Media review – How to Fail with Ed Miliband, Schitt’s Creek and an Au Revoir

How to Fail Podcast with Elizabeth Day

Two podcasts have kept me riveted on long journeys in the last couple of weeks. I’ve already written about Jack Blanchard’s Politico podcast with Owen Paterson, but last week I drove up to Norfolk listening to Elizabeth Day talking to Ed Miliband about the failures in his life. Believe me, it was gripping stuff. 

Miliband can sometimes appear a little buttoned up in interviews, particularly when they stray into personal matters. Not here. Out it all came. We heard or saw a side of Ed Miliband that we had never seen before. It wasn’t that he admitted that he’d got everything wrong; he didn’t. 

Indeed, he doubled down on his strategy as leader of the Labour Party to “move on” from New Labour. In his latest volume of diaries covering this period, Alastair Campbell made clear that he thought Miliband should have embraced New Labour achievements rather than seek to trash the period of 1997-2010. 

But it was Miliband telling the world about his family, his struggle with his mental health and coming to terms with what happened that made this podcast such a great listen. 

Elizabeth Day is a very talented interviewer, and although it can all seem a bit matey from time to time and sometimes a little too gushing, the atmosphere of two friends chewing the fat was a really charming way to conduct a conversation. “Oh Ed…” said Elizabeth on more than one occasion, leading the listener to believe that she was hugging him or squeezing his hand. Empathy is her watchword.

We didn’t learn a huge amount more about Ed Miliband’s relationship with his brother, which was almost skirted over at times. Still, it’s clear that the fracturing of the relationship in 2010 was the culmination of a period where Ed couldn’t quite compete with brother David. He got slightly worse A-Level results.

David got a First in PPE at the same Oxford college where Ed got a second. His victory in 2010 was the first time Miliband the Younger got an Upper Second. And David made more headway in the New Labour government than Ed did, ending up as Foreign Secretary, with his younger brother in the middle-ranking job of Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.

No matter your politics, no matter what your opinion of Ed Miliband, I promise you won’t regret it if you download this podcast. If I were compiling a top ten podcasts of the year so far, it would be in my top two.

Schitt’s Creek, Netflix

I’ve been late to the party with Schitt’s Creek, but even now, after watching two complete series and two episodes of the third series, I still feel that I’m the teetotaller who’s missing out on all the fun. Yes, it’s vaguely amusing, yes each character is well defined, but there’s something two dimensional about the whole thing. 

Most of my friends think it is laugh out loud funny. I’ve occasionally forced a smile, but for me, every episode is the same. I suppose most sitcoms are like that in some ways – they develop what they think is a winning formula and stick with it. You either “get” it, or you don’t. It’s like some people (like me) think The Fast Show is the funniest thing to hit our TV screens in thirty years; others get bored with the repetition of the famous one-liners, which is nice.

 If I’m honest American sitcoms – and surely this has to be classed as a sitcom even though it’s not filmed in a studio – are rarely very funny. Cheers, Frasier and Friends all left me cold. I could barely raise a titter at any of them. Maybe it’s me.

So Long, Farewell…

I regret to say this is my last Media Review for Reaction, for the time being. I’ve enjoyed writing the column over the last year, and thank you for reading it, but I need to devote more time to my book projects, one of which has a very looming deadline.

 I’ve therefore decided that I need to give up this column and my column for ConservativeHome, which I’ve been writing each week for more than a decade. I want to thank Iain Martin and his team for giving me the opportunity, and I hope I will still be appearing on Reaction from time to time in one form or another.