Last Night's TV; 24 Hours With . . . Bobby Brown (ITV1).

Byline: Dave Prentice

CHAT show hosts for the millennium come in many shapes and forms.

We've had the cosy (Parky), the jokey (Jonathan Ross), the camp (Graham Norton), . . . even men dressing as women (the immortal Dame Edna).

But, in keeping with the Big Brother age, we've not got the gaoler chat show host.

The premise is simple, if claustrophobic.

A faded celebrity is locked in a room with interviewer Jamie Campbell for 24 hours - the idea presumably being that subjects will open up and be more honest the longer and more familiar they become with their interrogator, sorry interviewer.

This seems like a self-defeating theory from the off.

Surely a chat show host's very worth is calculated by the speed with which they can make an interviewee feel at ease and open up?

And after 24 hours, seven of which were spent curled up sleeping, Bobby Brown opened up once.

It was a genuinely tense exchange, prompted by a poor homophobic joke which Campbell sought to stretch as long as he possibly could.

Programme makers were so thrilled by Brown's aggressive reaction they trailed it constantly throughout the half-hour show.

It was a genuinely uncomfortable moment, but do we want to feel uncomfortable watching chat shows?

Future guests include Stan Collymore, David Gest and Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen, which suggest it's not going to get any easier.

"I don't even want to leave," said Campbell after the 24 hours were up.

"S***. I do!" declared Bobby.

He wasn't alone.

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Title Annotation:	Features
Publication:	Liverpool Echo (Liverpool, England)
Date:	Jun 12, 2007
Words:	247
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