One of the country’s biggest podcasts is five years old. We could learn a lot from it, says Mark Smith

Whatever I do these days, I have two companions. Housework, gardening, ironing, driving, cooking, even having a bath for God’s sake, whatever it is, Tom and Dom are there with me, talking away and telling me stuff. I don’t mind, I encourage it. I like it. Carry on chaps.

Tom and Dom are Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, the presenters of The Rest is History podcast which began five years ago this week. It was launched during the pandemic in 2020 when most of us were at home with time on our hands, and it turned out what we needed was an eight-part series on the Aztecs and eight on the French Revolution, and four on the 100 Years War, and eight on General Custer, and four on Byron and the Falklands (separately, not together) and episodes on General Gordon, Thermopylae and Salamis, Æthelstan, and many others. What it proved, The Rest is History, is that when the present is so ghastly, as it was in 2020, the past can be a comfort, a thrill, and a laugh.

The podcast also came at an interesting time for the media, which was, and still is, facing rapid change which the bods in charge are scurrying around trying to deal with. By 2020 – the apogee of Black Lives Matter – TV executives had concluded clever, middle-class, middle-aged white dudes explaining things was no longer what they wanted and Tom and Dom are clever, middle-class, middle-aged white dudes. They’re also centrist or conservative depending on your point of view, which didn’t make them first choice for TV either.

Fortunately, the makers of The Rest is History appeared to take a different attitude and chose the people they thought were the best without controlling it for sex, race, age or class, and it worked. Not only are Tom and Dom qualified – Tom is a pre-eminent historian of the classics and Christianity and please........

© Herald Scotland