Although it wasn’t a meltdown - more a kind of slow, awkward fumble - top bluff Yorkshire chat show host Michael Parkinson had an infamously disastrous interview with Meg Ryan a few years back:
It’s an interesting clash of approaches. In the UK Parkinson was, at the time, a kind of television legend going way back, but from Meg Ryan’s point of view he was probably a fungus. They really didn’t get on and I’d love to see them trapped in an elevator together.
I’ve always wondered how Hollywood stars feel when they’re interviewed on British television. It must be like Captain Kirk being asked to address a planet where the dominant species resemble tiny furry slugs. He has to pretend to treat them with respect, as if they were people - with kings and warriors and a history and so forth - but they’re just furry slugs.
As mentioned before, Oliver Reed. This kind of thing happened again and again, to such an extent that it wasn’t funny as a spectacle, and (assuming it was a big put-on) it wasn’t funny as comedy. I will always remember him as the man who made it hard and ultimately impossible to sustain an erection whilst watching Amanda Donahoe cavort around nude in Castaway, the 1986 Nicolas Roeg film.
Now, I remember watching a piece of breakfast telly several years ago with Derek Jameson, former editor of recently-scrapped Sunday tabloid The News of the World and (at the time) television personality. It was about the media coverage of Princess Diana, and he was making a quite reasonable but blunt point that she sold newspapers, and that breakfast TV was as obsessed with her as anybody, and that her death had sold lots of papers as well. Eventually this turned into a heated argument and they cut to an advert break, obviously before things go nasty. I seem to be the only person who remembers this. It was striking because Jameson was off-script but right, and it was an odd intrusion of reality into the fake environment of breakfast TV.