Amol Rajan on leaving the Today Programme, the BBC's future and leaping into the "Digital Narnia" of the creator economy

Foreign.

0:00

Welcome to Insiders, a podcast all about the world of television. With me, Jermaine Mulville, and me, Peter Fincham. This is the podcast people who love television and want to find out a bit more about what goes on behind the scenes.

0:07

And we're delighted to be joined this week by, well, dare I say it, an actual broadcaster, professional broadcaster, unlike you and me, who looks, I might say, remarkably bright eyed and bushy tails. From man who consistently gets up at three in the morning to present the Today program on Radio 4 and has a two year old as well. That's not just a two year old combination.

0:19

Isn't this a parenting podcast because all of us have got four children.

0:41

Yes.

0:44

Yeah. We've got them at slightly different life stages, though.

0:44

Are you saying.

0:48

Should we tell people who this is? This, this. This mystery voice, the mystery.

0:50

He's already done it.

0:54

Jimmy. Do you know what, mate? You need to be much more engaged at the top of the. Your own podcast.

0:55

You know what?

0:58

I need to deliver it with feeling.

0:59

I miss the Amal Rajan bit.

1:00

It was literally. It was literally 40 of what you just said.

1:02

Honestly, I was so concentrated on saying, don't miss out his name. And I'm, I obviously was.

1:05

I thought I was coming to meet two icons.

1:09

Continue with Amal's.

1:12

Let me just, let me. Let me just get you giants. You know, it's like being in a care home.

1:14

I know.

1:18

Just think you're visiting a care home and it's part, it's part of your community outreach.

1:19

I'm going to continue with the intro. Alongside his Today duties, Amal also is a presenter, as we all know, of University Challenge, the hit BBC podcast Radical. And his own interview show, which has the pleasingly Ron Seal title of Amalrajan Interviews and all that alone would of course be more than enough for us to have him on the podcast. Earlier this year, he announced he was leaving the Today program. He was going to unleash his inner entrepreneur and jump into the great digital Narnia of the creative economy. Sounds very exciting. Welcome to the great digital Narnia of the creative economy.

1:24

Yeah. Honored. You are the. You are not. This is what Narnia looks like. A small blue room in North London. You know that one of the award absolutely fundamental rules of, like the creator economy is that you have to care what you look like. Yeah.

2:00

Yeah.

2:14

And you are in a room with no art, in a dingy basement with two pot plants.

2:14

Yeah.

2:18

And you're meant to be icons of modern media, innovators, entrepreneurs. I know Bastions of social mobility. And here we are.

2:18

Anyway, I wouldn't refer to our two producers as pot plants, by the way. I think that is immediately offensive. When are you leaving BBC?

2:27

I'm not leaving.

2:36

You're not leaving the BBC?

2:36

When are you leaving?

2:38

Peter, there's a guy who's worked.

2:39

I've read my briefing notes, Jimmy.

2:40

I know. When are you leaving the Today program?

2:42

Probably towards the end of the summer. So late August, early September.

2:44

Is it unusual for someone of your age to leave the Today program?

2:49

I mean, I've done five years. I've had a wonderful time. The Today program slightly undermines my thesis about why I should leave because it's such a big and influential beast. And I know it's a podcast about TV and so we shouldn't talk about radio programs, but the real story about tv.

2:52

You very rarely talk about TV on this podcast.

3:08

I know.

3:10

I wouldn't worry about it.

3:10

Talk about life in a care home. Yeah, but I mean, the Today program is this absolutely astonishing beast which 5.6 or 5.7 million different homo sapiens listen to every week, which is amazing, which is why it's a bit mad to leave it. So maybe I'm a little bit young, but I think, you know, you set up this podcast because actually, we live in interesting times and things are moving rather fast. And I want to be the actions,

3:11

let's say, we'd love. Obviously, let's come on to your plans and this sort of, you know, joining the creator economy and. And the hidden entrepreneur, et cetera. But I'd love to kind of talk about the BBC. We always talk about the BBC on this podcast. And I'll be honest, it's probably our favorite subject. But you, as somebody who's, you know, I know, I know you started out in the right show on Channel 5, but pretty much your broadcasting career is a BBC broadcasting career. You're very, very closely associated with BBC. You will continue on University Challenge and I'm sure other things. The BBC always feels that it's at a crossroads sort of moment with the existential threats, whether they're from, you know, from governments or whether they're from Netflix or. Or whatever. How does it look to you at this moment when you're loosening your ties with it? Let's put it that way.

3:36

This time is different. This time is different. And it's different because the Internet happened. And I can tell you the future of the BBC. And I say it's, you know, in a room full of people who basically believe this is a golden institution. One of the best things about Britain, one of the jewels of our culture and country, in a word, the BBC's future is smaller. It's smaller in absolute terms, and it's smaller in relative terms. I actually think its importance grows exponentially because of some prevailing trends, the. The kind of prevalence of news you can't really trust. The fact that we live in a very polarized society. And having a village pump where people come together for these national moments, I think that all becomes more important. The BBC becomes more important. It also becomes more important in the future for economic reasons, because the BBC is basically the center still of the creative economy here, or the creative industries and powers it. I think the BBC is more and more and more important, but it's going to get smaller. And this time it's different because of the technology. And I think previous crises over the Iraq war or when, you know, Marmaduke Hussey was leading the BBC were kind of mostly political crises. And it's true to say that the political environment might be less friendly than it has been for a long time, but in the end, the BBC has lost its control of our attention because the media landscape has changed and fewer people feel that they need to pay for a license fee.

4:30

Yes, I've got a book on my shelf at home. It's an old paperback and it's called the Last Days of the Bib by a man called Michael Lippman. It was published in 1989.

5:51

89. Right.

6:02

Yeah. So the notion that the BBC is about to fall off a cliff or is on the edge of a precipice is a familiar one. But. And there are many ways in which you. You could see problems coming at it. But if you accept. If we accept that as years go by, the license fee in its current form becomes harder to defend and more anachronistic. How do you fund the BBC?

6:03

I don't know that it is harder to defend, actually. I think you have to start with a prior argument. So, two things. One is that I don't think these are the last days of the BBC. When I say that, I'm saying something very specific, which is I think the BBC's future relative and absolute terms is spoiler. But I don't think it's going to disappear. I think it'll be around for decades. And I think, you know, hopefully, if it's cherished by smart people in Whitehall, which is a big ask, and there's no evidence of that happening recently, it will have a. It will continue to thrive. But above all, it will thrive because it's got a connection to the public. I think there's a very strong argument for a license fee style funding of it, but it requires an argument for something prior, which is the existence of something you call the public domain. And I think really the arguments over the future funding of the BBC, technical arguments about something bigger and more important, which is what do we want our shared space to. To look like? Should there be a point, as there is with for instance, the nhs? This is Mark Thompson's argument, really, should there be a space where, in the domain of what you broadly call culture or information, people are treated equally, the dustman and the Duke, the prince and the pauper and people come together and they pay, they're asked to pay a compulsory fee for something which they benefit from. It's like a contribution to a public fund. And they'll only do that if they have two things. One is they get something for that contribution and two is they believe in the broader thing they're contributing to. And so I think you have to try and make a new fresh argument for public funding of the BBC. And you could reform the license fee in lots of ways. For instance, you could make it part of existing tax, like the council tax. In Germany they've got something called the Runfund Beit Rag, which is kind of household tax. So you could try and fold it into that. But that requires political courage because I'm glad we got run from bike rug in the. In the first few minutes of this podcast. That requires political courage because that requires people in central government who are making difficult arguments about public service cuts to have the courage and skill to prosecute a political argument or contribution. And that's very hard to do if

6:28

you get, if you haven't founded that a general taxation, is it. Does it retain its independence quite the same way? You probably saw last week, BBC's response to the Green paper suggested that you don't have charter renewal, you have a row charter.

8:31

Yeah, you take it out. You take it out of this crazy

8:45

political kind of, gee, it's a good idea.

8:47

I think it's weird that the BBC is abnormal in its Royal Charter and it is this political football more than other things that are submitted to Royal Charter A and B. You just think the time that I had this other previous career between the right stuff and the BBC working for nearly a decade in newspapers. When I turned up at the BBC in 2016, I was the BBC's first, what they call media editor. So I covered media and tech and in my six years as media editor, I think. I mean, it was a time of unusual political turmoil in Britain. I think I had seven culture secretaries by the end, I interviewed. I do remember a guy, this guy called Jeremy Wright. Lovely guy, lawyer, apparently conservative. No, he was a Culture secretary for a while. I was on a panel with him once and press conference, and I said to him, would you respect Jeremy, should I bother interviewing you? Because there'll be another Culture secretary long in a minute. And he was very upset at this impertinent question from a BBC hack. And then his civil servants got in touch with me and said, this is absolutely outrageous. How dare you do this? And then other civil servants got in touch with me and said, actually, you're on something about a week later, there was a different culture. There has been a very, very, very messy approach to the future of the BBC from governments of all Hughes over the past decade. And I feel like there has been a review of the license fee. There's been consultations forever. And after, of course, you want to try and reduce the exposure to political volatility. Right.

8:50

But why do we find ourselves always apologizing the BBC? Is that. No, but, no, I'm saying, but politicians, they feel the sense of embarrassment about funding the BBC when it's very cheap to fund the BBC. I can never. I never got over the fact that it's, you know, it's like 50p a day. Why aren't the BBC basically getting out there and saying, this is cheap, this service is very cheap.

10:06

When I was a media editor, I used to actually go through, because it's unbelievably tedious, but I was paid really handsomely to do it. Go through the footnotes of the annual report and you find what's called efficiency savings, the phrase that Gordon Brown used to use quite a lot. If you go up to the seventh floor of New Broadcasting House at the BBC, you'll find on a desk with six people, someone who's responsible for EastEnders. She's watched by millions of people, sat next to someone who's responsible for a program that no one ever talks about called Death in Paradise. Death in Paradise. Death in paradise is watched by about 5 million people.

10:27

Yeah.

10:58

It gets talked about in the pages of various newspapers and they're sat next to someone who is the person responsible for another program called Call the Midwife.

10:58

Yeah.

11:04

These are massive national institutions and they're kind of organized. The amount of money the BBC spends on them is actually quite low.

11:04

When I was at the BBC, there was. I. I Found quite quickly because I joined it from outside and I, you know, it was not a BBC insider and I, I realized quite quickly that BBC is very uncomfortable when it talks about money and the cost of things.

11:11

So it was very English though, isn't it?

11:25

Well it's not, it's not just in Englishness. There was a gauge called cost per viewer hour that you could apply to any program. So I can tell you on BBC1, this is in the mid 2000s, I can remember which program was the best value cost per viewer hour on the whole BBC One hour.

11:27

Let me guess if.

11:44

Go on guys. New.

11:45

New tricks.

11:46

No, no.

11:47

Regional news?

11:48

No, no, no.

11:49

Bargain Hunt.

11:51

Yeah. Antiques Roadshow.

11:52

Yeah.

11:54

Huge audience.

11:55

So six and a half million back then.

11:55

Yeah, million costs. Tupman's Hamptony to, to, to make as it were. When I discovered this as somebody who just joined the BBC. Yeah. So why aren't we out there making this point? They said oh we can't do that, we can't do that because the minute we say that Antiques Roadshow is, is, is got the best cost per viewer.

11:57

Yes.

12:14

They're going to say what's got the worst? And then we're going to come to things like expensive dramas that nobody watches but are winning BAFTA awards and are interesting. And it's sort of, it was a sort of feeling of once you've lifted the curtain and the light shines in, you can't turn it off again.

12:14

Can I make some points that'll get me in trouble?

12:32

Please do.

12:35

I think Tim Davy is a world class CEO who has been a fantastic leader at the BBC and who is going to be very hard to replace. Almost certainly replaced by someone inferior who by the way, you know, is going to, I'm sure golf make huge amounts of money to do a lot less work and have a lot less stress. And if I was to make one criticism of his reign it's that because the BBC and we should say does up constantly has been mired in huge amounts of scandals but often things that aren't Tim Davies fault. I do think that over recent years there's been a kind of reticence about really going out to the public and making the argument for the successes. The trouble is there's a sort of almost siege mentality and the siege mentality is to some extent justified by the fact that there are a constant drip of cock ups.

12:36

All that's true but I think there's another reason. And do you know that thing in Private Eye trebles all around. Yeah. I've Always had this feeling about the BBC, which is a little bit like the Royal family, that because the public pays for it, the public doesn't want the BBC to look too comfortable. You know, no newspaper will ever mind a headline that says red faces at the BBC. BBC Crisis talks in the BBC. Another up the BBC, partly because their readers sort of think, well, we pay for it. So let's see them sweating a little bit. Yeah, money. All the BBC did was say, because I agree with you on one level, but if all the BBC did was say, we're absolutely marvelous, I would just

13:28

turn the dial a little bit up on some of the achievements in a subtle but. But confident way. Just make the point that there are things that people watch. So for instance, there's a particular trope this is to do with Today program, right? Which is that quite a lot of the people who have it in for the BBC do perform the same intellectual error, which is that they listen to the Today program. They listen to a question me or one of the other presenters did or didn't ask at 10 past 8, and they extrapolate from that to some generalized criticism of the BBC, overlooking the fact that for most people, the BBC is strictly. It's the weather, it's the travel on the.

14:12

David Attenborough.

14:48

David Attenborough. And the other thing which is completely overlooked is it's local.

14:49

Couldn't agree more.

14:53

Why are you leaving?

14:54

I want to talk about you and your plans now because you've got, you know, plans that to us look very interesting because you're starting a company and you want to become an entrepreneur. I said one become. That makes it sounds of, you know, becoming an astronaut or whatever, anybody become an entrepreneur, start a company. You are an entrepreneur.

15:04

What.

15:24

What's led you to want to make that change rather than, if you like, continue down the maybe more traditional line of saying, I present this program, present that program, maybe I'll get offered this one, I'll stop doing this one, you know, straightforward, if you like presenters life. I'm just really interested in the kind of thinking in your head about that.

15:24

I'll give you a really, really, really, really honest answer, which is that I, I want to fight, decline. And this. There's a massive, massive exemption and caveat to this, which is the Today program, which is actually not in huge decline and is a massive beast, but the story of my career. And only say this because you asked me about me. Sorry. My career is a kind of 20 years of disaster tourism and I've never been. I'm 42, and I've never really worked anywhere growing or profitable. That's quite weird. And I spent 10 years in newspapers and I had an amazing time. I fell in love with newspapers. I got to have an incredible decade of newspapers. There aren't that many. If you could work in newspapers, it'd be one.

15:44

You end up being an editor at 29, didn't you?

16:34

Yeah. You want to be an editor. And to be honest, there's no other paper I'd have wanted to edit. The Independent, which I really believed in. I got started buying it when the visionary and legendary Simon Kelner turned it into a compact or tabloid and took it against the Iraq war. And I got to be editor. That was amazing. But it was tough. And in the end, the Independent shut as a print paper. It's now a hugely successful digital product. But that was tough. And it was decline, decline, decline. It was union battles, it was saving, saving, savings. It was redundancies. It was an atmosphere of gloom.

16:36

Yes.

17:05

Despite the fact we did something incredibly heroic. And God, I'm so proud of what we did. And I went from that to the BBC. And the BBC is much bigger. And if you're going to work in TV and radio in the uk, the BBC is kind of where it's at. But the BBC is getting smaller. And I kind of, you know, I'm 42. I. There's a kind of little bit of a push factor, which is that it's not great having four young kids and extreme insomnia and do the Today program, but that's a small thing. I always want to caveat that by saying that the producers who work on the Today program have it much harder than me. Absolute heroes. They work 12 hour overnight shifts. But I just want to go to where the action is at, where the audience is, where the attention is, where the power is and where the ambition is. And I would say if you think about your distinguished career, just before we start recording, we were getting nostalgic about 1960s Liverpool. Jimmy.

17:05

Yeah.

17:56

If you think about when you guys started out, I would say one of the great blessings, and I'm sure you're self conscious enough to know this, is that you were where the action was at and you were at the height of your powers, as you still are now, when you. You were at the height of your powers and in places where media was controlled from when you ran ITV, Peter, or BBC1, when you came up with have I Got News for you? Or even when you guys started on whatever it was injury time or. Yeah, yeah, Doing, you know, Alan Partridge. Alan Partridge was the biggest thing anywhere. It was huge. May not have felt it at the time, but you were where the action was at. And today the action is spread in lots and lots of different places. It's fragmenting, but it's possible to use digital technology to grow a really big following and build digital communities. And I don't know how many people listening to this amazing podcast have heard of KB Lame, who's the world's biggest tiktoker, just done a billion dollar deal, or how many people have heard of Mr. Beast, who's the biggest person on YouTube. These people are absolute giants. Not famous in an old conventional way, but they have 160 million followers. And I like the idea of having a third career. Having had a lot of fun in newspapers and a lot of fun in linear TV and radio, of trying to unleash.

17:56

Do you? Occurs to me, Amal, that you're in a little kind of set that includes James Harding, who I'm sure you know, who was the editor of the Times, went to the BBC head of News, now runs Tortoise, Fantastic human being. And. And I'm doing some panel with him soon about, guess what, the future of the BBC. I. I know him well. And then, of course, very recent, we've had an announcement from Piers Morgan, who, you know, in a sense exists in a very different part of the forest to you. Not a BBC person at all. I know, actually, I. I commissioned his first programs on BBC1, but he's much more of an ITV person in his conventional television career, though no longer an ITV newspaper editor, television presenter, and he's now starting his own company.

19:06

So I'm basically playing 20 years catch up to Pierce. No, no, I'm saying, absolute grass. I'm going to be the youngest ever newspaper editor, except for Pierce.

19:53

But there are similarities.

20:01

Yeah, I've got. I've got. Can I just say, my most controversial opinion. This is going to get massive trouble. And you put this out on the Internet, guys, it's going to. I like Pierce Morgan. Yeah, I really, really like. I going to go further than that. He's getting cancelled. I respect him. Yeah, I respect him intellectually, I respect him journalistically and I respect the fact that throughout his career. And by the way, he's a person. You never know someone. You never know someone from their public profile. Piers Morgan is a man who will shock a lot of people and definitely get me cancelled. Capable of immense kindness and that never comes across in his kind of bolshiness, but he's an incredibly, incredibly kind person when he wants to be. One of the things I think is underestimated or under regarded about Piers is he's always been where the action is. At the end of the 1990s and early noughties, when tabloid newspapers in Britain ran Britain, he was at the summit in the late noughties, when talent shows of the kinds you guys brilliantly commissioned, especially in America, were kind of dominating the world to get audience to the tens of millions. He was on the biggest one of them all. He was on America's Got Talent, taken over that Hollywood lot by his friend Simon Cowell. He then had this funny interregnum with Good Morning Britain where he kind of made a lot of noise and was successful. And now, again, he's where the action's at because he's gone to YouTube and we're speaking shortly after, he signed a huge, huge, huge deal with a bunch of investors and credit to him. And I think he's got a. I mean, he's got flaws, Piers, don't get me wrong. And he has this tendency to slightly overdo it and spin out of control. But he has this knack of being where the attention is. He likes the attention. And yes, he is something of a model.

20:02

So can I ask you specifically, you're about to set up this production company. Company.

21:39

So I like Empire of Ideas and I peaked it.

21:45

Well, it's very funny because when we set up hat trick in 1986, we literally had one idea, which we did, which was. It's called Chelmsford 123.

21:48

How'd it go?

21:54

It was a comedy that was set in ancient Britain.

21:55

A very good cast.

21:58

It was starring, let's say starring. It was written by. It was written by Rory McGrath and myself because I did classics at university. You know, I did classics that are Liverpool comprehensive in the 1960s and that school now doesn't have a six form. I just want to say that it's.

21:59

You're a paragon of social mobility.

22:14

It's. It's 50 years later and it's. That neighborhood's gone backwards.

22:16

Anyway, do you do reunions for all you Cambridge Rascals?

22:20

No, we go on holiday together. We go on holiday with the. The. The. The Group Of Friends.

22:23

Jones.

22:30

We Go On Holiday Walking With Dinosaurs.

22:32

Yeah, Good title, isn't it?

22:34

This year we didn't go walking, we actually went boating because Rory, through Rory's got a bit of a dodgy hip. So we went on a boat in Provence and Peter crashed it.

22:38

I crashed it. I crashed. It was a big boat and we were going through this. We don't really need to hear this, do we? We're going through this little ancient brick kind of bridge and I rammed in the side of the bridges.

22:48

You were rowing these five.

22:58

No, no, it was a gin palace. No, it was a. It was a kind of.

23:00

It was an expensive.

23:04

It was.

23:06

I've got this picture of you on the cab.

23:07

We were all dressed.

23:09

It was like the equivalent of a kind of motorhome.

23:12

Let's get back to. Let's get back to this man painted picture.

23:15

You're painting a very nice picture. I'm jealous of your picture. You know, the answer to all your questions goes back to the same thing. You guys, yeah, you've had these extraordinarily successful, brilliant careers, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna be nice about you that you guys are. You know, part of the reason for coming here is because you guys are absolute giants of this industry as well as doing this great podcast, and you have been there where the big decisions were being made and at times when millions and millions and millions of people were watching your stuff. And I think I would just invite you to recognize, even for someone like me who's had a wonderfully fun career, I sit here as a humble person

23:19

who's just started as well.

23:50

Just started. But you know what?

23:51

Yeah.

23:52

I'm bored of missing golden ages, and you guys are the golden age. You're the golden age of the 80s, you're the golden age of the 90s, and actually the golden age of the

23:53

noughties, but not, not the current decade. Fair enough. Fair enough. But I just, I do do want to say one thing about that, because we can now see with hindsight that when Jimmy and Denise o' Donoghue and his partners were building up Hat Trick and when I was building up Talkback, we didn't know what we were doing. We didn't know what we were doing.

24:01

I don't know what we were doing. But that's the glory.

24:21

That's. And I've.

24:24

Look, you got to be humble. I'm, I'm here. I'm a. My third or fourth career as a founder. I've got huge ideas.

24:24

Oh, you're going to be fine.

24:30

And you know what? I realize what I. You got to be. You got to approach it with conscientiousness, ruthlessness, focus, rigor. I'm extremely hard working. Do you know what, What I plan to do might look nothing like what I'm doing in three years time.

24:31

Correct.

24:45

When you just. When you start out, action is information and you just try. So what I'm planning to do, since you're very kind.

24:46

Yes.

24:52

What specifically I want to take podcast, I currently do at the BBC, which will probably change in Radical. Radical. Yes.

24:52

Very good.

24:58

I'm going to work out whether it is that or it's something else with a slightly different name, but I want to own it and I want to own a podcast, which becomes a quote unquote podcast.

24:58

Yes.

25:07

Also known as a chat show. A YouTube show.

25:08

Yes.

25:10

It'll be twice weekly. I'll be doing daily stuff on YouTube as well. And basically you build a YouTube audience.

25:10

You will.

25:16

And on YouTube, I understand from years looking at it, that's the weird things I've seen all these trends, I've just not been able to jump into them. Takes a long time. You're flat for a long time. It's hard to monetize through advertising, it's hard to monetize through subscriptions. Might be easy in the beginning to monetize your sponsorship. And I'm having a lot of very, very, very exciting conversations about that. And I want to do that on YouTube. I also want to do live events, which I really love. Live events are incredibly exhilarating. I really enjoy them. And you know what people enjoy? It's one of the things you can't get. You know, the AI is never going to replace live events. And one of the things that people love about live events is, is that feeling of being in the same room as someone who has been pouring into their ears, that electricity of that sort of moment of connection, even if you don't get to meet them, that sense that I was there. And I love the idea of doing that. And I have a particular thing which is I'm also writing a book which is, you know, about basically this mad age we live in. It's actually about social mobility to me, and artificial.

25:16

That's my favorite thing.

26:11

Yes, my too. I made many documentaries about it and I set up a charity years ago which tries to help kids from really screwed up backgrounds get on in the world. And I want to take all these things around Britain's universities. So it's YouTube, substack events, books, and I'll still be doing Britain's longest running TV quiz. So I'm not severing ties with the BBC completely, but you know what? I'm. Listen, you've got to be humble about this stuff. I don't know how you felt when you set up Talkback. I don't know if you knew if Alan Partridge was going to be a massive hit, or you knew that years down the line, you're going to come up with the greatest satirical weekly quiz of all time. Who knows?

26:12

I kind of. I mean, you've been very flattering to us, but to. To kind of send it back in your direction. I think Jimmy and I, because we've been doing this a very long time, we meet people who say, I think you said he had a company. And I. I don't know if you find this.

26:43

Oh, yeah.

26:58

When. When I'm in that conversation, I know you're gonna say, I'm partly listening to their business plan, I'm partly listening to their. The equity structure they've got in mind, the investment they need. But I'm more looking straight at them and thinking, have you got what it takes? Which is a sort of. It's a. It's a hard to define, but you need a certain resilience, you need a positivity, you need a kind of, you know, you need to energize other people in a sense of. Of we can do this.

26:58

You need zeal.

27:29

Yeah. And I like what I was going to say is you. You've got all that. But then, so's peers, actually, when I read that. Peers. And I agree with you about peers, by the way. My children, when they want to wind me up or. Or, you know, really put me down, one thing that's every day really isn't. Yeah. But one. One of those. One of the things that they can really get at me is saying, your friend appears, Morgan, aren't you? And they think that's something I should be absolutely ashamed of. I say to them, well, I don't know if I'm a friend, because we're professional acquaintances, but I dealt with peers for 10, 15 years as a channel controller. And what have you got on? Very well with him. Liked him, thought he was a very clever, very smart guy.

27:30

Yeah, he is.

28:10

He's got it. You've got it. And I think you're. You know, this. This is, in a sense, what I find quite interesting, that in another generation, on screen, people didn't tend to think, I can start a company on Empire, I can do that. Of course you can.

28:11

But the barriers to entry are much lower now, in one sense. But also the potential audience, though monetizing that audience is hard. The potential audience is much bigger. On your thing about zeal, you know, Jeff Bezos has got this wonderful distinction. He says when people come to him for investment, he says, to himself. Are these people missionaries or are they mercenaries? Right. Are they sort of out to make a. But. And by the way, I intend to make, and I'm pretty confident, with all due humility, I will make in five, seven, ten years, a ton of money.

28:29

Yes.

28:57

And I want to. And you know why I want to is because while my mum's still around, I want to do this thing that I didn't do for my dad before he died. And I kind of hate myself for it. I want to say to her, mom, you're going to get on that plane, you're going to turn left.

28:58

Yeah, right.

29:08

I'm not. I don't give.

29:09

I get that.

29:10

I don't give a flying toss about houses, but I've got a mission and the mission is to build something.

29:10

Yeah.

29:16

And I like builds. And you know, it's funny, there's a sort I think a lot of people haven't realized when I said, when I was whatever, making my pompous announcement that Delboy was my inspiration growing up. Now that's true, because he was. And he's huge. It was kind of ironic because the thing about Del Boy is like, he always failed, didn't get anywhere. But he had fun trying. And Delboy was a good soul who had fun trying. He brought people with him and he got there. In the end, he walks into the sunset saying, this time next year will be billionaires. And the point is to throw yourself at it, to do it a conscientious, strategic way, to have a sense of mission, to build something and to lead. And I enjoy leadership.

29:16

And also, ironically, isn't it. It's that. That what. What you're doing is. And you're right, I think is to head in that direction. Is part of the problem that the BBC has that we started this conversation with is that more and more people now are taking. Are watching their content on a big screen on YouTube.

29:53

Yeah.

30:10

And I'm not sure there's much that the BBC can do about that. Right?

30:10

No. You know, it's like Netflix are worried about YouTube. Not just the BBC, everybody.

30:13

Every Netflix versus YouTube is the TV battle of our time. You know, it is. I had the pleasure of chatting to Ted Sarandos the other day on the Today program. One of the things I miss about Today program, by the way, is that on the Saturday, I interviewed Gordon Brown for 20 minutes about Peter Manson. On the Monday, I was interviewing Ted Sarandos and you're like, you know, but he. Ted Sarandos is very clear. YouTube is their main rival. And Netflix versus YouTube is I think, the primary battle for television, by which I mean people watching things on a mid sized screen or maybe a small screen. There's a much, much broader thing which is the battle for attention, which is tick tock and LinkedIn and Spotify and all that stuff. And it's war. It's war. And the BBC's got to find its, its place in that.

30:17

Yeah, because the thing that we talk less about, because we talk about YouTube a lot and about Netflix, the thing we talk less about and, and is, is about the battle between screens. In other words, we were brought up in our generation, you're a younger generation, but I doubt it was that different to think that telly meant a box in the corner of the black and white, one of the rooms. You don't go back to black and white days, but basically met a corner and, you know, the family watched the television. Now we've got, still got big televisions, but we've got laptops, we've got phones, and phones, in a way are the winners of this. And, but all that you're describing in your plans sound to me like things you can 100 watch on a phone.

30:56

Oh, and you can, I mean, I think the distinction between a podcast, even this exalted experience, and what, you know, we used to think of as an expensive chat show, it's kind of just falling away. Maybe a chat show at a live audience sometimes, you know, you could play in that noise if you wanted to. But one of the glorious things about podcasts is if you listen to them in audio form, you feel the sense of belonging or membership. You feel it kind of belongs to you in the moment. And it's a very one to one connection. If I could just have a tiny, slightly annoying detour in modern sociology. In 1995, Robert Putnam, great American sociologist, wrote a seminal essay which turned into a book five years later called Bowling Alone. And Bowling Alone was about how the rise of television led to the collapse of American civic society. Basically voluntary clubs, sports societies, all this sort of thing. We all went from playing outside to watching that box in the corner. And I think. And that Bowling Alone, huge bestseller, came out four years before the iPhone. And we've gone from the, you know, playing outside to the box in the corner to this individual atomized experience through our smartphones. And I think that there's something quite precious which has been lost, which is called society or civic society. But it does mean that as individuals you can be reached in a very direct, very intimate and reciprocal way. And one of the glories of YouTube, I think more so than Netflix for a creator potentially, is you get fantastic data and you can really have a deep connection with individuals. You can really create a sense of connection and belonging and community. And it's not the same thing as being famous in the old days when you know you want to, you know, you on Britain's got talent and 7 million people see you, but it's a one to one connection.

31:36

So. So who do you think your community will be in five years time?

33:13

It will be a community in the millions, globally, English language speaking, intellectually curious people who feel, which is, by the way, the dominant feeling in our country today, a sense of anxiety about these overwhelming forces that are redefining our lives. Technology, climate, demography, politics. You want to understand those forces and want to know what they need to do to win the future. I think the audience for that absolutely huge. I know it's huge because Radical is growing very, very fast. It's got an incredibly engaged and big audience. And the polling shows that that's the dominant feeling. People feel this kind of anxiety and they kind of feel this kind of, oh my God, it's all happening to me. I feel this kind of. I don't feel, I feel a lack of agency and I want to give people agency and a kind of feeling that they can survive in the future.

33:16

We should wish you luck. Is there a name for your empire yet? Have you. What's it? What are you gonna call it?

33:58

No.

34:04

Okay.

34:05

I mean, they're a nightmare.

34:05

Actually, I've got a title in mind, but I don't want to say what it is. Okay, well, don't worry, I've got a title for. I've got a name for my company and a title in mind. And actually the future, by the way, is that this title, which has a very pleasing acronym, could be spun out to make a bunch of different podcasts. So three again, I don't know what I'm gonna do three, five years from now, but I would hope that three, five years from now I have a core product which is me, and then a fleet of other vodcast podcasts, YouTube shows.

34:07

I can't wait.

34:31

What would you do if you're me and I've taken a lot of your

34:32

time, I do what you're doing. I think that you're. And I think what, what I sense from you is there's a.

34:34

How much money do you have?

34:39

There's a kind of, you want to

34:41

come up with this monster.

34:42

But honestly, Emma, when We set out. We, Jimmy and I have both been, you know, very lucky and. And we've been very well rewarded for what we've done. It didn't look like a route to making a lot of money when we were running these tiny companies in rooms above shops in Soho in the late 80s. It felt a bit more like we were avoiding having a proper career.

34:44

Yeah, but how did you turn that into big cash?

35:05

Well, I mean, it's too long a story to tell now, but basically.

35:09

And tax people are listening.

35:13

We owe it, and we have to know. But. But we've talked about this. We owe it to the Thatcher government.

35:15

It was the only good idea.

35:21

She had 25 quota for independent productions.

35:22

Yeah.

35:25

Which was in the late 80s. 87, I think. And we were running companies so small you. You'd hardly call them proper companies. We were just little, you know, little, as I say, room above a shop type thing. And then we just followed our noses as broadcasters needed to commission independently. So obviously the Internet didn't exist. YouTube didn't exist. All these things that the world you're going into didn't exist. But there was this opportunity to make programs for the BBC or Channel 4, particularly Channel 4. Great sponsors. The independent community in those days have we kind of followed our noses. And at a certain point we thought, wow, our companies are worth something. We even. Five years.

35:25

The mission came first. The creative came first. You know, when you did Alan Partridge, and by the way, I spent most of my. You should know. I say, you shut me up and send me out of your silly weird blue studio in a second. I spent most of my youth watching the product of your labors. Right.

36:05

That's really lovely to know. Yeah.

36:20

Which is true. I said I could quote more of Alan Partridge. And you know, trust me, I know.

36:22

Can I put something to you? But which. Which I sometimes say to people. The famous scene with Alan Partridge and Tony Hairs. I'm on Alan Partridge's side, of course, when he pitches all those programs, people always mention monkey tennis. He actually. He actually. He actually.

36:26

It's not a bad idea.

36:40

He pitches some quite good ideas. Regional. Regional detective show. Nothing wrong with that. And so on. But I. I feel emotionally. And I think you're one of these as well. I'm with Alan because he's doing the difficult thing, which is to pitch. But I've been Tony Hares, where you sit there with your arms folded like that, saying, no, no, no, no, no. And that's a great job. And I've had two of them. But it's Easier. It's easier. It's more exciting, better and more rewarding ultimately, to be the creator who has to sell something.

36:40

I tell you, what happened to us is that we. We did. I said, we did the show, which is set in Chelmsford in 123 A.D. which lasted two seasons. But in the meantime, I was asked to be in the radio version of Whose Lines Are Anyway? Because I was an actor in those days and I was terrible. I said hello and goodbye. I stood next to Lenny Henry and he couldn't keep up either because Stephen Fry and John Sessions were brilliant. But I did notice that my producer's hat on, and I didn't realize actually that I was drifting back into the producer's world, which I started at BBC radio in 1978, is that I said to the producer, this would make a great TV show. Have you pitched it? Yeah, I sent it to the BBC six months ago. And I said, oh, well, I'll bring Channel 4 down next week because I'm working at Channel 4. And I brought them all down, all the entertainment department. And we sat in a BBC studio, 200 people laughing their ass off at a BBC show. And in the room they bought the series for Channel 4 and months later it went out. I was in a restaurant in Soho and I heard someone on the table next to me talking to their friend and they said, have you seen this new show on Channel 4? It's called Whose Lines? Anyway, it's brilliant. I thought, oh, now we might be onto something. A little while later, Alan Yentob, Rangers and said we'd like something like Whose Line, but maybe a topical flavor. And Jeffrey Perkins and I.

37:11

Who?

38:28

Jeffrey Perkins. The late, great Jeffrey Perkins was part of the group. By then there were four of us.

38:28

You still have Hatrick?

38:34

Yeah. And we said, no, we don't do commissions. And then he said, get in the room, Alan. The Entabs just rung us up and is offering us a program. Get in that room and think of an idea.

38:35

I'll just quickly say about Alan that I had the. You guys know new Alan very well for many, many decades. I knew him better over the last. The last decade. And I had the enormous honor of officiating, or whatever you call it, introducing his memorial. And, you know, there was this profile of him by a brilliant journalist at the New Yorker called Sam Knight a few years ago, which cast him as someone who. There's two great things. One is that he basically, Alan Yantob, sort of, I think, embodied a kind of post war place in British society where these people, I know you don't like the idea of curators with the word curator, but there were these gatekeepers who had extraordinary power and I think that that is basically gone. And the other great thing about Alaniento is Henry Mance, another amazing journalist at the FT, wrote a lunch with the FT in 2016 around the Rio Olymp Olympics, there's a big doping scandal. And he had one of my favorite lines of all time. He said if name dropping were an Olympic sport, Yento would be accused of doping.

38:45

Yeah, I know that he really, honestly

39:39

listen, I, I, it was a very close friend of, of Alan and, and miss him and we'll, we'll miss him for, you know, absolutely forever. But I think there's an interesting thing to say here in as much as a comparison between Alan's career and yours. They're very different in other ways, but you've both been your off screen and on screen. But he in a sense saw his entire arc of his career as happily being at the BBC. You would sometimes to get, to get with Alan, he'll say his own detriment. I've been talking to somebody who might invest in the thing that I might do.

39:41

So committed.

40:14

You knew deep down he would never do it because the BBC, he would, you know, BBC was written through him like, like a sticker Brighton Rock and

40:15

he joined the world's service in 1968

40:22

and he's, you know, he embodied the BBC. He was most, you know, wonderful sponsor of talent, of creativity.

40:24

But I'll say this, he was a maverick inside the BBC and that's what I think the BBC was very good at.

40:32

No, I completely agree, but I'd be interested. I don't know exactly what Alan was doing at the age of 42, what you are now. He was probably the controller of BBC too. He's a very young controller. But had he thought, I'd like to leave the BBC and start my own, become an entrepreneur in would have been the. He wouldn't, he wouldn't have done it. He wouldn't have done it. The opportunities weren't there in the same way. And he was a BBC person.

40:36

Yeah.

41:00

So it's an interesting side of the time that you, at that age, even though you're, you're such an important figure on the BBC and present so many

41:00

things, I mean, I'm really not, I know some weird things. I'm really not. Can I just say one thing? And this is not me speaking against myself, but can I just say I'm really not. I mean, look, I. I'm lucky enough when you go, when you get lucky enough to sit behind a microphone on the Today program or indeed University Challenge, I've got a thing which is first, do no harm, okay? These are absolute jewels. And don't cock them up. Respect them and respect the audience. There are about 2 million people that watch University Challenge, linear and digital every week. These people love the show. I am, honestly. It's not me being humble. You'll think I'm just literally sitting on the shoulder of giants.

41:07

Yeah, I'm not. But that's not the point I'm making is that in your generation, you think I can continue on the BBC presenting these wonderful programs, but I can also get out into the big, wide open

41:42

waters of the Internet.

41:55

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

41:55

Absolutely.

41:57

That's the difference. And I think that's a sign of the times it might be, you know, about you as an individual as well.

41:58

And there are trade offs, which is the scariness, and there's maybe a potential lack of loss of profile. I would say that one thing to think about is not you can think about the loss of profile, which is like Jeremy Paxman, the great Jeremy Paxman here of mine, mentor of mine, friend of mine, very sadly, not very well at the moment. But he, you know, he wouldn't have gone off and done this thing because when he was on Newsnight, it was getting watched by huge numbers of people. And there would be this kind of thing of like, oh, if you leave the Today program, which, by the way, it's 5.6. Aren't the today program. Sorry, I'm going to say it the same program. The real story about Today program, which no one will write because why would they, is that it's not how many people it's lost, it's how many people it's retained. Today program is 5.6 million different people, extraordinary influence, amazing editorial standards. And it's kind of mad to give that up in some ways and give up the chance to interview Ted Sarandos and Gordon Brown. I would say that, you know, there's a different kind of following that you can create and a community you can create online with a much more intimate, reciprocal, one to one connection or one to many.

42:03

That's where you're going, well, look, good luck with it. And we've taken up enough probably too much of your time.

42:58

Taking up too much of your time.

43:02

One thing we've gathered is you're very busy man. So that's all for this week. Thanks for listening. Huge thanks to Amal for being with us. Any questions about the world of television you wanted to ask, send them our way. We'd love to hear from you.

43:04

You can get them on our socials or just email us or just. What the else do we do?

43:15

We're even better. Why not?

43:21

Bored, Jimmy? God sake.

43:23

This is the bit I hate.

43:24

Say it like you mean it. Say it with Patrick.

43:25

This is why I was never employed by the Today program.

43:28

Because halfway through, take some direction from a proper.

43:30

I'll do it. I'll do. I'll do. You can get in touch with us on the insider podcast through various social forms. So you

43:33

listen.

43:41

He can't improvise. It turns up.

43:41

He is really good, honestly. If you want to invest in ammo,

43:43

you can invest, but you can't have any equity. Get in touch with the insider podcast, Jimmy and Peter Fincham, who've got between them 150 years of experience.

43:48

All right, all right.

43:56

We love to answer your questions. I might get in touch with a voice note. You can contact them on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, YouTube.

43:58

Post every.

44:07

Just search for the insider podcast or the usual blurb.

44:08

Or you can even watch us if you got the nerve, on our YouTube channel.

44:11

Real masochist.

44:14

Bye.

44:15

All right, thank you.

44:16