Latest news with #DominicSandbrook
Washington Post
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Asked & Answered: An interview with ‘The Rest is History' podcasters
For the past 5 years, 'The Rest is History' podcasters Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook have been walking their audience through pivotal moments in history laced with fascinating, occasionally shocking facts: Augustus the Strong, for instance, king of Poland in the late 17th century, fathered 354 illegitimate children. Cleopatra spoke nine languages. And President Lyndon Johnson used to hold in-person meetings with aides while he was on the toilet.
Spectator
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Spare us from podcast host plugs
I've spent most of my working life producing radio commercials. You might expect me to say this, given my job, but when hosts read out ads on their own podcasts, I find it embarrassing. On commercial radio and television, viewers and listeners have always understood that the ads pay for the programmes and they're fine with that – on one condition. The ads must be separated from the programmes in a commercial break. This has always been the unspoken agreement between advertisers and their audiences: a programme might be interrupted but at least it stays honest to itself. Podcast hosts are trashing this time-honoured contract when they read out the ads themselves. Authoritative people such as Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland on The Rest is History, or Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster on Triggernometry, risk appearing disingenuous and cheap. It's so jarring to hear them interrupt their own informative dialogue to read out copy for money, saying things they almost certainly don't believe. It somehow makes us slightly more suspicious of everything else they say. On TV, this would be unthinkable. Imagine an episode of Downton Abbey in which Lord Grantham suddenly turns to camera and says 'Hi, I'm Hugh Bonneville and I've just bought the new Samsung Galaxy S24', then demonstrates its features by WhatsApping a photo to the butler. The better the podcast, the worse the offence. For me, podcasts don't come much better than The Rest is Entertainment. I bow to no one in my admiration for everything Richard Osman and Marina Hyde write, say and do. Everything except for their inauthentic readings of ads on their podcast. The issue here is a big one. Listeners rely on these two for intelligent and impartial recommendations but they're now making us wonder how impartial they really are. In a recent episode, sponsored by Sky, they were shamelessly plugging a series called Hacks. Fine. Hacks is a Sky show, Uncle Rupert is paying for their endorsement, we get it. But five minutes later they're avidly puffing Amazon Prime's Last One Laughing. How do we know that Jeff Bezos isn't also paying for their joint effusion? I'm fairly certain that he isn't but we're no longer 100 per cent sure. In last week's episode, Marina went into weirdly gushing detail about Glen Powell's new range of sauces. And this wasn't even an official ad. Or was it? Who knows? When our favourite hosts start trying to flog us products we're pretty sure they don't use, it feels like betrayal When the hosts read out the ads themselves, their independence and integrity is compromised. This is particularly pertinent to podcasts because we develop a far more personal relationship with their presenters than we do on other platforms. Most of the time we switch on the TV or radio without really knowing what's on; with a podcast we make a very deliberate choice. We have our favourites, based on a liking for the topics and, importantly, for the hosts. So when our favourite hosts start trying to flog us products we're pretty sure they don't use, it feels like betrayal. When I've spoken to podcast producers, they try to tell me otherwise. They'll claim that listeners love these personal endorsements – but I don't think they do. The hosts are made to read out the ads because it costs nothing and the podcast companies can then charge clients a premium for these endorsements, however fake they might be. But in doing so, they abase their presenters by turning them into door-to-door salesmen, and not even very good ones. They're not actors so they tend to deliver their lines badly and awkwardly. They're either too loud and enthusiastic or they're flat, monotone and sound slightly ashamed. Which they should be. All this could be avoided if advertisers ran proper commercials, separate from the programme, just as they do on radio and TV. The hosts can retain their dignity and continue to command the respect of the listeners. Producers should do everything to preserve our sense of trust in presenters – because we love it when they tell us things, but we hate it when they try to sell us things.
Times
03-05-2025
- Lifestyle
- Times
I'm a middle-aged man. How do I make friends — and keep old ones?
For a lot of blokes, making and keeping friends is especially difficult as we move into middle age. It's not just the demands of work and fatherhood. There's something about passing 40 that leads us to mistake isolation for leisure time and history podcasts for companionship (I couldn't tell you how my best friend is, but I'm fully caught up with Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland). As I'm a very run-of-the-mill chap (5ft 9in, never cry at funerals but often sob at episodes of The Repair Shop), I've presumed my own life experience to be fairly common, so have compiled this list to help fellow blokey blokes acquire and sustain, at the very least, a skeleton crew of mates. A lot of men simply
CBC
04-03-2025
- Politics
- CBC
An obituary for the post-war order
Humiliating the president of Ukraine in the Oval Office. Admonishing European leaders about migration and free speech. Voting alongside Russia against a UN resolution to condemn the invasion of Ukraine. Withdrawing from the World Health Organization and UN Human Rights Council. They are all signs from the Trump administration that point to a massive shift in America's foreign policy and alignment with the very "rules-based" international order the U.S. led after WWII. But how did the world order as we know it come to be? And if it comes to an end, what could the future look like? Dominic Sandbrook, co-host of The Rest is History, takes us through the last 70 years of global politics and how we got to this turning point.
Telegraph
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
I would pay not to go to Thatcher the Opera
Oh. My. Goodness. Can you think of anything weirder than Mrs T , an opera based on the premiership of Margaret Thatcher? But that's what's in store. It's the centenary of her birth this year and so someone had the genius idea of commissioning an opera, presumably on the basis that if a musical worked for Eva Peron – why not Mrs T, the opera ? I'm thinking of a succession of pussy cat bows, statement handbags and firm coiffures for the mezzo soprano in the title role, Lucy Schauffer. And I am longing to see who gets cast as Denis. But an opera is musical drama. It's not history. When it is history, like say, Mind you, the composer, Joseph Phibbs, is not one for the rollicking, singalong melody. I think we're safe betting that the audience won't come out of the production, humming the tunes. The librettist is Dominic Sandbrook, the historian and one of the two There's nothing particularly discordant about the combination of Mrs Thatcher and classical music in itself. She wasn't a philistine, though she did once tell The Guardian that she particularly liked Handel on account of 'all those marvellous tunes'. Miriam Gross wrote a fascinating essay in The Oldie about researching her musical tastes and it turned out that she told Isaiah Berlin that she once took part in the Oxford university production of Prince Igor. Whaddya know? Plus she was in the university Bach chorus. But the trouble with opera is that there isn't much room for nuance. It's good on murder, suicide, passionate trysts and dying of consumption and incarceration in a pyramid. It would be less good on policy arguments about privatisation, Commons debates and party conferences, though I can see that there's scope for good chorus action in a depiction of the miners' strike. An operatic character is either bad or good, like a cartoon, because the music has to send out a message; he or she is rarely a matter of light and shade. And Mrs T was a complex and interesting character; she was divisive and combative and destructive in many of her policies, but she was also kind, principled and rather religious. Dominic Sandbrook is too good an historian to be partisan, to give us a caricature, but there's a limit to what the form will allow. I am, therefore, rather dreading Mrs T, the opera . It is unlikely to work as opera and it can't work as history. It may however be good fun.
