After One Series, the Norton Chair Sits Empty Again

Claudia Winkleman's chat show has folded, and British television's succession question reopens

By Beatrix "Marginalia" Vellum

Claudia Winkleman was, for a while, the name most often floated as heir to Graham Norton's Friday-night couch. That conversation has quieted. Her own chat show has ended after a single series, according to the BBC, leaving one of the tidier answers to British television's succession question off the table.

The details of why the show wound down after only one run are not laid out in the reporting available to us, and we won't guess at them. What is clear is the gap it leaves. Norton's late-night format — a couch, a bottle of something strong, a run of guests loosening up in real time — has proven stubbornly hard to replicate. Winkleman, a proven presenter with a following built over years on other formats, seemed a reasonable bet to inherit it. One series in, that bet hasn't paid off.

This is a small story, but it points at a real problem in British broadcasting: the chat-show format itself may be harder to sustain than it looks. Norton makes it seem effortless — the loose banter, the sense that anything could happen — and that effortlessness is precisely what's difficult to reproduce. A single failed series doesn't prove Winkleman was the wrong choice; it may simply confirm how narrow the path to success is.

For now, the BBC and viewers are left where they started: without a clear successor, and with a genre that has quietly become one of television's harder tricks to pull off twice.

Worth watching who steps up next — I'll be paying attention so you don't have to.

— Compiled from reporting by the BBC.

The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."