Listening to Louis Theroux chatting amiably on his podcast with the comedian Jimmy Carr, I was surprised to find myself getting increasingly irritated.
It had been so promising. Theroux is a bright and witty interviewer. Carr is a funny but distinctly creepy comedian: smooth, quick-witted and yet oddly unendearing. While others reveal themselves (or at least a version of themselves) onstage, he hides behind the laughs.
Theroux would know that there is something worth digging into here but, as the long interview progressed, it became clear that nothing of substance was going to emerge. There was banter, anecdote and a lot pseudo-intellectual name-dropping by Carr (Foucault got a look-in at one point) but anything remotely troublesome was glided over.
The problem, I realised later was that that it was a podcast.
I had had a similar experienced listening to Adam Buxton – another interesting man cruising on Spotify autopilot – when he had David Byrne as a guest, or Richard Ayaode, or indeed Louis Theroux (Louis and Adam like to appear on each other’s shows – podcasts can be a bit óf a circle jerk sometimes).
With a podcast, the game is to have an informal chat. Because almost certainly your guest will be someone you know from the celebrity circuit, you will be giving outsiders the chance to eavesdrop on a couple of well-known insiders talking about their world: a sneak-peep behind the curtains of fame.
For the guests, these shows are about visibility, soft self-promotion – Carr’s appearance on the Theroux podcast to tie in with the release of a film he had written. In return for turning up, they provide gossip and opinion and know that they will never ever be put on the spot. That would break the undeclared code of these shows: keep it light, keep it friendly.
The Theroux/Carr schmoozefest revealed the podcast trap at its most obvious and annoying.
Carr argued a touch self-importantly about the right to offend, yet later admitted he had cheerfully accepted a well-paid gig in Saudi Arabia, a place where the wrong opinion will get you flogged or sent to jail. When Theroux asked mildly about that, Carr’s smooth reply was we should never seek to impose western values on others.
What??? The BBC version of Louis Theroux would have seen the self-serving feebleness of this reply and followed up, but in the podcast he let his guest get away with it and moved quickly on.
Later, Carr described himself as a ‘man of the left’ before shrugging off the small matter of using a legal but iffy Jersey-based tax-avoidance scheme. The real political division, he said, was not between left and right but (conveniently for him as a middle-aged man) between young and old. Again, Theroux treated this line as another pearl of wisdom.
That is the way with podcasts – and it is not entirely harmless. What the mad trolls of X/Twitter do with bile and false information, podcasters do with cosy chats. They entrench division and discourage debate between opposites.
Even the serious podcasts – say, the UK and US versions of The Rest is Politics – are based on the same principle: two articulate, well-informed communicators look at a topic and agree with one another, providing their audience with the reassurance that they – broadcasters and listeners – are together on the right side of the argument.
And where do you have to go to find interviews that are not compromised, that actually call the interviewee to account? Well, that will be the good old legacy media.
Vilified as ‘fake news’ by the cynical, politically-motivated champions of the new media, mainstream broadcasters and press, for all their flaws, blunders and imbalances, will give you a clearer view of the world in all its conflict and complexity than the one offered by those warm, friendly and so often utterly pointless podcasts.
