Rylan has the makings of a great interviewer… if he could just stop playing to the gallery

Telegraph

2 days ago

There is absolutely no point in trying to resist Rylan. The man with the Ken-doll face has become more ubiquitous than Alison Hammond. When it comes to television, Rylan is an ever-expanding foam, filling every available gap. He's been on The X Factor and he's hosted The Xtra Factor; he's been on Celebrity Big Brother (and won) and he's hosted Celebrity Big Brother. He's been on Celebrity MasterChef, Celebrity Gogglebox and Celebrity Ghost Hunt. He's hosted Supermarket Sweep, Ready Steady Cook and Sport Relief. He is now so intertwined with Eurovision that he appeared as himself in Doctor Who last month, as the perpetual host of the 'Interstellar Song Contest', emerging from deep freeze once a year. Age shall not weary him. When I close my eyes, I see Rylan. He is burnt into my retinas.
Now he is coming for my ears. Not only does he have his own Radio 2 slot, on Saturday afternoons, but the BBC are positioning him as a podcast mensch. Following How to Be a Man and How to Be in the Spotlight comes How to Be in Love (BBC Sounds, Wednesdays), a 12-part series in which Rylan intends to discover the 'secrets of healthy, long-term relationships' (Rylan's marriage broke down in 2021, so the mission is personal). Given that he emerged into the national consciousness as an absurd plastic pop contrivance, it's remarkable that Rylan is now given the heaviest of topics. It's like Jedward being asked to do a series on the Troubles (actually, I'd give that a listen).
Except the secret was out some time ago that 'Rylan' is a construct and that the man beneath the Botox – real name, Ross Clark – is far more witty and intelligent than we'd previously suspected. Those qualities were in evidence in the opening episode of the podcast – sorry, the visualised podcast, which I think just means they filmed it too – in which Rylan asked Stephen Fry to answer the question, 'What is love?' Not before, however, he blew enough smoke up the 'legendary' Fry's backside ('You're an icon… a national treasure') that you could have sailed the 67-year-old over Mont Blanc.
Fry is a little like Rylan, in that you know what you are going to get from him. He launched gamely into the evolution of love over a lifetime, from finding it tedious as a child ('It ruined movies – the adventure would stop and they would start kissing. Boo!') to those adolescent first flushes. I enjoyed Fry describing a teenager in love for the first time as feeling like they have joined a 'special band of people in history', putting you on a par with Romeo. 'Or Katie Price,' quipped Rylan, playing to the gallery.
I rather like Rylan, though he has something of a 'dirty burger' approach to his interviews, always deliberately undercutting anything too profound with something cheerfully coarse, as if afraid his fans would see the Ross emerging from under the Rylan if proceedings became a bit too grown-up. Fry can do coarse, of course, and the two men bonded over the enjoyably crude way they faced down homophobic bullying at school. In fact, at one point Fry, who spent 15 years celibate across the 1980s and 1990s, got so scatological that even Rylan recoiled: 'Stop – I'm going to end up celibate after this.'
Rylan missed a few tricks in this interview, defaulting too quickly to his brand persona before Fry could delve deeper into certain subjects. His celibacy, for instance, came from a mixture of the personal and the circumstantial, including the outbreak of the Aids epidemic. He was a young gay man, new to London and ready to embrace life, when suddenly he 'started going to funerals'. This too quickly segued into Rylan asking Fry about masturbation.
More fruitful – though rather off the central topic – was the pair discussing their mental health. Fry is bipolar, while Rylan suffered a breakdown when his marriage ended, attempted suicide and ended up on a psychiatric ward. It was refreshing to hear Fry discuss his bipolar disorder as something with a positive side. 'You're more alive,' he said. When a cabbie remarked that he'd 'gone off the rails', Fry had an epiphany: 'Why would you want to be on rails? Being bipolar took me off the rails and I could gallop free in the wild countryside.' It was a rare insight and Rylan, sensibly, didn't interrupt.
One can't blame Rylan for being a bit overexposed at the moment – we'd all take the work if we were offered it – but if I had one piece of advice for him as he continues his podcast journey, it's this: let's hear a bit more of what Ross has to say. We get enough of Rylan on the telly, perhaps us radioheads could have a little more of the real thing.