Sharon Osbourne: It was daytime TV's fault

The double-flopping of Sharon Osbourne chat shows on both sides of the Atlantic turns out to not be because Osbourne as a presenter is about as effective as a colander for cooking soup in. Oh, no - it was daytime TV's fault:

"My ITV (British channel) chat show was a gigantic mistake. I'd had a hard lesson when I did a chat show in America but I hadn't learnt. It was my ego getting the better of me, thinking I could be queen of daytime TV. Wrong!

"I had to be so careful what I said and how I said it. No swearing, nothing too provocative. I couldn't be confrontational or probing - two things I might claim to be good at. The questions I wanted to ask, I couldn't.

"The truth is, daytime TV is not for me. I just don't fit it. I know that now."

It was television which got smaller, was it, Sharon?

The trouble is, this just doesn't add up. After all, if "I couldn't swear" is one of the excuses for producing dreary programming, that seems less like a problem with the rules of daytime TV, more like a failure of imagination on the part of the host. Likewise, if you can't frame a difficult question in a way that will work for a family audience, then you probably have no claim to be a television presenter.

And as for the suggestion that you can't be provocative on daytime TV, that's just not true. Richard and Judy managed to get away with full-frontal male nudity and road-testing viagra - the difference being, of course, that the producers were able to trust their presenters with the material.