It's our fault Jonathan Ross lasted so long

In 2005, Jonathan Ross was awarded an OBE for services to broadcasting. On Friday, Ross will perform his greatest service to date: calling time on his excruciating chat show, Friday Night with Jonathan Ross.

Incredibly, none of the guests is Ricky Gervais, who is both Ross’s most interviewed guest – with eight appearances – and, by happy coincidence, one of his cosiest A-list chums. Lining up to pay their respects will be David Beckham, Jackie Chan and Roxy Music. Not bad for a swansong, although, as usual, the riveting mega-celebrity who will preoccupy our host above all others will be Jonathan Ross himself.

There are several reasons to be irked by Ross. Many licence-fee payers have long been nettled by the size of his salary. For some, the final insult came last year with the lewd messages that Ross and Russell Brand left on the actor Andrew Sachs’s voicemail and which were then broadcast on Radio 2.

But what has never ceased to amaze and infuriate me about Wossy is his inability to do the very thing for which the BBC paid him £6 million a year: interview people.

This is not to say that Ross is a terrible broadcaster, full stop. If the time, place and target are right, he does a nice line in ego-puncturing put-downs. Apologies if this sort of joke isn’t your cup of tea, but I have to confess to a cruel chuckle when he said that Heather Mills was such an inveterate fibber he “wouldn’t be surprised if we found out she’s actually got two legs”. This rudeness made him a spiky panel-show guest and a refreshingly irreverent awards host. At last year’s British Comedy Awards, for example, Ross told the gathered glitterati that the credit crunch had meant that “tonight’s goodie bags are so cheap one of them actually contains Channel Five”, and even took a pop at one of his pals, claiming that he liked Twitter “because you’re restricted to 140 characters, which is 139 more than Ricky Gervais has ever done”.

Ross is also a lively and voluble talker – hence the popularity of his Radio 2 show – and has been an engaging critic since he inherited The Film Programme from Barry Norman.

However, it is one of the great and endlessly repeated mistakes of TV commissioning to think that just because someone is funny or talkative, they deserve their own chat show. Even Peter Cook, the greatest chat-show guest of all time, made a hash of hosting Where Do I Sit? and was replaced after two episodes by Michael Parkinson, who did rather better. Despite becoming an embarrassingly soft touch in his later years, Parkie at least understood that interviewing people is an art in itself, built on curiosity, careful research, asking short, open-ended questions and, most of all, knowing when to shut up.

No wonder the best talk- show host of recent years is Clive Anderson, a man well practised in the art of extracting information from others during his career as a barrister.

It would be unfair, though, to blame Ross for the death of the chat show. There are plenty of similarly awful hosts – Alan Carr, Lily Allen and Davina McCall to name three. Nor is there a dazzling alternative ready to succeed him, although Graham Norton appears the most likely candidate.

It may be an unpalatable truth that the people to blame for Ross surviving – and even thriving – for almost a decade as Britain’s pre-eminent chat show host are us, his viewers. One only has to flick through a tabloid newspaper to see that we have two default attitudes to celebrities: fawning adulation and a sneering desire to see them knocked off their perch.

The key to Ross’s popularity, while it lasted, was his curious ability to maintain both these positions at the same time. Perhaps he will find a natural home on ITV, where he will present a new chat show next year. In the meantime, I’ll be making the most of Friday nights without him.