Jonathan Ross admits he’s an introvert and that ‘woke cancel culture’ is getting ‘dangerous’

Jonathan Ross weighed in on being ‘woke’ and ‘cancel culture’ during an appearance on Loose Women on Monday.

And the presenter – who has racked up a roster of hundreds of famous guests on his various TV and radio chat shows – admitted, surprisingly, that he is an introvert at heart.

‘I used to struggle in company. I’d start feeling antsy and want to be elsewhere,’ Jonathan explained. ‘I like people but I like it in a limited way and a controlled way. 

‘If friends come round, it’s almost like an overload if it’s open ended. I kind of want to know when I can get rid of everyone. My default setting is that I’m more comfortable being on my own.’

Asked what his wife Jane thinks of this, he elaborated: ‘I used to say to her, I obviously love her very much, but I kind of like it when we’re in the same house but not in the same room.

‘You know you need contact and interaction with other people but you can turn it off.’

On today’s younger generation, Jonathan mused: ‘When young people are saying the way things were aren’t the way things should be, we owe it to ourselves to listen. But it’s getting to the stage where people are paying too much lip service.

‘When you see people being stopped from speaking at universities or this new thing called “safetyism” – I don’t feel safe working in this environment because people have different opinions to me – I think that’s wrong.

‘Where people get cancelled or shut down just because they hold different opinions, that’s a dangerous area and I’m not comfortable with that.’

Touching on social media, he went on: ‘We weren’t sharing images of ourselves at all and now we are – sometimes undressed, on holiday, what we’re wearing.

‘There’s more at stake it seems in how you live where we kind of just got on with it.

‘It’s not necessarily a bad thing it’s just the way things are. Each generation has things to deal with. It must be pretty tough to be a young person today.’

Jonathan is currently a judge on The Masked Singer and its new spin-off, The Masked Dancer.

He sits on a panel alongside Davina McCall, Mo Gilligan and newcomer to the franchise, Oti Mabuse, a Strictly Come Dancing pro. On it, the panel have to guess who the disguised dancer is.

‘Oti feels because it is her field, she should get people right and of course she does. She’s such a lovely woman.

‘I love seeing that little kids love [the show], I’ve never been involved much in shows that the whole family can watch.’

Of the fact that the show is far less brutal than other talent series, he added: ‘When you see those shows where people really want to make you say “I don’t think you’re quite good enough” – I’d struggle with that.

‘This is fun, it’s upbeat. There’s nothing much at stake, it was an easy thing for me to say yes to.’