Carpool Karaoke puts James Corden in driver’s seat of success

A British comedian has found success, and fascinating singing passengers, on the gruelling US TV late-night timeslot.

James Corden performs at the Tony Awards in New York.

When James Corden took over the reins of The Late Late Show in March last year, he was seen as a huge gamble for the CBS network. “I’d never even been on an American talk show,” he admits. “Nobody knew who I was.”

Even if America had heard of him, the task in hand was not easy. The hour-long show, taped in front of a live studio audience, airs five nights a week.

He has a 60-hour working week, week in, week out, in the unforgiving glare of late-night television. Worse still, The Late Late Show is late late. It goes out at around midnight, when most sober and sane people are tucked up in bed. To succeed, you need to connect with that great blubber belt of midwestern sofa-dwellers. These people do not take to foreigners kindly.

“What are the chances of a chubby boy, and I’m being generous, going to America to do a top job like this every night and being anything other than a complete disaster?” he said at the time. “I’m scared I’ll be the boy from High Wycombe who just couldn’t hack it and had to go back home with his tail between his legs.”

Corden had also just become a father for the second time. Five weeks after his wife, Julia, gave birth to their second child, the family was relocating to California. The rumoured £650,000 relocation package and £13,000-a-month villa in Santa Monica would have helped, but, as he put it, “it was tough”.

Fifteen months and 207 shows later, Corden has been transformed into America’s sweetheart. The comedian who once co-wrote a quaint little sitcom called Gavin and Stacey is now a bona fide west coast A-lister. He is 30kg lighter, thanks, presumably, to the vegetable smoothies and the hour of aerobics with which he starts each day. He has a better haircut. And he has connected not just with those nocturnal sofa-dwellers but also with a large chunk of the YouTube generation and their very short attention spans.

While viewing figures for the TV broadcasts have risen only slowly since Corden replaced Scottish-born comedian Craig Ferguson, his online success is astronomical. In September he celebrated news he had a million YouTube subscribers. Last week he broke six million, and his clips have had more than 1.3 billion individual views.

Much of this is down to Carpool Karaoke, a segment of the show clearly designed to be viral-friendly. The idea is simple. He picks up a celebrity, usually a musician, he drives them to work and they sing along the way. Part of its success is the star power of his guests. Adele’s clip has had 112 million views online. One Direction’s is at 71.5 million. Justin Bieber has visited twice, totalling 127 million. This month the first lady, Michelle Obama, got a lift to the White House with Corden.

The other part is down to his karaoke skills. The 37-year-old is no shrinking violet. He is a man who would volunteer to sing in public while the rest of us ran for the hills. His complete lack of embarrassment on camera has become his trademark. Americans love a trier.

Before he left for California, Corden had become something of a Marmite figure in Britain. After Gavin and Stacey he was on the road to becoming a national treasure, but with his success came the perception he was overconfident, cocky even. Industry goodwill evaporated after several spats with other actors and a swaggering BAFTA speech, in which he berated judges for not giving him a third award.

Critics moved in for the kill when a sketch show he wrote with his Gavin and Stacey co-star, Mathew Horne, tanked. It got worse when Lesbian Vampire Killers, his execrable homage to Hammer Horror, was deemed the worst film of 2009, if not the entire first decade of the century.

Skip forward three years and one pep talk from his mentor, Welsh actor and comedian Rob Brydon, and his Tony Awards acceptance speech for One Man, Two Guvnors — which was a smash hit in London and on Broadway — shows a transformed man. Here was the tearful, authentic, even gushing Corden that America would come to know and love.

“What struck me in rehearsals,” says One Man, Two Guvnors director Cal McCrystal, “was his utter fearlessness. He just threw himself into the stunts, some of which were really dangerous. Because of his size, I wasn’t sure he’d be up to it, but he just went for it.”

McCrystal and Corden were planning a return to Broadway with Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum when the call came from CBS.

“Of course he was always going to say yes,” says McCrystal. “But I think once he did, he realised what a daunting prospect it was. Fortunately, he’s an extremely confident guy. He knows how to party, but he’s also driven and he has the personal energy to support that drive.”

McCrystal expects him to tread the Broadway boards again once the CBS contract expires. Others say he is homesick, openly discussing a return to England. “We have bouts of homesickness,” Corden said earlier this month.

Of course, talk of returning home might just be a cunning ploy during contract negotiations.

He may miss Blighty, but when he weighs up the pros and cons, the sunshine and the drizzle, the fanatical American audience and the lukewarm British one, he may just decide to stay.

The Sunday Times