Onetime collaborator Craig Duncan recently took to YouTube to look back on “the most difficult and obnoxious presenter I’ve ever worked with.” The British TV director encountered Corden on a 2013 episode of the comedy panel series A League Of Their Own, in which stars Corden, Jack Whitehall, Andrew Flintoff, and Jamie Redknapp parodied MasterChef. “It was season seven, episode three, and I’ll never forget it,” he begins his tale.
Duncan knew he was in for a challenge from the beginning, when Corden’s production team asked him, “How are you working with difficult presenters?” before he booked the job. Still, he was unprepared for what was ahead of him when he arrived at a rehearsal for the show.
“There was a joke, and I remember [Corden] just looked at it like, ‘That’s not funny, that’s not funny, ah shit, we have to rewrite this,’” Duncan recalls. “I dunno, maybe he was having a bad day, I thought, and the writing had just not been up to scratch, but I definitely thought, ‘Man, you know, somebody wrote that, not nice to do that.’ But television isn’t for the faint-hearted and sometimes you have to take these knocks on the chin. I just kept thinking of the person who wrote the joke and that they’re doing the best with what they’ve been given, which was a garbage show, as far as I was concerned.”
Even though he wasn’t enthusiastic about the gig himself, Duncan acknowledges that making TV requires a lot of hard work from a lot of people, and has nothing but kind words for A League Of Their Own’s production designers and the rest of the on-screen talent. As for Corden? He apparently showed up to set 45 minutes late and told the director how to do his job.
Director Slams James Cordon
“Cheers, James, you got your way!” Duncan concludes. “Well done for treading all over my toes, I don’t care, I’ll get paid at the end of the day, and I hope I never ever work with you again!”
