The biggest difference between the old and new broadcasting, it turns out, is not knowing when to tune in. When Emily Maitlis was on BBC Two’s Newsnight and Jon Sopel reporting from Washington for BBC News, you found her at 10.30pm and him at 6pm or 10pm, regular as Radio Times.
For the first edition of their new daily commercial podcast, The News Agents, subscribers had been advised to set their devices for 5pm. But it was 5.48pm when the launch show dropped on my Global Player app.
Perhaps now that the presenters can say anything they want – a much-vaunted bonus for Maitlis and Sopel of going to Global, in contrast to the editorial corseting they allege at the BBC – they were having trouble deciding precisely which of their torrentially liberated opinions to express.
Their opening episode, Trump – Prison or President?, focused on the legal fight over classified documents the 45th US president transported to his Florida mansion. As the Maitlis-Sopel double-act vibe began with a BBC States-based show, Americast, it may be smart to start on Washington turf, and with a guest, former Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci, familiar from that franchise.
A less happy rationale could be the potential difficulty of casting a grabby British first edition, due to the question-terror afflicting current senior UK politicians. The News Agents would have been rivalled for media attention on Tuesday by Nick Robinson’s interview with Liz Truss on BBC One, until she made a last-minute decision not to risk inquisition. Such scrutiny-shyness might be even more problematic for The News Agents following Maitlis’s explicitly contra-Conservative lines in her recent Edinburgh TV Festival lecture.
Maitlis called Scaramucci “Mooch” and Sopel “Sopes”, while dubbing third voice Lewis Goodall (providing the sort of backgrounders he used to on Newsnight) “Luigi” because “everyone has to have a nickname”. Emily didn’t seem to have one yet, but perhaps it should be “Matey”, given the strenuously casual presentation.
If Maitlis’s and Sopel’s introductory banter – Artemis space rocket-related crosstalk about his “pistons pumping” while fearing “engine bleed” – was an example of what the BBC stopped them doing, that may just have been one of the wiser judgments of the corporation spoilsports.
Tonally, the first podcast most resembled the post-show Newsnight green room cool-down, with presenters and contributors speaking slightly more loosely. Yet, when “Mooch” compared Trump to Hitler, Maitlis interjected, “Quite the parallel!”, in exactly the classic sandbagging way of a BBC presenter.
No show can fairly be judged on its first go, and the BBC would never launch a new show in which the main presenters have a combined age of 114, so this is bold of Global. It remains to be seen, though, if the best use is being made of these latest big-money signings. The News Agents tests two propositions: that celebrity broadcasters can flourish without a fixed network schedule show; and whether there exists widespread public hunger to know the real political opinions of ex-BBC presenters.
The growth and scope of the podcast market suggests that the first gamble might succeed. As for the second, while the BBC doctrine of “impartiality” is multiply problematic, it at least warns the corporation’s newsroom aristocracy against an automatic London Liberal default that Brexit and the Daily Mail are on the wrong side of an invisible but indelible line, while lockdown and the licence fee are beyond argument.
As the Global (especially LBC) audience seems, at least from phone-ins, to be more porous on that border, a crucial issue will be how Maitlis and Sopel utilise their new editorial freedom. Will their untrammelled thoughts actually include some unexpected ones?
And, surely, there needs to be a regular drop time. After all, the ancient journalistic support industry on which the title of the podcast puns depends on convenient daily delivery.
