In April 2022, a teary-eyed James Corden announced his plans to quit his high-profile gig as the host of The Late Late Show. After spending the best part of a decade in California, schmoozing on the chat-show sofa with Hollywood stars and persuading everyone from Adele to Michelle Obama to sing along to his car radio, the actor-writer-presenter said he was ready to return to London to bring up his young children. The response on this side of the Atlantic, though, couldn’t exactly be described as an open-armed welcome. The general sentiment? America, you can keep him.
That’s because slagging off Corden has become something of a national pastime. We’re so good at it, so persuasive in our derision, that even the Americans have started to copy our snark, rolling their eyes whenever the 45-year-old, say, makes yet another splashy cameo in a movie musical adaptation (a 2021 Change.org petition arguing that Corden should “in no way shape or form” be “in or near” the forthcoming Wicked film managed to amass more than 100,000 signatures). Hating on Corden is now an easy punchline, a default setting. Now that he’s reinstalled in the UK, he will have some work to do to win over a cynical home crowd.
