Table For Four review — it’s time to put a tax on celebrity yammering

Here’s an idea for Rachel Reeves: a tax on microphones. Or, more specifically, a tax on celebrity-bought microphones. It might slow down the… what’s the collective noun for podcasts? Yammering? Babbling? Blathering?

The latest wheeze in the sea of what could also not unfairly be called “unedited radio” has Mathew Horne and Joanna Page, who play the leads in the TV show Gavin and Stacey, inviting a “celebrity duo” for a meal, wine and a chat. If there is any phrase more likely to make me want to head to a dark room and put a towel on my head, “celebrity duo” might be up there. Along with “bona fide national treasure”, which is how Page introduced one of their first guests. “It’s only…” she went on as if announcing the next Pope.… Gary Barlow and Olly Smith. A sad trombone sound was needed.

I have nothing against the Take That crooner and his pal, the writer and wine expert, but there is something about celebrities plugging celebrities and their podcasts that can grate. Barlow has a podcast, so does Smith. They have known each other for only “two or three years”, having met through the TV show Saturday Kitchen. But they have a wine venture together, Barlow is working on another Take That album, the band is touring this summer and Smith has a novel out (with another coming). So many plugs we needed a multi-socket adaptor.

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It’s said that speech programming should paint pictures with words, but the audio experience gave me no idea of the set-up. They were sitting and being served food and wine by someone called Sam and at the end they did a parlour game where they had to name pop songs with the loser doing the washing up. But was it a studio? Someone’s home? If you weren’t watching on YouTube, guesswork was required. (Sam is Good Food magazine’s senior food editor Samuel Goldsmith by the way.)

Also, if there is anything duller than a dinner party with people you don’t know, it’s listening in on a dinner party with people you don’t know as they rhapsodise over various food and wine combinations. Smith was quite interesting when discussing how, with climate change, we Brits might one day produce a decent pinot noir. But when he said that meeting Gary was like “basking in the warmth of a human rainbow”, I was glad I wasn’t tucking in. I might have brought my dinner up.

On they gushed. The actor Sam Neill, a fellow winemaker was, Smith said, “the loveliest person on the universe”. “On the universe” makes an interesting formulation, don’t you think? Like he’s God or something. Then Page remembered the time she was filming a TV drama in South Africa and went to a rugby match with him and Charles Dance and went for dinner with the team after. She thinks she was watching the All Blacks. The self-deprecation was nuclear. She’s from Swansea, which explains why she knows nothing about wine. It’s all about White Lightning with her. Really?

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Still, matters did improve. As the vino flowed, everyone relaxed and the Page/Horne tactic of not probing too hard helped their guests to settle in. Barlow riffed with free abandon — “Who’s into saunas?” he asked hopefully — which did at least get the conversation flowing again. He was quite honest about how the 1990s was a “mean time” and dissected Take That’s falling out and how their later reunion freed up headspace. But it’s an old story.

It was so matey and genial, it feels mean to bash a show like this. But this kind of mateyness can be exhausting and alienating. I suppose it depends what you think podcasts are for. As kitchen background noise or a hum in the car on a long journey it’s passable. But goodness, we have too many shows like this already. Come on, Rachel. Ready your red box. The yammering tax needs its first parliamentary reading.
★★☆☆☆