The Rest is British Soft Power

Our most popular cultural export

The Rest is History must be the only thing of which I can say that I was into it before it was popular, my sole experience of being an early adopter. I remember listening to the very first episode as soon as it was released, during Lockdown 2, because I had been a fan of Tom Holland for years and followed him on Twitter. Straight away, I knew that it would be an enormous success, because even people who rarely watched history documentaries or read history books would find it entertaining.

And now, as they say, ‘the rest is history’ (ho ho). The show has just been named Apple Podcasts Show of the Year 2025, the first ever British winner, and is beyond successful, into the realm of ‘phenomenon’. When television writers in the distant future make dramas set in the 2020s and wish to give immediate shorthand to establish the decade, they’ll put The Rest is History soundtrack somewhere in the background, just as they always have Tears for Fears playing on the radio during any drama set in the 80s.

It became such a huge part of my life that, when cooking or cleaning and unresponsive to questions, the children came to learn that I must be listening to ‘Tom and Dom’ on my AirPods. Initially, of course, when I mentioned that I had actually met Tom Holland a few times, they’d respond with awe until they realised that I was not talking about the Spiderman actor. It became a running joke about ‘your Tom Holland’ rather than the ‘famous’ one.

During the golden years of television there were a number of shows which became so commonly popular in one’s friendship circles that they were routinely talked about – The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones – but there were always plenty of people who had never watched them; there’s so much choice, after all, and the media culture has fragmented.

As Tom and Dom discussed on an old episode about the 1990s, that was the last period when the whole country had a common popular culture. Yet The Rest is History is approaching something close to that. It’s become so all-pervading that literally everyone I know, or ever speak to, listens to it. Perhaps I live in a bubble, but it’s a warm and cosy bubble filled with chat about the Kaiser’s deck shoes and Costa Rica’s infamous Dr Valverde, a sick and twisted psychopath who liked to torture frogs. The word I’d use to describe the show is ‘wholesome’, a term they’re fond of, an escape from the modern world, without rancour, hectoring or - crucially - swearing.

I realised that it must have become something more than popular when I read that it was the biggest podcast in Finland. Admittedly the Finnish market is not globally important, but this obviously wasn’t some quirky localised fanbase, like Norman Wisdom in Albania. It had become big everywhere, including the largest market of all; to use an analogy that Holland might appreciate, they’d reached their Ed Sullivan moment.

I must have been among the earliest paid subscribers, and went to their first live gig, in Clapham, and to both of their musical events at the Albert Hall. It was notable that the Clapham gig was overwhelmingly male, 90 per cent by my estimation, and everyone there looked either like me or The Times’s James Marriott (by sheer coincidence, I actually bumped into James outside, having never met him before). At the Albert Hall, in contrast, the gender balance seemed evenly matched, which suggested that they had broken out of the nerd demographic.

That first Albert Hall performance was about Mozart and Beethoven, a double biographic sketch which also worked as a broader narrative about Europe in the age of revolution and the Romantic movement. It was also a story about the evolution of the individual; whereas composers had once been seen as servants to their aristocratic patrons, to the point of wearing their livery, they came to be valued as artists, celebrities and household names who had risen in status and were able to make far more money. Watching it, I couldn’t help but think about the underlying comparison with the two historians in front of us, that this was their story, and I’m sure the analogy occurred to many others.

They were both respected and successful historians, but you can be a successful historian and go about your daily life in anonymity, and you wouldn’t necessarily spend your time on global, sell-out tours. While I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to what they were earning before, they’re obviously making rather more now, from subscriptions, advertising, live events and merchandise (I have on my shelf a TRiH Athelstan mug, given to me as a present by one of the children).

I hadn’t actually read Dominic Sandbrook before, but have since hugely enjoyed a couple of his books on modern Britain, as well as two of his children’s series (on those esoteric subjects, Henry VIII and the Second World War). I know of many people who had never heard of either of them, but have come to read their books since becoming fans of the show, one of whom was confused upon seeing them live, having matched the voices to the wrong face.

Many of those fans have politics which might preclude them from listening to a conservative of any form in normal circumstances, but the show is politically well positioned. It’s unwoke without being anti-woke, because that would become tedious very quickly, as well as less rigorous or interesting. Even where they have their political views, and they’re open about them, there is a sense of distance, because historians are not in the business of commentary and must view events with an almost fatalistic sense of the long term. Nations rise and nations fall, after all (blub).

Most of all, it doesn’t treat history as a morality tale, which is how the educational establishment and the media too often view it, and that is especially popular to the young. Indeed, half of the show’s listeners are apparently under 35, while the median age for BBC viewers is around 61, and even among BBC iPlayer users only nine per cent are below 35. If the show is a great success, it also serves as an admonishment to those within the broadcast media who failed to appreciate the continuing popularity of history, and the thirst that young people have to learn about the past. Yet while it’s easy to criticise the BBC, The Rest is History clearly owes much to Melvyn Bragg’s wonderful In Our Time, my favourite podcast avant la lettre.

All the great drama series of the 2000s I mentioned were American, and I’d even go as far as to argue that The Rest is History is now Britain’s main cultural export and proponent of soft power. While the case might be made for the Premier League or Warhammer, the Goalhanger production has far more sway on international elites and how educated, cultured people around the world see our country.

Foreigners tend to value an idea of Britishness characterised by classiness and erudition, but also humour and modesty. Yet the global popularity of our national brand is out of tune with what our own cultural elites value, which reflects their sense of cringe but often comes across as strangely parochial and inward-looking. Two erudite historians who wear their scholarship lightly, whose interests are openly Anglocentric but reflect a passionate interest in the world beyond our island, talking to the audience like a pair of friendly academics in a cosy pub in Oxford – that’s the fantasy they want.

Fans are always conscious that any show will pass its peak, and then start to decline as everyone runs out of ideas. There’s no sign of it yet, and the good thing about history is that it’s literally endless, and you can always return to the subject at greater length. Their recent series on Nelson was outstanding, despite covering previous ground, and nothing says the holiday season like that festive subject, the Nazis. I can’t wait for the eleven-episode series about the Costa Rican Civil War.

The children used to joke about ‘your Tom Holland’ but he is ‘the famous one’ now that our eldest, aged 17, has become a keen listener, and her new A-Level history teacher shares that passion. In fact, I’m taking my daughter to watch the pair live on a family trip next September. How wholesome.