How TV shows and podcasts are making gripping drama out of Brexit crisis

The competition is on for TV shows launching this month. It’s not just scheduling clashes they’re up against, it’s Brexit. Not even Top Boy’s tension or the competitive larking around on Bake Off can compete with what’s unfolding in Westminster.

“I’ve only watched 10 minutes of the dramas I’m supposed to because the real thing is more interesting,” says TV critic Scott Bryan. “Brexit news is pretty much at the same pace as TV drama: unexpected twists, exits of key characters and a narrative that is on the limits of believable.”

Viewing figures for current affairs are up on the start of the year and fresh shows and faces are responding to the clamour for clarity on Brexit. Andrew Neil has a new show on BBC Two, which attracted nearly a million viewers in its first night, while Laura Kuenssberg and Katya Adler’s award-winning Brexitcast on BBC Radio 5 Live has been downloaded more than eight million times. It’s “demand led”, says Kuenssberg, and they do emergency extra podcasts when the need arises.

The presenters fit the show in around their lives, with Kuenssberg broadcasting from the back of a taxi and news reporter Adam Fleming dialing in from his bed. Presenters are primed for a frantic few months. Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis says: “I’ve given up drinking for the month as I felt I needed a clear head and proper sleep. But I keep waking at 5am jammed full of adrenaline so that hasn’t worked. And it may only be September but you need a winter coat and gloves for College Green at 10.30pm.” Channel 4 News presenter Fatima Manji agrees, wearing a strong range of jackets, including a pink mac that matched her headscarf.

“A challenge is that many viewers don’t understand what’s happening,” says Dorothy Byrne, Head of News at Channel 4. “When I tell people what I do, they ask, ‘What’s going on?’ I’m not always sure myself. Sometimes I have to ring [C4 News political editor] Gary Gibbon to explain it to me. Every voter needs a hotline to Gary Gibbon.”

Maitlis adds: “It’s become OK to admit you don’t understand things. No one does — it helps our audience when we admit that, and when we challenge politicians for trying to make things sound simple or obvious when they’re clearly not.”

On Newsnight, she says, they work to “get the guests who give us the best news lines and move the story forward, but also those who can step back and remind us of the place this will have in history and of our understanding of the country. It’s important not to lose that in the urgency of the moment.”

Staff at BBC Radio Four’s Today usually work on the next day’s show from 9am until 8pm with some refiling overnight and freshening up at 6am, but in the last week of August, 10pm until 11pm was the pivotal hour.

Sarah Sands, editor of the show, sums up the spirit of the moment: “Is it because Boris Johnson is a classicist, a journalist, a populist or because he is answerable to a Westminster Che Guevara that the story has been so bonkers? People were watching the Parliament channel on their phones. Imagine! Politics is the new football.”

Read more

Hearing over Johnson's Parliament suspension enters day two- LIVE

Farage attacks 'pipsqueak' Luxembourg PM over Boris 'humiliation'

Jean-Claude Juncker tells MEPs risk of no-deal Brexit is 'palpable'