At a time of night when I should have been relaxing on the sofa, glass in hand, I found myself bolt upright in front of Andrew Denton’s new television program on Seven: Interview. For the first ten minutes of the show, I was in a blind panic; “Who are these women? Are they sisters? And why are they on television?”

A quick Google told me that Bronte and Cate Campbell were two sisters who had just won swimming medals at the Commonwealth Games. Wasn’t Channel Seven the host broadcaster for the Games? Suddenly, it all made sense — Denton’s new show had been promoted on social media as “Andrew Denton is back. Interview after the Commonwealth Games.” This one must have been imposed on him by Seven chairman Kerry Stokes.

It was an odd choice of talent to kick off a brand new show. I’m a sport-free zone, but Denton is so talented he can usually make anyone sound interesting. And the test of a good interview show is keeping around a viewer, like me, who has NFI about the talent.

However, he was defeated by the Campbell sisters, who — let’s face it — have spent the past 15 years ploughing up and down a swimming pool and not much else. They seem very nice, but sportspeople at that age are rarely good talent because their lives are consumed with training and competing — there’s little backstory. After hearing about the main source of sibling angst (stacking the dishwasher) I found myself wondering if Stokes had forked out for real Grant Featherston chairs or made Denton and his guests sit on the cheap copies. This was at 9.15pm.

It went on and on until 9.34pm when, following a small singalong of the second verse of the national anthem and some poetry reading from Bronte, the interview wound up. Finally, I could log off Twitter, which was not complimentary.

“Did Peter Beattie put together the order of talent?” said one tweet. “Surely if you have to interview network athletes you do it after the headline guest?”

Which, considering the headline guest was Led Zeppelin’s lead singer Robert Plant, was a fair point. His interview was much more interesting because Plant, 69, is an talented musician who is also articulate and self-reflective.

Although the content was good, the interview was ultimately hobbled by the commercial television format, which chopped it up into four-minute segments. The ad breaks were incredibly long and crammed with advertising for My Kitchen Rules and sports betting agencies. It’s hard to maintain the flow of a conversation between two people when it’s constantly interrupted by exhortations to buy a car; this was not a problem for most of Denton’s previous shows, of course, because they were shown on the ABC.

In the 1980s into the 1990s, he hosted a number of TV shows, including Blah Blah Blah, The Money or the Gun and Sweaty. From 2003 to 2008 he was the host of Enough Rope with Andrew Denton, for which he won several awards, including Gold Logies in 2008 and 2009. His other interview show from that period, Elders (with older, notable Australian) contained some unmissable television.

The problem is that since Denton last hosted an interview program, in 2009, the format has moved on. Viewers increasingly watch interviewers such as John Oliver and Stephen Colbert, whose programs are very fast-paced and exuberant; by contrast, this looks a little old-fashioned.

Will the viewers of Seven stick around to watch Interview after the histrionics and manufactured drama of its lead-in program, My Kitchen Rules? Will the ABC viewers, his natural audience, actually switch channels to watch a program on commercial TV? The ratings will tell us.

I was in the middle of saying to my spouse “I don’t think I’m the target audience for this program” when the trailer for next week’s program came up. “Mick Fanning!” I asked him, “who’s that?”

“He’s a surfer,” he sighed. “And no, you’re not”.