Leaving the BBC for a podcast – what were Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel thinking?

What Sopel, Maitlis and Goodall are actually engaged in is the same ‘mission to explain’ that the best current affairs shows do, and the podcast is a less effective vehicle for imparting that understanding

Maybe it’s me. Well, obviously it is me, but I’ve never quite got the point of podcasts. Some years ago, when I actually owned an Apple device more or less specifically designed to listen to them, they were all the rage. Then they disappeared.

Now, like a miraculously recovering scorched lawn, they’re back, and their verdant attractions means they are more popular than ever. The sub-genre, the political podcast, seems a particularly improbable success. According to the slightly self-congratulatory references in The News Agents, theirs is only rivalled for global supremacy by The Rest Is Politics, which features Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart.

Well, whoop de do. I have to say I’m more interested in the top of the Premier League, and indeed the relegation zone, but again, that’s just me.

The News Agents (and that’s two words because it’s nothing to do with WH Smith’s or Monty Gerhardi’s Mags’n’Fags corner shop) didn’t succeed in changing my mind about the podcast, political or otherwise. Indeed, it rather soured my opinion still further because I cannot help but wonder what Jon Sopel, Emily Maitlis and Lewis Goodall think they’re playing at. They’re all brilliant journalists, and if this is what they left the BBC for, then everyone – the corporation, viewers, listeners and the protagonists themselves – is worse off. (Except for Global, of course, which now owns their journalism).

The spin, ironically for a “show” that purports to get behind the headlines, is that the fearless threesome will now be liberated from pettifogging rules about impartiality and, in Maitlis’ case the subversive influence of Conservative Party agents, and are now free to say what they “really” think.

Yet this was far from what was offered up in this first episode, predictably enough focused on Donald Trump and his snaffling of official documents. There was absolutely nothing in this podcast that couldn’t have been broadcast on, say, Newsnight, and that is greatly to their credit.

Long experience and mostly strong adherence to the usual standards of fairness and truth meant that the podcast was balanced, informative and analytical. Voices defending Trump – Lyndsey Graham, Majorie Taylor Greene – were duly heard warning about riots and witch hunts, and ex-Trump Whitehouse staffers were duly invited to try and explain what goes on inside the mind of Trump.

Former acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, and his former Trumpite director of communications, Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci were thoughtful and insightful, and, given everything, about as objective as they could be about a president accused of espionage. Mulvaney described Trump as an “adrenaline rush kind of guy”, for example, which seems fair.

The trio and their guests kicked around whether Trump might get sent to jail, and now he might do at the next presidential election against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and came to the reasonable, tentative conclusion that no, Trump wouldn’t be next seen in a penitentiary or age jumpsuit, and that he’d beat Harris but maybe not Biden. There’s nothing on any of that that would breach BBC producer guidelines or earn them a reference to Ofcom.

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The outspoken Emily Maitlis of the infamous Cummings Monologue or indeed her recent MacTaggart Memorial Lecture was entirely absent in this podcast, and rightly so. She, and the others, didn’t editorialise, or at least not unduly. She didn’t suddenly emerge from her Global Player chrysalis as a scornful, hate-filled, liberal version of Mark Steyn or Tucker Carlson, but rather as the consummate professional journalist she has always been (excepting the odd lapse).

The thing I actively disliked about the podcast was the very thing that is supposed to make these exercises so refreshing and fun – that terrible forced chumminess and informality, supposed to be like three old friends gossiping in a bar. I don’t like it. As someone who spends too much time gossiping in bars, this isn’t something I don’t feel I need, or at least not if they’re not actually going to explore some of the fruitier stuff you read online about Liz Truss.

What Sopel, Maitlis and Goodall are actually engaged in is the same “mission to explain” that the best current affairs shows do, and the podcast is a less effective vehicle for imparting that understanding. Plus the jokes fall a bit flat, and they’ve given themselves unimaginative nicknames – “Sopes”, “Em”, “Louis” – and that only adds to the incestuous feel of the thing. The token efforts to involve their audience feel just that, tokenistic.

I was also a bit unnerved about the distinctly junior, subservient role Goodall has been allotted in the podcast, as some sort of fact-checking researcher gimp. I was only surprised that Maitlis and Sopel didn’t send him out for a couple of lattes and some pastries half way through or tell him it he’s had his turn explaining what an affidavit is, and now it was time for Louis to have his ball-gag put on for walkies. That would be worth downloading.