Pushing the envelope - Netflix ends DVD rentals

Picture: Netflix

The DVD had barely been in existence when I moved to Silicon Valley at the beginning of 2001. I should know: I’d been involved in launching the format just four years earlier. It was, as tech executives are prone to say, a “game changer” - storing an entire film on, effectively, a CD with picture quality visibly superior to VHS tape. No wonder it was the subject of an obligatory ‘format war’ between rival companies promoting their respective high-capacity video disc platforms with the hope of benefitting from lucrative patents.

As the DVD was in 1998, the Internet was in relative mass-adoption infancy when 26-year-old former US Marine and Stanford computer science graduate Reed Hastings launched Netflix in the Silicon Valley satellite town of Los Gatos. Hastings cleverly combined the nascent DVD format with an online portal for home video rental to rent out new-release films for $6 each, with up to three discs at a time sent out by post. The first disc Netflix sent out was a copy of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice.

Four years later the New York Times reported that Netflix was sending out almost 200,000 discs every day to some 670,000 monthly subscribers, a figure that soon ballooned to a million. By then, amongst hyper-tech savvy Silicon Valley residents, Netflix’s distinctive red envelopes were landing on doormats like leaves in an autumn storm. Moreover, it became routine for subscribers to go to ever-more creative lengths to post them back to Netflix before late fees were applied. I was travelling quite a bit within the US at the time for work, so I would take my return envelopes with me, looking for the most obscure and remote postbox locations from which to send them, just for a laugh. 

Equally entertaining was the creation of the wishlist from which films were chosen: unlike a traditional video rental shop, browsing Netflix’s menus ensured that at any given time, as soon as you’d returned one disc, another would be on its way. As a result, there would be tremendous expectation of a new disc or discs arriving in the post.

Of course, this all now seems rather arcane, given the overwhelming pivot toward on-demand services such as Netflix itself. But go back to the early 2000s and Netflix can be credited with not only driving the popularity of DVD, but also opening up a mesmerising choice of rentable titles, from big-budget blockbusters to independent productions, documentaries and cult Japanese anime films. 

Indeed at one point, Netflix was sending out more than a million discs a day drawn from a 75,000-strong library, enabling the likes of me to experience films I would never have watched had I been hurriedly scanning VHS spines - with my head cocked awkwardly to one side while trying to read vertically - in a traditional rental shop, the likes of which arguably Netflix put paid to.

Incredibly, though, Netflix has not stopped its DVD service, even after launching its now ubiquitous streaming platform in 2007. Until now: “After an incredible 25-year run, we’ve made the difficult decision to wind down at the end of September”, Netflix’s co-chief executive Ted Sarandos said earlier this year, hailing how the company’s DVD postal service had “paved the way for the shift to streaming”.

Picture: Netflix

Not surprisingly, maintaining the DVD rental business has, according to Sarandos, “become increasingly difficult”, accounting for just $126 million of Netflix’s total revenues of over $31 billion. Still, not a bad return. However, the end of DVD rentals does come at a time of changing fortunes for Netflix, for the first time in its 25-year history. Rival streaming services such as Disney+, Apple TV and Paramount+ have been increasingly eating into revenues and subscribers, leading to Netflix losing a million of them in the first six months of last year, its first audience decline in a decade.

To counter this the company began introducing new tiers of advertising-supported packages, as well as announcing a crackdown on so-called password sharing, a less-than popular measure amongst families seeing teenagers head off to university with barely the financial means to remain connected to their favourite shows.

At its peak, the DVD service had more than 16 million subscribers, but today the number is just 1.5 million, and all based in the US. Contrast that with the 223 million subscribers Netflix’s VOD service has globally. Given the relative numbers, winding up the DVD business will barely meet a whimper but there are still those who, 25 years on, swear by it. “When you open your mailbox, it’s still something you actually want instead of just bills,” subscriber Amanda Konkle of Savannah, Georgia, told Associated Press, having been using the platform since 2005.

Others have continued to rent DVDs from Netflix because, surprisingly, it invariably offers a greater choice of titles. Licensing conditions on the streaming service can mean that some films are available only during a particular window. 

Some subscribers even came back to Netflix’s DVD rentals during the pandemic as - incredible to think as it is - they ran out of things to watch via online platforms. Many - especially scholars of film history - have found Netflix’s vast library of vintage movies indispensable. 

That said, the company has been progressively winding down the DVD service, reducing the availability of many titles as logistics and other resources have been diverted into the main business. “Our goal has always been to provide the best service for our members,” Sarandos said in a statement, “but as the business continues to shrink that’s going to become increasingly difficult.” As the company itself acknowledged in a letter to investors earlier this year, the DVD service was the "booster rocket that got streaming to a leading position".

The DVD itself is not dead yet. Much like the optical CD technology from which it was adapted by Philips, Sony and their rivals at Toshiba, people are still buying DVDs. The Salvation Army says that DVD sales have more than doubled in ten years at their charity shops, as entire collections have been donated and then snapped up on a whim. Another charity, the British Heart Foundation, said that they had sold more than 1.9 million DVDs last year through their shops. 

Like collecting rare records and books, the ‘lucky find’ is helping, as those trying to find out-of-print titles or not available on streaming services come across rarities. And as the cost-of-living crunch continues to bite, families are even ‘cord cutting’ and returning to physical forms of entertainment that cost a fraction of the monthly cost of online packages. Similarly, there are plenty of households disenfranchised from video streaming due to the fact they live in communities with poor or even non-existent broadband.

There’s no doubt that the rise of streaming has created vast gaps on living room bookshelves - mine especially. My own DVD collection now occupies a sizeable corner of a storage facility (at some stage, to be bequeathed to a charity shop). There is always the chance that DVD might go through a vinyl-style revival, much as CDs continue to sell in the era of Spotify. 

But unlike the business model for music streaming platforms - which is great for the consumer but lousy for the artist - video remains in the grip of Hollywood pricing mechanisms. While it might seem like buying a film from video on demand service is not the same as owning it, I have far less emotional attachment to the DVDs now collecting dust than my CDs (which already went through one purge, 13 years ago, when my library was more or less halved).

I’m probably just not as attached to films as music, knowing that most of what I like to watch is available to stream to my living room TV or my iPad with equal ease and none of the clutter. That said, I can’t help but echo Amanda Konkle: back in the day, when those red envelopes appeared through the front door, there was a sense of excitement not generated since by scrolling through a menu with a remote control. The early days of the Internet, eh?

WFH WTF

Readers of the London Evening Standard will have been presented this week with what appears to be the newspaper’s single-handed attempt to get Londoners back into the office.

“Remote working is killing London. Get back to the office”, the paper thundered with an editorial by Dylan Jones, the editor. In it he recounted now-familiar stories of parts of the city apparently deserted on Mondays and Fridays, of company bosses complaining of empty (and expensive premises), and everyone from restaurants to dry cleaners noting that trade was still down as a result.

“Come Friday, it’s like a bomb has dropped, with deserted streets around Moorgate, empty shops in Broadgate, the surrounding restaurants all starved of trade. And it has got to stop,” Jones opined. “Remote working is killing London. It’s killing trade, killing commerce, and killing the city’s ability to properly get back to work.”

“Speak to any shopkeeper, retailer, or news-seller, or anyone in the hospitality industry, and they will tell you the same,” he continued. “London feels like it is on its way back: commuter patterns are up, West End footfall is up, and tourists are beginning to feel as ubiquitous as they were pre-Covid. But there is still a bewildering lack of urgency among employers regarding full time in-office working. Many companies still only expect their staff to come to work three days a week - usually Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday - making a mockery of the working week.”

We are, of course, talking about the post-pandemic reality (although, with Covid-19 very much on the march again, it’s debatable just how ‘post-‘ things really are). But there is also the view that if there was one good thing to come out of the disease it’s the adoption of more flexible working arrangements for those who can make use of them. It is, though, somewhat arrogantly London-centric to assume that everyone works in an office. But equally, it’s hard to fully get an objective picture of just how our cities are performing in these changed times. 

For the last four months I’ve been working on a fixed-term contract for an industry association whose headquarters is located in the City of London. I’ve been absolutely loving going into the office as often as makes sense. That, though, is the key: ‘as often as makes sense’. Go back 35 years to when I joined Sky TV, then based in the West End, and I was in the office Monday to Friday, and wearing a suit and tie every day. Indeed less than ten years ago I was going into the Paris HQ of the telecoms company I was working for every single day without giving much thought to it (largely as I was living just a handful of Métro stops away and could even walk there if the mood took me).

The Internet age changed everything. The first time I had both my own work-supplied mobile phone and laptop was in the mid-1990s, where remote connectivity was more useful for business trips with the PR agency I was working for at the time. Dial-up access, at home or in a hotel room, was a faff and frankly more novelty than necessity. But over the next couple of decades remote working progressed from something you could do if necessary (for example instead of taking a sick day, or when you needed to be at home for a plumber) to the mandated instruction it was during lockdown. 

I started at my last company a month into the first lockdown in the UK and didn’t see the inside of its headquarters until August the following year. Even the ‘Great Return’ of 2021 seemed tentative. It took months before the so-called ‘TWAT’ syndrome became a thing (people only coming into the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays). Those who went in on Mondays or Fridays were either contrarians trying to make a point, or the socially awkward, preferring the peace and quiet.

If the Standard’s campaign this week is to be believed, TWATs are still a thing. There’s no doubt that my place of work is quieter on Mondays and quieter still on Fridays , which calls into question the financial logic of renting large commercial office spaces in central London on days like that. But on Tuesdays, increasing through Wednesdays until Thursdays when it is packed, the place is genuinely buzzing with bodies. Desks need to be booked in advance and heaven help anyone needing a meeting room without reserving one first.

Along with the Victorian Pencil, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and his absurd pass-agg campaign to get civil servants back into Whitehall post-Covid (when he held the hilariously oxymoronic post of Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency), the most vocal proponents of returning to five-days-a-week in-office working have been the CEOs of large commercial banks. On my own evidence, working in the City, the pubs and bars I walk past appear to be well populated by laddish banker bros quaffing pints at various times of their stressed out days. “Coming together fosters better collaboration and teamwork, enabling us to better serve our clients,” Andrea Rossi, CEO of the City fund M&G told the Evening Standard. Banks have been the most belligerent on this issue, but in-person attendance in other sectors has suffered. “Of course I would prefer to see people, have them in the office,” top advertising industry executive Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of S4 Capital said this week. “It helps in terms of one-to-one creativity”.

Maybe the City of London, where I am currently based, is not reflective of the rest of the capital, or indeed the country. But I certainly haven’t noticed much of the reported deadening of commuter traffic into London on Mondays and Fridays. The Evening Standard kicked off its campaign this week by reporting new travel data which showed that the capital’s three main commuter railway networks – South Western, Southeastern and Thameslink – are carrying 22 million fewer passengers each month than four years ago. “We are not seeing the level of people commuting five days a week that we saw pre-Covid,” Angie Doll, chief executive at GoVia Thameslink Railway, said. “We are seeing people commute on a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday – and that pattern is absolutely set now. I can’t see that changing again.”

This doesn’t exactly stack up in my own experience: travelling at peak-time from south-west London, even on Mondays and Fridays you’re lucky to get a seat on the 0740 to Waterloo, and on every other day of the working week you’re packed in like sardines. Of course, train strikes make the decision on whether to work at home or not a lot more simpler for those who are able to use the option. 

South Western, one of the largest carriers of commuters from the outer suburbs and southern shires, noted to the Standard that its passenger demographic meant that more were likely to be in senior professional jobs where they could work from home should they choose to (and, I would hazard a guess, have the sort of salaries that put them further outside of London), are more likely to work in senior positions or belong to the managerial classes than other train companies. In other words, they are more likely to have the ability and authority to work from home.

“We have not given up on the weekly commute,” SWR’s customer and commercial director Peter Williams told the Standard. “But commuters are telling us that their travel patterns are fixed in the short term. But there are nuances. Younger people show more willingness to get into the office. It’s important for them to build their profile — and to socialise after work. There are also some employers who hope that at some point they’re able to coax their colleagues into the office more frequently. But with the cost of living pressures, they don’t feel that now is the right time to be insisting on that.”

Which brings us to the notion of ‘hybrid’ working. As someone who has been looking for a permanent job since March, I’ve noticed the amount of hybrid work being advertised. In fact, at one company I interviewed with, its Cambridge office was there largely for collaborative needs when required, and even those who lived locally worked from home on more days of the week than they came in.

Workplace flexibility is clearly here to stay. Many with children or caring responsibilities have found it a boon, as have those whose salaries haven’t kept up with the cost of commuting (not just the price of a return ticket, once you add in the coffees, Pret lunches and all the other ancillary costs that come from leaving the house each morning).

Personally, I love going into the office of my current employer. The work itself is so much more rewarding when you have colleagues to bounce ideas off. Waiting for an e-mail reply or a WhatsApp response is just not the same as walking across to someone’s desk and asking them something. According to research by the Office Group, some 83% of workers would prefer working from some form of company premises than working remotely full-time. 

For me, it’s partly the social interaction but also - oddly - the commute itself. For the lengthiest leg of my journey by Tube from Wimbledon into the City I get a seat for its duration with which to read or listen to podcasts. The overall travel time of an hour each way creates a buffer between home and work life. And even if parts of the commute involve dealing with other people, their headphone noise, phone conversations and sniffing, it’s still a marked improvement on not seeing anyone at all throughout the day during lockdown. 

During the pandemic I had commute envy. My wife, a teacher, was going out every day to teach the children of key workers, which made me deeply envious of her ability to get in the car and drive even just a couple of miles down the road, seeing things other than the hedge outside our living room that was my vista for 18 months. Now, I emerge from Cannon Street station to be confronted with early morning life - people heading in to their offices, going for breakfast, grabbing coffee, being out there.

I don’t have a home office or even a desk at home, so going into company premises provides me with somewhere proper to sit at, a large monitor, hot and cold running tea/coffee/WiFi/toilets and, most importantly, people, as opposed to an over-attentive cat. When lockdown first imposed WFH on the much of the workforce, there were younger members of my then-team perched on beds in flat shares or kitchen tables at their parents’ houses. I felt sorry for them, missing out on the shared office experience that I’d had from the very start of my career. 

While it is nice to go in on a Friday when the place is virtually deserted, being amongst and around busy people making whatever contribution they make to corporate life is without substitute. It’s something those younger workers have lost out on profoundly, and will continue to so if they’re still not going in regularly or even at all. Productivity is, let’s face facts, not what it is when you’re at home.

There are other disadvantages to working from home. Firstly, it’s making us fat. Or fatter. A survey conducted by the fitness app MyFitnessPal has found that Brits consume nearly 800 more calories and take 3,500 fewer steps when they work from home - a not surprising set of statistics, based on my own personal experience. 

Mental health has also taken a battering, especially for those who live alone or with vulnerabilities. In its 2022 New Future of Work Report, Microsoft revealed that, while working remotely can improve job satisfaction, it can also lead to social isolation, guilt and overcompensation. At first, there were countless articles about baking banana bread and going for a spin on the Peleton whenever the opportunity arose, but the reality was that many home workers found themselves working even longer hours. As many as 80% have reported their mental health suffering as a result of being tied to laptops all day long, with human interaction facilitated exclusively by home broadband. 

WFH has also dampened spontaneity. Research by the reservation app Ambi found that 30% of working age adults felt that the pandemic killed off having fun, and that spirit has yet to return. It said that 40% of home workers in the UK found that not being in the office all week has made them boring - either not agreeing to ad hoc drinks after work with colleagues or even getting too comfy to want to go out with their own friends.

The Teams meeting experience...

I would agree with both: on multi-window ‘virtual’ meetings, with an array of colleagues resembling the opening titles of The Brady Bunch, it’s a fair bet that some will be distracted by their mobile phones, or e-mail, social media, web browsing or some other form of partial disengagement. We’ve all done it. We all still do it.

I recognise that mine is a metropolitan view. I can’t speak for those in the regions who might be holding on to working from home for other reasons. But as a general statement, over the 37 years of my professional life, I’ve always only benefitted from being in an office. Perhaps I’ve been lucky: perhaps, working in busy, buzzy newsrooms and for the last couple of decades press offices in corporate headquarters, I’ve been able to enjoy the banter, the exchanges of ideas, the arguments and disagreements, occasional bollockings and even more occasional praise that come with face-to-face working. I couldn’t go back to being perched on my sofa, peering into a laptop camera, all the time. It was a novelty once, but it’s not and never will be where I do my best work. And that is largely down to the fact that my kind of work thrives in a social and sociable environment.

Shutting the window...£1 billion later

Picture: Chelsea FC

It still strikes me as absurd that the new Premier League season is almost a month old and yet, even as late as last night, teams were still doing business before the transfer window shut. This summer’s spend has exceeded £2 billion, and it doesn’t fill me with that much pride that my own club has contributed significantly to that outlay.

Since the Boehly-Clearlake consortium took over Chelsea last summer, it has spent around a billion pounds on new players, some of whom haven’t even made it to a second season, drawing question marks over the scattergun strategy of purchases that certainly marked the 2022 summer window, and continued in January this year.

With Mauricio Pochettino taking over as head coach in July (having been closely consulted in the weeks leading up to him starting work), Chelsea’s summer transfer activity has, at first glance, looked more purposeful, with many of the badly needed positions filled. Looked at from a higher level – with 10 players coming in, and 21 senior squad members offloaded, the club has undergone a complete oil change, to the extent that the only players remaining from the pre-takeover Abramovich era are Thiago Silva, Ben Chilwell, newly installed club captain Reece James, Trevoh Chalobah and reserve goalkeeper Marcus Bettinelli. Oh, and Malang Sarr who, embarrassingly, Pochettino didn’t seem to be aware of when asked about by journalists this week.

If it wasn’t clear before, it should be abundantly apparent now that the player transfusion has been deliberate: capitalise on the net-loss sale of homegrown players like Mason Mount, Ruben Loftus-Cheek and, last night, Callum Hudson-Odoi, and focus on rebuilding around youth – on which Pochettino’s reputation has been built – with players signed for six, seven and even eight-year contracts, with the costs amortised over those periods to lower Financial Fair Play exposure as rules currently apply. 

That, though, is the positive spin: the negative is that somehow Boehly’s spending – which in buying Enzo Fernández and Moisés Caicedo has twice broken British transfer records – Chelsea’s seemingly limitless spree on the brightest young talents around has seen little limit.

Moisés Caicedo
Picture: Chelsea FC

Whether it has been to any good remains to be seen: since 12 August, Chelsea have won one, drawn one and lost one in the Premier League with their expensively assembled squad, while at the same time seen their injury list pile up to 11 – effectively a complete team – with the need for further reinforcements as a result. The latest is 21-year-old Cole Palmer from Manchester City, something of a fringe player under Pep Guardiola but seemingly highly regarded by Chelsea’s talent acquisition experts looking to augment Pochettino’s attacking options further.

The logic to most of the acquisitions is not in doubt, nor the decision to part company with academy-developed and therefore marketable players. Getting rid of ineffective and expensive overheads like Kai Havertz, Romelu Lukaku, Hakim Zyech and Christian Pulisic will have lowered the wage bill, allowing the club to bring in players in their late teens and early twenties on smaller salaries, their exorbitant transfer fees spread over the longer period of their extended contracts.

Graphic: Sky Sports

Whether, though, this approach will keep Premier League and UEFA investigators happy is another matter entirely. In the aftermath of Roman Abramovich’s sanctioning there was a very real chance that Chelsea could have folded, especially as negotiations between the Government and the consortium ran into issues at the 11th hour. The Fair Play aspect does mean that the £1 billion spend since is a calculated risk by Todd Boehly and his partners.

Some will say the risk is worth it, given how phase two of the “project” – this summer’s clearout and subsequent refresh – has brought in players like Caicedo and Romeo Lavia, Christopher Nkunku and Nicolas Jackson. Pochettino’s new broom approach has also appeared to restore last summer’s marquee signing Raheem Sterling to his best, with Caicedo’s arrival freeing up Fernández to look more like the £107 million he was bought for.

With no European football this season and expectations around a largely entirely new squad taking time to bed in alleviating some of the pressure on Pochettino, he has a unique platform on which to build. It’s hard to judge which has been the more beneficial development – new blood or the expulsion of those whose number had grown to create a bloated and largely unresponsive squad under Thomas Tuchel, Graham Potter and Frank Lampard last season.

Of course, with the visit today of Nottingham Forest, Poch will only have four competitive games behind him – three in the league and a narrow, blush-sparing win over Wimbledon in the Carabao Cup on Wednesday night – which means judgement must be reserved in the short-term. But if the club line that this is a long-term project is to be believed, questions will be asked on what measure of success will be an acceptable return for the eye-watering outlay. 

Is, even, a cup this season ambitious for a club that has this year spent £222 million on two midfielders alone? Is a European finish to be expected and if so, are we talking about a Top Four place next May, or a Europa League or even a Europa Conference League place? Note, no one is talking about Chelsea challenging for the Premier League title itself this season, but surely the target must be to match or get close to Manchester City amid renewed challenges from Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, Newcastle and Tottenham.

Nothing is guaranteed, and as Pochettino’s injury woes have piled up, the rug has, if not been pulled from beneath him, certainly shown signs of slipping. On paper he has a wealth of talent at his disposal, but on paper is never a guarantee, as Mykhailo Mudryk has demonstrated following his £88.5 million transfer from Shakhtar Donetsk and a decidedly unimpressive opening spell in the Premier League, which is now curtailed by injury. As we’ve seen so often in football, the heavier the price tag the heavier the weight of expectation, and that may well have been the cause of the young Ukrainian’s decidedly underwhelming displays so far. He, perhaps more than any other squad player, will be Pochettino’s primary target for improvement.

While the astronomical amount of money Chelsea has spent over the last three windows will always be a lighting rod for critics and rival fans alike, the harsh reality is that if it doesn’t result in sustained success, it will only be seen as one of the most profligate billionaire’s folly in football’s most recent history of inflationary excess.

“We need to be careful with the young guys because they need time to settle,” Pochettino said during his press conference yesterday ahead of today’s home fixture against Forest. “We need to settle all the players who have arrived late, create spaces and build a solid structure to perform after.” 

Cole Palmer
Picture: Chelsea FC

He was addressing questions about the £42.5 million arrival of Palmer, the final purchase of this extraordinary window. “He is from Manchester and is going to move to London. London is different, the club is different, the culture is different. He needs to - first of all, before he starts to perform - settle and feel his space. We are not going to put pressure on him to perform. He needs to be happy and calm and find space in this team.”

“He fits the project and he is a young and talented player. Of course, he also decided to come because he expected to play more and be important here. That’s not the most important thing, the most important thing is that he wanted to come because he sees Chelsea as a project for him to improve his game and to maybe be more involved in every single game. But, yes, I think the quality is there. He has great potential.”

Pochettino appeared to suggest that with Palmer his 13th new player this summer the spree will slow down. “We need to explain the reality in the same way - we sign players, we sell players. It is more about net spending than really the money you spend because that’s the balance the club is now trying to get.” Crucially he addded: “This is a very special situation for the club from the beginning but, for sure, the club won’t keep doing for years what they have done in the past.”

For me, the summer transfer window is usually a time of excitement. At Chelsea in the modern era, it’s been one long Christmas Day, lasting from June to September each year. This time around, following the randomness of the Boehly-Clearlake spree last summer and again this January, it’s easy to feel brittle if, for nothing else, the risk to pride if the influx of new players goes tits up. 

Just once it would be nice for Chelsea to be the club people don’t talk about until they’ve achieved something. Tribality normally prevents that, as the barely-acknowledged successes in the Abramovich era serve testament to (amid the near universal deification of the two Manchesters). But the club doesn’t help itself. I’ve always bridled at the suggestion that Chelsea has, for the last 20 years, bought success, as almost every club at the top of the pyramid is guilty of the very same. I just hope that the price tags we’ve seen this summer can be justified on the pitch, and the new intake give us up in the stands something to be genuinely excited about.

Now that is Fighting Talk!

It is a mild and slightly damp Saturday morning at the beginning of October, 2003. I’m in my car negotiating the tramlines that run along the streets of Amsterdam while touring neighbourhoods in the search for somewhere permanent to live following my return from a two-year sojourn in California. Being the typical Brit abroad, I’m listening to the BBC on the radio, but given the trams’ overhead power lines interfering with reception, the best I can hear is a very crackly 5 Live on AM. 

Through the signal that fades in and out, I realise that I’m listening to the rat-a-tat-tat schtick of Johnny Vaughan, the former Big Breakfast co-host, who appears to be presenting some sort of sports quiz. The panelists are footballer Stan Collymore, the now ubiquitous comedian/actor/game show host Bradley Walsh (who is also an ex-professional footballer), sports writer Will Buckley, and Canadian DJ and sports nut Greg Brady, dialing in from Toronto. From what I can tell through the electrical interference, it’s a high-bantz experience.

It transpires that I’m listening to a brand new show called Fighting Talk, which zips along breathlessly under Vaughan as I try to remember the protocols of Amsterdam driving (basically, don’t, but if you do, give cyclists priority, then pedestrians, and then, if you’re lucky, you). The show ends with a win for Collymore before Vaughan hands over to 5 Live’s afternoon sports anchor and I go about my business of apartment hunting. 

20 years and four permanent hosts on, FT remains a weekend fixture (or, in my case, the Monday morning commute as I catch up with the podcast version) for the duration of any football season when it is on. Its premise is punditry, but not the monotone of Match Of The Day analysis. Instead it is a combination of knowledge and more subjective, often provocative and invariably damn funny opinion, triggered by left-field questions that sometimes only have a passing connection to sport (sample: “Sports people as biscuits”.

Points are awarded - somewhat arbitrarily it seems - for answers and it doesn’t make any difference whether the recipient is a Sport Billy with a Panini sticker book’s worth of trivia in their head, or a professional comedian possessing the sharpness of wit that comes from surviving the comedy club bearpits. And unlike, say, the occasionally po-faced A Question Of Sport, whose sports personalities are invariably anything but, FT works around the absurdities of competitive endeavour. Sport is merely a vessel for the ever-changing panel drawn mostly from sport, broadcasting and the comedy circuit to be quizzed on.

Greg Brady

“So much of sports talk is not interesting,” says Greg Brady, a regular on every FT season since 2003. “With Fighting Talk, though, you get pinned down into actually having an opinion.” Two US radio shows, Pardon The Interruption and Round The Horn provided something of the show’s template when producer Simon Crosse - who’d known Greg for a few years - invited him to be on the very first show. “In 2003, living in Detroit, I sort of knew the format, but radio hadn’t really done the arguing-in-a-pub thing, where you’re rewarded with points. Simon thought there had never been anything like it on UK radio – punditry then wasn’t very pointed.” 

“Everyone on it takes it very seriously,” Greg adds. “No one shows up unprepared. We do know the questions in advance, but not the answers, and it’s not scripted. We’re often surprised with what the other panelists have to say, and that makes for a more entertaining and unpredictable show. Knowing everyone’s answers in advance wouldn’t be the right thing to do. The show should get a lot of credit for the way it has evolved as topics in society have evolved. There are things from 20 years ago we wouldn’t cover now.”

What has kept FT fresh for the last 20 years has been the combinations of panelists, some of whom can be considered regulars (Brady says he’ll do five or six shows in any season) while others have come and gone as other work commitments have permitted. One early fixture was Tom Watt, better known as Lofty in EastEnders, who regularly demonstrated a propensity for being a proper football Statto. The Fast Show’s Simon Day has been another, along with sports journalists like Steve Bunce, Des Kelly and Martin Kelner, athletes Kath Merry and Gail Emms, and comedians like Tom Davis, Neil Delamere, Elis James, Eddie Kadi, Mark Watson and Henning Wehn. 

FT has created a legend out of football manager Phil Brown, coined a catchphrase in Bob Mills’ “I didn’t come here for a lesson on communism!”, and made the final round of ‘Defend The Indefensible’ (DTI as FTers know it) a source of controversy every bit as sour as any VAR decision. It has championed women with all-female panels, and has its own self-styled First Lady, sports presenter Eleanor Oldroyd. It’s topical, but doesn’t try to be Mock The Week/Have I Got News For You topical, even with the wild card of the ‘AOB’ round. And you don't have to be a Top Trumps-collecting obsessive to get the sporting references.

“You won’t hear the same four people every week,” points out Greg. “At the beginning it would have taken a little time to establish its rhythm – ‘Have we got the right mix?’ ‘Have we got people who know their stuff, can talk about their sport, about other sports, and if they’re not from the sporting world, contribute as entertainingly as possible?’” Over time, he says, the panels have broadened out, but there remains a cadre of panelists who’ve returned regularly, simply because they enjoy it. “The only reason panelists give up FT is when they have other things in their career to take up their time,” Greg adds.

That sort of longevity - and the support of a hardcore fanbase (who are also members of an enthusiastically-engaged Facebook group), is down to the chemistry woven by producers Crosse, Mike Holt and Charlie Copsey. “The balance of guests is usually really good,” says another FT veteran, comedian, author and hotelier Ian Moore, now in his 14th year on the show. “That’s down to the three of them - Simon, Mike and Charlie,” he adds, pointing out that they get the best out of the competitive mix of comedy and sporting professionals, each with their own knowledge, preparation and style of banter.

Former Fighting Talk host Colin Murray with producers Simon Crosse and Charlie Copsey
Picture: BBC/Facebook

For Greg Brady, interacting with the panel presents an interesting challenge: with a few exceptions of when he is London, for most editions of FT he dials at six in the morning from Toronto, where he presents the breakfast show on the city’s Global News Radio 640 station. “A Fighting Talk for me will start at 6am Eastern Time, which being a Saturday means it will have been the sixth day in a row of being up at that time.” But that’s not the greatest hurdle - when he dials in, he’s up against a host and three other panelists he can’t see. “It’s the ultimate blind date, sparring over who is the most promising golfer on the Ryder Cup Team, or a Robbie Williams song as a car – a typical Fighting Talk curve.” He wouldn’t have it any other way, however. “Over here [in North America], talk shows are like arranged marriages, but with Fighting Talk there is so much freedom to go with the flow of the fun or opinion. The mix of the people you get with FT is what makes it.”

Colin Murray in the FT driving seat
Picture: BBC/Facebook

Johnny Vaughan cast the dye in his single season as FT’s inaugural presenter, bringing the gently laddish charm that made The Big Breakfast required viewing in the 1990s. He was followed by Christian O’Connell, then Colin Murray in his first stint, Josh Widdicombe and Georgie Thompson alternating, and then Murray again for a second run between 2016 and this summer, and the end of the 22-23 football season. Guest presenters over the last 20 years have included Sir Terry Wogan, World Of Sport legend Dickie Davies, Jimmy Tarbuck, football commentator Jonathan Pearce and comedian Justin Moorhouse (who won the 2014 season as a panelist). 

For the start of its 21st year tomorrow, the show has a new host: 5 Live breakfast presenter Rick Edwards who, he says, has been a huge fan of FT since that first season with Vaughan at the helm, a fact, he says, “does age me.” Having begun his career as a stand-up, Edwards should be a snappy host, though as a former panelist, he knows the pitfalls. “Over the years my performance as a guest has been patchy, and I am really looking forward to bringing that inconsistency to the host’s chair. I can already feel the power going to my head. The bosses will regret giving me the keys to that sound effects box.”

Although he won't be on the first show of the new season, Greg Brady is looking forward to an early opportunity to be on FT with Edwards. “It might take a couple of episodes to get in tune with the ad-libs, the mockery and the opinion, but he’ll get there. It’s a little like the Rolling Stones saying that it’s only rock and roll – you’re born to be wrong a lot of the time in sport, so Rick will have to balance the possession time, who is the funniest – even if they’re not obviously funny people – who has the best knowledge, what would make good radio, what will draw out the punditry.”

Rick Edwards
Picture: BBC

Johnny Vaughan, whose production company World’s End makes the show for 5 Live, said: “The Fighting Talk team are thrilled to have Rick at the helm for the next part of the journey. Over the years we have been so lucky that each host has brought with them their own unique style, passion and humour and that is what has helped make Fighting Talk Britain’s longest running, favourite sporting entertainment show. We are delighted that Rick is now part of a glorious Saturday tradition!”

Fighting Talk returns to BBC 5 Live at 11am on Saturday 2 September. An extended podcast version will be available via BBC Sounds