KANSAS CITY — Ladies and gentlemen, I have glimpsed the 10th circle of TV hell.
If you think the kick-off times back home are tortuous, at least you’ve been spared the spectacle of James Corden and Rio Ferdinand, nursing a pint of flat-looking lager, chewing the fat about the day’s World Cup events.
Welcome to After Hours with James Corden, Fox Sport’s flagship “post-game” programme and the bright idea of an American TV executive who presumably hadn’t suffered through James Corden’s World Cup Live in 2010.
Think the vuvuzelas were the worst thing about that tournament? Not me. I still have PTSD about Corden and Abby Clancy lightly bantering about New Zealand’s 1-1 draw with Slovakia with a succession of uninspiring studio guests. What do you mean you don’t remember “Uru-guy or Uru-girl”, the feature where they picked out a fan who looked a little bit androgynous and guessed at their gender? Shame on you.
Corden brushed off that embarrassment to become the host of The Late Late Show for 10 years, relocating to Los Angeles before creating last year’s absolutely brilliant finale to Gavin and Stacey, the sitcom he helped co-create. He really should stick to that sort of thing, because the live football format is not his friend.
The pints in front of the guests are the first warning sign of what they are trying to do. The second is when they crack a joke about John Stones’s genitalia and a match mascot that isn’t really safe for publication.
Corden has brought his parents, Malcolm and Margaret, along for the World Cup ride, and at the end of the show, he gets his mum to recreate Diana Ross’s missed penalty in the 1994 opening ceremony. Phoenix from the Flames, anyone?
US TV viewers won’t be familiar with David Baddiel and Frank Skinner, or Fantasy Football, so he will probably get away with it but you wonder what the audience is here for. The live crowd cheer at the wrong moments and only seems to get animated when Mila Kunis turns up as the special guest.
Her introductory gambit? “I don’t really know anything about soccer,” she cheerily announces – and it soon becomes obvious that she is not kidding. But she does tell a story about meeting the President of Paraguay in a restaurant, which goes on for about five minutes too long.
‘You do wonder what possessed Fox to invite Rio Ferdinand across the Atlantic,’ says Mark Douglas (Photo: Fox Sports)It’s genuinely awful. Of course it is. Ferdinand is utterly dreadful, wearing a jacket that no man pushing his fifties should have a second look at, and a charisma void.
On opening night, Corden tried to draw him into some actual chat about football – asking whether it was a good thing that three players were sent off in the Mexico-South Africa match – and Ferdinand babbled something about it being a good thing.
“I just think that’s entertainment,” he wittered. “Get them players off and get the crowd going crazy.” Even Corden looked bemused at the breathtaking stupidity of it.
That’s Ferdinand for you and you do wonder what possessed Fox to invite him across the Atlantic.
Presumably, they thought, as someone who had played in two World Cups for England, he might offer some heft, but his insight here amounted to “goalies being the weirdest dudes on the pitch”.
The pre-recorded bits are markedly better than the live stuff. In the early shows, Corden ventures to the USA training headquarters and chats to the players and manager Mauricio Pochettino and he appears genuinely self-deprecating in the way he talks to them.
He has filmed segments with Declan Rice and Kylian Mbappe, which are quite good too. The players seem to quite like him, anyway – even if Alexi Lalas went viral on Friday calling him a “full kit w**ker” on live TV.
That’s the weird thing here. Corden is actually a proper football fan and has spent enough time watching West Ham to know that this sanitised, anaemic version of terrace “banter” is pretty embarrassing.
Look, I get it. This stuff is difficult to do. In 2021, Peter Crouch – who is genuinely funny – had a crack at it with Maya Jama with Crouchy’s Year-Late Euros: Live and it was terrible. Even Baddiel and Skinner struggled to do live, post-game versions of Fantasy Football in 1998 (although their daily podcast series in Germany 2006 was way ahead of its time).
But I feel sorry for American audiences having to put up with six weeks of this stuff – and just oh-so-grateful no one at the BBC or ITV had this particular bright idea.
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