In June, The Telegraph launched a new podcast, The Poshcast, a riotously funny, tongue-in-cheek experience, led by two Jilly Cooper-esque heroines bent on decoding modern social norms, etiquette and the minefield of manners, as well as relevant news issues of the day. A quarter of a million downloads later, Sophia Money-Coutts and Cleo Watson’s weekly show is one of the fastest-growing properties on the newspaper group’s roster. CORQ spoke exclusively to Money-Coutts about how she’s making posh great again.
Every podcast pair needs a good origin story: Watson and Money-Coutts met at a media event at The Groucho Club a few years ago. They bonded over a margarita or four, got so drunk that Watson’s husband had to take out her contact lenses, as Money-Coutts says, “because she couldn’t possibly manage it”, and have been friends ever since. “I think it’s rare as grown-ups that you make proper adult friends,” she notes. One of the magic ingredients of The Poshcast is the hosts’ chemistry.
The other magic ingredient is their pedigree: Money-Coutts is a journalist who began her career at Tatler and has been writing a column for The Telegraph for ten years, as well as being a novelist, diarist and podcaster. Watson began working in politics and was an adviser to former Prime Ministers Theresa May and Boris Johnson (a role she likened to being “nanny”). She also hosts the political podcast In The Room for The Independent with former deputy cabinet secretary Helen MacNamara. Oh, and they both write “naughty novels”. It was Watson who messaged Money-Coutts, “should we think about a podcast?”
The pair batted around various ideas but, says Money-Coutts: “I suddenly thought, ‘I’ve been doing a column for The Telegraph for a decade on posh problems, ever since leaving Tatler’.” As a result, the writer knew talking points from her column performed extremely well online, engaging people and driving traffic. She says: “A few years ago I wrote about the whole ‘are you a shoes-on or shoes-off household?’ debate, and the letters page in The Telegraph was about that for weeks.”
She thought they could easily expand the universe, and The Poshcast was born. “There was a bit of nervousness because ‘posh’ is quite a loaded word.” Posh is a loaded word, but the culture seems to have relaxed around it. Money-Coutts highlights the success of Disney+’s Rivals adaptation, for instance. “I genuinely think Rivals has helped change that a bit. Maybe the government changing has helped a bit as well. There’s more of a sense of humour about that whole world now, rather than out-and-out hatred.” Nigella Lawson camping it up on The Great British Bake Off is another boon: “We can celebrate our culture and cakes and Nigella and it doesn’t mean that we’re members of the BNP.”
Not only that but what does posh really mean these days? In their pitch document, the journalists stated their goal was to decode posh. “So yes, to a certain extent it means red trouser-wearing, dukes shooting pheasants on their massive estates. But also it means, do you shop at Waitrose? What car do you drive? Do you take your shoes off when you enter someone else’s house? It’s come to be a much broader term.”
You may also like
They pitched to The Telegraph knowing that in the modern podcasting landscape, they needed an elevated product. Gone are the days of bedroom podcasts: “They have to be so slick and so produced, and you have to have all the social clips. I knew we were going to be incapable of doing that ourselves.” She adds: “The Telegraph mocked up some artwork that was a bit like Rivals.” They knew they had gone to the right place.
Both are acutely nervous that the “wrong soundbite could be taken the wrong way” but despite the fear of constant cancellation, nearly all of the 16 episodes have been filmed in some sort of fancy dress and they have already gone on the road at Goodwood Revival Festival.
It’s a clever, entertaining slice of joy and Money-Coutts acknowledges that it is the intent: “We’re trying to be jolly when there’s lots of grimness going on elsewhere. We’re not actually saying, ‘We think it should be 1793 and there should still be dukes at the top of the tree.’”
The age range of the podcast audience is extremely gratifying. “I think the age is very wide. We’ve got quite a lot of thirty-something listeners, which won’t necessarily be Telegraph readers.” There’s also a whole 60+ cohort who are not necessarily podcast listeners: “My parents’ generation and their friends, kind-of-Telegraph readers, so that’s really exciting.” The content is distributed across the usual podcast platforms and the paper’s app – giving it an ecosystem that stretches well beyond the newspaper itself.
@telegraphlifestyle ‘I don’t know what came over me’ In this week’s episode of The Poshcast, Cleo and Sophia discussed all things travel etiquette. Is it ever okay to ask for an upgrade? Let us know in the comments 👇 🎧 You can listen to this week’s episode of The Poshcast at the link in our bio
The pair are relishing the themed episodes (such as the Barbara Cartland one) but also the emails from listeners, who they name-check regularly. There is a thriving podcast community ready to clutch their pearls at Money-Coutts saying “on the weekend.” She says: “Our audience is probably more women, but quite a lot of men judging from the very cross emails that I get about my grammatical cock-ups.” They also have a significant cohort from the US and emails are coming from all around the world from listeners who “actively want to know what the right thing to do is at a dinner party”.
One commenter on their launch article posted: “I foresee a problem with this podcast. They’re not possibly going to have enough material week in, week out to be able to keep it up.” Money-Coutts fires back: “I promise you, the topics of class, poshness in Britain – I know a lot of people would wish that they’d vanished and died, but they haven’t. It’s bottomless material.”
Certainly, with the Sussexes returning to the UK, and Charles Spencer revenging through his book Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, the posh keep on giving. “I’m also quite excited about all the etiquette-y things that we can discuss with Halloween and Christmas coming up.”
The writer is also grateful for the opportunity that a podcast gives her to assert the humour and gentle teasing of it all – what she learned to describe as the “Tatler theme park” when working for Kate Reardon at the magazine. “I’ve got most in trouble online when people have taken what I’ve written the wrong way and thought I was being dead serious. The really nice thing about having a podcast is that our tone is so much more obvious.”
Plans for the future are currently under wraps, although live events are clearly in the pipeline. Money-Coutts also wants to play with the formats and introduce more guests. “I want to have quite a wide range of guests. Ideally, we’d have the Queen. We’d love Danny Dyer. We want to have everyone on to discuss what ‘posh’ is.”
The Poshcast works because the joke is never simply that its hosts are posh; it is that class, taste and etiquette remain endlessly fascinating cultural territory. With their impeccable credentials, Money-Coutts and Watson have turned that fascination into something warm, knowingly ridiculous and highly shareable, while giving The Telegraph a way to reach listeners beyond its traditional readership. The rest is Poshcast.
By Emilie McMeekan, insights director at CORQ.
