This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Britain needs bold ideas for a better future and this reviewer has one: ban podcasts in which a vaguely counterintuitive pair of political commentators talk about a random assortment of world events.
Yes, it might be a niche suggestion — not as bold as Net Zero or Levelling Up, say — but at least it will do unquestionable good. This format has been more overused than the colour red in the Soviet Union.
The latest example is Alas Vine & Hitchens from the Daily Mail. I didn’t want to dislike it. Peter Hitchens is a great writer and a great man, and Sarah Vine is … a human being. But listening to their podcast is more depressing than listening to a pensioner describe his haemorrhoids.
Why does the podcast exist? Vine and Hitchens never explain its purpose. They just start talking. But to what end? The question sent me spiralling off into a haze of existential anguish over the possibility that life is meaningless. Ultimately, though, the answer is that the Mail thought putting two opinionated columnists together would be a cheap and easy means of generating content.
Everything about Alas Vine & Hitchens screams, “Will this do?” “Imagine Vine and Hitchens[sic] respective columns brought to life,” the Mail’s promotional material proposes. I’m not sure why a newspaper is implying that prose is any less “alive” than conversation. Indeed, on the strength of this podcast it is very clear that the opposite can be true.
The first episode stops for an ad break 20 seconds in. “If you liked this episode,” we hear, “you’ll love this … ” I’d barely had the chance to start forming an opinion. I do know, on the other hand, that someone who likes Hitchens is unlikely to “love” a football podcast called It’s All Kicking Off or anything hosted by Richard Coles.
I’m not blaming Hitchens or Vine here. The problem is the format. Hitchens does his best to hold forth entertainingly — his rant about Ukraine in that inaugural episode, for example, making several excellent points — and Vine is not especially annoying.
Yet the pair have all the chemistry of a Smiths reunion. They talk over each other, and they misunderstand each other — their conversations veering from point to point like two drunkards trying to navigate past each other with full pints of beer.
After a couple of episodes, they hit upon the brilliant thought that they can each introduce a conversation topic every week. This concept flops when Vine introduces the subject of modern slavery, and Hitchens muses on Net Zero, fracking and his teenage Marxism before admitting that he does not know a lot about modern slavery.
Readers, these podcasts have to die. Yes, all of them. Their reason for existing, in an age where Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell have inexplicably made millions of pounds out of being wrong for a couple of hours a week, is almost entirely economic. They are cheap to produce. There is no creative or intellectual energy here. It is just small talk with pretensions.
A critic, as Kenneth Tynan said, is someone who knows the way but doesn’t necessarily know how to drive, but I want to plead with the makers of podcasts to pursue the call of creativity and not heed the demands of content.
Over at Wondery, Scam Factory explores how people are being conned into modern slavery — take note, Mr Hitchens! — working for large-scale scammers. Last year, more than 1,000 people were rescued from scam factories in Myanmar.
It is a fascinating theme, though the host, Denise Chan, is a bit too chirpy for the tale she is telling. “The atmosphere was atmosphering,” she says, in a moment of exposition which made me want to put my head through my desk.
A rougher and more sober tone might have more effectively conveyed the suffocating terror of the victims’ predicament — and the unfolding chaos as a sister tries to get her missing brother released.
The podcast is interesting on how scammers prey, or are compelled to prey, on people’s fears and desires — dangling anxieties and nightmares in front of them like faceless fishermen.
Where it gets really weird is when the sister, in an attempt to free her brother, agrees to recruit new victims for the scam factory. The podcast does not seem to probe her decisions here — even when other relatives bizarrely decide to work in the factory too. Is there information being withheld from the listeners, and not just the victims, or am I too cynical?
Still, it is good to have a sobering reminder of how devious people in the grip of greed can be. It also gives me an idea. What about a factory in which presenters are compelled to produce minimum effort podcasts?
With 100 political commentators being forced to churn out very mildly disputatious conversations day in, day out I could soon rival Goalhanger Podcasts — unless, of course, they’ve had this idea already.
