Hanging Out with Ant & Dec: good vibes and not much else

Household names Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly have a new weekly podcast, Hanging Out with Ant & Dec, in which they – surprise – hang out with each other. This is the main aim of the show, apparently, because since they’re family men these days, they’re not seeing each other as much as they used to. Perhaps not an entirely enticing reason to listen to a podcast but – you know, it’s Ant and Dec! The show is just as you might imagine: funny but not uproarious, upbeat but not manic, teasing but not mean. The 35 minutes of the first show tumble by, a froth of good vibes and not much else.

The difficulty for Ant and Dec is that, though their friendship seems genuine, they aren’t used to being open about themselves. Other celebrity friendship podcasts, such as Miquita Oliver and Lily Allen’s Miss Me? and Jo Whiley and Zoe Ball’s Dig It, rely on the hosts revealing who they are to listeners.

We learn about their childhoods, their regrets, their love-life mistakes, what makes them cry. All the mess of life. Ant and Dec (particularly Dec) are nowhere near as naturally open. We learn what’s in Dec’s shed (cushions for outdoor furniture), where Ant got his John Lennon tattoos (New York), who they’d each invite to a fictional dinner party (Marilyn Monroe, Bobby Robson) – all very small talk.

Oddly, it sounds more like a traditional BBC radio show than a podcast. Listeners’ emails provide a little intimacy, but not that much. One listener says that their new baby is called Declan Anthony; another that her dream dinner party guests would be … Ant and Dec. Hmm.

The duo also have a second, shorter weekly podcast, Mystery Door Monday. The idea behind it is that, each week, there’s someone or something behind a mystery door, and Ant and Dec have to guess what or who it is. It’s a visual gag that doesn’t quite work for audio and, this first week, didn’t quite work full stop. Once the hosts had guessed the job of their first mystery guest, clairvoyant Jayne Wallace of Psychic Sisters, there was much shuffling of tarot cards for her to get into a position where she could predict Ant’s future.

Her insights – the podcast being a success, with T-shirts as merchandise, “and on the back of that, there is a TV show” – were so lame as to be laughable. But Ant and Dec, as true pros, will already know all of this and will make improvements. And Hanging Out is such easy listening, I’ve no doubt it will be a chart-topping smash.

Here’s another TV star with his own podcast. Harry Hill, even more beloved (in our house, anyway) than Ant and Dec, has had a podcast for a while, but this new version of The Harry Hill Show is, he says, a “vodscarf” – visualised podcast – which means that, for its full joy, you really should be watching (it’s on YouTube). Hill’s madcap show – though excellent listening – can only be fully appreciated visually, where you see that his “son” Gary is a ventriloquist’s doll and Bruno and Abu, who are fighting, are in fact a huge bear (man in a costume) and rodent (stuffed toy). Oh, and that Sarah, Hill’s AI assistant, who gives out actual facts about his guests, is a 6ft-tall person in a silver-foil-wrapped box with tube legs. These characters stand behind Hill as he “interviews” his guest.

Hill recently spoke to fellow comedian Stewart Lee (it ended with Lee attacking Hill over his desk and wrapping a telephone cord around his neck) and last week it was fellow comedian Nish Kumar, bamboozled and giggling from the start, when Hill introduced him to the Andy Burnham dance. “Throw a chair / Peel a parsnip / Iron your trousers … Strangle a fox / Pipe the buttercream / Stub your toe.” I was howling throughout. I rarely say: “Watch a podcast” – but, really, watch this one.

Just room for one more TV-star-goes-into-podcasting show: Get Birding with Sean Bean. Yes, that is the highly Alan Partridge-like title and, yes, it is a real show. The Get Birding podcast has been going for four seasons: now there is the addition of actor Bean and, you guessed it, a fully visual element.

You don’t need to watch this show: it’s carefully made for audio and packed with tips and information for the newbie birdwatcher. This episode is based around the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch and features Elbow’s Guy Garvey, as well as birders familiar to previous listeners such as Mya-Rose Craig, City Girl in Nature (AKA Kwesia) and beatboxer Jason Singh. But if you do decide to take a look, you will find something quite comforting about watching Bean wander about on a misty Yorkshire morning, FaceTiming other birders while sitting on a bench. He’s so Sean Bean at all times: gruff, good-hearted, genuine. He’s just there because he likes birdwatching and someone had the foresight to ask him to host the show. The result is possibly the most wholesome thing you’ll hear – or see – all year.

Photograph by James Turner/PA