Later... With Jools Holland: a cockroach in the schedules

Later… With Jools Holland (11 April, 10pm, and 14 April, 11pm, BBC2) is back with its 50th series. Really? Only 50? I could have sworn there were more than that. Like the Antiques Roadshow and MasterChef, it is a cockroach in the schedules: inelegant, insistent, indestructible. The BBC proudly calls Later… its “flagship live music show”, apparently forgetting that it’s actually its only live music show, if you don’t count talent contests or the customary musical play-out on The Andrew Marr Show. Because where else can you find live music on the box?

To today’s youngsters, reared on apps and algorithms, televised pop music must seem like a quaint concept. But for those of us too lazy or knackered to unearth new music by ourselves, television remains a portal into a world where performers can be artful, interesting or just awful. We have watched with sadness as these shows have come and gone: The Word, as embarrassing as it was brilliant; CD:UK, a Saturday morning festival of neon; Popworld, where Simon Amstell and Miquita Oliver struggled to disguise their mutual antipathy. And, of course, Top of the Pops, cruelly retired and now archived on BBC4 as a late-night reminder of better times.

As other music shows have withered, Later… has endured, with 10 times the artistic credibility and none of the fun. I am forever tortured by that ellipsis in the title, a tantalising hint that its long-serving host could be replaced and it could just as easily be Later… With Lauren Laverne. We can but dream. Jools is the real problem here, with his smarmy grin, his awkward patter and his excruciating habit of crowbarring himself and his boogie-woogie piano into other people’s songs, no matter how incompatible.

The best niche programmes rely on repetition but in Jools’s hands Later… truly is the Groundhog Day of music shows. This week, introducing acts including Kasabian, Goldfrapp and Thundercat, he will stand at the centre of the studio surrounded by patient artists, arms outstretched and palms facing heavenwards. Several songs into the show he will appear with a clipboard, like a sales manager doing a stock take, and ask three, maybe four questions of the most special of the special guests. Such is the precision and complexity of said questions – “How did the album come about?” “How do you like touring?” – that they must be committed to paper.

Somewhere in this torturous exchange, Jools will make a joke about BBC budgets, possibly related to the beaker of water that passes for guest refreshment, or the wobbly garden furniture on which the interviews are conducted. It’s no wonder that, in this high-def facility in the badlands of Kent, so many guests insist on wearing sunglasses. This isn’t rock star posturing, they’re simply masking their incredulity.

In 100 years’ time, when Holland has floated off to the boogie-woogie party in the sky, Later… will no doubt still be on the BBC, with only minor tweaks to the format, and so will Jools. Like Elvis’s touring hologram, he will live on in digitised form, still sitting on a piano stool a little too close to the pop stars of the future. And the viewers will be grateful because the live music industry will have long since died, Spotify will run the world, food will come in sachets, and a pixelated Jools will offer the only evidence that music can still be played on stages by humans.