Drowning in lukewarm tea

What's the point of The Daily Telegraph's new daily news podcast?

Previously: A video guide to the history and politics of British newspapers...

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With a name — The Daily T — that will baffle a lot of the Telegraph’s tweedier readers and a presenting duo with almost negative chemistry, the paper’s new daily podcast is bizarre. Former BBC Economics Editor, Kamal Ahmed, and Harry and Meghan-obsessed associate editor and part-time GB News presenter, Camilla Tominey, came off like a trendy undertaker and a HR functionary desperate to seem 'fun’ as they trundled through three news stories that had already been well-trodden by the time the episode dropped at 5pm.

They brought in Telegraph political editor Ben Riley-Smith to talk about Rishi Sunak’s latest attempt at a relaunch (a speech where he sounded more like one of the more basic AI generated voices) and provided predictably Tory-friendly analysis. It was akin to wandering past a house and hearing dry dinner party chat drifting from the open window, a babble of furious agreement. That was followed by understandably gentle coverage of a report into the failure of maternity services in the NHS before shifting to a predictable discussion of Harry and Meghan’s Nigerian tour.

The promotional material for the episode presented it as “frank, fearless and witty” but it rarely ascended beyond awkwardness. Ahmed sounded desperate to ingratiate himself with Tominey, while she maintained the flinty cheeriness of someone internally seething about a dispute with a neighbour about a shared fence.

The theme music and jingles are generic that they sound like they’ve been swiped from a 90s news parody, making the Telegraph’s claim that its audio team has been sweating over brewing The Daily T feel distinctly over-stewed. At the end, there was an ersatz attempt at making the show seem organic with a clip of Tominey celebrating the first episode included in the fade out. That kind of deliberate looseness could be delightful in the early days of podcasts but it’s now far too contrived.

The Daily T is as an attempt by The Telegraph to encourage its existing audience to remain in its hermetically sealed universe of reporting and commentary. In the puff piece published to promote the podcast, Ahmed says the podcast will harness “the vibrancy of the newsroom” but the stories covered in the first episode were far from hot off the press and more rapidly cooling. The hosts’ attempts to agree disagreeably just led to dead debate and it will have seemed dreadfully boring to Telegraph readers used to the boggle-eyed paranoia of the paper’s comment pages.

On its own terms as a right-wing news podcast, The Daily T fails at the first hurdle. It’s guilty of the greatest sin in media: Being boring. Previewing the podcast, Tominey said “there’s a gap in the market for something that hasn’t been designed by a Left-wing committee,” but The Daily T shows every sign of being the product of group think in the Telegraph offices. It’s a bland format fronted by bland presenters which relies on the publication’s existing audience and is unlikely to bring in new listeners. The feed that now offers The Daily T was previously home to The Telegraph’s Two Minute Briefing podcast.

The thinking behind The Daily T is obvious: In a world where podcasts like The News Agents and The Rest Is Politics are enormously popular, surely The Daily Telegraph can get a piece of the action. But for all the noise its presenters are making about being different, their first episode was indistinguishable from any other news podcast, with no hint of a spark or even an angle that might keep the attention of the average Telegraph reader. This tea arrived stone cold.

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