After a lifetime tuned to Radio 4, I’m joining the exodus of listeners and presenters to an edgier, less predictable medium
Apodcast? Imagine the Lady Bracknell disdain with which the old big beasts of broadcasting, the Paxmans and Humphryses, would regard leaving the BBC for a medium that amateurs play with in their parents’ basements. Yet at the height of her career, Emily Maitlis, Newsnight’s star, Prince Andrew’s elegant nemesis, is off to present a podcast.
With her goes Jon Sopel, the BBC former US editor, a shoo-in for the vacant political editor job. Is it the money? Certainly the media group Global must have cut large cheques to lure Eddie Mair, Andrew Marr and Andrew Neil. (Unlike BBC salaries, they aren’t revealed for public perusal.) But while Sopel and Maitlis will also have an LBC radio show, the podcast is the central lure.
The pandemic accelerated a huge change in our listening habits. Increasingly we work out in gyms or walk our dogs with a podcast in our wireless earbuds. In 2021, 41 per cent of over-16s had listened to one in the previous month. Consumer choice has been refined down from a favourite radio station or even presenter, to the most arcane individual preference. Whether you love comfort food, Marxist philosophy, self-help advice or snooping on other people’s sex lives, someone is streaming it.
We have become pickier, but also more intolerant. Social media allows us to create echo chambers: on Twitter we hear only views we share, blocking anyone who disagrees. So, while cooking dinner, why endure a radio voice which grates or a subject you don’t care for, even for a second?
Until two years ago, I regarded podcasts as baggy and tiresome with low “information transfer” — ie it took an hour of flabby chit-chat to learn what I could pick up in a six-paragraph Times story. I didn’t like the “bantercast” bros, the presenter sycophancy, the “thank you to my dear friends at Good Girl organic dog foods” icky endorsements, the special whispery narrator voice, the padding out of stories for endless episodes. I worried what relatives thought about loved ones’ murders turned into hours of true-crime content.
The soundtrack to my life has always been Radio 4. My parents, no music fans, kept it on all day. In a working-class family, pre-internet, far from London, it gave me culture, politics, the whole world. My first act every morning is to switch on the peerless Today programme. Radio 4 was my education — yet now I lunge to switch it off.
Why? In part, the BBC, like all liberal institutions, has become careful to the point of self-censorship. Comedy shows such as The News Quiz or The Now Show poke fun only at obvious targets, or abandon humour for hectoring, while many documentary programmes are identity politics in their most static form: “This is what it’s like to be me”. I’m interested in all underexplored viewpoints, but there must be a story, surprises, nuance, complexity. By contrast, a long-standing BBC programme In Touch, for the visually impaired, bubbles with ideas, like how blind characters in sci-fi emboldened the presenter to deal with his own sight loss.
So, despite sharing Radio 4’s broadly left politics, I switch off. Because I can predict what will be said, the language used, the conclusions drawn. I know “difficult” questions will be wafted away. Quite simply, I’m bored. Friends in America say they feel the same about NPR (National Public Radio). It is preaching to the choir. Except with Radio 4, I’ve been a choir member my whole life.
Now I seek out “heterodox” podcasts, with a liberal yet rational and questioning stance. I listen to Blocked and Reported, about online insanity and the US left, or Bari Weiss’s Honestly. It’s refreshingly free-thinking. I feel warmly towards the presenters, that I’m part of an exclusive club of fellow sceptics. I get that righteous buzz of having my views confirmed.
This is why 11 million people a week tune into the three-hour right-wing ramblings of Joe Rogan, which Spotify paid £100 million to host. A podcast, no matter how popular, feels samizdat, outside the mainstream, something you found for yourself. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex may have received £18 million for a podcast which so far amounts to one 35-minute episode, but mainly this is an entrepreneurial medium. A whole empire can evolve with no backing but just one great idea, like My Dad Wrote a Porno, where three people discuss a smutty book written by one of their fathers. The trio now sell out the London Palladium.
What the BBC has not yet digested is that its current stars enjoy a different relationship with a podcast audience. Brexitcast began when a producer heard Laura Kuenssberg chatting about the gossip, jokes and intrigue she heard as political editor. Not only was this more informal, often amusing, account of events popular, but Kuenssberg, used to death threats and misogynist abuse, received mainly warm emails. Since listeners had chosen the podcast, they felt loyal. There was room to explain ambiguities and thus avoid cancellation uproar. Maitlis and Sopel also found Americast a refuge from the usual vitriol which, as the former Scotland editor Sarah Smith described last week, every BBC figure endures.
This week in Ukraine we’ve seen the BBC at its best: its vast reach, resources, experienced journalists. But younger viewers don’t wish to consume news in old ways and older viewers chafe at a lack of editorial freedom. (Andrew Marr is leaving to “get my own voice back”.) Once BBC lifers like Mishal Husain or Kuenssberg would be loyal, because there is no bigger name than the BBC. But with a podcast you are the brand.
_”The BBC, like all liberal institutions, has become careful to the point of self-censorship”_
Not sure what Janice Turner means by ‘liberal institutions’, but this sentence genuinely makes me wonder how much attention she paid to Maitlis and Sopel’s _Americast_.
TL;DR: Please notice me, Joe.
This really is mindless drivel. Apart from anything else, podcasts are something the BBC has embraced enthusiastically, they have [dozens of them](https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/podcasts).
Also, to give you some idea of what the author considers “a liberal yet rational and questioning stance”, this is the title of latest episode of the podcast she recommends:
> How Wokeness, Toxic Masculinity, White Privilege, And TERFs Forced Vladimir Putin To Invade Ukraine
4 comments
After a lifetime tuned to Radio 4, I’m joining the exodus of listeners and presenters to an edgier, less predictable medium
Apodcast? Imagine the Lady Bracknell disdain with which the old big beasts of broadcasting, the Paxmans and Humphryses, would regard leaving the BBC for a medium that amateurs play with in their parents’ basements. Yet at the height of her career, Emily Maitlis, Newsnight’s star, Prince Andrew’s elegant nemesis, is off to present a podcast.
With her goes Jon Sopel, the BBC former US editor, a shoo-in for the vacant political editor job. Is it the money? Certainly the media group Global must have cut large cheques to lure Eddie Mair, Andrew Marr and Andrew Neil. (Unlike BBC salaries, they aren’t revealed for public perusal.) But while Sopel and Maitlis will also have an LBC radio show, the podcast is the central lure.
The pandemic accelerated a huge change in our listening habits. Increasingly we work out in gyms or walk our dogs with a podcast in our wireless earbuds. In 2021, 41 per cent of over-16s had listened to one in the previous month. Consumer choice has been refined down from a favourite radio station or even presenter, to the most arcane individual preference. Whether you love comfort food, Marxist philosophy, self-help advice or snooping on other people’s sex lives, someone is streaming it.
We have become pickier, but also more intolerant. Social media allows us to create echo chambers: on Twitter we hear only views we share, blocking anyone who disagrees. So, while cooking dinner, why endure a radio voice which grates or a subject you don’t care for, even for a second?
Until two years ago, I regarded podcasts as baggy and tiresome with low “information transfer” — ie it took an hour of flabby chit-chat to learn what I could pick up in a six-paragraph Times story. I didn’t like the “bantercast” bros, the presenter sycophancy, the “thank you to my dear friends at Good Girl organic dog foods” icky endorsements, the special whispery narrator voice, the padding out of stories for endless episodes. I worried what relatives thought about loved ones’ murders turned into hours of true-crime content.
The soundtrack to my life has always been Radio 4. My parents, no music fans, kept it on all day. In a working-class family, pre-internet, far from London, it gave me culture, politics, the whole world. My first act every morning is to switch on the peerless Today programme. Radio 4 was my education — yet now I lunge to switch it off.
Why? In part, the BBC, like all liberal institutions, has become careful to the point of self-censorship. Comedy shows such as The News Quiz or The Now Show poke fun only at obvious targets, or abandon humour for hectoring, while many documentary programmes are identity politics in their most static form: “This is what it’s like to be me”. I’m interested in all underexplored viewpoints, but there must be a story, surprises, nuance, complexity. By contrast, a long-standing BBC programme In Touch, for the visually impaired, bubbles with ideas, like how blind characters in sci-fi emboldened the presenter to deal with his own sight loss.
So, despite sharing Radio 4’s broadly left politics, I switch off. Because I can predict what will be said, the language used, the conclusions drawn. I know “difficult” questions will be wafted away. Quite simply, I’m bored. Friends in America say they feel the same about NPR (National Public Radio). It is preaching to the choir. Except with Radio 4, I’ve been a choir member my whole life.
Now I seek out “heterodox” podcasts, with a liberal yet rational and questioning stance. I listen to Blocked and Reported, about online insanity and the US left, or Bari Weiss’s Honestly. It’s refreshingly free-thinking. I feel warmly towards the presenters, that I’m part of an exclusive club of fellow sceptics. I get that righteous buzz of having my views confirmed.
This is why 11 million people a week tune into the three-hour right-wing ramblings of Joe Rogan, which Spotify paid £100 million to host. A podcast, no matter how popular, feels samizdat, outside the mainstream, something you found for yourself. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex may have received £18 million for a podcast which so far amounts to one 35-minute episode, but mainly this is an entrepreneurial medium. A whole empire can evolve with no backing but just one great idea, like My Dad Wrote a Porno, where three people discuss a smutty book written by one of their fathers. The trio now sell out the London Palladium.
What the BBC has not yet digested is that its current stars enjoy a different relationship with a podcast audience. Brexitcast began when a producer heard Laura Kuenssberg chatting about the gossip, jokes and intrigue she heard as political editor. Not only was this more informal, often amusing, account of events popular, but Kuenssberg, used to death threats and misogynist abuse, received mainly warm emails. Since listeners had chosen the podcast, they felt loyal. There was room to explain ambiguities and thus avoid cancellation uproar. Maitlis and Sopel also found Americast a refuge from the usual vitriol which, as the former Scotland editor Sarah Smith described last week, every BBC figure endures.
This week in Ukraine we’ve seen the BBC at its best: its vast reach, resources, experienced journalists. But younger viewers don’t wish to consume news in old ways and older viewers chafe at a lack of editorial freedom. (Andrew Marr is leaving to “get my own voice back”.) Once BBC lifers like Mishal Husain or Kuenssberg would be loyal, because there is no bigger name than the BBC. But with a podcast you are the brand.
_”The BBC, like all liberal institutions, has become careful to the point of self-censorship”_
Not sure what Janice Turner means by ‘liberal institutions’, but this sentence genuinely makes me wonder how much attention she paid to Maitlis and Sopel’s _Americast_.
TL;DR: Please notice me, Joe.
This really is mindless drivel. Apart from anything else, podcasts are something the BBC has embraced enthusiastically, they have [dozens of them](https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/podcasts).
Also, to give you some idea of what the author considers “a liberal yet rational and questioning stance”, this is the title of latest episode of the podcast she recommends:
> How Wokeness, Toxic Masculinity, White Privilege, And TERFs Forced Vladimir Putin To Invade Ukraine
Make of that what you will …
[drug-addled leftist war correspondent hobos](https://open.spotify.com/show/0rOatMqaG3wB5BF4AdsrSX), [dungeons and dragons campaigns](https://critrole.com/) and [exhausted philadelphia-based civil engineers discussing disasters](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPxHg4192hLDpTI2w7F9rPg/videos)?
man if only.