In February, it was announced – cue a certain amount of high drama on Twitter – that Emily Maitlis, the presenter of the BBC’s Newsnight, and Jon Sopel, its North America editor, would be leaving the broadcaster after 20 and 40 years respectively and joining Global, the owner of, among other radio stations, Classic FM, LBC and Heart. They would, we were told, be presenting a daily news podcast together, a format inspired by their partnership on Americast, a BBC series that had been a huge hit (at moments, it was the UK’s most listened to podcast in any genre). Was this a coup? It certainly was. Inside the BBC, no one had any idea that two of its biggest names were about to depart until after the pair had been driven, in a car with blacked-out windows, to Global’s HQ in Leicester Square to sign the deal of their lives in conditions of utmost secrecy. In media circles, the gossip thereafter was energetic and, possibly, somewhat envious. Both were reported to have won hefty pay rises in the process (at the BBC, Sopel earned at least £235,000 and Maitlis at least £325,000).
And now here they are, the nearest thing British news has to a pair of high-octane celebrities, waiting to greet me on the other side of a set of security barriers, a small PR retinue in tow. How are they feeling? Are they nervous, excited or both? In fact, their mood seems to be set today to lightly giddy. Having worked on the podcast for weeks – dummies have been made, complete with real-life interviewees – both are about to disappear for a holiday before their launch at the end of this month. There is a feeling that school is out, at least for a while; Maitlis is wearing shorts with her heeled mules.
But perhaps this is just how they are. There has always been something slightly playful about their relationship or so they tell me once we have installed ourselves around a table in a nondescript meeting room. Maitlis says that when, long ago, they used to present on the BBC news channel together, the danger that he would make her corpse was ever-present. Off air, there was much giggling. “What was that programme?” asks Sopel, who is smiley and loquacious. “You know… the one where there were these couples living next door to each other and they were great mates and they had an organic garden?” Does he mean The Good Life? “Yes, The Good Life.” Maitlis, who is made of somewhat sterner stuff, rolls her eyes. “That doesn’t make sense at all,” she says. “Are you thinking I’m Barbara?” But it gets worse. “No, the other one,” he announces. (He means the dreaded Margot, with her kaftans and her snobbish affectations.) Maitlis flashes him an indulgent smile. “We’re not like them in any sense,” she says, with all the firmness of a parent.
In recent years, Global has been the cause, at least according to the Daily Mail, of something of a brain drain at the BBC, Shelagh Fogarty, Eddie Mair and, more recently, Andrew Marr having all signed to LBC. But the move of Maitlis and Sopel is, perhaps, of a different order altogether. They aren’t filling existing slots in a schedule. They are trying something entirely new, the concept of which I’m not sure I entirely understand. Perhaps this is a stupid question, but what, precisely, will a daily news podcast involve? When will it land and when do they hope listeners will listen to it?
True to form, Sopel answers first. “Well, it’s not going to be breathless, breaking news, just yapping and hyperventilating,” he says. “We’re going to stand back from the big story. We’re going to ask: what do I need to know about this? What will be really engaging, intelligent, something I didn’t already know? We’re going to get some really great guests who will illuminate these topics.” OK, but could he give me an example? Two days before, for instance, Britain saw record temperatures. So would their podcast, were they to be making it right now, look at the weather? Maitlis now jumps in. “My feeling is that it wouldn’t,” she says. “Our producer found this marathon going on in Death Valley in California, so we could have done that as an opener… like: you might feel this is unbearable, but what about there? But beyond that – not to underplay climate change – everyone’s doing the same story. We’d kind of like to hold back on that.”
All the same, isn’t there already a lot of in-depth news available elsewhere? How will they compete? “That’s the challenge,” says Sopel. “I’m not saying it’s going to be easy.” So will they record it on the day and put it out, say, in the evening? “We’re working on the speed of turnaround,” says Maitlis. “At the moment, it’s got to be up by drive time [about 5pm] and we’ll record it mid-afternoon.” The show will be called The News Agents (do you see what they did there?). They’re aiming for a two-hour turnaround and while the five podcasts they’ll put out every week won’t be more than an hour long, they will never, other than in exceptional circumstances, be shorter than 30 minutes. “You’ve got to be realistic about people’s driving time, or walking the dog time, or whatever it happens to be,” says Sopel.
Maitlis relishes the “endless flexibility” of a podcast. “On a day when the prime minister is making a statement at seven o’clock, we’ll go: hang on guys, it’s worth waiting and we’ll drop it later. After the byelections [when the Conservatives lost both in Wakefield, and in Tiverton and Honiton], we all decided that we would all have stayed up through the night and [dropped it] first thing in the morning.” Then again, the byelections happened on the same day as Roe v Wade was revoked by the US supreme court, thus radically restricting women’s abortion rights. “I think we would have done two podcasts on that day, probably,” says Sopel.
All this does sound exciting, but I still wonder: how will they wheedle their way into people’s busy, overstuffed lives? “We’ve got to make it a habit-forming thing,” says Maitlis. It would, she says, be crazy for them to tell me that they know exactly how it’s going to work at this point. It is a case of responding to the audience’s needs. “What we loved about Americast was that people were really hungry for it, [disappointed] when there wasn’t an episode.” They relish the thought of listeners asking why they aren’t doing this or that subject. “We’ve got to find our way. If we’re doing a lot of stories about South Sudan, and there isn’t an audience out there for South Sudan, you know, we would try to work around that. You have to tell stories that are editorially important, but you also have to tell stories that people feel they are not getting elsewhere. That’s the challenge and it is a risk.”
Four other notable news presenting duos
Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid
Good Morning Britain, ITV (2015-2021)
Morgan and Reid presented the ITV breakfast show GMB until he quit last March after a row about Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. During those eventful six years, Reid was often calm and measured during Morgan’s volatile outbursts, with viewers drawing comparisons to the spoof programme This Time With Alan Partridge.
He said (of his departure from GMB): “I thought the whole thing was a farce.”
She said: “There is only one Piers Morgan. But no one is completely irreplaceable.”
Michael Portillo and Diane Abbott
This Week, BBC One (2003-2015)
The unlikely duo – a former Tory cabinet minister and a Labour backbencher – assisted Andrew Neil on the Thursday-night programme. Although the duo’s politics were poles apart, fans of the show often commented on their chemistry.
He said: “She’s great when she’s angry.”
She said: “Michael and I certainly never socialised beyond the BBC walls.”
Nicky Campbell and Rachel Burden
BBC Radio 5 Live (2011-2021)
Campbell and Burden accompanied audiences in the early morning for a decade. The friendship and respect that the duo developed over the years shone through, particularly as they said farewell to each other when Campbell left the show in 2021.
He said: “You’ve been such an amazing friend.”
She said: “Sometimes the cracks slightly burst through but I loved every single minute of it.”
Anne Diamond and Nick Owen
TV-am, ITV (1983-1986); Good Morning With Anne and Nick, BBC One (1992–1996)
The breakfast TV co-hosts captivated audiences as they approached hard-hitting issues with an informality and chattiness that was unusual at the time. They reunited to host a weekly internet chatshow on Zoom during lockdown in 2020.
He said: “We rarely talk across each other – we just think the same way journalistically.”
She said: “We used to always finish each other’s sentences and we still do.” Rebecca Brahde
She looks across at Sopel, who says: “Yeah, we might fall flat on our face. In five years’ time, people might be laughing at us.” Then again, whenever he came home from the US, it was Americast that people stopped him in the street to talk about. “That was kind of revelatory. Like, God, this is where people are listening.” Which is more important, though? When it comes to audience, is it size that counts or engagement? Surely Global is really only interested in the former? “I’m greedy,” he says. “I want both.”
Will they miss being on the telly? A lot of people, even those who consider themselves to be journalists first, and presenters second, get addicted to it, whether or not they care to admit it. But as it turns out, we will still see their faces. “The podcast isn’t just audio,” says Maitlis. “It’s very, very heavily based on visualisation. We’re having a TV studio built here for us.” And there’s more. “We’ll be on TikTok,” says Sopel. “TikTok isn’t just 12-year-old dancers any more.”
I guess it will be in this studio that Lewis Goodall, Newsnight’s policy editor, also recently poached from the BBC, will come into his own (when his move was announced, Maitlis posted a picture of the three of them together, joking about its “proud parents of returning gap-year son” vibes). “He loves detail,” says Sopel. Wasn’t the BBC crazy to let him go? Isn’t Goodall, who is 33, precisely the kind of young journalist it should be promoting as the old guard take up new opportunities? “Yeah, I didn’t think we’d get him. I’m thrilled. But he speaks to our ambition. Risk, jeopardy, challenge. Whatever you want to call it, we’ve got it and Lewis is up for it.” Goodall will present the podcast on Fridays.
***
This story begins with Maitlis. She is the instigator, the motor, the disruptor. Think back to last December. Omicron was spreading across the UK. Masks were again mandatory in public indoor spaces. In the same month, she and the former producer of Americast, Dino Sofos, who’d recently left the BBC to set up his own production company, went for a walk in the park. “Like spies,” she says. Sofos asked her: would you really leave the BBC? “And I said yes. And then I said: but we’d never get Sopes, would we? And Dino said: no, because Sopes is going to be the BBC’s new political editor.”
Had Sopel been offered Laura Kuenssberg’s job? “They hadn’t yet etched my name on the cup. But the cup was ready,” he says. “It was clearly intimated and I think other people had been discouraged from applying.” Did he have doubts about that job? “I don’t want to sound glib, but I think going from travelling on Air Force One and being in the east room of the White House to sitting in a transport select committee in Westminster… I had reservations.” When Maitlis approached him with the idea of joining Global, and working again with Sofos (he’ll produce their new show), he thought it was a perfect opportunity. They could both leave the BBC “at the top of their game”. It was a “no-brainer”. After this, it was all a matter of timing. Both wanted their exit to be “clean and gracious”. Sopel: “I wasn’t prepared to jerk the BBC around.” Maitlis: “The last thing you want to do is – can I say prick-tease? – is to be a prick-tease.” She wants me to put a parental advisory on this bit of the interview.
Cut to the day when they were meant to formalise everything. A storm blew in and Maitlis, away on the south coast, had no wifi or phone signal. A gossipy colleague rang Sopel and put the frighteners on him. “Oh no, I thought. Is she on a plane, about to sign for some American network?” The back-stabber! But it all worked out in the end. They were driven into the car park at Global, security guards shutting the lifts so no one could see them as they moved through the building. “If we hadn’t been participating, it would have been, like, wow!” says Maitlis. “But it was scary as well. An emotional moment.”
Only once the deed was done, and publicity photographs had been taken, could the BBC be informed – about half an hour before Global announced its coup. Were their bosses upset? Angry? Disappointed? Were they thanked for their years of service? Apparently, I should ask other people about this. “We got a lovely, lovely message from Richard Sharp, the chairman,” says Maitlis. (This is telling, I think. Sharp, who was appointed last year, is a former adviser to Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak and a Conservative party donor; some believe he will not prove to be much of a friend to the BBC.)
But all this talk of clandestine negotiations and fresh fields can’t disguise the fact that their departure coincided with a “clampdown” on impartiality by the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, something that Maitlis in particular has seemed sometimes to struggle with in recent years (in May 2020, the BBC said that her opening Newsnight monologue about the allegations that the prime minister’s adviser Dominic Cummings had broken lockdown restrictions did not meet its standards of due impartiality). “I’m happy to engage completely with this subject,” says Sopel. “I just think it’s the big thing.” Is it one reason why they are at Global? “No, that’s not quite right,” says Maitlis. “I would differentiate between what we think about impartiality and what we’re trying to do here, which is just a bloody crazy idea.”
They both have things to say about it, though. Sopel talks of the time he was on a trip with Barack Obama, who was flying to the UK, supposedly to try to influence the vote on Britain’s membership of the EU. Sopel filed a piece, only to get a call from a BBC night editor, who said: this is fine, but it hasn’t got anything about Nigel Farage in it. What was his response? “I said: I don’t think Nigel Farage was on the plane.” But impartiality, he believes, isn’t just about how you cover a story - it’s about what stories you cover. The BBC has, he thinks, “ducked” the reporting of the full consequences of Brexit.
“Impartiality will be really important for us here,” says Maitlis. “We’re not trying to do shock-jock stuff. We’re not trying to scream opinions at the world. Impartiality, in its true sense, is about covering stories without fear or favour. I get nervous when impartiality is used as a way of shutting down journalists. Is it because you were asking questions you shouldn’t have been? I don’t think that’s impartiality - that’s censorship. And if your journalism is going to suffer by staying somewhere where you cannot ask those questions, what are you doing, right?” She remembers being on a panel shortly after the 2020 US election. The moderator said that “some people” believed that Trump won the election. “That’s technically true. But it doesn’t make it a fact. Election results aren’t feelings.”
It is, I tell her, exhausting for journalists that so many politicians now simply lie; we waste time establishing facts when we could be doing something so much more vital. “That’s spot on,” she says. “With Partygate, I had this intelligence, but when Lewis checked it out with Downing Street, they just said: that is categorically not true. What do you do when you go to source and people won’t confirm the story? It is really tiring.” On the other hand, pointing out lies, however necessary, also wears down the audience or so Sopel thinks. “Covering the Trump presidency. If you go on the news every night and say: liar, liar, pants on fire, people will turn off.”
Before I left my desk, a colleague suggested I ask Maitlis and Sopel where they fit in the pantheon of presenting partnerships, a notion that causes Maitlis visibly to blench. “We’re not trying to be Richard and Judy,” she says. “That’s silly.” But they are good pals, and know each other’s families, and she relishes the eye rolls she sometimes gets from Sopel’s daughter. Their dogs get on well, too. Will their friendship survive the pressures of working together every day? “We can be honest with each other,” says Maitlis. “Whenever I’ve dipped my toe into showbusiness, people are, like: amazing, marvellous, great! Whereas journalists just go: fuck you, fuck you and everything’s fine in the morning.” They annoy each other. It irritates her when he embarks, as he is prone to, on one of his rambling anecdotes and she is “extremely impatient”. He could “kill” her sometimes. But they’re there for one another. When Maitlis’s father, an academic at Sheffield University, died earlier this year, Sopel immediately asked for details of the funeral.
All of which brings me to think that they must both have ideas about who should play Maitlis in the two – two! – planned TV dramas about her extraordinary interview with Prince Andrew in 2019 (the one with which she is involved will be made by Blueprint Pictures, which brought us A Very British Scandal, starring Claire Foy as the naughty Duchess of Argyll). But alas, no. They are in talks with “a couple of [potential] Andrews”. But otherwise, she, like Sopel, is staying mum. All she will tell me is that “we have got to do it justice, because it’s not just a one-dimensional tale about Pizza Express, you know…” (Andrew claimed to have been in a Pizza Express in Woking with his daughter Beatrice on the date when it was alleged he had sex with Virginia Giuffre.)
At which point, a publicist arrives, tapping a watch. Could I have an email address for one of them, in case I need to check anything? Apparently, I can’t, which is a bit humbling, because we are all three of us, after all, only hacks, even if they, unlike me, do get asked for selfies. But no matter. They are great fun, smart and joshing and flirty and I, for one, will be tuning in to The News Agents, either at 5pm or – far more likely, because how will I ever give up Evan Davis, or Eddie Mair, or find the time to eat? – as the clock strikes midnight and I’m about to struggle into my pyjamas.
• The News Agents launches on 30 August
