Swearing, huge sponsors and no worries about bias: how broadcasters are milking life post-BBC

Former Beeb bigwigs Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall have carved out a lucrative career with their podcast The News Agents

With podcasting being more freeform and less disciplined than Radio 4, some of the top hosts have developed verbal mannerisms that reveal more about them than they perhaps realise. When Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall left the BBC in 2022 to front The News Agents, the lure was the chance to rip off the straitjacket of impartiality. With the freedom to speak as they find, each presenter has seized the day in ways that say something uniquely about them. 
Having buttoned his lip for decades in newsrooms, Sopel has embraced the opportunity to swear like the most potty-mouthed fishwife. He audibly and massively enjoys turning the air blue. “Have you ever dared to tell Emily Maitlis to f–k off?” he gleefully asked Goodall last week, when Maitlis was on holiday. 
The congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene did precisely that in an interview with Maitlis about Donald Trump in March. The lexical shift is subtler in Maitlis. She still asks probing questions with all her usual vigour. It’s when she ventures into an opinion that hesitancy creeps in. Her every third thought is nervously prefixed with the words, “I guess…” What that involuntary buzz phrase tells us is that the DNA of BBC balance dies hard. 
And then there is Goodall. On the face of it, he is the George Harrison of the outfit, whom fewer fans scream for. The reality is that his steamroller prolixity and dazzling confidence make him the podcast’s dominant noise. His habit is to check if listeners (and colleagues?) are keeping up by means of a teacherly tic that he may have no idea he’s doing. 
As The News Agents reported from last week’s Democrat National Congress in Chicago, this was him on Kamala Harris: “I think last night you saw in [Tim] Walz’s speech why she picked him, right? He is Mr Midwest, right? They’ve got two history-making elements to the Harris presidency, right? There is a slight paradox with her, right, in the sense that this is the thing that she would never have wanted in many ways, right?” Once heard, never unheard. 
An even purer form of Chinese water torture was laid on by The Rest Is Politics, whose two presenters spent just the one episode together at the DNC. For half of it they sat in a quiet room while Alastair Campbell (who mispronounced “Kamala”) explained everything that he’d read on the plane about the manifesto produced by conservative think tank Project 2025. 
Rory Stewart listened and, every two seconds in that prim staccato of his, said “yuh… yuh… yuh… yuh… yuh… yuh… yuh… yuh…” It sounded glaringly odd and perhaps reveals that Stewart, whose custom is to tell Campbell what he finds interesting, is uncomfortable when relegated to a passive sounding board. You’d never get any of this on Radio 4, but podcasts are conversational and have many hours to fill, so producers presumably don’t have the bandwidth to rein the mannerisms in. 
You can let them grate or you can go with the flow, as with Dominic “sort of” Sandbrook and Tom “kind of” Holland. The two Rest Is History boys have, no doubt unconsciously, developed one construction that they both use all the time, and it’s delightful. They’ll summarise something that happened in a place and a period – rape and pillage, for example, then add “and all that stuff/all that kind of thing”. “Edward III fights the Hundred Years’ War, wins lots of battles, all of this,” riffed Sandbrook in this week’s excellent (as usual) 488th episode. 
It’s an inclusive shorthand that addresses listeners as intelligent equals. The most knowing verbal quirk is – or was – to be found in The Rest Is Entertainment, which covers all bases from showbiz froth to geopolitics. For months now its gallopingly articulate hosts Marina Hyde and Richard Osman seem to have colluded in a prank by omitting a crucial consonant in adverts that they are contractually obliged to read out. 
“This episode is bought to you by…” they say with a straight face, as if satirically thumbing a nose at commercial paymasters. Recently advertisers appear to have changed their scripts to thwart this hilarity. Once the podcast starts, count how many times Osman says “by the way” per episode. Encyclopaedic knowledge tumbles out of him so fast that it’s as if his sentences have to retrieve stray facts before they get left behind. 
It was a low count this week as they covered problems at the celebrity video service Cameo and Hollywood’s craven relationship with China. He said it only once, and Hyde twice, these things being catching. On Thursdays, they host a cheerful questions-and-answers edition before promising to be back after the weekend. “See you next Tuesday,” they both say in a twinkling pay-off that slyly manages to out-filth Jon Sopel.