Sir Roger Moore interviewed on the set of `The One Show`

Last week, BBC1’s The One Show received its highest ratings ever. Matt Warman goes behind the scenes and meets presenters Christine Bleakley and Adrian Chiles.

As preparation for Wednesday evening’s edition of The One Show, its co-host Christine Bleakley – the former Strictly Come Dancing contestant – is explaining to studio guest Sir Roger Moore what it’s like to be interviewed on television’s most popular tea-time programme. He looks at her and smiles charmingly. “I know you whizz through things,” he says. “I think it’s a damn good show. My daughter was furious that I wasn’t on it months ago.” - reports The Telegraph.

The fact that the 81-year-old ex-James Bond – who lives mainly in Switzerland – has not only heard of The One Show, but is also a fan, is quite remarkable, especially given that, just a year ago, BBC1’s current affairs magazine programme was struggling for ratings.

“I’m happy to talk about anything,” Moore says later. “And one of the great things about this show is that they can ask you about the other things they’ve got on the programme that evening.” It’s that feeling of a real conversation, says One Show editor Doug Carnegie, that is making the programme so successful.

Indeed, having achieved its highest viewing figures ever last week – 5.8 million people – it could soon overtake ITV1’s soap Emmerdale. “That’s my ambition,” deadpans Bleakley’s co-host Adrian Chiles, “to be more popular than Emmerdale.” Chiles says the show works because it seems much like real life. “We’re pretty close to ourselves when we’re on telly – and we’ve kind of invented an atmosphere where it doesn’t matter if you mess something up. Although you can’t do that all the time.”

The One Show is a product of 200 people’s labours, and is tightly formatted. “There’s something of The Big Breakfast about it,” says Carnegie. “Our aim is for the feel of a little event that you’re eavesdropping on.”

In practice, he says, that means “that we move from the plight of Iraqi war veterans to the plight of the natterjack toad. We used to just ask, say, Liam Neeson about his new film; now we require guests, whoever they are, to have an opinion about Iraqi war veterans and natterjack toads.”

Because of the varied subject matter, Bleakley and Chiles occasionally have to perform what they call “handbrake turns”. “It’s not a chat show,” says Chiles. “Getting it to hang together tonally is very, very hard.” He says that often “just a sentence – one moment of sobriety” is all that’s needed to move from, say, housing repossession to Roger Moore’s early modelling career.

Tessa Finch, the executive producer who developed the programme initially, says that The One Show is actually quite old-fashioned. “It may seem that we’re an entertainment show but actually we’re a very strong factual show,” she says. “At seven in the evening, what the audience wants is really something gloriously Reithian – it’s absolutely essential that it’s informative and educational, but we like to sprinkle some glamour too.” Carnegie agrees: “It’s the first opportunity for the BBC to loosen its tie in the evening,” he says.

Although the show is topical, a lot of the items on it are commissioned far in advance. “The plans are laid up to 18 months ahead,” says Finch. “We have four different teams who put the show together: Monday night’s show will be made by one team, Tuesday’s by another, and so on. We’re very eager never to rest on our laurels, and so every day begins with a frank dissection of the previous night’s show. Adrian and Christine arrive after lunch, go through the script, and from four we start to focus completely on the evening’s show, about half of which is always live.”

That means that Chiles, Bleakley and Carnegie write and rewrite the script. Now, says Chiles, they’re allowed to get on with it within the team, but initially there was interference from BBC1 executives. “It was struggling for ratings at first, and the channel were twitchy,” says Chiles. “But it was even worse when the ratings increased because everybody wanted to be a part of the success. Now they’ve finally relaxed.”

And relaxed is exactly the word to sum up The One Show’s success. As Carnegie puts it, the programme is quite easily able to deal with everything from the serious to the trivial. “A lot of what we do is proper analysis,” he says. “We do these fantastic authored pieces, such as Andrew Neil’s on Barack Obama – but then we’ve also got pictures on our website of babies that look like Adrian Chiles.”

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