{"id":2304099,"date":"2026-02-27T23:30:55","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T23:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2304099"},"modified":"2026-02-27T23:30:55","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T23:30:55","slug":"table-for-four-review-its-time-to-put-a-tax-on-celebrity-yammering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/table-for-four-review-its-time-to-put-a-tax-on-celebrity-yammering\/","title":{"rendered":"Table For Four review \u2014 it\u2019s time to put a tax on celebrity yammering"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Here\u2019s an idea for Rachel Reeves: a tax on microphones. Or, more specifically, a tax on celebrity-bought microphones. It might slow down the\u2026 what\u2019s the collective noun for podcasts? Yammering? Babbling? Blathering? <\/p>\n

The latest wheeze in the sea of what could also not unfairly be called \u201cunedited radio\u201d has Mathew Horne<\/a> and Joanna Page, who play the leads in the TV show Gavin and Stacey<\/i><\/a>, inviting a \u201ccelebrity duo\u201d 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, \u201ccelebrity duo\u201d might be up there. Along with \u201cbona fide national treasure\u201d, which is how Page introduced one of their first guests. \u201cIt\u2019s only\u2026\u201d she went on as if announcing the next Pope.\u2026 Gary Barlow and Olly Smith. A sad trombone sound was needed.<\/span><\/p>\n

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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 \u201ctwo or three years\u201d, having met through the TV show Saturday Kitchen.<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Joanna Page: \u2018I\u2019d love to be reincarnated as a pigeon\u2019<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019s home? If you weren\u2019t watching on YouTube, guesswork was required. (Sam is Good Food magazine\u2019s senior food editor Samuel Goldsmith by the way.)<\/p>\n

Also, if there is anything duller than a dinner party with people you don\u2019t know, it\u2019s listening in on a dinner party with people you don\u2019t 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 \u201cbasking in the warmth of a human rainbow\u201d, I was glad I wasn\u2019t tucking in. I might have brought my dinner up.<\/p>\n

On they gushed. The actor Sam Neill, a fellow winemaker was, Smith said, \u201cthe loveliest person on the universe\u201d. \u201cOn the universe\u201d makes an interesting formulation, don\u2019t you think? Like he\u2019s 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<\/i> she was watching the All Blacks. The self-deprecation was nuclear. She\u2019s from Swansea, which explains why she knows nothing about wine. It\u2019s all about White Lightning with her. Really?<\/p>\n

\u2022 Read more radio and podcast reviews<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

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 \u2014 \u201cWho\u2019s into saunas?\u201d he asked hopefully \u2014 which did at least get the conversation flowing again. He was quite honest about how the 1990s was a \u201cmean time\u201d and dissected Take That\u2019s falling out and how their later reunion freed up headspace. But it\u2019s an old story.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.
\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606\u2606<\/p>\n

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\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.thetimes.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s an idea for Rachel Reeves: a tax on microphones. Or, more specifically, a tax on celebrity-bought microphones. It might slow down the\u2026 what\u2019s the collective noun for podcasts? Yammering? Babbling? Blathering? The latest wheeze in the sea of what could also not unfairly be called \u201cunedited radio\u201d has Mathew Horne and Joanna Page, who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2304100,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2304099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Table-For-Four-review-\u2014-its-time-to-put-a.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2304099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2304099"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2304099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2304101,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2304099\/revisions\/2304101"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2304100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2304099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2304099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2304099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}