Amol Rajan Connection review: safe debut, not radical — SkimNews
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- Amol Rajan launched a YouTube project called The Amol Rajan Connection, a long-form, one-on-one video podcast he teased by saying 'we are about to get 100 years of change in a single decade.'
- The Amol Rajan Connection uses a poster mock-up based on the 1972 Jamaican film The Harder They Come and is backed by sponsors including two tech corporations, one of Britain's largest banks, and an upmarket supermarket chain.
- Rajan soft-launched the project with an appearance on former Tory chancellor George Osborne's podcast, explaining that 'the BBC, and BBC News, is going to get smaller at an accelerating rate' and that he wants to 'go to where the action is.'
- The debut episode's guest was former England manager Gareth Southgate, whom the reviewer cast as 'the anti-Amol' — unflashy and measured — across two hours covering his playing and managerial career, Fifa's governance, the Manchester City situation, and concerns about young men.
- The reviewer found the debut 'safe' and 'traditional,' concluding that it failed to provide 'proof of concept' for Rajan's stated ambition of capturing the moment's upheaval.
Why it matters: Rajan left the influential BBC Radio 4 Today programme to pursue what he calls 'the action' of digital long-form video, and his debut's gentle, soporific tone with Gareth Southgate — rather than a sharper, more combative guest — puts immediate pressure on the venture to prove to its four major sponsors that subsequent episodes can generate the friction and reach its branding claims to deliver.
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