Adele stressed again and again how nervous she was as she sang to a London Palladium crowd that seemed to contain every celebrity within a hundred square miles. But the quality that came through during An Audience with Adele (ITV), the 90-minute special with which ITV marked the release of her new album, was her sheer, steam-rolling charisma. If her tearjerker power-ballads didn’t get you, nattering anecdotes about being pulled over by the police in LA while driving to the supermarket did the trick.
The Londoner is a pop A-lister but also a cultural phenomenon. Such is her influence, streaming service Spotify this week disabled the “shuffle” function on its website, seemingly because Adele wanted fans to listen to her new LP, 30, all the way through from start to finish. Another sign of her star power is that ITV has been persuaded to dust down its old “An Audience With” format for the first time since 2011 (excluding a posthumous 2013 tribute to Les Dawson).
Guest of honour in 2011 was Barry Manilow and, iconic though he is, it feels safe to assume well-wishers coming out to salute him didn’t include Stormzy, Emma Thompson or Bryan Cranston. But was that actually the star of Breaking Bad hunched in the VIP area down the front or did your eyes deceive you?
This celeb-spotting component of the broadcast was where the real fun was to be found, especially for Adele agnostics, assuming there are any left (her record sales suggest that might not be the case). So when Adele introduced Send My Love (To Your New Lover) by saying it was the song fans enjoyed dancing to, first to her feet was Emma Thompson.
Dua Lipa at another point appeared to be sharing an in-joke with a pal a few feet away only for Michael McIntyre’s vast wedge of a head to loom into focus. It was like being at the celeb version of the school play, where the apple of everyone’s eye also happens to be the planet’s biggest pop star.
Part of Adele’s appeal lies in the distance between her glamorous musical persona and her gobby real-life self. And yet she had come across as worryingly Gwyneth Paltrow-esque when interviewed by Oprah Winfrey for a TV special that aired last week in the US. There, she had described her recent divorce as a “process” and generally sounded as if she’d been up all night listening to mindfulness podcasts.
The yoga mat had however been left behind as she came to London (the concert was shot November 6 – two weeks after her Oprah chinwag was filmed). This was the Adele the world had fallen in love with: melodramatic but endearingly earthbound. She sang like a turbocharged diva and chatted between songs in the style of a neighbour who’d poked their head over the hedge with some juicy gossip to share.
“I got really emotional when I come around the bend up there,” she said, taking a breather after the first few tunes. Later, she restarted Easy on Me after becoming choked up on the first try. Or as Adele put it: “one more time, I’m s—-ing myself.”
ITV was clearly keen that An Audience With Adele be more than just a concert film. And so there was a heartfelt reunion with her favourite English teacher, whom Adele hadn’t seen since she was 12.
Celebs were meanwhile invited to stand up and pose funny questions. Dawn French asked if people constantly came up to Adele to share their romantic woes (yes, though only at parties). And Samuel L Jackson wondered if she’d ever used her “Adele-ity” to get out of trouble (which led to the anecdote about the policeman pulling her over).
These were all presumably pre-rehearsed and nothing asked was devastatingly insightful. But Adele bantered with unforced gusto. And by the end she had more than lived up to the promise of her opening song by treating audience and viewers at home to an evening of hometown glory.
