“Have you seen we’re on a bus now?” says Simon Mayo to co-presenter Mark Kermode in the opening episode of Kermode and Mayo’s Take, referring to the posters for their show adorning British public transport. They have every reason to feel discomfited by this. Both have long maintained that advertising a film on the side of the bus is a sure sign that it’s going to be rubbish. “It’s almost like we’re daring this to go badly,” says Kermode. “No, [it’s that] we have so much confidence in what we’re doing that we don’t care,” counters Mayo.
And what are they doing? The answer is: pretty much what they’ve always done, which is sit and argue about films, though now they are doing it as a podcast for Sony rather than as a radio show for the BBC. (They are not the only big beasts of broadcasting to have taken their leave from the BBC lately — see also Jon Sopel, Emily Maitlis and Andrew Marr.) The shift from radio might seem a bold move, though it’s worth remembering that the pair are, in many ways, podcast pioneers. In the mid-2000s, Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review on BBC 5 Live became downloadable as a podcast, prompting listener numbers to go through the roof — at their peak they averaged 1.6mn downloads per month, making them second only to The Archers in popularity.
In the new show, their remit has been expanded to include television, though you’re unlikely to find reality TV or baking competitions being dissected here (more’s the pity — I’d love to hear Kermode demolishing Married at First Sight). “Film-adjacent TV” is what he calls it, meaning they will cover TV shows with cinematic pretensions. Therefore, in the latest episode, along with the week’s film releases, they also deliver their verdicts on Apple TV Plus’s The Essex Serpent (a slow starter but essentially decent, they decide). Another difference is that the pair are required to sing for their supper and read out adverts, which is every bit as awkward — and therefore funny — as you’d imagine.
Elsewhere, though, Kermode and Mayo’s dedicated listeners can rest easy knowing that there are mercifully few new bells and whistles in a programme that, along with telling us what to watch, continues to feature interviews with actors and directors. (Thanks to their BBC show’s vast reach, they regularly bagged A-listers for the interview slot, so it will be interesting to see if that continues.)
Their conversational back-and-forth, long ago dubbed “wittertainment”, also endures, their partnership resting on their knowing each other inside out and understanding where their respective strengths lie. Where Kermode brings the knowledge and passion, Mayo brings a sense of calm and thoughtfulness that helps keep his opposite number’s more verbose moments in check. All of which is to say that Kermode and Mayo’s Take is exactly as you’d wish it to be: new, but reassuringly the same.