Dan Snow interview: ‘My father said I was nuts to get into podcasting'

Telegraph

2 days ago

In August 2004, the day after the first episode of his ­second ­history series, Battlefield ­Britain, was broadcast, Dan Snow took a walk through London and ­spotted an Evening Standard headline board that read 'Global record TV audience for Olympic Opening Ceremony'. BBC One's viewing figures had reached 10.2 million as the nation enjoyed the Friday-night theatrics from ­Athens.
'I pity the guy who was on BBC Two,' thought Snow. The guy on BBC Two, enthu­sing about the ­Battle of Hastings to almost no one, was Snow, alongside his father, ­Peter. 'You work and you bleed and you travel to make a ­project. And then the show goes out and it disappears.'
Snow was 25, a newcomer on the cusp of a distinguished television career, but even then he was looking for a way to do things differently.
Fast-forward a couple of decades and he is sitting in a wood-panelled room at the National Maritime Museum, in Greenwich, interviewing curator Sophie Nibbs about pirates, the subject of its latest exhibition. The setup is small – a couple of microphones, a laptop, a producer – but the interview is part of something much larger.
In 2015, Snow turned his back on the holy grail of television historians – a regular plum gig for the BBC – and founded History Hit. Initially, it comprised no more than his Facebook and Twitter pages, plus an embryonic podcast. But now, a decade later, it's a 'premium entertainment network' consisting of eight podcast series with nearly 10 million monthly listens, an on-demand streaming service with more than 1,250 original documentaries, a YouTube channel with 1.6 million subscribers, and a production company that, among other things, has produced Dan Snow & the Lost City, airing on Channel 5 this Thursday.
Snow has found a way to do things differently. Forget TV historian – he's a media mogul.
After his podcast interview with Nibbs, he talks me through the rise of History Hit, which officially turns 10 on June 18 – the first podcast was for the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo. When I hear about his schedule, I feel grateful he can fit me in. He has spent the morning delivering a talk at a primary school, before a full afternoon of creating 'content' in Greenwich.
After the interview, a photoshoot, before 'Lime-biking it to Waterloo and caning it home for story time'. Ah yes, and that's the other side. Snow, with his wife, the prison-reform campaigner Lady Edwina Grosvenor, has three children: Zia, 13, Wolf, 10, and Orla, 9. Tomorrow morning? Straight back to London from his home in the New Forest for more content creation.
Given all that, you might expect Snow to be knackered, but the 6ft 5in ex-Oxford rower looks as fit and as eager as a butcher's dog. His title of the 'history hunk' looks secure for a good while yet, even at the age of 46. Away from the slavish demands of network television and its fickle commissioners, he is absolutely loving running History Hit. 'I'd been desperate to pivot to digital,' he says. 'I'd experimented with things – the Facebook page, smartphone guides for English Her­it­age sites. I was just aware that there was a new way of doing things.'
It was a producer named Dan Morelle who suggested Snow make a podcast. Snow vaguely remembered Ricky Gervais doing one years before, but wasn't entirely convinced. But it was 2015, Sarah Koenig had recently launched the blockbuster podcast Serial, and the medium was about to explode.
'I was very lucky,' says Snow. 'I caught a bit of a wave, and it was still early enough to look exciting and fresh. I just rem­ember the excitement of self-­commissioning, which remains to this day. We were in Jersey last week [for the VE Day events]; we went to Libya recently, where we were the first camera crew in Cyrene since the conflict; we went to America – we didn't have to ask ­anybody.'
What's clear is that Snow has a good nose for what's about to take off – and what's about to decline. He calls the late 2000s and early 2010s a 'bubble', during which the BBC threw money at history documentaries and made stars of the likes of him and Lucy Worsley. The controller of BBC Two between 2008 and 2014 was Janice Hadlow, a historian. 'She just commissioned loads of history,' says Snow. 'But I could sense the way the wind was blowing: shrinking budgets, and money being spent on internationally ­saleable stuff, big sexy dramas to compete with the streamers. The specialist factual middle was ­getting squeezed.'
By 2015, Snow had made more than 30 history series for the BBC, but he recalls the constant ­frustration of having to 'convince someone in a big building, somewhere on the fifth floor' that his ideas were good. BBC ­commissioners would tell him that people just weren't interested in the ­Hurricane aircraft or the burning of the Medway dockyards in 1667. Snow disagreed.
'I still remember the first time someone sent me a cheque for just talking about history and putting it on the internet. It was the most amazing moment. A moment of emancipation. It was only £150, but it was exciting to realise there was a world beyond the History Channel, the BBC and the Discovery Channel. It felt like a path to sustainability.'
That path, however, was not easy. One minute Snow was the BBC's poster boy for popular history, the next he was hustling on social media. It was, he says, pretty embarrassing. 'You turn on your livestream and four people are watching. And one of them is your mum, and then you notice your mum has stopped.'
Former colleagues in television would pol­itely ask what he was up to and why he was trying to sell subscriptions on Facebook. 'It felt tawdry,' he says. 'People would ask if this was a valuable use of my time.' Had he con­sulted his father for advice before pivoting to digital? 'Yes. And I am very happy to say that it's one of the few times he's been wrong about something. He just went, 'What are you on about? This is absolutely nuts.' Now, he's a subscriber. He ­listens to endless podcasts.'
Another deciding factor in the leap was Snow's home life. Feeling frustrated at trundling around Norman castles and being the BBC's 'slightly younger David Starkey ', he suggested he might do something more 'authentic', something that would find the intersection between history and news.
The BBC said no, just keep making films about castles. 'And then I had my first child. When I was in the hospital, I got a message.' The Syrian civil war had just broken out and the BBC wanted to send him there.
'I was like, 'Actually, I've changed my mind, I'd really like to go to some nice, safe Norman castles.' You become a parent and a switch just flicks. But I did do tours of Syria and the Congo. It was terr­ible. There's nothing worse than looking over your shoulder all the time, that feeling of insecurity, the adrenaline fizzing. It really degrades you.'
Follow Snow on social media and you'll note an impish side to him, especially in dealing with politicians. 'When Donald Trump says, 'No president has ever been treated as badly as I have', it's just hysterical. I think of the Roman emperor who was imprisoned by the Persians and used as a footstool. It's quite fun calling these people out.
'What's funny is politicians who say, 'Don't rewrite history'. History is always changing. I was with a copy of the Magna Carta last week, and there, written down 800 years ago, it says we will not deny justice to any free man, nor will we enter their house or send them into exile. I studied that in the 1990s and it felt like ancient history.
'And yet today we are seeing images on social media of US immigration enforcement agents just chucking people into the back of cars and sending them to different countries. Normal people like us have spent thousands of years trying to get the ­powerful to behave themselves, to treat us with respect, to agree that they will rule in a certain way. It's a story that goes back to the beginnings of time, and it's there in the Magna Carta. And it's here today.'
Snow has to go. Photoshoot. Lime bike. Reading Morpurgo to the kids. Bed. Content, content, content. Before he does, I ask him about his great podcast competitor, The Rest Is History. Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook 's massively popular show, produced by Gary Lineker's Goalhanger podcasts, casts a long shadow over all others, let alone direct competitors. Snow is sanguine. Since Holland and Sandbrook began in 2020, History Hit's listening figures have only grown.
'We can all thrive,' he says. 'A rising tide lifts all boats, right?' The history business is booming.