Claudia Winkleman gave the great British chat show a proper go — one series, a seven-week run, a now-notorious teal sofa — and then handed it straight back, explaining she was simply "too nervous to enjoy it." Not cancelled. Not axed by a jittery commissioner. Quit. On her own terms, according to the BBC, which all but admitted it would have happily made a second series and, per Deadline's Jake Kanter, had already struck "a deal beyond one season."

You cannot even properly dunk on this, which is deeply inconvenient for everyone in the comments. "Too nervous to enjoy it" is the most honest sentence anyone has ever said about the format. This is a woman who fronts The Traitors and survived years of Strictly, and the thing that finally got to her was a sofa with her own name above the door. The pressure of your name on the marquee apparently hits different.

The show wasn't even a disaster, which makes the exit more interesting. The seven-week run produced genuinely lovely television — Lisa Kudrow turning up and being visibly thrilled to meet Linda from The Traitors is exactly the surreal collision these shows exist for. Ratings were lower than Norton's but respectable; the reviews were mixed, not a bloodbath. As the Telegraph's Anita Singh put it, marshalling a room of guests and cueing their pre-agreed anecdotes is brutal work — "Graham Norton makes that look deceptively easy."

And that's the real story hiding under the headline: the throne Norton is vacating, and the dawning realisation that the British chat show has become a hospital pass. It used to be the crown jewel of a presenting career. Now it's the gig your most bankable, most beloved star tries once and politely declines to do again. Singh reckons another couple of series and Winkleman would have grown into it — but the format gives a spontaneous performer almost no room to be spontaneous, which is a polite way of saying the job might be the problem.

The comparisons are already being drawn to Davina McCall's short-lived 2006 attempt, as former BBC One controller Peter Fincham noted — another beloved presenter, another chat show that didn't stick. Maybe the lesson isn't that these women couldn't do it. Maybe it's that the shiny chair everyone assumes is a prize has quietly become the one nobody sensible actually wants to sit in.