Rise of the ‘Dadcast’ – How white middle-aged men stormed the podcast charts

Ok, so Steven Bartlett’s ‘Diary of a CEO’ is the exception, but most popular podcasters – from Alastair Campbell to Gary Lineker – are all a certain type of man talking about the same kind of things. Do we have a problem, asks Sam Leith (who’s one of them)

They’re the modern broadcast equivalent of retreating to the shed at the bottom of the garden for a fag and a nip of the Macallan (PA/Getty)

Good lord, a colleague remarked the other day looking at the UK podcast charts. It’s a lot of... middle-aged white blokes chatting, isn’t it? And so it is. Take your pick from the top five.  

At number one when I checked yesterday: Louis Theroux (53). Then there’s The Rest Is History, featuring Dominic Sandbrook (49) and Tom Holland (56). Then there’s The Rest Is Politics, with Alastair Campbell (66) and Rory Stewart (51).

Number four is a relative outlier – The Diary of a CEO’s Steven Bartlett is only 31 and the only non-white podcaster in the top five.