I don’t know if the realisation that you are truly not as smart as 16 years of schooling led you to believe you were is exclusive to me, but: have you ever arrived at a party – a dinner party normally, but it can just be a normal party that multiple men in ¼-zip jumpers have been invited to – and you’re late and a bit flustered and you hand off a bottle of wine to the host and everyone watches you take off your cagoule in silence, and then you turn and say “Hi” and everyone introduces themselves with a brief hand-up, palm-open, no-motion wave, and they are all called “Tom” somehow, even the women, and you realise with dread that you have walked into a conversation they are all 40 minutes into, you haven’t a clue what anyone is going on about and nobody has any intention of dumbing it down for you, because they think that you, too, know what the term “red-brick university” means and how it differs from a “Russell Group” one, and that you take regular driving holidays to the south of France and can recite your credit score from memory, and that you are one of Them?
Anyway, related: Brexitcast (Thursday, 11.45pm, BBC One), the award-winning BBC Sounds politics podcast, has been glammed up for TV for the duration of the election. When I say “glammed up”, I mean … well, I suppose putting a dressing gown on over your pants to answer the door to a delivery driver is technically “glamming up”, so let’s stick with it. Because Brexitcast is TV anarchy: here’s Laura Kuenssberg, sipping tea in an editing van in a Lancashire car park; here’s Katya Adler, alone in a studio in Brussels; here are Adam Fleming and Chris Mason, not knowing whether to look at each other or the camera or the microphones they’re speaking into, deep in gloomy Westminster.
Brexitcast – and there is no point talking about the content of the episodes I watched because in the 10 days between me writing this and it reaching newsstands, Nigel Farage will have exploded something or resigned from something or resigned from an explosion, and they’ll be talking about that instead – oscillates between various studios as the four hosts and the occasional guest all mic in to the collective discourse. While it isn’t pretty, it is clever: an informed conversation about the day’s politics by people who do that smart-person snicker instead of an actual real laugh.
I am starting to think this might be weirdly trailblazing, though: TV, doing away with all glamour, and co-opting the soothing do-the-washing-up-to-it manner of podcasting. Brexitcast – as something to actively watch – is a bit like peering at the underside of a car for half an hour. But in an age when speaking into a microphone and intersecting it with mattress adverts has become the media boom we never saw coming, it could be the start of TV clawing something back from the podcast world.
Yes, it feels a lot like those days you were off ill from school and somehow ended up watching Adrian Chiles on Working Lunch, baffled at the enormity of the adult world. But Brexitcast caters perfectly for those people, the ones at parties you are no longer welcome at. Maybe the future of TV is just people named Tom snickering at in-jokes.
