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What do Mike Leigh and Steven Bartlett have in frequent? Little or no, absolutely. I can’t see the octogenarian auteur behind Bafta-winning movies like Secrets and techniques & Lies and Vera Drake kicking again after a protracted 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 just one cultural power highly effective sufficient to carry these two males collectively on the identical couch. And that cultural power is The One Present.
Since 2006, the 7pm weeknight slot on BBC One has belonged to the broadcaster’s premier something-for-everyone-and-no-one seize bag of {a magazine} present. The delirium-inducing theme tune – trumpet fanfares accompanied by somebody shouting “ONE… ONE… ONE!” at growing quantity and pitch – heralds the beginning of a televisual rollercoaster, presided over by the perma-cheery Alex Jones, alongside whichever dependable BBC stalwart has been rostered in to be her presenting companion.
Every 30-minute episode is an odyssey by present affairs, uplifting native tales and each attainable echelon of movie star. It’s like children’ TV for adults, a night present that ought to by all rights be airing at 10.30am. The tonal shifts are sufficient to provide you whiplash, defying all accepted guidelines of cohesive broadcasting. The agenda follows the nonsensical logic of a fever dream: unconnected scene follows unconnected scene with zero clarification. And that’s exactly how what ought to by all rights be one of many BBC’s most boring programmes has as an alternative turn into unapologetically unhinged viewing. I prefer to assume because of this round 3 million folks tune in every evening, not simply because they’ve forgotten to show over after Information at Six.
Take Thursday (23 January) evening’s broadcast, hosted by Roman Kemp and the unflappable Jones, a One Present veteran of 15 years. First up, Bartlett needed to sit by a brief video of Harry from season two of The Traitors participating in an immersive Agatha Christie whodunnit. Then, Leigh and longtime collaborator Marianne Jean-Baptiste joined him on the well-known inexperienced couch. All three of them seemed on as Carol from the Isle of Wight was praised for her work with service canines (then loved a experience in a monster truck as a reward).
The paradox of The One Present is that each single episode is in some way wildly completely different and fully the identical. And so Thursday’s lineup was directly head-scratchingly unpredictable within the specifics, however totally consultant of the programme’s basic method. We start with some form of vaguely topical human curiosity story. We’re launched to a star visitor, there to discipline softball questions on their newest mission. Then, it’s time to fulfill extra celebs. For max dissonance, they normally hail from a really completely different strata of fame to the one occupied by their new sofa-mates. Assume 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 along with Dakota Fanning, a lady who has absolutely by no means heard of TV Burp.
Subsequent up is one other VT, which could cowl something from fly tipping to fraudsters (with the unhealthy guys normally performed by a recreation manufacturing assistant, carrying a hoodie as a shorthand for dodginess). The celebrities are held hostage all through – as Al Pacino discovered when he tried to stroll off mid-broadcast in 2020, wrongly believing that his presence was not required. You see the cogs shifting within the A-listers’ brains as they surprise why their publicist has signed them as much as sit and nod politely whereas they watch Jeff Brazier strolling down a suburban excessive road. Typically, they’re quizzed on what they’ve simply watched, like when Dame Judi Dench was requested whether or not she’d ever put her ft up on a prepare seat (reply: after all not).
This quirk is what makes The One Present distinctive. On ITV, This Morning covers a equally eclectic array of considerations, however their well-known visitors are spirited away through the advert breaks, in order that they by no means need to weigh in on, say, the UK’s pothole epidemic. The Graham Norton Present has a comparably mish-mash strategy to movie star bookings, however Norton doesn’t power his A-listers to feign outrage or delight over numerous mundane considerations that by no means darkened their very own gilded lives. Plus, you get the sense that the Hollywood stars have a minimum of a imprecise concept who he’s, and what present they’re on (not like Pacino, who seemed totally baffled when Jones jokingly requested him if he’d “been dreaming of The One Present?”)
The cumulative impact is concurrently banal and weird. None of it makes any sense in any respect – if historians look again at any random One Present episode in just a few centuries, they’ll be deeply, existentially confused about what British society deemed necessary and/or entertaining on the daybreak of the third millennium. The late comedy icon Mel Brooks put it finest throughout his 2017 One Present look. Moments after he’d had Jones and her then-co-host Matt Baker cracking up together with his jokes, the presenters carried out a tonal handbrake flip and began telling the story of a lady attempting to trace down her long-lost father. “What a loopy present that is!” Brooks stated, neatly summing up what each visitor (and each viewer) had been pondering for years.
After all, it speaks volumes that the jolt from wisecracking celebs to lacking members of the family is certainly not the present’s most jarring transition. That honour goes to the time when Jones glided from a nature phase to an interview with Ozark’s Jason Bateman, utilizing the immortal line: “Now, from the transformation of the dragonfly… to the transformation of Jason Bateman.” It takes an actual lightness of contact to make a clanger like that one work – even when her smiles and enthusiasm grate in your cynical soul, you continue to need to admit that Jones is excellent at her job.
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Off display screen, although, the present’s unsung hero is unquestionably its expertise booker, who clearly has a) one of the capacious contact books within the UK leisure trade and b) the imaginative and prescient and panache required to boldly put collectively some unfathomable intellectual – lowbrow movie star pairings. Netflix movie Scoop was primarily based on the work of Sam McAlister, the producer who organised Prince Andrew’s interview with Newsnight, and I’d simply as fortunately watch a drama concerning the machinations of The One Present’s celeb liaison workers. Maybe Sheridan Smith, a basic inexperienced couch visitor, might star within the lead function. She’d be capable to draw on the time when she bought caught in a elevate with Stephen Fry moments earlier than they had been each set to look on the programme, in scenes that will’ve been reduce from W1A for being too on the nostril.
As that gaffe proved, dwell TV usually goes off-piste, and The One Present is not any exception. In 2022, the actor Dan Stevens, previously of Downton Abbey, appeared on the couch to advertise his new present Gaslit, a drama concerning the Watergate scandal. “What you’ve bought is a legal for a pacesetter who’s wrapped in a messy battle, embroiled in a silly scandal and surrounded by formidable idiots, who actually ought to resign,” he stated, earlier than quipping that he’d simply learn “the intro to Boris Johnson”. The gasps within the studio had been audible.
It’s not simply the visitors who go off script, both. One of many present’s most memorable moments got here in 2011, simply because the credit had been about to roll on the finish of an interview with then-prime minister David Cameron. In true One Present fashion, he’d been seated subsequent to an owl and its handler all through. “Simply in a short time, how on earth do you sleep at evening?” Baker requested, with seconds of display screen time to go. The previous Blue Peter presenter delivered his zinger with a cheerful attraction that gave him believable deniability. It’s solely attainable that he was merely asking Cameron about his nighttime routine, fairly than alluding to the affect of Tory austerity – however I like to think about the trade as a light-weight leisure Malicious program.
When a lot TV now feels prefer it’s been created by an algorithm to offer a frictionless viewing expertise, The One Present’s unapologetic weirdness makes it really feel like an endearing outlier. As Brooks stated, this programme is undisputedly “nuts” – however that’s the enjoyment of it. Lengthy could it reign as probably the most baffling factor on the BBC.
