It pays to revive Nationwide

I’ve been waiting ages to use that headline, ever since the The One Show was announced. Unfortunately, on the evidence of tonight’s first edition, it might not have been such a profitable decision after all. It all seemed a bit, well, inconsequential, really. Anna Adams did some undercover reporting which proved that, when sitting next to someone with a noisy mobile phone on a train or in a restaurant, some people will confront them. And some won’t.

New Who companion Freema Agyeman was grilled live from Pontypool, from a trailer that looked alarmingly like a 1980s Barratt showhome, in a textbook example of the “what? … sorry … I was just going to ask you” troubled satellite interview. Kate Humble searched for red deer in a piece which relied a lot on whether you go for her head-girl hockey-sticks manner (guess what, I don’t). And finally, a live interview with one of the victims of those drug trials that went wrong, and his new wife. It sounded like a decent scoop, but it never quite revved up (although I’d started flipping by this point).

Adrian Chiles is, as everyone’s been saying, a brilliant presenter, but he is undoubtedly better when there’s something more tangible to work with, such as football analysis, an Apprentice firing or a hapless chief executive to be interrogated on Working Lunch. The presence of Nadia Sawalha put me in mind of too many dire BBC morning shows, usually involving the residents of Albert Square nagging us to stop smoking or something.

It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t exactly feel like vital viewing, either.

Oh, and the five-minute regional bulletin at 7.25 feels a bit unnecessary, as you just get the same stories they’d recapped half an hour earlier and, in the case of London, a second full regional weather forecast in the space of 30 minutes.