The Rest Is Cricket?

The former BBC cricket producer and current King of Podcasts, Tony Pastor, explains what makes this audio format so successful and how cricket might benefit

Have a look at what’s top of the podcast charts this week. The Rest is Politics, the Rest is History, Empire, Leaders, the Rest is Entertainment and the Rest is Football are all in the top 15. (Sadly The Analyst Inside Cricket and Storylines: the women’s cricket show are not.) You may know that all of the former are produced by the same company – Goalhanger, the production company co-founded by Gary Lineker and former BBC cricket producer Tony Pastor. Their podcasts average 15 million downloads a month (The Rest is History generates over half of those) and they are making a veritable killing. I interviewed Tony last week on The Analyst podcast. I wanted to find out how we in cricket could really catch the podcast wave.  

Actually there was another reason for interviewing Tony. He sort of created The Analyst. We first met in a BBC videotape truck at an Ashes Test match in1997. He was an assistant producer responsible for replays and graphics and other inserts, and I was the pitchside reporter. With nothing much to do during the actual match (it was before the days of pointless vox-pops during play) I hung out in the VT truck and watched Tony and the other editors at work. I was fascinated by the camera angles and replays that never got on air. Tony would often ask me questions about batting technique and bowling skills.

“I was intrigued by the concept of reverse swing,” he remembers, “and one day we went out onto the pitch before play and you wrapped sellotape around one side of a tennis ball and showed me what adjusting the weight of the ball and the texture of the ball did to the way that it traveled through the air and then we filmed it. We put it out on air in between overs and Ritchie Benaud said off the back of it ‘Wow, very interesting’ and that was the birth really of The Analyst and I was always badgering you with questions after that.”

One of those questions, in about 2018 was, “what’s all this podcasting business – how do you make money out of it?” Well he’s certainly found the answer. Having been head of ITV Sport for a decade (giving Isa Guha her first presenting gig on ITV4 covering the IPL incidentally) he left the traditional TV landscape to create Goalhanger with Lineker. It was originally a TV production vehicle, but pivoted to podcasts four years ago.  

“We were making television features, but getting TV commissions in the UK is not the easiest thing in the world, is it?” he says. “You’ve got to go through endless processes and its expensive. The beauty of podcasting we've found is that if we have a good idea, we don't have to persuade anybody to do it. We just do it. We approach the talent ourselves. So Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, for example, and the Rest is History. We approached them and said, ‘We'd love to do a long form history pod that ranges across all of time, you know, from the early Christians and the Romans and the Greeks all the way through to the World Wars, Watergate and wherever.  And the idea there was to just get somebody who was a real specialist in one area, Tom, who is probably the leading man in the country on early Rome, Christian Britain, et cetera. And we've paired him with somebody who was an absolute expert on post-war Britain, on the rise of Thatcher, on American politics. And it's proved an absolute runaway success. It gets 10 million downloads a month, with a huge following in Australia and America. Their live shows in the US have been huge. That’s a big area of development for us. The Rest is Politics sold out the Palladium faster than the Foo Fighters - in six minutes. Staggering!”

“What we’ve found is that long-form conversations between two people like you and Simon Mann who know their area inside out, who have an engaging relationship, who people enjoy coming back to listen to that conversation, can do really well. I got told that we're now in the era of TikTok where everything has to be fast cuts, everything has to be a minute length, no longer. Low and behold, it's not true. People want long-form conversation. They want really engaging, entertaining, informative, intelligent conversation between people they enjoy the company of. It's a very intimate experience listening to a podcast. You put your headphones on, you walk your dog, you go for some exercise, you're on a tube train, you’re cooking. And the demographic of podcast listeners is so much younger than radio or TV. For example, 48 % of our Rest Is Politics listeners are under 34. If you said to me at the start of this, half of your audience for two middle aged blokes talking about Alexander the Great will be under 34, I’d just refuse to believe you.

So how can cricket properly catch this podcast wave? It could learn from Pastor’s experience with football. “When I was working in live TV I spent a lot of time in green rooms with the ‘talent’ - the people who are going to be on the screen in the studio commentating and being a pundit - and they would often tell you all their best stuff in that green room - the funny time they were out with Shane Warne, what Gaza told them in the dressing room before the cup final, and then of course they'd go on air and they’ve got three minutes to analyse the game before a commercial break. There's no chance to lean back in your chair and go ‘I've got to tell you about the time Bobby Robson said this to me etc.’”

“We want the green room conversation not the studio conversation. We want you to come in and go, you know, my first agent was bloody useless, that sort of thing.  If you have a look at our YouTube clips of the Rest is Football, all the most popular ones are things like Gary [Lineker] tells the truth about meeting Brian Clough.”

Gary Lineker with Goalhanger co-founder Tony Pastor

“I think the biggest single opportunity that lies for cricket in this medium is that podcasting is only just really starting to expand in India. When it becomes a super successful medium in India then there'll be no limits to what it can achieve. There's been a real significant uptake in Spotify subscriptions and usage in India. Interestingly, quite a lot of people there don't buy a monthly subscription, but they buy it for the evening. They'll be having people around, they want music, they want to create a playlist. They've had to create different products for the market. But the amount of people using Spotify is really, really rocketing there. I think when India opens up, you'll see significant growth in podcasting around cricket.”

Again, the key will be to find two engaging, informed commentators perhaps with contrasting opinions, aping the ‘Rest Is’ formats. “The success of the Rest of History in part had been on the fact that we had this ancient history specialist and a modernist and we found that they could quiz each other in a really interesting way. So with the Rest is Politics I thought let's have somebody to the left of centre and somebody to the right of centre, but they can talk to each other in a civil way. Alistair Campbell came up with the phrase, ‘let's ensure we can disagree agreeably.’ And that’s what he and Rory Stewart do.”

“People want to choose what they listen to. It's sort of the Netflix thing in telly. You look at the TV shows over Christmas and you think blimey, I'm struggling to find what I want to watch here. And then you go onto Netflix and Amazon and Apple TV and your choice is so much more extensive and you think this is the future. And it's similar in audio. It democratises it.”

“Last week, Wayne Rooney got sacked from Birmingham City. Gary and Micah Richards, two of our hosts on The Rest Is Football, jumped onto their computers, put their headphones on, 20 minutes later after the decision, they've recorded a 15 -minute conversation about Rooney, where does he go from here, was it the right decision, etc. It's out an hour later and we've done an instant reaction. So there is a sort of democratisation of media in that sense, I think.”

“A younger audience is less likely to just stick on a radio station with random music on it. They don’t want to listen to a radio schedule curated by someone else. They'll either go to Spotify and choose their own music or they'll come to us and hopefully listen to talk. The landscape is changing fast.”

Cricket’s rich literary hinterland proves it is a sport awash with great stories. The podcast world is cricket’s oyster. Watch this space….