Review: Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, BBC1 (From Blackpool Citizen)

Review: Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, BBC1

3:48pm Thursday 22nd July 2010

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I’VE spent a lot of Friday nights with Jonathan Ross. Too many, I think.

Now though, I’m going to have to find someone else as he’s got something else to do and someone different to be with.

This was Ross’s final Friday night fling with the BBC as he’s jumped ship to ITV.

Ross admitted being close to tears, but I should imagine the many millions he’s pocketed over the years will help cushion the move, largely thought to have been instigated following the fallout over obscene phone calls he and Russell Brand made as part of his radio show.

Over the 13 years Ross has spent at the BBC, he’s chatted with most of the major players in the entertainment industry. Whether he’s actually any good as an interviewer is questionable, but his chatty style is easy on the eye and the ear.

It doesn’t really matter who the guests are, but just for the record they are a humble, back-on-the-big-screen Mickey Rourke, Hollywood star Jackie Chan — who only looks about 40 despite actually having to wait for television to be invented before he could star on it — and the very chummy David Beckham, with music supplied by self-styled country gent and father of ridiculous pro-hunt campaigner Otis, Bryan Ferry.

Chan didn’t have much to say, Rourke, who bought Ross a pair of shoes, told a few stories about being down on his luck and Beckham, who sat on Ross’s lap, admitted he had his wife stored as “Posh” on his mobile phone and said they would like another baby.

Despite his Manchester United-Real Madrid past Beckham seems like quite a nice bloke — well, in comparison with most of the current England squad, he does, anyway. He is a fitting final guest for Ross, but it’s hard to feel much sense of loss as JR bids us farewell and Roxy Music stagger through their greatest hit.

Are we bothered that Ross is going to ITV? If you like him you’ll turn over, if you don’t, you know what to do when he returns to the screen in a year or so.

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