Can a Podcast Save the U.K.? Crooked Media Takes on British Politics

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/arts/pod-save-the-uk.html

Version 0 of 1.

One evening early in 2018, the British comedian Nish Kumar received a call from a friend in the United States, asking if he was free. “Lovett or Leave It,” a podcast from Crooked Media, needed a last-minute replacement panelist for a taping in London, where Kumar lives.

The answer was an easy “yes.” Kumar, as it turned out, was a fan of Crooked podcasts, and had bought a ticket to watch the recording.

“I was like, ‘I’m in the venue right now,’” the comedian, 37, said in a recent interview. He joined the panel to discuss topics including Brexit and the royal family.

At the taping, Kumar met the founders of Crooked Media — Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor and Jon Lovett — who also host the network’s flagship and first podcast, “Pod Save America,” along with Dan Pfeiffer. Offering a look at the week in politics from four veterans of the Obama White House, “Pod” became a liberal answer to conservative talk radio after it began in 2017.

In the years since meeting at the taping, Kumar and the Crooked founders discussed making a British version of “Pod Save America.”

“I’d been thinking about doing a show in the U.K. because obviously there’s a shared culture, similar political system, we speak the same language and it just made sense,” Vietor, 42, said in a video call from his home in California. “We didn’t have an identical experience with Trump and Boris Johnson, but it felt similar at times,” he added, “and misery loves company, you know?”

In early 2022, the efforts — and Zoom meetings — began in earnest, and the first episode of “Pod Save the U.K.” is now set to arrive on May 4, with subsequent episodes arriving weekly.

The podcast is co-hosted by Kumar and Coco Khan, 35, a journalist for The Guardian. While one of the calling cards of “Pod Save America” is its hosts’ perspective as political insiders, the British show has opted for a different tack.

It became clear during the piloting process that, “the most important thing from the point of view of the listeners is that chemistry between the hosts, the relationship they build,” said Louise Cotton, the executive producer of “Pod Save the U.K.” Any additional expertise could be bolstered by guests, she added.

Still, Khan and Kumar are no strangers to political commentary. Kumar is unashamedly political and progressive in his stand-up and television work. For four seasons, he fronted “The Mash Report,” a “The Daily Show” style satirical news program, on the BBC for which Kumar and the corporation were criticized for perceived liberal bias.

Khan said that she hoped to bring her background as a journalist to the new show, with a focus on the politics inherent in everyday British life. “So many politics podcasts are focused on what happened in Westminster today,” she said. Her great passion, she added, is “how the average person lives and is impacted by politics or a lack of politics where it’s needed.”

Kumar has found himself returning to what he sees as the facilitation of national decline under the Conservative Party, who have been the governing party in Britain since 2010. That is evident, he said, in the crisis facing the National Health Service and the strikes that have recently disrupted the country’s services.

“The big thing that crops up for me on the podcast and in my life, much to the detriment of my social interactions, is 13 years of Conservative rule, 13 years of underinvestment,” Kumar said. “If you underinvest in something, it is going to wither and die. And that’s really what I feel and see around me.”

“Pod Save the U.K.” is Crooked Media’s first international production. The show is a collaboration between Crooked and Reduced Listening, a British podcasting company. The British producers were brought on because, according to Cotton, “We all know the British landscape.” And, while much of the editorial direction has been left to the team in Britain, “those underlying values about being progressive and being committed to how can we do politics better” will be maintained, she added.

Crooked’s journey across the Atlantic is the latest example of the company’s growth since the first episode of “Pod Save America” landed in podcast feeds in January 2017. The show currently averages 12 million monthly downloads and YouTube streams, according to Crooked. And the network at large has started 30 podcasts since its inception, with 17 active podcasts on its roster.

Many of those podcasts have extended beyond the realm of straight political commentary into health (“America Dissected”), culture (“Keep It”) and scripted comedy (“Edith!”). This is in addition to the company’s foray into television, its live shows and a muscular merchandise offering.

“Pod Save the U.K.” enters a British media landscape in which political podcasts are increasingly popular. “The Rest is Politics,” fronted by the former Labour communications director Alastair Campbell and the former Conservative lawmaker Rory Stewart, regularly sits at the top of British podcast charts. As does “Novara Live,” a podcast from left-wing media organization Novara Media, and “The News Agents,” a daily podcast hosted by three former BBC journalists.

The success of alternative political news sources in Britain comes, in part, from “a growing dissatisfaction with the way news is reported by established organizations,” said Adam Shepherd, the editor of PodPod, a British podcasting industry publication. “There’s a lot of people that feel, rightly or wrongly, that there’s an increasing amount of organizational bias that goes into news publication, that there are areas of news reporting that are being underserved.”

Against this backdrop, what ambitions do the hosts have for the show? Khan said that she hoped to offer a different perspective. “I was just like looking at politics podcasts and with the exception of Novara, when you look at all the artwork, it’s pretty much exclusively men, close to, a few women, and not really that many brown faces,” she said.

For Kumar, “I think it will be nice for the people around me that I have a weekly outlet for my news-based grievances,” he said.

“I’m hoping this will have a net beneficial effect on my interpersonal relationships,” he added.