Rise of the ‘Dadcast’ – How white middle-aged men stormed the podcast charts

Ok, so Steven Bartlett’s ‘Diary of a CEO’ is the exception, but most popular podcasters – from Alastair Campbell to Gary Lineker – are all a certain type of man talking about the same kind of things. Do we have a problem, asks Sam Leith (who’s one of them)

They’re the modern broadcast equivalent of retreating to the shed at the bottom of the garden for a fag and a nip of the Macallan (PA/Getty)

Good lord, a colleague remarked the other day looking at the UK podcast charts. It’s a lot of... middle-aged white blokes chatting, isn’t it? And so it is. Take your pick from the top five.  

At number one when I checked yesterday: Louis Theroux (53). Then there’s The Rest Is History, featuring Dominic Sandbrook (49) and Tom Holland (56). Then there’s The Rest Is Politics, with Alastair Campbell (66) and Rory Stewart (51).

Number four is a relative outlier – The Diary of a CEO’s Steven Bartlett is only 31 and the only non-white podcaster in the top five.

And finally, there’s The News Agents, where, my goodness, we find the first woman on the list in the form of Emily Maitlis (53), alongside Jon Sopel (64) and Lewis Goodall (34). 

That last entry – a sort of Newsnight-across-the-water – is centrist dad heaven. Which seems to be a hint as to who is consuming these formats most enthusiastically. Spoiler alert: it’s not blue-haired members of Generation Z. The podcast charts are routinely topped by shows which appeal to middle-aged, middle-of-the-road blokes like me. 

The world-conquering format – Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger Podcasts has four “The Rest Is” titles and one spin-off in the top 20 – seems to be to take people who were on the telly a bit in the Nineties and Noughties (mostly blokes), sprinkle with comic banter, and add information. Call them “Dadcasts”, perhaps: the modern broadcast equivalent of retreating to the shed at the bottom of the garden for a fag and a nip of the Macallan. 

Rory Stewart, 51, hosts ‘The Rest Is Politics’ with Alastair Campbell, 66 (PA)

Of course, this is to overgeneralise. Women listen to these podcasts too – and host many of them. Hand on heart: even as I write these words, my wife is painting the spare room and listening to The Rest Is Football.

But do men listen to female-hosted podcasts in the same way? My hunch is that they do not. The listenership, say, for Elizabeth Day’s How to Fail or Katherine Ryan’s Telling Everybody Everything will skew female as surely as the audience for the average romcom.

Just as men see football as a sensible and worthwhile recreation and fashion as a girly frippery, millennia of patriarchy have left us with the general impression that men talking is the default and that women talking is a niche interest, and probably has to do with feelings. Besides, women aren’t funny, right?  

I observe these prejudices. I do not endorse them. I'd venture, too, that the abundant information that these podcasts offer about politics, nutrition or ancient history may be the excuse, but it isn’t the point.

These pods aren’t, psychologically speaking, about improving yourself by becoming better informed about the world. That’s the cherry on the cake.

‘The Louis Theroux Podcast’ sits comfortably in the top five of the UK podcast charts (PA)

Really, what they are is the warm bear-hug of being involved in a good chat. With, y’know, the lads. The sort of sparky, fun, banter-filled evening you might have in the pub, or the poker night you never got round to hosting. 

In real life, your two best mates are tedious drunks with a limited conversational range and a snowfall of dandruff spackling their age-inappropriate sportswear.

But thanks to the magic of “Dadcasts”, you can now imagine that your two best mates are as amusing and well-informed, as good at impressions and as weirdly interested in dinosaurs and hedgehogs, as Holland and Sandbrook are.

Or that they have Campbell’s caustic wit. Or that they are just nice and sensible like Stewart. Or even, bloody hell, here’s Alan actual Shearer in your living room, sharing a laugh with you.  

What’s more, because the podcast is radio, only without anyone editing it properly – it is immensely reassuring to those of us who look with despair and alienation, an inner crumbling of one’s sense of relevance, a loosening of one’s very grip on the 21st century, at the media intake of our children.

Learning is the cherry on top; the real reason men love podcasts is feeling like you’re involved in a good chat (PA)

There they are, these adolescents, barely noticing us, peering and stabbing at their devices, eyeballs rotating as they hoover up TikTok and Twitch and YouTube Shorts, all set at 1.5 speed, like they’re in a Philip K Dick novel. (And when we mention Dick to them they say: “What?” or “Hurr hurr.”)   

 But when we don our earbuds and go out to mow the lawn or do the washing up or paint the spare room or fill the car up with petrol at the big Tesco, the world makes sense again.

There are some nice, middle-aged blokes like us talking about real things, like the Tony Blair years, or tanks in the Second World War, or early Nineties indie albums, or football, or the days when pornography was something you found in hedges.  

These are regressive stereotypes, no doubt, but the crest of late middle age is when you tend to yearn a little for regressive stereotypes in an age whose mainstream media is determinedly hostile to them. And in the Dadcast, at last, they have found what I believe the young people today call a “safe space”.  

If you like...

* The Louis Theroux Podcast, try How To Fail With Elizabeth Day

A brilliant award-winning podcast where the indomitable journalist gathers a host of big names to celebrate the things that haven’t gone right

Author and broadcaster Elizabeth Day presenter of How To Fail… (Sony Music Entertainment/Joe Magowan/PA)

* The Rest Is History presented by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, try The History Chicks

Hosts Beckett Graham and Susan Vollenweider explore the many fascinating stories of women throughout the centuries

* The Diary of a CEO, with Steven Bartlett, try Working Hard, Hardly Working

Mogul Grace Beverley uses her podcast to do away with stuffy business talk and help women be the boss they want to be