marianne Jean-Baptiste joined him on the famous green sofa. All three of them looked on as Carol from the Isle of Wight was praised for her work with service dogs (then enjoyed a ride in a monster truck as a reward).
The paradox of The One Show is that every single episode is somehow wildly different and entirely the same. And so Thursday’s lineup was at once head-scratchingly unpredictable in the specifics, but utterly representative of the programme’s classic formula. We begin with some sort of vaguely topical human interest story. We’re introduced to a star guest, there to field softball questions about their latest project. Then, it’s time to meet more celebs. For maximum dissonance, they usually hail from a very different stratum of fame to the one occupied by their new sofa-mates. Think Tom Fletcher from McFly sitting alongside Kerry Washington. Strictly’s Shirley Ballas chatting with Hollywood’s go-to villain Mads Mikkelsen. Or Harry Hill thrown together with Dakota Fanning, a woman who has surely never heard of TV Burp.
Next up is another VT, which might cover anything from fly tipping to fraudsters (with the bad guys usually played by a game production assistant, wearing a hoodie as a shorthand for dodginess). The celebrities are held hostage throughout – as Al Pacino found out when he tried to walk off mid-broadcast in 2020, wrongly believing that his presence was no longer required. You see the cogs moving in the A-listers’ brains as they wonder why their publicist has signed them up to sit and nod politely while they watch Jeff Brazier walking down a suburban high street. Sometimes, they’re quizzed on what they’ve just watched, like when Dame Judi Dench was asked whether she’d ever put her feet up on a train seat (answer: of course not).
This quirk is what makes The One Show unique. On ITV, This Morning covers a similarly eclectic array of concerns, but their famous guests are spirited away during the ad breaks, so they never have to weigh in on, say, the UK’s pothole epidemic. The Graham Norton Show has a comparably mish-mash approach to celebrity bookings, but Norton doesn’t force his A-listers to feign outrage or delight over various mundane concerns that never darkened their own gilded lives. Plus, you get the sense that the Hollywood stars have at least a vague idea who he is, and what show they are on (unlike Pacino, who looked utterly baffled when Jones jokingly asked him if he’d “been dreaming of The One Show?”)
The cumulative effect is simultaneously banal and bizarre. None of it makes any sense at all – if historians look back at any random One Show episode in a few centuries, they’ll be deeply, existentially confused about what British society deemed important and/or entertaining at the dawn of the third millennium. The late comedy icon Mel Brooks put it best during his 2017 One Show appearance. Moments after he’d had Jones and her then-co-host Matt Baker cracking up with his jokes, the presenters performed a tonal handbrake turn and started telling the story of a woman trying to track down her long-lost father. “What a crazy show this is!” Brooks said, neatly summing up what every guest (and every viewer) had been thinking for years.
Of course, it speaks volumes that the jolt from wisecracking celebs to missing family members is by no means the show’s most jarring transition. That honour goes to the time when Jones glided from a nature segment to an interview with Ozark’s Jason Bateman, using the immortal line: “Now, from the transformation of the dragonfly… to the transformation of Jason Bateman.” It takes a real lightness of touch to make a clanger like that one work – even if her smiles and enthusiasm grate on your cynical soul, you still have to admit that Jones is very good at her job.
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Off screen, though, the show’s unsung hero is surely its talent booker, who clearly has a) one of the most capacious contact books in the UK entertainment industry and b) the vision and panache required to boldly put together some unfathomable highbrow – lowbrow celebrity pairings. Netflix film Scoop was based on the work of Sam McAlister, the producer who organised Prince Andrew’s interview with Newsnight, and I’d just as happily watch a drama about the machinations of The One Show’s celeb liaison staff. Perhaps Sheridan Smith, a classic green sofa guest, could star in the lead role. She’d be able to draw on the time when she got stuck in a lift with Stephen Fry moments before they were both set to appear on the programme, in scenes that would’ve been cut from W1A for being too on the nose.
As that gaffe proved, live TV often goes off-piste, and The One Show is no exception. In 2022, the actor Dan Stevens, formerly of Downton Abbey, appeared on the sofa to promote his new show Gaslit, a drama about the Watergate scandal. “What you’ve got is a criminal for a leader who is wrapped in a messy war, embroiled in a stupid scandal and surrounded by ambitious idiots, who really should resign,” he said, before quipping that he’d just read “the intro to Boris Johnson”. The gasps in the studio were audible.
It’s not just the guests who go off script, either. One of the show’s most memorable moments came in 2011, just as the credits were about to roll at the end of an interview with then-prime minister David Cameron. In true One Show style, he’d been seated next to an owl and its handler throughout. “Just very quickly, how on earth do you sleep at night?” Baker asked, with seconds of screen time to go. The former Blue Peter presenter delivered his zinger with a cheerful charm that gave him plausible deniability. It’s entirely possible that he was simply asking Cameron about his nighttime routine, rather than alluding to the impact of Tory austerity – but I like to think of the exchange as a light entertainment Trojan horse.
When so much TV now feels like it’s been created by an algorithm to provide a frictionless viewing experience, The One Show’s unapologetic weirdness makes it feel like an endearing outlier. As Brooks said, this programme is undisputedly “nuts” – but that’s the joy of it. Long may it reign as the most baffling thing on the BBC.
