An episode featuring Louis Tomlinson will be screened in cinemas tonight. As ever, clicks and cash seem to trump good-quality content
At the tender age of 22, Steven Bartlett, the soft-spoken Manchester Met dropout, scored his first business triumph with his marketing start-up, Social Chain. At 26 he swept the world of podcasting with his blockbuster, Diary of a CEO. And at 29 he became the youngest ever Dragon on Dragons’ Den. Now, at 33, what worlds are there left for the media mogul to conquer? Cinema, it turns out.
This week, Bartlett’s pioneer spirit will take him into more uncharted territory. Diary of a CEO will become the first UK podcast broadcast in cinemas when it is screened at select Cineworld venues in London, Birmingham, Cardiff, Didsbury (Manchester), Glasgow and Dublin.
Diary of a CEO usually features vapidly self-congratulating interviews with public figures, punctuated by occasional slurps from the glutinous Huel, which used to sponsor the show. It achieved peak infamy in 2022 when Love Islander Molly Mae-Hague told listeners that “we all have the same 24 hours” when defending her work ethic.
The show’s big-screen debut will feature a two-hour interview with former One Direction heartthrob Louis Tomlinson, offering “fans the chance to watch it the night before its global release”. That 24-hour head start is a privilege that will cost viewers £14.99. If that sounds implausible as a temptation – after all, Diary of a CEO is broadcast twice a week already – then it is just the latest part of Bartlett’s story that defies logic.
After all, less than a year ago Bartlett was the subject of a BBC investigation which accused him of “sharing harmful health misinformation”. It followed a perception that his podcast had pivoted away from its original purpose – interviewing business leaders about their success – and towards health and wellness content, much of which exists at the fringes of scientific credibility. The BBC focused on his credulous dialogues with Aseem Malhotra, a doctor who has been accused of vaccine misinformation, and Thomas Seyfried, who proposes treating cancer with a ketogenic diet. Both are pariahs in the medical establishment; both have been given platforms by Bartlett.
Miraculously, Bartlett kept his seat on the Beeb’s Dragons’ Den. It was a second miracle (making him eligible for canonisation) after he survived allegations made, in 2023, that he had fluffed his CV with inaccurate claims about his first business. His assertion that Social Chain reached “a market valuation of $600m before he resigned” was provably false – the figure relied on a merger with a German retailer, which happened after he left the business – and looked daft when the business was sold for just £7.7m in in February 2023.
But truth and accuracy don’t really matter in the unregulated Wild West of podcasts. In fact, a willingness to treat facts as optional has been key to the rise of manosphere maestros like Joe Rogan, Theo Von and Andrew Schulz. “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” as the famous Mark Twain quote goes. Except – quite fittingly – Mark Twain never actually said that.
Bartlett’s latest assault on British cinemas demonstrates both how resilient his brand is and how desperate the entertainment industry is to find new revenue channels. Last week, Taylor Swift was booking cinema space – between scantily populated showings of the latest Paul Thomas Anderson and Kathryn Bigelow masterpieces – for an album watch party, and now Bartlett’s trying his hand at turning our struggling cinemas into a marketing space for other media.
After all, at time of writing, of the 842 seats available at the 7pm screening at London’s O2, only 39 have been filled (4.6 per cent of capacity). For a podcast that became the first title from the UK to reach a billion listens, that’s not a particularly inspiring return. But, as ever with Bartlett, it has people talking.
Diary of a CEO is far more than a podcast now. It is a giant, revenue-extracting machine, conquering on-demand audio, YouTube, TV (episodes were made available on iPlayer in 2023, an arrangement which has ended), and now cinema. This latest excursion into theatrical broadcasting demonstrates just how pervasive Bartlett’s brand of wide-eyed, susceptible “journalism” is. It’s far easier, and cheaper, to produce than a feature film – indeed, it’s far easier and cheaper to produce than journalism that doesn’t require inverted commas.
Just as the Wizard brought innovation to Oz, so too has Bartlett’s ambition changed British podcasting. This latest gambit has coincided with the launch of Flightcast, his new video-first podcast hosting platform. Collaborating with a former MrBeast (the mack daddy of YouTubers) engineer, Bartlett is returning to his roots. Having started in business, he spent the last few years as a media entrepreneur. Now he looks to be astutely leveraging that success, planting crops on the ground that he had salted.
His credentials and content might have been challenged, but Bartlett has shown demonstrable nous when it comes to squeezing his audience. In his commitment to creating a show that puts clickbait and advertising sales ahead of veracity or public service, he is teaching the rest of the media an important lesson. The great fear is that they might learn something from it.
