This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
I cut my journalistic teeth as a political correspondent in the 1990s and 2000s, first on newspapers and then on television. I remember those years of Cool Britannia, with the Spice Girls and Noel Gallagher traipsing into Number 10.
Even when that New Labour honeymoon soured, the TB-GBs (the nickname for Tony Blair, the then prime minister, and his arguments with his chancellor Gordon Brown) seem somehow quaint compared with the existential turbulence of recent administrations.
Returning to Westminster to launch The Cathy Newman Show, a new flagship nightly show airing on Sky News and streaming on YouTube, the mood couldn’t be more different. Politics feels shoutier, more bitter. The bit of green carpet that divides government from opposition looks like a chasm.
It’s undeniable that politics has changed dramatically and the world has, too. Just days before the local elections, the two party political system that has reigned supreme throughout my professional life appears shattered. And the media landscape has been upended as well.
Many of us get our news from social media platforms or a string of podcasts rather than the traditional broadcasting behemoths of years gone by. YouTube has overtaken the BBC and ITV in total audience reach in the UK, becoming the most-watched media service.
That’s why my show is being built with YouTube in mind from the off, streamed live there and posted in its entirety after broadcast. Highlights will also feature on multiple platforms, including TikTok.
And just as the old political system is being remade, so we will play our part in constructing a new world of broadcasting.
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The four-minute (eight if you’re lucky) “media round” – where politicians race to deliver their “lines to take” before being interrupted by a presenter trying to get answers in a limited time – has served no one well. Neither politician nor presenter feel satisfied by the encounter, and the viewer sometimes gets little out of it.
So we will give interviewees – politicians and public figures from around the world – time to speak.
The vibe will be less performative, more podcast. It will be forensic but friendly. It will give space for politicians with opposing views to listen to each other, cutting through the cacophony of life in Westminster and beyond.
For those that despair at the state of the world, we will also have optimism: interviews with inspiring figures, cultural powerhouses and creative dynamos. After 20 years at Channel 4, it feels like the right moment to try something a little different.
In the midst of war, economic and political strife, I don’t blame Generation Z and Millennials for feeling nostalgic for the 90s. But if I cast my mind back to those early days in my Westminster life, there was plenty of trouble then.
The Iraq war, which haunts the current government still, more than two decades later, brought 1.5 million people onto the streets of London. Even after the rose garden love-in, Britain’s role in military intervention in Libya caused the newish prime minister David Cameron’s coalition partners concerns, there was squabbling over social care (sound familiar?) as the parties failed to agree, and a wave of public sector strikes over changes to pensions.
While it’s hard to imagine the current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch playing David Cameron to Sir Ed Davey’s Nick Clegg, the state of the polls right now suggests some kind of coalition arrangement might be needed if Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is the largest party at the next general election.
This new era in politics, then, might have echoes of the past after all. But however it shapes up, we’ll be there to document it.
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The Cathy Newman Show will stream live on YouTube and airs Monday-Thursday at 7pm on Sky News from 27 April
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