Initially Bill Cotton was keen on a format more akin to the USA's "Ed Sullivan Show", featuring entertainment and chat. However, Parkinson and his producer, Richard Drewett (who had worked on "Late Night Line-Up"), envisioned a combination of guests whose celebrity had been achieved in different fields. Their plan was that the final section of each show would become a conversation rather than a formal interview. The pair wanted to move the style as far as possible from the American prototype, even down to the removal of the host's desk, which Parkinson viewed as the "biggest obstacle to a proper interview". At first, Cotton was against this but Drewett convinced him otherwise.