Boldly and brilliantly unoriginal: Kermode and Mayo’s Take reviewed

Last April Fools’ Day, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo wound up their award-winning film review show on BBC Radio 5 Live after 21 years on air. A little more than a month later they are back with Kermode and Mayo’s Take, a podcast so similar in flavour and format that you could call it an up-yours to their critics.

While Mayo stressed that it was their decision to go their own way – ‘we have decided, and to be clear: that’s no one else has decided’ – he was slightly more candid about his experience in an interview with the Radio Times a few weeks ago. People of my generation have grown up with Kermode and Mayo, and were as surprised as any by their departure. But we needn’t fret. The pair have taken their production team with them to their new studio at Sony, making the transition highly efficient.

Kermode and Mayo’s Take is neither fresh nor new but boldly and brilliantly unoriginal

All of which is to say that Kermode and Mayo’s Take is neither fresh nor new but boldly and brilliantly unoriginal. It is their old show in a fresh pair of knickers. There are a few gestures towards doing something different. They’ll be reviewing the odd bit of TV in addition to the usual film releases, for example. But the effort to preserve the status quo is obvious, with audience participation, bird song – and Jason Isaacs – still featuring heavily across the two hours.

This will come as a relief to what they call ‘LTLs’ (long-term listeners), rebranded ‘heritage listeners’ in homage to the ‘heritage artichoke’ or rather, as it turns out, the heritage tomato. To judge from those writing in, there was already a good deal of heritage knocking about in the first episode, which saw Kermode and Mayo swap notes on Nick Cave’s new film, This Much I Know to Be True, and Uncharted, a mediocre offering starring Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg.