Television - Andrew Billen thinks we should see even more of Jonathan Ross

On Radio 2 on Saturday morning, Jonathan Ross did an unusual thing - unusual for him and unusual for the business in general - and apologised for the quality of his performance. Ross was clearly worried about the debut of his Friday Night With Jonathan Ross which had aired the previous evening on BBC1. It was, he told viewers sarcastically, his comeback show: he hadn't been on TV for hours. Since Film 2001 on Thursday, in fact.

Yet it was a comeback, for all that. In 1987, Ross, an unknown researcher from a failed Channel 4 chat show, began hosting The Last Resort for that channel. Its smart use of Eighties irony, its trashiness, which was also ironic, and its compere's rudeness made it look very much like the future of chat, and Ross the future of television. Ross, however, failed the endurance test. Semi-kindred spirits such as Chris Evans, Danny Baker, Graham Norton and, at breakfast, Johnny Vaughan honoured his style, but left the man who invented it behind.

On Saturday, Ross kept calling Friday Night a "work in pro-gress", and admitted to making many errors - including the cardinal sin of not properly introducing his guests. This was true: in commending John Lydon to us, he omitted to mention the Sex Pistols at all. Yet Ross had nothing much else to apologise for. It was a very assured debut indeed and, on a funny night (Have I Got News For You had been on riotous form, bullying Boris Johnson, 90 minutes earlier), Ross was extremely funny. Either he is the wittiest man on television or his four writers need pay rises.

Ross has ways of making tongue-dangling sexual innuendo acceptable which Baddiel and Skinner could learn from. "I love ladies," he told us, "although I couldn't eat a whole one. But I think I know where I'd start."

Mock-lusting after Tamzin Outhwaite of EastEnders, he improvised on her admission that she needed to go to the loo by saying that she should consider him her servant. "I mean, if you want to wee on me or anything . . . "

He got away with that, too. Only his jibe that Martin Bashir had achieved a first by spending an hour with Michael Barrymore and living broke the spell of generous mischief.

On chat shows, the personality of the host is almost everything, but you want to pick a format to show it off to best advantage. Only two have really lasted. There is the British, swivel-chaired model of Michael Parkinson, Russell Harty and Michael Aspel, in which a journalist grills guests politely in return for them sticking around and joining in a group discussion. Then there is the American version that comes out of vaudeville. Its host is a comedian who delivers a monologue, retires to behind a desk, chats humorously to guests one by one, performs sketches, and has the option of a sidekick.

Ross has always favoured the American way. Or to put it another way, Ross has always wanted to be David Letterman, its foremost exponent. This is an honourable aspiration. (If you want to know why, you can find out by watching Letterman at around midnight on ITV2 each evening.) Ross knows the grammar of the chat show so well, however, that he has managed to vary and even send up the format he most loves. The house band has been replaced by a choral group named, incredibly enough, Four Poofs and a Piano. There is a camera in the green room. Ross delivers his stand-up routine, while sitting behind the desk, to his sidekick, Andy Davies, the producer of his Radio 2 show.

Although comperes' chaperones used to be a commonplace of the American chat show - the most famous being Ed McMahon (Hank to Johnny Carson's Larry Sanders) - the last, Conan O'Brien's porky pal Andy Richter, recently left NBC's Late Night With Conan O'Brien show. I wonder how long Andy "Boswell" Davies will last.

To be less of an anorak about proceedings, let me add that Ross's greatest gift is understanding his audience. His guests may not have been properly introduced, but any fortysomething with nothing better to do than watch TV on a Friday night would be familiar with Johnny Rotten and Outhwaite. If we stumbled in placing Neil Hannon of Divine Comedy, he did us the favour of singing a 1994 Frankie Goes to Hollywood hit, "The Power of Love". Ross also understands ageing metabolisms and honoured that other late-night American tradition of putting the biggest name on first (in this case, Lydon) rather than building up to him, thus letting sleepyheads retire earlier than they might. And one other point in Ross's favour: none of his guests had anything specific to plug.

In the New Year, one of Ross's young pretenders, Johnny Vaughan, was to have launched a three-nights-a-week prime-time chat show on BBC3, to be repeated later on BBC2. But BBC3's launch has been delayed by government diktat. If I were Lorraine Heggessey, BBC1's controller, I would push Ross into the resulting vacuum. The Comeback Kid has earned the right to be the BBC's first nightly chat-show host since Terry Wogan was eased off the air nearly ten years ago.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

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