EXCLUSIVE: The Rest is Politics will be bringing together talent from Goalhanger podcast regulars for a special US elections broadcast live from New York on YouTube.
The four performers on the evening of November 5th are Alastair Campbell, Rory Stewart, Anthony Scaramucci (aka “The Mooch”), Dominic Sandbrook, and Marina Hyde. Rest is Politics duo Campbell and Stewart will host the live event, which will be streamed on YouTube from a venue in New York. Scaramucci, a former Trump aide and fierce critic who now hosts The Rest is Politics: US with BBC North America’s Katie Kay, will play the key analyst role and “bring valuable insight from all angles,” he told Deadline.
The show will be broadcast live throughout the evening and into the morning. In addition to Scaramucci, Goalhanger will bring its talents to the table with Guardian columnist Hyde, who co-hosts The Rest is Entertainment with Richard Osman, and post-World War II American history expert Sandbrook of The Rest is History. Guests from outside Gary Lineker’s team, Goalhanger, will also make appearances. Media experience company Disply has partnered with Goalhanger to bring viewer interactivity and real-time data to the show.
Tony Pastor, who runs Goal Hanger with Lineker and Jack Davenport, said the idea for the live special came about when Campbell and Stewart — whose show has taken the U.K. podcast scene by storm in recent years — were featured on Channel 4’s coverage of the U.K. election in July. With millions of listeners every week, Pastor and his team thought “The Rest is Politics” had enough of a following to go directly to viewers on YouTube.
Paster is aiming high, hoping his election special “The Rest is Politics” will provide a “fifth option” on the night, competing with the UK giants BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky News.
“We felt like we’d rented out our talent and our audience to Channel 4,” Pastor said. “Alastair and Rory were pretty diluted compared to the wealth of great talent on Channel 4, but we thought viewers wanted more from them, so we thought why not use our own talent and broadcast it live on YouTube.”
Pastor reeled off a string of statistics to back up the move. He said “The Rest is…” has a steady 42 million monthly downloads, leaving plenty of room for shows to cross-promote election features. He added that “The Rest is Politics” alone has been downloaded 12 million times in the past 30 days, with almost half of its viewers under the age of 33. Pastor said viewers flock to YouTube during major events, noting that during the recent Euro soccer tournament, YouTube accounted for roughly half of the views for “Rest is Football,” hosted by Lineker.
Go where the audience is
Meanwhile, the US version of The Rest is Politics reaches more than 1 million viewers per episode across both audio and YouTube. Pastor said Scaramucci and Kaye’s podcast has more listeners in the US than in the UK, and that a YouTube election special could attract viewers on both sides of the Atlantic. Pastor has previously described producing the show in the US as the “holy grail.”
“The key to good distribution and engagement is to go where your audience is, and YouTube is the largest digital media platform, allowing us to maximize engagement with our audience,” added Scaramucci, who famously served as Donald Trump’s communications director for just 10 days and has since become a staunch critic of the former president, and likely the next president. “I had a great experience with Goalhanger and The Rest Is Politics: US, and it was humbling to know that so many people wanted to hear from us and clearly trusted the TRIP: US team to bring interesting voices to the table.”
Pastor said the team is “relying heavily on ‘The Mooch’ to bring in some of the biggest and most interesting names in American politics.” Pastor said Hyde, from Goalhanger’s latest podcast, “Rest is Entertainment,” will bring his trademark “acerbic wit,” while Sandbrook is “an absolute expert in the field of American history.”
The move marks the latest big one for WME-affiliated Goalhanger, which has been slowly expanding over the past five years on the back of the success of its flagship franchises and describes itself as the largest independent podcast group in the U.S.
The announcement comes at an interesting time as the US election campaign looms, with Kamala Harris steadily closing in on Trump in the polls and Trump having just been the victim of a second assassination attempt in just a few weeks.
