Is Joanna Lumley the worst Baftas host of all time?
Name: Bafta hosts.
Age: On and off since 1977.
Appearance: Varies; most recently, Joanna Lumley.
At least the Baftas has a host, not like the stupid Oscars. Did you see Sunday night’s ceremony?
Of course not. Then you missed Lumley’s monologue.
Why is that important? Because if you had witnessed it, you would know that anything would be better than having her as a host. A tin of paint would be better. An exploded horse would be better.
It can’t have been that bad, surely. Ahem. To Stan & Ollie’s Steve Coogan: “That’s another fine dress you’ve got me into.”
Wait, was that the joke? To The Wife’s Glenn Close: “A lot of men here have already moved on to the sequel, The Second Wife.”
Hold on, what? To BlacKkKlansman’s Spike Lee: “I’m surprised that it did so well at the Klan film festival.”
Oh no. At least you’re only reading it. Watching it on TV was excruciating. Not only were the jokes bad, but the Bafta audience responded with a total, ominous silence.
The crowd wasn’t onboard? Every time the camera cut away to an actor, we got to see someone new wishing for the sweet release of death. Coogan pulled a face. Claire Foy squirmed. Richard E Grant, God love him, looked like he’d been stabbed right through the heart.
But Lumley isn’t a comedian. No, but the people who wrote the monologue are professional joke writers. This entire mess should be laid at their feet. The whole thing was so bad that when it came time to upload it to YouTube, Bafta edited most of it out.
Were the previous hosts any good? No, not really. For the most part, the Baftas have pinged backwards and forwards between Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross. Ross limped on until the termination of his BBC contract made his stint untenable; Fry, you’ll remember, had an almighty Twitter flounce when the internet didn’t like one of his jokes.
So it’s a cursed role? No! It isn’t at all. Look at Billy Connolly in 1991. Although only an unofficial host – he was a via-satellite co-host brought in to shore up Noel Edmonds – he was effortlessly, uproariously funny.
But Lumley was the worst? Hey, I’m an optimist. I think she is the worst there will ever be. Bafta could hire a screaming newborn baby or a distressed nun or a concussed goat to host next year and it would still be funnier than anything we saw on Sunday night.
Do say: “The biggest winner at the Baftas was The Favourite.”
Don’t say: “The biggest loser was my brain, which liquified.”