Conan O'Brien

The Oscars’ host has a love of the absurd — especially when it comes to his work, says Andrew Anthony

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When Conan O’Brien, the MC at next week's Academy Awards, nervously started out as a talkshow host, the reviews were so bad that one critic suggested he should return to his previous identity, Conan O'Blivion. Instead he stuck to the job, amid continued speculation that was he about to lose it, and slowly built a reputation for madcap professionalism.

In the US, late-night talkshows have long enjoyed a prominence in the culture far greater than their audience size. In the Donald Trump era, they've also become an improbable frontline of resistance, with Jimmy Kimmel Live! suspended following Maga-critical comments, and Stephen Colbert's The Late Show cancelled in what many see as an appeasement to Trump.

O'Brien has offered his support to both men but has never been particularly political himself. After three decades in the celebrity chat trenches, fronting Late Night, the Tonight Show and then finally Conan, the 1.93m (6ft 4in) redhead, who turns 63 next month, is in danger of becoming an elder statesman in the business. For most of O'Brien's 28 years behind the prop desk, he was operating five nights a week. What confers a kind of hallowed status on talkshow hosts is not reach but familiarity, the reassurance that at a given hour each night they will be there to prompt, guffaw and play their part in the American celebrity industrial complex.

It was an unlikely calling for the history and literature graduate from Harvard. Not for him the well-trodden standup comedian’s path to the host's swivel chair. Nor, he has said, did he harbour an abiding passion to ask guests about their latest movie. As he once put it, dreaming of “interviewing B-level celebrities” is “a sad ambition”.

Sad, perhaps, but also upliftingly lucrative. Four years ago O’Brien sold Team Coco, his podcast and digital media business, for $150m. The centrepiece of the deal was the podcast