Two podcasts have kept me riveted on long journeys in the last couple of weeks. I’ve already written about Jack Blanchard’s Politico podcast with Owen Paterson, but last week I drove up to Norfolk listening to Elizabeth Day talking to Ed Miliband about the failures in his life. Believe me, it was gripping stuff. 

Miliband can sometimes appear a little buttoned up in interviews, particularly when they stray into personal matters. Not here. Out it all came. We heard or saw a side of Ed Miliband that we had never seen before. It wasn’t that he admitted that he’d got everything wrong; he didn’t. 

Indeed, he doubled down on his strategy as leader of the Labour Party to “move on” from New Labour. In his latest volume of diaries covering this period, Alastair Campbell made clear that he thought Miliband should have embraced New Labour achievements rather than seek to trash the period of 1997-2010. 

But it was Miliband telling the world about his family, his struggle with his mental health and coming to terms with what happened that made this podcast such a great listen. 

Elizabeth Day is a very talented interviewer, and although it can all seem a bit matey from time to time and sometimes a little too gushing, the atmosphere of two friends chewing the fat was a really charming way to conduct a conversation. “Oh Ed…” said Elizabeth on more than one occasion, leading the listener to believe that she was hugging him or squeezing his hand. Empathy is her watchword.

We didn’t learn a huge amount more about Ed Miliband’s relationship with his brother, which was almost skirted over at times. Still, it’s clear that the fracturing of the relationship in 2010 was the culmination of a period where Ed couldn’t quite compete with brother David. He got slightly worse A-Level results.

David got a First in PPE at the same Oxford college where Ed got a second. His victory in 2010 was the first time Miliband the Younger got an Upper Second. And David made more headway in the New Labour government than Ed did, ending up as Foreign Secretary, with his younger brother in the middle-ranking job of Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.

No matter your politics, no matter what your opinion of Ed Miliband, I promise you won’t regret it if you download this podcast. If I were compiling a top ten podcasts of the year so far, it would be in my top two.

Schitt’s Creek, Netflix

I’ve been late to the party with Schitt’s Creek, but even now, after watching two complete series and two episodes of the third series, I still feel that I’m the teetotaller who’s missing out on all the fun. Yes, it’s vaguely amusing, yes each character is well defined, but there’s something two dimensional about the whole thing. 

Most of my friends think it is laugh out loud funny. I’ve occasionally forced a smile, but for me, every episode is the same. I suppose most sitcoms are like that in some ways – they develop what they think is a winning formula and stick with it. You either “get” it, or you don’t. It’s like some people (like me) think The Fast Show is the funniest thing to hit our TV screens in thirty years; others get bored with the repetition of the famous one-liners, which is nice.

 If I’m honest American sitcoms – and surely this has to be classed as a sitcom even though it’s not filmed in a studio – are rarely very funny. Cheers, Frasier and Friends all left me cold. I could barely raise a titter at any of them. Maybe it’s me.

So Long, Farewell…

I regret to say this is my last Media Review for Reaction, for the time being. I’ve enjoyed writing the column over the last year, and thank you for reading it, but I need to devote more time to my book projects, one of which has a very looming deadline.

 I’ve therefore decided that I need to give up this column and my column for ConservativeHome, which I’ve been writing each week for more than a decade. I want to thank Iain Martin and his team for giving me the opportunity, and I hope I will still be appearing on Reaction from time to time in one form or another. 

The pair approached me to be their lead presenter on the channel, with Donal Blaney joining the team also. Stephan had bought a Georgian townhouse in Doughty Street, in Bloomsbury, from where we intended to broadcast live each evening. While we were broadcasting, the whole house was being renovated. It was a building site. Looking back, the whole enterprise was ten years ahead of its time, but it only lasted a year.

Tim’s view was that we should be concentrating on short video clips rather than trying to emulate linear TV. I disagreed, and my view prevailed, but in retrospect, he was right, and I was wrong.

We launched before we were ready. Most of the channel’s presenters had little experience of presenting, let alone reading an autocue. Our set was a disaster and looked like a middle eastern bordello. The sound was dodgy, and the lighting was awful. As Theresa May might say: “Remind you of anyone?”

This experience leads me to have some sympathy for the team that has set up GB News from scratch in a matter of months. Mistakes, they’ve made more than a few. Indeed, too many to mention. However, most of the early technical teething difficulties ought to be rectified very quickly. At 18 Doughty Street, we decided after the first night to ditch the set which had been built, and within a week or two, we had something radically different and easy on the eye.

The fact is, with the technical problems and the apparent advertiser boycott, you could argue that GB News might be pleased with the level of coverage they have had. The haters were always going to hate, and because of its overt intention on editorial direction, did anyone ever think that anyone in the liberal media was ever going to be anything less than condemnatory? Of course not.

In some ways, GB News is the wrong name. It’s not actually a news channel, given it doesn’t have news bulletins at the top of the hour, or indeed anywhere else. Its entire programming output is based on commentary and opinion. And why GB News, why not UK News? What has Northern Ireland done to deserve being ignored?!

Forget the technical difficulties; the launch evening on Sunday was a missed opportunity. Instead of Andrew Neil having an hour-long love-in with his fellow presenters, why not start with a bang? With a hufe newsmaking interview? After all, that’s what Andrew Neil is known for. And then to follow it with a manic Dan Wootton launching into a slightly bizarre anti-lockdown monologue, well, I can’t think anyone can have thought this was a good idea with the benefit of hindsight.

To judge any media launch on the evidence of its first few days is something any responsible media reviewer should avoid doing. I wish any new media start-up well. Competition and variety ought to be the very spices of life. Not that you’d know it from the liberal left, who will lose no opportunity to try to shut it down.

Andrew Neil is someone I have the highest regard for, and he will make it his business to ensure that the enterprise succeeds. His parameters for success may well be very different from the rest of the media’s, though.

I listen to a dozen podcasts each week and I’ve now worked out that more than half of them are about football, rather than politics – make of that what you will. The latest addition to my regular staple of podcasts is Quickly Kevin, Will He Score? hosted by the quick-witted Chris Scull, Josh Widdicombe and Michael Marden. Although its format is relatively standard for a podcast – host banter plus an interview with a guest – it is different in that its whole raison d’etre is only to talk about football from the 1990s. When my LBC producer Robbie Hawkins recommended it as something I would enjoy, I was sceptical. But, I’ve slowly become rather addicted, so much so that I’m now working my way through their entire five year back catalogue.

The title of the podcast is taken from an exchange between my football commentating hero, Brian Moore, and Kevin Keegan in the seconds before David Batty missed his penalty against Argentina in 1998. It was probably the low point of Moore’s commentating career. “Quickly Kevin, you know him better than anyone, do you back him to score?” Batty was starting his run-up. What else could Keegan reply but “Yes”. A second later, he didn’t. And England’s World Cup dream was over.

Josh Widdicombe is a Plymouth Argyle supporter and one of the great things about this podcast is that they don’t just talk about the big Premier League clubs. Michael Marden may be a Manchester United fan, but he’s equally at home talking about Gillingham. Chris Scull used to present a brilliant podcast for the West Ham fan site, Knees Up Mother Brown, alongside James Corden’s producer James Longman. Sadly that finished when Corden took Longman to Los Angeles. Although Widdicombe is the star attraction, it is Scull who holds it together. Sometimes the banter gets a bit out of control and flights of fancy come to the fore, but they’re obviously having a good time, and so is the listener. They are all of a similar age, mid to late thirties, and they all found their footballing feet in the 1990s, 20 years after me. But the 1990s was quite a special decade in football, featuring two of the best international tournaments ever held; Italia ’90 and Euro ’96. The Premier League was formed in 1992 and the game was full of the kind of characters which seems rare in today’s monochrome world of sport. Quickly Kevin is a podcast that celebrates every whimsical aspect of football in the 1990s and if you try it out, I suspect you’ll be as hooked as I am.

The Euros on TV and Radio

It’s not just sport in general that has become a bit monochrome, the disease has infected the world of football commentary. Where have all the character commentators gone? Back in the day David Coleman, Brian Moore, John Motson and Barry Davies were people that every football fan knew. On radio, Peter Jones, Bryon Butler, Mike Ingham and Alan Green ruled the roost. They had one thing in common; each had their own individual voice. They weren’t overproduced. They clearly did their prep, but their commentary was not over-prepared, and there is a difference. Listening to many of today’s football commentators, you feel that virtually all their bon mots are prepared in advance. The spontaneity of Alan Green seems to have disappeared. I struggle to name a single BBC TV football commentator, with the exception of the perennially superb Jonathan Pearce. Sam Matterface on ITV is showing that he can step into the boots of Brian Moore, which Clive Tyldesley never quite filled.

Nowadays, the ex-footballer-co-commentator plays much more of a role in football commentaries, but they are very hit and miss. Too often, they seem to be overly keen to come up with clever one-liners, which they think will impress the listening TV or radio bosses. The best pundits intervene only when they have something meaningful to say. On television, silence is sometimes the best form of commentary. You don’t need to explain what’s happening when any watching viewer can clearly see it for themselves. On radio, clearly, the commentary team needs to explain exactly what is going on because the listener cannot see it for themselves. What the listener doesn’t want is for the commentator and co-commentator to self-indulge in amusing conversations which have very little to do with the game they’re supposed to be describing.

The BBC studio pundits will feature Thierry Henry, Cesc Fabregas and Jürgen Klinsman, alongside the regulars of Alan Shearer, Rio Ferdinand and Micah Richards. These are all perfectly good pundits, but very safe options. Where are the risk-takers? The Brian Clough character? The commentary team consists of Guy Mowbray, Steve Wilson, Robyn Cowen, Steve Bower, Jonathan Pearce, Vicki Sparks, Rob MacLean and Mark Scott. I rest my earlier case.

Radio 5 Live’s coverage will be fronted by the excellent Mark Chapman. Their team of commentators and pundits blow their TV colleagues off the planet. And they have all 51 games. On ITV, two of their main presenters are female, Seema Jaswal and Reshmin Chowdhury, but their main presenter is Mark Pougatch, who I really rate. He’s a proper sports journalist. Studio pundits include Ian Wright, Roy Keane, Gary Neville, Patrick Vieira, Graeme Souness, Ashley Cole and Eniola Aluko, who is, in my view, the best female pundit in football. This commentary team is led by Sam Matterface. 

There isn’t quite the buzz around Euro 2020 that there was at the start of Euro ’96. Maybe that will change if we beat Croatia on Sunday. One can but hope.

He was funny, witty and entertaining – far from the slightly monochrome character we had previously seen in the normal political interviews politicians undertake each day. I had seen this in an hour-long interview and phone-in I did with him in March last year during the Labour leadership contest. I was more impressed than I perhaps wanted to be.

When I saw the Labour leader had agreed to do a Life Stories interview with Piers Morgan for ITV, I understood why. He had had a good first nine months as Labour leader, but since Christmas, something has gone wrong. Not only has Labour failed to make headway in the polls, but Starmer’s own ratings have also fallen way behind those of the Prime Minister. Being Leader of the Opposition during a pandemic is no easy task, and it’s not easy to make an impression when it’s been impossible to go out and meet the public or speak to live audiences.

Starmer is criticised not only for not producing many (if any) new policies and failing to explain what Labour in 2021 stands for. He’s still in part haunted by his Brexit stance in Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet. People in red wall seats have long memories judging by the results of the May elections.

A new strategy was needed. Deborah Mattinson, the doyen of the focus group, hasn’t yet started her new job as Starmer’s Director of Strategy. Still, I imagine she, along with Ben Nunn, his Head of Communications, have been instrumental in getting him out doing more personal interviews.

First, it was the Matt Forde Political Party podcast recorded live at the Garrick Theatre in front of an audience, and then it was Piers Morgan’s turn. They were both very personal interviews and both quite different. The first was full of humour and gags, and the second will be remembered for its intensely emotional sections. Both were hugely enjoyable, and both could prove to be seminal moments in Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party, not least because they demonstrated to his handlers that he’s rather good in this kind of environment and can be trusted not to drop a bollock or appear false.

Piers Morgan is a brilliant interviewer in these kinds of situations. Contrary to popular opinion, he doesn’t go into these interviews wanting his subject to either cry or walk out. If you believe that, you misread him. What he’s very skilful at is putting people at their ease and getting inside their heads. He understands that there’s a reason his ‘victim’ has agreed to do the interview, and they must be allowed time to explain themselves.

On Good Morning Britain he was quite happy to be a bull in a china shop. Here, he’s avuncular, empathetic and understanding, and it makes for bloody good TV. I watch all his Life Stories unless his guest is someone I particularly loathe. Even when it’s someone I can take or leave, I usually find the interviews enjoyable, and I find out things I never knew before.

Matt Forde is also a brilliant interviewer, but very different to Piers Morgan. When he interviewed me on his podcast last year, he got me to reveal things I hadn’t told any other interviewer before. It’s probably the best interview I have ever given, which was primarily due to Matt. He’s such an enthusiast for politics and his guests that he makes them trust him. It is as if you’re having a one-to-one heart-to-heart.

The fact that tens of thousands of people will soon hear your words is far from your mind as you explain your latest personal faux pas or controversial viewpoint. In his chat with Starmer, he gets him to open up in a very different way to Piers Morgan. Starmer becomes a bit sweary and shares some hilariously funny anecdotes. The audience clearly loved him, and although in this case, the live audience was bound to be well disposed towards him, the listener to the podcast will have done too, even if their own politics are very different.

Tony Blair won elections because he was able to build a wide electoral coalition. He didn’t frighten moderate Tories, who warmed to him. He knew that he could communicate to swing voters over the heads of all the political programmes and interviewers. He could connect that few politicians before him had had.

Keir Starmer and his advisers would do well to adopt the same approach. It worked with Piers Morgan and Matt Forde, and I suspect you’ll be seeing a lot more of Keir in places you never expected to see him.

Over the last twenty years, there has been an explosion of interest in history, not just British history, but all sorts of history. The podcast genre is absolutely ideal for capitalising on this. I’ve already reviewed the daily History Hack podcast in a previous column, so I thought I’d turn my attention to Dan Snow’s History Hit this week. This podcast is also more or less daily, and it covers a vast range of subjects. It’s unashamedly the antithesis of a Radio 4 style podcast and sometimes almost overly informal. Snow is a populist, and he wants every ‘ep’ of his ‘pod’, as he refers to them, to appeal to the broadest possible audience. His enthusiasm draws you in, even on a subject you think you might not be especially interested in.

I’ve listened to two very contrasting podcasts this week, one on the history of Eurovision, in which he interviewed Eurovision aficionado Scott Bryan about where the contest came from and what it means. And then, a few days later, I had the pleasure of listening to a 50-minute podcast titled ‘Hunting the Bismarck’, which detailed the events that led up to the Royal Navy sinking the German Battleship, the Bismarck, in 1941. He used archive interview footage from those involved and who witnessed it live and told the story in his own words. 

Fascinating stuff, and I learned a huge amount that I didn’t know before. Other subjects covered this week were the military in Rome, the palaeontologist Mary Anning, an interview with top diplomat Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Martin Luther, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. You don’t get much wider variety than that.

I wonder how many listeners listen to every episode and how many dip in from time to time when something catches their eye. I appeared on the podcast a couple of months ago, talking about prime ministers. When we were talking off air, Dan told me he enjoys the podcast more than anything else he does. It clearly works financially for him. Each episode is sponsored, and he does live sponsored reads too. It made me wonder if the history podcast will usurp the TV history documentary at some stage.

Listen to the History Hit podcast here.

A Gay and a NonGay podcast

This podcast shouldn’t work. It’s a weekly 15-30 minute chat between two friends, one of whom is gay (James Barr), and one of whom isn’t (Dan Hudson). They are both comedians. Their raison d’etre is to challenge preconceptions of the gay world by straights and, to a lesser extent, vice versa. All sound a bit, well, boring? No, it’s the very opposite. They usually have a good laugh along the way, and it’s very conversational.

The latest episode is all about the Eurovision Song Contest, which, needless to say, James loves, and Dan doesn’t. And there’s no convincing him that it has any allure, despite Italy winning with a rock song. They don’t come to blows, but it gets all quite heated. This has become a very popular podcast indeed, although I do wonder what proportion of its listeners are straight. 

They are now doing live events, and the podcast has created its own little cottage industry. I’m not surprised. The two hosts are incredibly likeable, and it’s always got a little frisson about it where the deviant inside your head wonders if Dan has ever been tempted to, well, you know. Perhaps they’ve discussed this in an episode I’ve missed. Another reason to delve into their back catalogue. And that’s not a double entendre. Well, it is, but not an intentional one. Believe that, and you’ll believe anything.

Listen to the A Gay and A Non Gay podcast here.

Norcott is a south London cheeky chappy working class Tory, and styles himself as the voice of common sense. He is not actually particularly right wing, and his act is more about exposing the hypocrisies of the left and all its wokery, rather than being particularly pro-Tory. He’s not afraid to criticise the Conservative party or conservatism, but he won’t indulge in the character assassination and the utterly perverted cruelty favoured by the likes of the unfunniest supposed comedian on the circuit, Nish Kumar.

I’m not going to claim I “discovered” Geoff Norcott, but I do remember the first time I heard him and said to my left wing LBC producer that we must get him on. “But why?” came the response. “He’s right wing. How can he be funny?” “Well, I’m right wing. I can be funny,” I replied. He raised an eyebrow. We duly invited him on and then a few weeks later he was on the BBC Question Time panel and was the star of the show. Since then, he has been invited back three or four times.

In 2018, I went to see him perform at the Edinburgh Fringe. He was in the same room that I did my show in a year later. He was brilliant and I left with aching cheekbones. The funniest part was when he had told a mild joke about Jeremy Corbyn, which provoked a middle aged lady to stage a walk out, dragging her husband with her. Norcott thought this was hilarious and wondered out loud what kind of show she had been expecting.

Norcott’s skill is to deploy right wingery without lapsing into the kind of pseudo-racist stuff which the Left clearly expects from him. He delights in explaining how he came from a Labour background and how the Left not only let down him and his class, but why he and people like him drifted to the right. His book Where Did I Go Right? How the Left Lost Me is one Keir Starmer and Emily Thornberry would do well to read, as they clearly have no understanding of why their party has lost people like Norcott.

Norcott’s podcast What Most People Think is 89 episodes old. It’s a mix of him spending 45 minutes musing and ruminating on the events of the week, sometimes with a guest, sometimes not. It involves a copious amount of swearing, and if you can’t cope with that, it’s best to give it a swerve. But if you enjoy some good robust chat which is both thought provoking and amusing, then you’ll enjoy this podcast.

Last Thursday, Norcott was on the Politics Live panel with fellow comedian and podcast interviewer Matt Forde. It was unusual for the show to have two comedians on at the same time but they provide a good yin to the other’s yang. And that’s what happens in the podcast too. Their mutual respect shone through and demonstrated that people from opposite viewpoints can get along. I’ve had Matt Forde on my own All Talk podcast, and I’ve appeared on his Political Party podcast – hardly incestuous at all – so I know what a dream guest Matt Forde is. In the immortal words of Sir Cliff Richard you just wind him up and let him go. His riff on Scottish independence was the best defence of the union I have ever heard.

However good and entertaining Geoff Norcott is on this podcast and on TV, that will never match his live performances. If he’s in a town near you on tour, go and see him. It will be the best £20 you’ll spend this year.

Book tickets for Geoff Norcott on Tour here. 

The truth is it wasn’t a very good watch. Election nights are full of drama, with lots of things happening. When it’s stretched out over three days, it doesn’t really work. There’s not enough drama, and not enough content to keep the viewer’s attention. There’s too much repetition and too much meaningless banter with pundits who were, too often, uttering inanities.

On the BBC Huw Edwards showed us his lighter side from time to time with an almost comical obsession with what was going on in Wales. To be fair, Wales was one of the more interesting areas of the country to follow, given Mark Drakeford defied all expectations and got Labour’s best ever result since the first devolved election in 1999. Indeed, he had been tipped to lose his own seat. With the demise of UKIP, few bothered to report that the Conservatives added 5 seats to their total, to get their best ever result too. Plaid Cymru, as ever, flattered to deceive. I have no idea how Huw Edwards votes, but I suspect if he ever moved back to Wales, his cross might not be too far away from Plaid on the ballot paper! I do hope I haven’t libelled him… Rwy’n siŵr y bydd yn ei gymryd fel dyn.

Staying with the BBC, a star might have been born. Stepping into the shoes of the magnificent Peter Snow and the irrepressible Jeremy Vine was Newsnight’s Lewis Goodall. Bouncing around, and deploying all the excitement of a Duracell Bunny, he kept us all entertained with notional swings and, as Peter Snow would have said, had “just a bit of fun”.

Talking of fun, the brown stuff really hit the fan on Saturday evening when it emerged that Keir Starmer has sacked Angela Rayner as Party Chair and Campaign Coordinator. Twitter went wild, but as ever, it was at least 20 minutes, if not longer, before Sky and the BBC started reporting it. And this is the main point of this review. Twitter is far better at reporting election nights and days than the cumbersome mainstream media ever will be. I always use Twitter as a primary source when I’m presenting on LBC on election nights and I can therefore report things to my audience way ahead of Sky or the BBC. Frankly, if the @BritainElects Twitter feed ran an all night Twitch video stream they’d clean up among those of us who class ourselves as political geeks. While the BBC won’t report a council result until all the wards have been counted, @BritainElects bring you results ward by ward. Geek heaven. And you can interpret a lot from those results.

Later in the week, I decided to listen to the LibDem Podcast to see what they made of the results. This podcast isn’t exactly welcoming to anyone who isn’t dyed in the wool LibDem. It’s a perfect example of the phenomenon of podcast navel gazing. There is a rolling cast of around five or six LibDem activists who chew the LibDem fat each week, but they never actually introduce themselves. They assume we know who they are. This was the first time I had listened to the podcast and it was irritating that I couldn’t work out who they were and where they came from. It did become clear as it went on, but an introduction is surely elementary. 

I certainly found it really interesting to hear about their respective experiences on the campaign trail, especially when one of them was fully expecting to lose but pulled through by only 100 votes. 

Given the LibDems only gained 8 council seats, fell under the threshold to be considered a main party grouping in the Scottish Parliament, only gained one local council and polled 1 per cent in the Hartlepool by-election, you might be forgiven for thinking this might be the podcast equivalent of attending a wake. But not a bit of it. Straws were clutched. Pearls were held. Tunnels had lights at the end of them. In fact it was all jolly encouraging. Bless, I thought. It’s the hope that kills you in the end. I know. I support West Ham.

Pariah – made by the team at Tortoise – is a good example of a long-form documentary that the so-called “Old Media” would have never made. It’s a four-episode podcast, each episode lasting between 40 and 50 minutes. In truth, the final episode could have been dropped as it contained a lot of padding, but more on that later.

The point of the podcast was to tell the story of Harvey Proctor, the former Tory MP targeted by Operation Midland. Presented by former Today Programme and Panorama editor Ceri Thomas and Panorama journalist Alistair Jackson, it is more Radio 5 than Radio 4 in style, with the two presenters happily chatting to each other at various points. 

There are extensive interviews with Harvey Proctor throughout, who is very open about his background and the scandal he found himself enveloped in back in 1987, which led to him having to stand down. He was accused of having rough gay sex with two underage rent boys. It was a classic tabloid sting. The News of the World had paid the rent boys, who were 19, two years under the legal age of consent for gay men at the time. Proctor was a controversial MP at the time, known for his admiration of Enoch Powell and an advocate of voluntary repatriation for immigrants.

I published Harvey Proctor’s book CREDIBLE BUT TRUE, where he talks about the scandal, but clearly, this is the first time he’s talked in detail on broadcast. Ceri Thomas wasn’t impressed by the book and felt there was more of the story to tell. On the latter point, he was right, mainly because as a man close to 70 in 2015, I don’t think Harvey was ready to spill all. 

Over the last six years, his experience proved to him that there were voices in the media who he could not only trust but were actively wanting to put his side of the story forward over the allegations made in Operation Midland. Just to remind you, Nick – real name Carl Beech – had accused him of all sorts of malevolence against both him and other young boys. Most of the allegations were from the outset clearly preposterous, and I said so at the time, attracting a lot of criticism for doing so. 

When Harvey went public with his response to the allegations at the St Ermin’s Hotel in August 2015, I interviewed him on my LBC show later that day. Harvey became quite emotional at one point, which was hardly surprising given his life had been ruined. He had lost both his job and his home, was utterly destitute and hadn’t even had his day in court. He was a broken man. I resolved to help him and started a Crowdfunding campaign which raised in excess of £10,000.

The strength of the Pariah podcast is that Harvey is given time to tell his story in his own words. As the series goes on, he becomes more comfortable and up-front, speaking about both his early life and troubles. He is a man of his generation and doesn’t find these things easy. 

The final episode concentrates on his previously held views on race and immigration, which all in all felt rather unnecessary. Thomas and Jackson were just that little bit too keen to tell the listener how uncomfortable they were with those views. So what? Who cares what they thought? The podcast wasn’t there to inform us as to their views. It was fine to give the full background to the listener, but why ignore his ‘way ahead of his time’ views on the Common Market or his campaigning on mental health. Not a mention.

But all in all, this podcast series is a compelling listen, and if this is the sort of thing Tortoise will do more of, they are to be applauded.

You can listen to the Pariah podcast here.

Let me say this up front. I am an unalloyed Rachel Johnson fan. Like most of the Johnson family, she is an adornment to our national life, even if she sometimes puts her foot in it. Her recent memoir of her time in Change UK and the LibDems, Rake’s Progress: My Political Midlife Crisis, was a brilliantly written and very amusing page turner. If it hadn’t been published right at the start of Covid, it would have troubled the bestseller charts.

At roughly the same time, she started presenting a weekly show on LBC, which in turn has led to her launching a podcast of her own, in which she interviews a series of so-called ‘difficult women’. Quite why Global Radio didn’t call it Rachel Johnson’s ‘Bloody Difficult Women’ is a moot point, given that’s what Ken Clarke had called Theresa May, and where the phrase originated from. Had I been her, I would have insisted on it.

In Johnson’s first outing she interviewed former Supreme Court judge Brenda Hale. She followed this up with an interview with Sasha Swire, wife of former Tory MP Sir Hugo Swire. These diaries were quite incendiary and yet Lady Swire chose not to do any interviews, so taken aback was she by the reaction, especially within the Conservative Party. I tried to persuade Swire to do an interview with me at the time the book was published, but lamentably failed. Rachel Johnson clearly has more persuasive powers and so it was that I sat down to listen to the two of them chat away about David Cameron’s double entendres and how Sasha herself would have been a much better MP than her husband.

I have to say it was a brilliant listen. Rachel doesn’t really do interviews, she does conversations, and as a listener you feel as if you are eavesdropping on a private chat, rather than a studio based interview. And that’s what good podcasts interviews are all about. She got Sasha to open up without appearing to try. All in all, it was a job really well done. And I will make sure I listen to the rest of the series.

State of Mind with Richard Sefton podcast

Mental health podcasts are two a penny, and it’s difficult to break through without a major media backer. However, this new podcast, State of Mind, has had an impressive start. Richard Sefton is a MIND counsellor and has an engaging manner. He’s a great conversationalist, but more importantly a good listener. Most of his guests (I was his guinea pig on a pilot episode) are well known to one degree or another, and he takes a very light approach to the interviews. He’s talked to Beverley Knight, Jemma Forte and Jamie Lee Grace, among others. In fact, his podcasts are not really interviews, they’re opportunities for his guests to talk about themselves and their career. Sometimes you feel there ought to be a little more mental health input, but someone Sefton keeps you listening, even when it’s a bit gushy.

The standout episode so far was with the haemophiliac campaigner, Mark Ward. This podcast was two hours long, but it is very worth listening to. His life story is one you’ll never have heard the likes of before. As a child, he acquired blood infected with HIV and has lived with the condition for the last forty years, with medics constantly predicting his imminent demise. He lays bare the effect on his personal life, relationships and career, and it makes for difficult and traumatic listening at times.

On occasion, Sefton doesn’t speak for ten or fifteen minutes, leaving the listener transfixed by what Ward is saying. Quite how he’s retained a level head and an equilibrium of thought is something few will be able to comprehend. At the end of the two hours, you’re left feeling emotionally exhausted and wondering how on earth he’s reached the age of fifty. This podcast episode is possibly the best bit of audio I have heard in 2021 so far. It deserves an award of its own.

Football podcasts are two a penny nowadays, but what a discovery All to Play For has been. It is presented by actor and comedian Tom Davis and former West Ham, Chelsea, Liverpool and England star, Joe Cole. Each week they chew over the latest football fat and have a single guest, who they talk to about their career. Nothing particularly innovative about that you may think, and you’d be right. But it is still a football podcast with a difference. Between them, Cole and Davis manage to eke out some really enlightening, funny and surprising anecdotes from their guests in a way that never happens on Sky or the BBC.

Cole is speaking to his guests as an equal, and isn’t afraid to be wholly honest about his views on certain players and managers, giving his guests a false sense of security. The episodes with David James and Gareth Barry were cases in point. They lifted the lid on England’s disastrous 2010 World Cup campaign in South Africa and what Fabio Capello was like as a manager. Suffice to say, they’re not fans of his. It wasn’t done in a bitchy way, but nevertheless, some of the anecdotes were pretty gobsmacking. It made you ask how Capello had ever attracted the reputation which secured him the England job in the first place.

Many of the players on the podcast are people that Joe Cole has played with at his various clubs or in the England team, and he’s using his contact book well. I just pray he can lure Paolo Di Canio on at some point.

When I first started listening to the podcast, I found Tom Davis to be a slight irritant. His obvious hero worship of Joe Cole was at times a bit sick-inducing but, as time went on, I came to realise what he’s there to do – and that’s to encourage Joe Cole to be himself and approach the podcast as if it’s two mates chatting down the pub. That’s what Jacqui Smith and I try to do in our For the Many podcast, and it’s a recipe the punters like. Cole presented by himself on a a few episodes while Davis was away filming, and I think he surprised himself at how naturally it came to him. He’s got an easy way, and although he sometimes gets a little tongue tied, and plays up to the cockney geezer stereotype a little too much (he’s actually not a cockney and was brought up in Kentish Town) he has an element of the loveable rogue about him, combined with the aura of a nineteen year old cheeky chappy. Age hasn’t lessened his obvious delight and surprise in that he’s had the career he’s had and that he’s doing what he’s doing.

I saw Joe Cole make his debut for West Ham and was distraught when he left the club to join Chelsea after the relegation in 2003. But he’ll always be a Hammer in my mind. But even if I wasn’t a Joe Cole fan or West Ham supporter, I’d still want to listen to this podcast because it gives me, as a football fan, something different to all the other personality based football podcasts.

Most of the guests on this podcast are household names – Jens Lehman, Robert Huth, Andy Cole, Alan Shearer, Trevor Sinclair, Wayne Bridge, James Collins, Andy Townsend, Kevin Phillips and Darren Bent, to name but a few. Most of them are far more eloquent than you imagine footballers could ever be, judging from their post match interviews on mainstream TV. Jermain Pennant, for example, was an absolute revelation. Wes Brown, perhaps less so, given that he uttered the immortal phrase “do you know what I mean, like” about 100 times in the space of a 40-minute interview. Despite that, his anecdotes were still something to behold.

I guarantee that if you’re a football fan and you give this podcast a try, you’ll listen to the whole back catalogue.

Line of Duty, BBC & iPlayer

OK, I have given in. Every single person I know seems to watch Line of Duty and is a massive fan. I feel completely left out of conversations around the proverbial watercooler because, until a week ago, I hadn’t seen a single episode of the six series. However, on Sunday nights in recent weeks, I have caught a few minutes here and there of the latest series.

I decided to start at the beginning, because, as Julie Andrews constantly assures us, it’s a very good place to start. I am now five episodes into series one and am completely hooked. So much so, that this weekend I plan to get to the end of series two. I have no idea how accurate the depiction of the police is. Indeed, I’d hope it’s very inaccurate, but I have rarely seen a series which develops the characters so quickly, so well. You feel you know all about them and their back story by the end of episode two.

The whole hour of each episode embodies a sense of rawness, there’s always the anticipation that something major is about to happen and if you lose concentration for a second you’ll regret it. As a viewer, you’re drawn into the plot and always feel you are alongside DS Arnott in trying to solve the riddle of the vortex of corruption that has enveloped DCI Tony Gates. On Gogglebox, Jenny from Hull takes notes during each episode, much to the hilarity of her friend Lee. But I can see why. In series one the plot is fairly comprehensible. I’m told that changes as we get to series three and beyond. Personally, I can’t wait.

They were soon to be somewhat dashed. Don’t get me wrong; I consider myself to be quite environmentally aware. I suspect I am the only person who has ever made a speech on the dangers of Acid Rain to a Conservative Party conference back in 1986. I deplore excess packaging and will go out of my way not to buy things wrapped in excessive plastic. I’ve also just ordered an electric car to replace my Diesel SUV 4×4. Get me, eh?

So I approached this documentary with a sympathetic ear. The programme’s primary aim was to educate us on how our seas are so polluted, and that the fishing industry is so corrupt that there is an unspoken conspiracy to rape and pillage our seas to destruction. The pollution part played a secondary role, mainly because we’re much more familiar with the argument. Sky’s Ocean Rescue initiative did a superb job in raising oceanic pollution up the political agenda.

The on-screen documentary maker Ali Tabrizi had a simple aim – to do for the oceans what Al Gore did for Climate Change in his film An Inconvenient Truth. The trouble is, he used outdated tabloid journalistic techniques to do so. He often turned up in a company or NGO’s office demanding an interview with someone about something. He knew full well you don’t get interviews on that basis, ever. Yet he thought it would add a bit of drama. It didn’t. You do not need to exaggerate a case to make it well. And in many ways, Ali Tabrizi made a compelling case that the worldwide fishing industry, especially when it comes to tuna and dolphins, is riddled with corruption and dominated by mafioso types.

Several of his talking heads warned him he was in mortal danger if he pushed his investigation too far. Our intrepid Ali went ahead nonetheless and travelled to the world’s main centres of whaling. Well, Japan anyway. What he found did, to be fair, make for some pretty shocking watching. But that was nothing compared to the horrors of the programme’s final scene in the Faroe Islands, where we were treated to what can only be described as blood bath scenes from a horror movie. Speedboats rounded up dolphins/young whales in a bay, and they were then ritually slaughtered, many of them wrenched out of the water onto the beach and butchered. The bay was a sea of red. It was awful.

What the documentary demonstrated well was that the Dolphin friendly labels you see on Tuna products are purely designed to give the consumer the warm glow of buying a sustainable and environmentally friendly product when they do nothing of the sort. 

It also showed that governmental attempts to regulate fish hauls/catches are also illusory. So-called bi-catching, where nets catch forbidden fish and the primary catch, is totally out of control and no amount of government observers aboard fishing vessels seem able to do anything about it. Indeed, the film also asserted that more than 40 government observers have met unfortunate ends or gone missing over the last 20 years, all over the world.

Many parts of this film were concerning, but you never felt Tabrizi had all the evidence he needed to make some of his charges stick. Rather like Al Gore, some of his statistics are now being called into question. The New Statesman says: “The film’s over-simplification and outdated statistics risk adding to the challenges already facing the world’s oceans.” 

Many of the talking heads interviewed have complained that some of their comments have been taken entirely out of context. The film claims that the world’s fish stocks will run out by 2048. This is based on a 2006 report whose author has now said it is totally out of date.

Unfortunately, despite having noble aims, Seaspiracy’s core messages are undermined by a simplistic, sometimes tabloid approach to the subject and a lack of rigour. It’s an opportunity missed.

This documentary is a difficult watch. At times I wondered whether it should have ever seen the light of day. At times I wondered if it really fulfilled its aims. At times I wondered if its dual strands of career retrospective and encouraging us to learn more about the debilitating effects of dementia really sat well together. At the end of the ninety minutes I was filled by a profound sense of sadness that one of England’s (and, I should say, the Republic of Ireland’s) footballing greats should be depicted in this manner.

Was I being self-indulgent? Who was I to question to decision of Jack’s wife and children to allow this profoundly moving film to be made? After all, I didn’t have to watch it.

Jack Charlton, who died only a few months after the documentary was shot, was one of the great characters of football in the final forty years of the 20^th century. Outspoken, opinionated and set in his ways, he truly was from a different mould and a different era to today’s pampered football professionals. Hailing from the mining town of Ashington in the North East he came up the hard way. He spent a lifetime proving people wrong and winning people round. He did it at Leeds, with England, and then gloriously with the Republic of Ireland’s national team. “Go home Union Jack”, they shouted when he was appointed. By the time he left the job ten years later in 1996 he was the nearest thing the country had to a living saint, apart from Mary Robinson, obviously. He led the Republic of Ireland to two consecutive World Cup Finals leading to some heroic performances against teams which they shouldn’t have, in any normal circumstances, come close to beating. He achieved it by recruiting players who knew what it was to play as a team. They didn’t play attractive football. It was very much hoof it up the pitch. There weren’t many Fancy Dan players in Jack Charlton’s teams. They intimidated the opposition. They left their mark. And it worked.

This film did a great job in showing what Jack Charlton was like as both a player and manager. But it was heartbreaking to see Jack watching previous Irish games on an iPad and clearly not even recognising himself on the screen. There was the odd flash of recognition, but that was it. Otherwise, it was just a blank look. At times you could almost hear his brain trying to whir into gear, but things never quite clicked. I had this experience with a close relative myself, who was in the early stages of dementia. It was heart-breaking to witness. It was as if someone had got into his brain and put the dimmer switch on.

The documentary also explores the troubled relationship Jackie had with his younger and more talented brother, Bobby. Bobby eclipsed Jackie as a player, although of course they both played in the 1966 World Cup winning England team. But Bobby played 106 times for his country, compared to Jackie’s 35 appearances. Bobby was for many years England’s record goalscorer, notching up 49 goals over more than a decade wearing the shirt of the three lions. But as a manager, Bobby was a failure. Jack wasn’t massively successful as a club manager, but his record with the Republic of Ireland spoke for itself. A family feud grew to the point where the two brothers weren’t on speaking terms. When Jack died in July last year, there had been no sign of the divide healing. Only three months later, brother Bobby was also diagnosed with dementia.

Bobby and Jack were both powerful headers of the ball. And in their era, footballs were very different from those of 2021. Can their dementia be linked to heading? It’s a massive issue for football to address. The Daily Mail has long led a campaign for the dangers of heading a football to be taken more seriously. Finally, the administrators of the game itself are also waking up to the idea that many footballers’ brains may well have been damaged in this way. The question is, what to do about it.

I’ll leave you with this anecdote from the fim. Picture the scene. Jack’s wife Pat is with him in their home. On the wall hung his certificate of honorary Irish citizenship. They were looking at some of the fan mail that he still received most days from Irish people just wanting to express their thanks. Pat remarks: “They think a lot of you in Ireland, don’t they?” Jack sits, trying to form a reply in his mind. After what seemed an eternity, he murmurs: “I have no idea”. If that doesn’t break your heart, nothing will.

A proud, ebullient picture of a man, reduced to a husk. That’s what dementia does. It is the most cruel of diseases.

The great joy of making a podcast is that it can be whatever you want it to be. The BBC has had a tendency to think its podcasts must be ersatz-radio programmes, with all the production quality and tone of what appears on its normal radio channels. Brexitcast/Newscast partly put paid to that, and Covid Confidential certainly continues that trend. Presented by political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, it seeks to tell the story of Covid through five different moments in the crisis, using on and off the record interviews with people involved in developing government strategy. Sounds a bit dry, doesn’t it? In fact, it’s the complete opposite.

Most of us have found the last year very trying, to one degree or another. If I was still in publishing I would be very reluctant to publish a book on the Covid crisis on the basis that I don’t think people are very interested in reliving the experience. People want to move on, and not dwell on all the awfulness of the last twelve months. When I saw that Covid Confidential had been made, even I was a little reluctant to listen to its two thirty-minute long episodes. I am, however, glad that I relented and downloaded them.

Laura has her long term producer Paul Twinn alongside her as they give some behind the scenes colour to their involvement in some of the big moments of the last year. They lay bare the chaotic nature of their dual existence, and how they came to be at the centre of the unfolding dramas. It’s not just about them, though, it’s about how decisions were arrived at, the conflict within government, the reluctance of the Prime Minister to close down the country until the last minute. It’s about the way the politicians came to the decisions they did, having weighed up the scientific and economic evidence laid in front of them. It’s about the awful, dawning realisation in mid March of what was about to hit us. It’s about the agonies that both politicians and scientists have been through, realising that they made wrong decisions. All in all, it’s a very human story.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock, and leader of the opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, were the only politicians to give on the record interviews. Starmer might as well not have bothered given he told us nothing we didn’t know already. Hancock was a little (but not a lot) better, especially when his voice broke when recounting the story of the moment he learned that the vaccines worked. A true Eureka moment.

This podcast will never air on Radio 4. Or 5 Live. This is a pity because it deserves a wider audience than it will inevitably get on BBC Sounds or other podcast platforms. The chatty nature of the podcast ought to give it a much wider appeal than you’d expect from a political podcast, but how do you convey that in a marketing campaign without it appearing to be yet another dumbed down BBC programme designed to appeal to the ‘yoof’ market?

I’m going to be honest, I have put off writing this column because it’s not easy writing about two people, one of whom I regard as a new friend. The other is a former political enemy, who once tried to ruin my reputation. Luckily, we kissed and made up not too long ago, but more of that later.

Kate Garraway is the new friend and Derek Draper the former enemy. Derek has spent the last year in an intensive care unit suffering with the terrible after effects of Covid. No one in this country has been in hospital as long as Derek. His body has been ravaged, with most of his vital organs being severely affected. On many occasions, it was thought he wouldn’t survive the night. He’s lost eight stone in weight. Kate Garraway, a presenter on Good Morning Britain and a colleague of mine at Global Radio (she presents the mid morning show on Smooth Radio), is his wife.

This documentary, made by Kate, is a warts and all fly on the wall look at the trials and tribulations that her family has gone through over the last year. It features footage of Derek in his ICU bed, including moments when he can speak again. Perhaps the most heart rending moment was when he utters one word: “Pain”. Twice. The nurse asks him where the pain is but he cannot respond. Like the rest of the nation, I was in bits.

It must have been a big decision for Kate to do this documentary as it lays bare the pain and upset that have dominated her family’s last twelve months. Some will criticise her for doing it, but they are wrong. Sometimes private traumas can lead to others feeling they are not alone and help us gain further understanding about the terrible effects of a disease. I know from my radio show that every time someone rings in talking about their own mental health, for example, it leads to others feeling less alone.

I first met Derek Draper in the late 1990s when he was Peter Mandelson’s special adviser. He cut quite a dash. New Labour were at the height of their powers and so was Derek. Some time later he was involved in a minor lobbying scandal, where he professed to know personally the only 17 people who mattered in the Labour government. He then went off into the sunset to train as a psychotherapist, a profession in which he scored notable successes.

In the autumn of 2008 he invited me to lunch. He had seen the success I and Guido Fawkes had had with our respective blogs, and wanted to know how the left could compete. He said he wanted to launch an equivalent of ConservativeHome. I was only too happy to give him some free advice; “Don’t make it all about you,” “attempt to keep some semblance of distance between the site and the official party,” and “don’t feel you always needs to take down the opposition.” I might as well have whistled in the wind. To cut a long story short, he linked up with Gordon Brown’s formidable henchman, Damian McBride, and they hatched a plan not only to launch Labour List but also a Guido Fawkes equivalent, The Red Rag. The site never actually got off the ground, but after a Freedom of Information request, Guido Fawkes and I revealed emails between Derek and Damian that showed how they intended to smear various Tory politicians, and how they had intended to ruin my own reputation by smearing me as a racist. Derek tried to pretend to me that it was only a bit of fun. I remember replying by email saying I couldn’t deal with someone who was willing to indulge in that kind of chicanery.

Both he and Damian were forced to quit. A year later Damian wrote me an email of abject apology. I also ran into Derek not long after and he admitted how wrong he had been. Since then, we’ve met on a few occasions and I did an hour long interview with him in 2019 for my Book Club podcast.

I’ve only got to know Kate since appearing regularly on Good Morning Britain on Fridays. She’s a great host and has a wicked sense of humour. Her onscreen partnership with Ben Shephard is rather wonderful. She’s got a good political brain and we enjoy some good banter, even at 7.15am. 

She was very brave to go back on screen after a gap of a few months. In the end, however awful her domestic situation became, life had to go on with some semblance of normality for Kate and her two children. One of the joys of the documentary was to see how normal the Garraway/Draper household actually is. One of them tidy, one not so much; the children playing like any other children would, the Volvo Estate in the street. Kate remaining strong for the kids, and for the cameras, but one can only imagine the tears and the heartache she has been through. She doesn’t want people to feel sorry for her, but of course we all do.

I haven’t seen Kate in the flesh for a year now. Our TV encounters are all over Zoom. I just pray that the next time I see her, Derek will be home and embarking on what will inevitably be a long road to a full recovery. And one day, perhaps I can even give him a big man hug.

Finding Derek is a difficult watch at times. But watch it you should.

Finding Derek is available on the ITV Hub now.

This film is only eleven minutes long, but it tells a very worrying story. Sellafield ought to be the safest place in the country; it needs to be given what happens on its premises. It ought to be a working environment where people not only feel safe from the toxic materials stored there, but also able to work with colleagues in an atmosphere of mutual respect. This film demonstrates that is far from the case, with multiple incidents of racism, misogyny, homophobia and workplace bullying rife. And it all leads one to wonder, well if they haven’t got that sort of thing under control, how can we be confident they are looking after the nuclear waste properly?

The evidence provided in this film demonstrates that Sellafield’s management is deficient, at least in its HR policies. The BBC was leaked letters and interviewed a dozen members of staff with justifiable complaints about Sellafield’s approach to it s staff. Some of the details were horrific, especially the tolerance of racial slurs. A human resources consultant, hired in 2017, detailed many of the complaints. She described Sellafield as a “ticking time bomb because of the cultural issues and no one seems to be holding them to account.” Her contract was terminated days after she submitted a report critical of the Sellafield HR department. She’s now taking them to court alleging that she was let go for whistleblowing. Sellafield is contesting the case.

The big issue here is that there are worries that the culture at Sellafield discourages employees from coming forward if they have concerns about the running of the plant. Think about that for a moment, and think of the consequences. If you saw the series Chernobyl on Sky Atlantic you will fully understand the ramifications. A staff survey, leaked to the BBC showed exactly how worrying this is, with a dramatic drop in the number of staff who said they felt they could come forward and speak out without fear of reprisal.

As a staff member said: “At Sellafield you’ve got two really dangerous elements. You’ve got toxic materials and a toxic culture. You put the two together and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.” Indeed.

Murray Walker: A Life in the Fast Lane, iPlayer

The great thing about iPlayer is that it can revive programmes from years gone by at a moment’s notice. It was great to see the BBC show this wonderful programme about Murray Walker’s long and fantastic life. And what a life. He was to Formula 1 what Richie Benaud was to cricket and Dan Maskell was to tennis. When he retired as the BBC’s main Forumla 1 commentator, the sport never seemed quite the same again. That is, of course, if you classify F1 as a sport… but let’s leave that debate for elsewhere.

OK, maybe not. I’ve never really got the appeal of a sport where it’s the cars that really determine who wins more than the ability of the driver. Of course, the driver plays a role, but not in the traditional role of the sportsman or woman who is integral to whether they, or their team wins. If all the cars were identical, it would be much  more interesting and it would prove that the best driver had won. Nowadays, it’s the best car which invariably wins. There, I got that out of my system.

This bio-documentary concentrates on his decades as a commentator on all sorts of different motorsports, not just F1. However, we also learn about his war record and his life in the world of advertising, which was his day job in the years when commentary was only a part time activity.

Perhaps the most moving part of the programme was the section about the death of Ayrton Senna. Walker had to commentate on events live and he did it in the most sensitive way. It’s not something you can prepare for, and you’re walking a tightrope, knowing that one word out of place would be an absolute disaster. This programme was first shown in 2011, but was reshown on Tuesday of this week, only three days after Murray Walker died at the ripe old age of 97. He was one of a kind.

If you were compiling a list of the top 10 funniest women in Britain over the last 20 years, Caroline Aherne would undoubtedly feature on it. This half-hour tribute to one of Britain’s greatest ever comedians was far too short.

Aherne burst onto the scene playing chat show host Mrs Merton in 1994, as well as various other characters on The Fast Show. It hardly seems possible that this was 27 years ago. She never thought of herself as an actress, yet her portrayal of Denise Royle in The Royle Family was at times incredibly moving, as well as brilliantly comic. Many critics consider The Royle Family her finest work – looking back we see it as a long running series, yet it actually only ran for two years. If I’m honest, I never found it particularly funny. It didn’t really rate in terms of belly laughs, a stark contrast to The Mrs Merton Show which could leave your sides aching and your cheeks almost numb with its machine gun fire rate of one liners and putdowns. The most famous, of course, was when Mrs Merton asked an almost speechless Debbie McGee, “So what first attracted you to the millionaire, Paul Daniels?” She also had a cutting edge and an acid tongue, reducing Bernard Manning to a gibbering wreck after she questioned him about his self-admitted racism.

In The Fast Show she played the Cypriot weathergirl whose only line was to predict that the weather would be “Scorchio”, yet each time she said it, it raised a huge laugh. She also played Renee, the wife of henpecked husband Roy, who was one of my favourites.

Caroline Aherne wasn’t just a wonderful character actress, she was a brilliant comedy writer. She really was an all rounder and it is a tragedy that she died so early, at the age of 52 in 2016. This programme is a timely reminder of her immense talents.

Winston Churchill’s War, Sky History

Sometimes you wonder why TV channels bother to commission documentaries given the facile nature of so many of them. Unfortunately, this is the case with Winston Churchill’s War. You know you’re unlikely to be impressed when the narrator can’t even pronounce the name Amery.

This is a four part series which purports to shed new light on Winston Churchill as a war leader. It will fail in every way if the shallow first episode is anything to go by. Indeed, the whole of the first episode, bar the last three minutes, is all about Churchill’s pre-Number Ten life, with far too long spent on making spurious comparisons with Adolf Hitler’s upbringing and pre-war political career.

I understand that sometimes, in order to attract a wide audience, you have to appeal to the lowest common denominator and assume no knowledge in your audience, but this programme appears as if it’s made for a teenage audience, rather than one with at least a basic knowledge of history. I mean, if you didn’t have a basic love of or interest in history why would you be watching programmes on Sky History, formerly known as the History Channel, anyway?

Even worse than that, Churchill’s character and record are infantilized to such a degree that the viewer starts to wonder why bother continuing to watch. It was as much as I could do to get to the end of the first episode. Surely the next three episodes can’t be as bad. Can they?

This documentary about the former leader of the Liberal Democrats was a joy to watch. Having said that, it was more adulatory than objective when looking at Charles Kennedy’s life, career, achievements and failings. By the end of the hour, he had been portrayed as a Highland folk hero, the greatest prime minister we never had and someone who had been failed by others. None of these things are true. While it is right not to speak ill of the dead, especially someone who died in such awful circumstances, a documentary ought to contain warts and all. It also started in an odd place, with his unexpected victory in the 1983 general election. There was little context, little mention of his upbringing. Maybe that’s a carp too far, but I felt we could have learned more had there been more about his family and education.

One advantage of this programme being made by BBC Alba, as opposed to BBC2 or BBC4, was that it contained many local voices which might not otherwise have been heard. It wasn’t a whole host of big names in politics doing the vox pop interviews, it was largely local voices from his constituency party, many of them speaking in Gaelic. They were insightful, human, and entertaining. And it was truly lovely to hear a language that is rarely heard south of the border. It sometimes felt like being in the middle of an episode of ‘Outlander’.

I knew Charles Kennedy a bit, and a nicer, more friendly guy, you could not hope to meet. Approachable, affable, funny, he was always someone I looked forward to meeting or interviewing. He was one of those rare breeds of politicians who are just the same off mic, as they are on mic. But for a man who always appeared an outward going extrovert, he was in many ways the direct opposite. He suffered a huge sense of imposter syndrome. He wasn’t a shy man, but he never quite appreciated his own talents. He was also let down by some of his closest advisers who, in the understandable quest of trying to mask his failings from the wider public, allowed him to get away with far too much.

No one should ever decry his many achievements, not least in leading the LibDems to their highest ever total of parliamentary seats and being a major presence in local government. His instincts against the war in Iraq gave his party a USP in British politics at the time. And yet, he failed to build on that, and those achievements became clouded in the mists of his alcoholism. This dark period wasn’t ignored in this somewhat hagiographical documentary but perhaps there needed to be more detail of how it affected his role as leader and what his colleagues tried to do to help him. And some did try.

In some ways this was an old-style political documentary, possibly more suited to the 1980s rather than the 2020s. But I’d like to see more of them. Too often political documentaries are based on controversy and opinion. All this one tried to do was portray the ‘good’ side of a good man. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all. Sometimes we should be reminded that at their core, most politicians go into politics for the right reasons, and they try to do good. Charles Kennedy was one of those people.

I miss him.

Boom Radio

Radio is experiencing a real boom period at the moment, with lots of new stations being launched on DAB or online. After local stations were gobbled up by national radio groups like Global and Bauer, ultra-local community stations are mushrooming all over the country. Barriers to entry are fast disappearing, and the costs of transmission are reducing all the time. You don’t need an FM licence, or even to be on a local DAB network, in theory, although with the advent of ultra-local DAB networks, even the costs for those have come down markedly.

Boom Radio is a new national station designed to appeal to the so-called Baby Boomer generation, which used to be catered for by Radio 2, but less so nowadays as it desperately seeks a younger audience. This innovative new station is the brainchild of two seasoned radio station operators/owners/launchers, David Lloyd and Phil Riley. They launched the Heart brand in the 1990s, ran LBC for some years and latterly the Orion Radio Group, which became Free Radio before it was sold to Bauer. Lloyd started out as a local radio DJ and on Boom he has returned to a presenting role in the mid-morning slot. He’s joined by “Diddy” David Hamilton at lunchtime, Graham Dene at Breakfast and Nicky Horne at Drivetime. The superb Graham Torrington hosts the late-night show, with Jane Markham on afternoons. They are all voices which those in their 50s, 60s and 70s will recognise from radio stations past. It’s got a very ‘mellow’, even ‘smooth’ feel to it and the joy is the presenters do their own thing. Their links are more than 30 seconds long and they don’t seem to be required to say ‘Boom’ twice in every link between songs. How refreshing, how Boom.

The big question is, can a new entrant like this pull listeners away from the competition without a national DAB presence. It’s on local DABs in the big cities, but local DAB is a crowded market. However, with the increasing use of smart speakers and apps, it might just be possible to make a breakthrough and attract the kind of advertisers needed to turn a profit.

I’ve been dipping in and out of Boom over the last two weeks, and the thing I like about it is that I haven’t heard the same song more than once. I’m sure there must be a playlist, but it seems to be a lot more expansive than its rivals. If I tune in to Magic and hear Do That To Me One More Time by Captain & Tenile one more time I think I will scream. Every bloody time. And it only got to Number 7!

In a few short weeks I’ve found myself saying, “Alexa, play Boom Radio” more and more. And I suspect if you give it a try, you will too. If you are, like me, of a certain age…

Why, oh why, doesn’t the BBC commission more contemporary documentaries like this? As an institution, the BBC has unparalleled access to all the leading political players in the world. Just mention the three letters BBC and world leaders generally agree to be interviewed. This kind of programme is not inordinately expensive to make, yet how many are made each year? One? Two?

Donald Trump’s foreign policy is one that will be analysed for decades to come. In some ways this three part documentary series barely scratches the surface. Part one looks at the US relationship with NATO and Europe. Part two looks at Trump’s efforts to bring about a settlement in the Middle East and the fallout with Iran, and part three examines Trump’s extraordinary policy towards North Korea. Each episode is gripping and the viewer learns a huge amount, including from those who were in the room.

What is refreshing is that the narrator adopts a genuinely factual and balanced approach in her explanation and analysis. This was exactly the right way to script it. Her priority was to explain what lay behind Trump’s motives and how his sometimes outrageous brand of diplomacy actually brought about some unexpected results. Sometimes, but not always. The documentary certainly doesn’t shy aware from Trump’s impetuousness or outright foreign policy failures, but unlike many other programmes, there is no agenda beyond a mission to explain. How refreshing.

One of the weaknesses of our broadcast media is its lack of willingness to inform us about what’s happening in the rest of the world. Why is it we don’t know more about the farming protests in India? Why do we hardly hear a peep of news from most of our neighbours in Europe beyond a 90 second report on a news bulletin. I make a point on LBC each night of spending 25% of my newshour on foreign stories, albeit in recent years even I have succumbed to the lure of having a report from the US each day. That may well change now the box office President is no longer on stage. I also try to make a point of doing hour long phone-ins on foreign stories, mainly so I and my listeners can be educated by other listeners who know a lot about the issue at hand. Working on a commercial station, I am not obligated to do this, but I feel it’s part of what we should do. I was one of the first to do a documentary on the plight of the Uighur muslims, back in 2019. That should have been the role of the BBC, who have been playing catch-up ever since.

I’d love Tim Davie, BBC director general, to instruct his news and current affairs departments to commission far more documentaries on foreign affairs. And they could start with the outrages going on in Myanmar and Hong Kong.

The Mile End Institute Podcast

The Mile End Institute is part of Queen Mary, University of London and its mission statement is to “bring together politicians, policymakers, researchers, commentators, and the public to discuss the major challenges of a changing world.” It is mostly presented by the Institute’s co-director Tim Bale, who is more political geek than political academic. And from a podcast point of view, that is a very good thing.

I realise this is a gross generalisation, but political academics are often incredibly boring and unengaging and don’t see it as part of their role to engage with mere political mortals. They see no reason to justify their work or positions to the general public and are quite content just to continue their research in their ivory towers with the odd inconvenience of a lecture or seminar thrown in. The thought of doing a regular blog, or tweet, let alone present a podcast appears anathema to most of them. Ok, I am exaggerating to make a point, but only by a little.

This podcast is much more engaging and interesting than the title might suggest. Bale knows how to interview and to get the best out of his guests who range from book authors to people involved at the sharp end of politics. The first episode I listened to last year was about life in Number 10, featuring Theresa May’s chief of staff, along with Patrick Diamond, who lectures at QMUL but was also an adviser in Number 10 under Tony Blair, and Jill Rutter who worked in Downing Street under John Major as a civil servant. It’s quite Radio 4 in its style, but there are some light moments too. Unlike many of his contemporaries he is only too willing to get out onto the airwaves, taking a lead no doubt from the great Professor Peter (now Lord) Hennessy, who has brought such joyful enthusiasm to radio listeners and TV watchers over the years, along with thousands of students who have graduated his courses at Queen Mary. Bale has learnt his trade at the feet of the master.

The most recent episode was rather less enlightening than some others. Titled The Political Lives of Postwar British MPs we didn’t really find out much at all about the subject at hand. What we learnt about was an oral history project on the subject conducted for the Parliament Trust by two academics, who went into great detail about how they had conducted interviews with MPs over the last few years. It’s also been turned into a book, but I’m not sure this podcast episode will have encouraged many people to buy it. I wanted to learn about the lives of the MPs, not the way they conducted interviews. And having looked up the book on Amazon, I now know I definitely won’t be buying it. Its retail price is over £60! Good luck with that.

Tom Harris was a Labour MP between 2001 and 2015. He was also one of the first MPs to harness the power of the internet through his blog, And Another Thing. But in 2010, he announced he was retiring from blogging. He said “it was getting me involved in too many squabbles”, and was having a negative effect on his mental health. He was right to do so. I did the same a month later. His blog also played a major part in him losing his dream ministerial job as a Transport minister in Gordon Brown’s government. After he lost his Glasgow South seat in 2015, along with every other Labour MP in Scotland bar one, he started writing a daily column for the Telegraph Online and he’s never looked back.

This new podcast is rather innovative. Each episode is 12-15 minutes long – a sort of bite sized podcast. In each episode he  regales a story from his life in politics. I can’t work out whether he’s reading from a script or it’s all spontaneous. It’s almost like listening to a chapter at a time from the audiobook of his autobiography.  It’s all highly entertaining and at the end of each episode you are left wanting more. The theme running through most episodes is his immense feeling of inferiority, which we now have come to know as “imposter syndrome”. I suffer from it myself to one degree or another. Neither of us went to public school or Oxbridge, and that’s got a lot to do with it. There’s that constant feeling of not quite belonging in the milieus in which we move.

The series is only half a dozen episodes old, but in those six episodes we learn a lot about the Labour Party in the 1980s and 1990s. There are some hilarious anecdotes too, as the young Tom Harris makes his way in the strange world of politics and seeks to make progress in the Labour Party.

I find myself longing for extra episodes where we’ll find out more about his life as a backbencher, a blogger, a minister and how he then came to vote Conservative. One thing we can be assured of – there will be a lot of laughs, and possibly a few tears along the way. 

An Inconvenient Ruth with Ruth Davidson, Global Radio

An Inconvenient Ruth started life as an occasional interview podcast but has now become a weekly, Sunday night programme on LBC (the broadcaster I work for), which is then turned into a podcast. Most of us know Ruth Davidson as the highly successful leader of the Scottish Conservatives, who almost singlehandedly turned around the party’s fortunes north of the border. She’s a naturally ebullient character who commands respect across party boundaries. Since she stood down from the leadership and had a baby, she has broadened her horizons and returned, in part, to her past. She started out as a journalist on BBC Scotland.

The secret of being a good interviewer is to enable your interviewee to relax, and she does that incredibly well. She’s also able to attract a very wide range of guests, who in recent months have included politicians, pop stars, media types, sports personalities and many others. She is well prepared and does her research on each of her subjects but gives the show/podcast an air of naturalness that some interviewers find difficult to achieve. It’s much more of a conversation than a grilling. And most important of all, she lets her guests speak. There is no constant interruption or hectoring, which is so prevalent among interviewers trying to prove themselves to their bosses. Ruth Davidson has nothing to prove to anyone, and that’s what makes these conversations so riveting. Her personality shines through and her little asides are often both hilarious and insightful. In a recent episode she interviewed the master of interviewing, Sir Michael Parkinson. It was an absolute delight to listen to, as was her encounter with Sir Nicholas Soames. While I haven’t been able to bring myself to listen to her chats with Paloma Faith or Eddie Izzard (life is too short), I’m sure they are equally brilliant.

Ruth Davidson is clearly enjoying life at the moment, but she is soon going to have to make a choice. I think it is now inevitable that there will be a second Scottish independence referendum. In that referendum, the Remain campaign are going to have to campaign in a very different way to 2014. It can’t be about Project Fear. It has to be a campaign which points out the positive sides of the Union. It must appeal to hearts as well as minds. Gordon Brown can appeal to people’s minds, but not their hearts. Ruth Davidson can do both. Her country still needs her.

You might think that as a publicly funded broadcaster, presumably with public service broadcasting at its heart, that the BBC would devote a lot of time and effort to making programmes about business and enterprise. You might think that in its news output it would have a regular, if not daily, business programme as part of its news output. You’d be wrong. The BBC does none of these things. It pays lip service to business news at a time when it should be front and centre of its output.

Sky News, on the other hand, broadcasts an hour of prime time business based news each day, fronted by former Sun City Editor Ian King. He used to have half an hour at 1.30pm, but in recent months he’s moved to the 10am-11am prime time slot. When it was announced I must admit I thought it was a bizarre scheduling decision by Sky, but it has worked out brilliantly. It’s a bright and breezy hour, fast moving and informative. King doesn’t talk down to his audience, he makes his subject accessible and interesting, even if you’re not particularly involved in the world of business and commerce.

King has a massive contacts book and uses it to the full. Business people often resist broadcast interviews because they always imagine they’ll be done over in the same way politicians routinely are. King isn’t interested in doing this, partly because he knows if he does it, they’ll never return. This can lead on occasion to some interviews being unnecessarily soft and appear as if it’s one friend interviewing another. One example was an interview with IAG head Willie Walsh at the height of the dispute over working conditions.

However, that’s a minor carp. Sky are to be congratulated for giving this show a prominent position in their line-up, and the BBC should be ashamed that they haven’t done something similar.

Chesapeake Shores, Netflix

In the 1970s it was The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie that provided us with so-called “Feel Good” programmes. They went out of fashion for quite a long time but in recent years, the advent of Netflix and Amazon Prime, and more recently Disney and Apple TV, have brought this type of entertainment back to our screens. And about time too. During lockdown they are much needed. A few weeks ago I wrote about the outstanding  Netflix series Virgin River. Based on rural life in a north Californian community it had some great story lines and very relatable characters. Once I had finished the two 10 episode long series, I was desperate to find something similar. I had developed a routine and when I come off air on LBC at 10pm, I have something to eat while watching the BBC News at Ten and catching up on emails. And then, I want to relax and watch something which I don’t have to think about too deeply. I call it “Switch Off TV”. I just watch it and let my brain start to calm down. And then I’m ready for bed.

When I finished Virgin River I asked for suggestions as to what to watch next and someone suggested Chesapeake Shores. It is set in the eponymous (fictional) town on the coast of Maryland, not far from Baltimore, and follows the fortunes of four generations of the O’Brien family. Most of the storylines are based on the personal relationships between the different characters and the morals and ethical dilemmas they encounter. It can be both moving and schmaltzy at the same time. The most well known character is Jesse Metcalfe (the hunky gardener in Desperate Housewives) who plays the rather troubled Trace Riley, the love interest of the main character in the first season, Abby O’Brien. They were teenage sweethearts until Abby upped and left Chesapeake Shores at the age of 16 for the bright lights of New York without so much a goodbye. Trace made a name for himself as a Nashville singer but a tragedy brings him back to his home town coincidentally at the very same time that Abby returns to live there for reasons I won’t divulge for fear of issuing a spoiler.

There are five children in the O’Brien family, all in their twenties or thirties. All their characters could easily be in The Waltons. Abby is Mary Ellen; Bree is Erin, Jess is Elizabeth, Connor is Jim Bob and Kevin is Jason. I think.

Some people will think this is “Mush TV” and they’d probably be right. But sometimes we don’t need action films. We don’t need more murder, blood and gore. Sometimes we need to feel comfortable, happy and optimistic. This is one of those times. And I for one am grateful I have another 25 episodes to get through. I may be some time.