Brexitcast BBC1, 11.35pm, Thursday
SOMEONE kicked the bucket, another slapped a microphone, and the BBC’s Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg revealed her Samantha from Sex and the City side. The BBC had promised “non-boring Brexit chat” and the first televised version of the hit podcast tried its best to deliver. But did it?
The four presenters, Kuenssberg, Europe Editor Katya Adler, and correspondents Adam Fleming and Chris Mason, had been given shiny new headphones, branded “Brexitcast” microphone covers, and a table with the show’s name on it. Why they needed to wear headphones when they were all sitting in the one studio - rather than two being in London, one in Brussels and one in Strasbourg - was a mystery. But hey, this is a tv version of a podcast and it has to look the part, dahling.
After five minutes of joshing everyone settled down to talking about the Court of Session ruling and the publication of the Government’s Yellowhammer report into Brexit preparedness.
For a while, it was just like the podcast, burbling along easily, the kind of programme that sends one off to sleep happily. In radio, that’s a good thing. On television, however, there was too much action going on at the same time as there was not enough. We were watching four people sitting in a row. Very dull. But they were gesticulating wildly, girning, and Kuenssberg’s phone was pinging and whirring like a Gremlin fed after midnight. “Has your pizza arrived?” quipped Mason. Very distracting.
Apart from the unintentional comedy of Fleming’s foot coming into contact with a bucket of paint under the table - grey, just like the new set that had been built - and Mason’s hand hitting the microphone, you began to wonder what was the point of having a TV version.
Being on TV allowed the team to show tweets rather than simply talk about them, and the programme had a certain novelty value in being the first BBC podcast to make the switch to the small screen. We also got to see Fleming, a former Hutchy pupil, beam bright red as a video was shown of Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, wishing the team well for their first programme.
But at the same time there was a loss of intimacy, and it is easier, and somehow more acceptable, to listen to people talking informally than to watch them. The whole enterprise seemed longer, and flabbier.
There is a likeable mix of personalities around the Brexitcast table - Mason the cheeky, bespectacled younger brother, Kuenssberg the ferociously smart blonde (think a cross between SATC’s Samantha and Christine Lagarde), Fleming the swot (complete with his famous inches thick binders) and Adler the slightly older, wiser sister. It is how they interact that matters, not where they interact.
The glitches can be ironed out, and when things get back to normal and the team is in different places the show might look livelier. But a quick check on the podcast version of the TV show on Sounds (confused yet?) showed Brexitcast was still better in sound than in vision.
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