News Agents review: is Sopel and Maitlis’s podcast a ‘slick, expensive mess’?

Former BBC heavyweights Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall have launched their highly anticipated new daily podcast The News Agents.

Lured away from the BBC by the promise of “chunkier pay packets and freedom from those pesky impartiality guidelines”, the new daily news show from three of the corporation’s starriest former employees kicked off yesterday on rival broadcaster Global, said James Marriott in The Times. The show’s launch had been trailed by a “weeks-long publicity blitz” that promised a “suave up-to-date show that would blast aside the staid, fuddy-duddy stuff on Olde-Worlde radio”.

But its first episode, which focused on the raid carried out on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home by the FBI last week, proved to be “a bit of a mess”, wrote Marriott. “Though it is in fairness a slick, expensive mess.” What the show’s debut did offer was “tantalising glimpses of the much better show that will doubtless be constructed from all the beautiful, uber-professional moving parts that are welded together so oddly in this first episode”.

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“On a day when the [British Medical Association] warned of a doctors’ strike, a police investigation was reopened on an alleged child grooming gang in Hull and Goldman Sachs suggested inflation could top 22 per cent next year”, it was a strange choice for Maitlis and Sopel to serve up a full half-hour on the FBI raid on Trump’s home, said Judith Woods in The Daily Telegraph. “I would have switched off after 11 minutes had I not been contractually obliged to listen.”

Nevertheless, Maitlis and Sopel “both made for a marvellous pairing on Americast”, added Woods. “Which explains but absolutely does not excuse the late, lame, lacklustre content of their inaugural News Agents show.”

The very thing I “actively disliked” about the podcast was the very thing that was supposed to make it “refreshing and fun”, wrote Sean O’Grady in The Independent. The show had an air of “terrible forced chumminess and informality, supposed to be like three old friends gossiping in a bar”. And “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,” he added.

A ‘bold’ move for Global?

But “no show can fairly be judged on its first go, and the BBC would never launch a new show in which the main presenters have a combined age of 114”, pointed out Mark Lawson in The Guardian. The move is “bold of Global”, he added.

“It remains to be seen, though, if the best use is being made of these latest big-money signings,” continued Lawson, as well as “whether there exists widespread public hunger to know the real political opinions of ex-BBC presenters”. And we are yet to see “how Maitlis and Sopel utilise their new editorial freedom,” he added. “Will their untrammelled thoughts actually include some unexpected ones?”