Hooray for Davina - or should that be McCall?

Roll on 2006, and Davina McCall's new show! The first ever prime-time evening chat show to be hosted regularly by a woman! What strange coverage that announcement received. Instead of simply finding it bizarre that a woman has never done the job before, the majority of commentators have set out to explain why not - most of them propounding the idea that women are 'not suited to the role'. If one is going to make these broad-brush definitions of the sexes (and let's face it, there would be no newspaper columns if one didn't), you could reasonably argue that women are far better suited to it. In our day-to-day conversation, in the main, women quite naturally take the role of chat-show host: asking questions, looking interested, probing a little deeper. Men instinctively talk like chat-show guests: telling jokes, asserting opinions, interrupting.

Men hold forth. Women keep the ball rolling. With a woman at the helm of a televised talk show, there is a chance we might at last have a host who actually listens to what the interviewee is saying.

It is interesting, I think, that the show is going to be called Davina. Traditionally, the surname is used: Aspel, Wogan, Parkinson. I find something a little twee in the rule-change made for a girl. It's like the distinction at Wimbledon: a flowery 'Miss Sharapova' rather than a businesslike 'Roddick'.

But in recent years, chat-show hosts have become much more female anyway. Jonathan Ross, Graham Norton, Paul O'Grady: hardly the butchest examples of the hairier species. They all love a giggle, a gossip and a brightly coloured suit lining. None of them, I suspect, is a stranger to the hair dryer. And they are all excellent hosts: it is as though the TV commissioners are quite aware that 'being in touch with your feminine side' will make you better at the job. They have even let these metrosexual boys use their full names in the programme title, softening the military snap of the old-school surname only.

And at last, a light bulb has flicked on: somebody has gone the whole hog and hired an actual woman

Having said all of this, of course, it is preposterous to make sweeping gender distinctions at all. (And I'm allowed to contradict myself since, as a woman, I am capricious and illogical.)

In arguing for women being natural chat-show hosts, I am being friendlier but no less blinkered than the people who argue that they aren't. And you know what those people imagine, don't you?...

Tom Cruise: I am finally ready to reveal the full details of my marriage, and I will answer any questions with complete honesty.

Davina: Ooh, good! What I want to know is - would Nicole do the kitchen in taupe or beige? I'm having a total nightmare trying to work mine out, basically I'm getting a new kitchen as retail therapy, I'm really down but you know how it is when you're having a bad day and it feels like a fat day, so you can't buy clothes because you just look like a great bloated fat sheep, so I'm thinking kitchen units...

... but of course, if everybody conformed to gender stereotypes, then Parkinson wouldn't be much cop either.

Parky: Tom.

Cruise: Mmm.

Parky: Pint?

Cruise: Yeah.


Parky: What about the tits on that Scarlett Johansson?

Cruise: Yowzer!


In the end, of course, the gender of a chat-show host should make no difference at all. They don't have normal conversations anyway, they have TV conversations. It's a performance. It is what the rest of us do at the office Christmas party. It has nothing to do with the way we converse with our friends. On television, it's always the Christmas party. The lights are always twinkling, the music's always playing, everyone has dressed up specially, and the priority is always effect rather than meaning. (Even if the effect is 'meaningful'.)

What does it matter, whether a man or woman is sitting in the TV chair to play Father Christmas? The beard is only borrowed anyway - it's the ho-ho-ho that counts.

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