S6 Ep 5: Amol Rajan, broadcaster

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian. A podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life. Because even as a restaurant critic, I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobble together when you're curled upon the sofa. each week I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors

0:47hello friends now you find me on a chair sorting through my bookshelves which are three rows deep I am chucking things out. Okay, actually, I am releasing them back into the world. Look, I have spent four years telling myself I needed a bigger place to live and that life would be better if I just had more space. And I kept saying it and I believed it. And then I realised what I actually needed to do was just get rid of about three quarters of the things that I have amassed during this lifetime so far. How about these cookbooks full of complex 14 stage recipes? I have to accept I'm never going to make these.

1:32What about my old cross trainer that I really only use to dry knickers on? It's just an indoor washing line people. Swedish death cleaning is what it's actually called. It is cleaning out your house through the eyes of the people you love who'd come over after you've died which things would they actually take away what would they want i'm telling you they would want absolutely none of my stuff a few pairs of dangly earrings maybe a couple of pairs of shoes the rest will be going in a skip okay the bookshelves are looking better secretly between me and you while i'm at it i am keeping the clever books i'm putting them at the front so that passers-by think that I am brainy.

2:17This bedraggled copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul can probably go into the charity shop, whereas William Makepeace Thacker is Vanity Fair. I'm going to put this at the front. Look like I'm rereading it again. I've never finished that book. I'm glad I'm doing this now because my guest for today's episode is Brainiac broadcaster, host of University Challenge, Amol Rajan. I first met Amol when we both worked at the Independent newspaper, where at the tender age of 29, he became the paper's youngest ever editor, at which point part of his role became to try to make me file my copy on time. The poor soul.

3:04Since then, he's been media editor at the BBC, and these days he's the presenter of Today, BBC Radio 4's flagship news programme. Oh, and he's got four tiny children too. What I'm desperate to know is what in God's name does this dynamo eat when the kids are asleep and the microphone's turned off and he's got post-broadcast munchies? I'll just ask him.

3:41Amal Rajan, welcome to Comfort 18. I've just noticed one thing. Go on. You know at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where he gets to the end and then the knight goes, I knew you'd come. And he has to choose the Holy Grail. And the bad guy chooses the wrong one. And then Indiana Jones chooses the right one. You've got the Holy Grail behind you. That golden cup. That golden cup original. If you drink liquid from that, it heals. I drink lizard's blood from that once a week. That's how I'm slightly famous. I thought that we all knew that. Have they not asked you? Hang on. Welcome to comfort eating.

4:19It's not just comfort eating, is it? Sorry, we should probably start recording. Amal, last year, you took over from Jeremy Paxman to host University Challenge. The show is the pinnacle of British braininess. It's the bastion of the establishment. It has not changed much over the decades. You're only the third ever presenter since 1962. There has been one moment since you began that does suggest that we have entered a new era. A moment that unexpectedly went viral and produced this remix. Hit it. Can't accept drum bass. We need jungle, I'm afraid.

5:04what a beautiful remix there by vengeance you know what that was just this outbreak of complete wonderfulness this sample of this answer on university challenge which just went completely viral was so amazing it was all social it was no media it was just people being really nice it was all like this is outbreak of love and affection i'm going to break down what happened for people but didn't hear it or see it. You asked the Aberdeen team to name the genre of dance music that developed in the UK in the early 1990s out of the rave scene and reggae sound system culture associated with acts such as a guy called Gerald and Goldie.

5:43Now, they answered somewhat foolishly, drum and bass. And you replied with, I can't accept drum and bass. We need jungle, I'm afraid. And then it all kicks off. I'm still, even now as I sit here, getting sent videos on my Instagram feed of people showing massive names in drummer bass like Fabio and Groove Rider and at these massive gigs people are playing that and I just I sort of can't believe it but your insistence on precision in the history of dance music now this is suggesting something were you a raver I was a raving nut for about six years I was a massive raver I went to university and I met the most amazing people and I was really worried because I thought I'd be surrounded by really posh people and I remember turning up in corduroys mustard corduroys and this sort of dodgy railway station masters hat and then I met a load of people from London and they were massively into the drum and bass scene for about the next three years of university and for about three years after that I went raving constantly most weekends and it was wonderful and I had an amazing time and I feel so grateful for my raving years.

6:57And one of the things that made this incredible viral moment so special is it really did reconnect me with my former raving self. Now you're on University Challenge, I don't think you can go to raves anymore because you never saw Bambergas going at the back of the hacienda. I did once see Jeremy Paxman in Ministry of South. Now I'm joking.

7:29Now, every week, my guest brings me their secret ladle of love, their treasured hugging a mug. It is their most beloved food. Let's be honest, sometimes it's downright bizarre. Please, Amol, unveil your snack. I cannot tell you how excited I am. What we have here is oat cakes. on one side of the plate though you've got thick cheese with big blobs of hot sauce on the other side of the plate we've got thick dark chocolate in slabs the tiny little backstory to this is if you grew up in south london there was a weatherspoons in brixton which i used to go to all these jamaican men would come in with a bottle of hot chili sauce and there is a chili sauce that I now have every single day and it's called cold sauce cold k-o-l-d it's a fermented hot pepper sauce it's amazing right can I have some please yeah it's got it's got a so I like a really good cheddar like a quick cheddar or a compte and and then a bit of this cold sauce

8:37oh my gosh this is a standing open the kitchen that is unbelievable there's something there must be something in hot pepper fermented sauce and definitely in cold sauce that's addictive because once you have a little bit you need to chase that flavor i think maybe it's the tingle on your lips. Yeah. That's like burning. I think that this has everything. The guilty pleasure snack needs. You've got the gravelly under layer of carb that fools you into thinking it's a health food. Then you have the thick layer of essentially fat. It's portable. It's got heat. Yeah. Everyone's got a bit of midnight cheese in them as well.

9:26And I know because of the next thing we're about to have, I know that actually that oat cake with cheese in that chili sauce is a precursor to a kind of pudding. Well, look, you're one of the only people that's ever brought a snack in two stages. This is... Don't make me feel special. What's the next break? So this is an oat cake with chunky sea salt chocolate. And the reason for it... Don't look so dismayed. It's not meant to be funny. The reason for it is I think the reason for having this is that all chocolate is improved by salt. And if you have an oat cake with a really high quality bit of chocolate, it's basically the poshest Kit Kat you've ever had.

10:08Well, may you laugh, Ms. Dent. I put on a nice frock for you. And now I've got basically got a fermented chili stirring right down my right boob. Oh, my God, you have as well. I really have. The oat cake has a little bit of salt in it and it has a kind of umami twang. It has a kind of, you know, once you're going with it, it has this kind of binding, salty connectedness. Do I sound like I'm talking complete bollocks? I once saw umami twang at Reading.

10:43Let me take you back now, Amal, to your childhood. you were born in 1983 in Kolkata in the east of India but when you're three your parents make a huge decision they leave India they leave everything they know and they up sticks to London first Chiswick then to Tin where you settle why the move it's kind of dawned on me how absolutely nuts and how improbable it is to get to the age of 40 odd as my parents were and leave everything behind go halfway across the world where you don't know anyone you speak the language but you've got no mates foreign land no real idea what you're doing and you do it for one reason only which is that you want a better future for your children I've always felt that my parents' sacrifice not just my dear dad who's not along with us but my mum as well in coming to this country was something I had to repay so your dad was in India and he just did he see a job that was here did he apply for a job he was a bona fide genius he's extraordinarily unusually intellectually brilliant at maths from a very very poor family he's one of 11 children he had six younger sisters had to get them all married because that's how he did it in those days he went off to north india to live a solitary life and then his brother said mum's really worried about you not getting married you need to get married um there's this lovely girl in the ammunitions factory where i work and that was my mum married my mum you i think he went for the indian civil service and then he also got into this bank which was a state bank called Yuko Bank and then he actually got a posting to London.

12:18So there's you, your brother and your mum and dad. Tell me a little bit about family life. What's cooking? When do you eat? My mum and dad were from very very different parts of India. My dad's from Tamil Nadu in the southeast where the food is almost more Korean. It's idli, sambar, rasam, dosas. It's hot, it's sour and the main staple is rice and lentils. My mum is from West India where stop salivating my mom's from West India it's Maharaja so near Bombay the food is much more wheat based but the curries are very different they're often slightly more liquid and my mom was astonishing at cooking both those different entirely different cuisines different ingredients different techniques.

12:56How did you learn the other she married your dad and then she was like get me a book get me the aunties let me learn. I think women in those and it's amazing makes me emotional think about it I think they were just expected to some extent please their husbands in the kitchen they were expected to provide and expected to learn and my mum worked she worked full-time she was a dinner lady then she worked in a nursery and then she ended up in admin at the foreign office but my mum was just expected to do that and my god she did it incredibly so there would be just the most amazing suite of curries you'd have a cauliflower curry and a paneer curry and you'd have okra or lady's finger as it's sometimes called or an aubergine curry you'd have this amazing set of curries every night every single night but this is so much work.

13:36I hope you're listening to this mum I'm so unbelievably grateful and if you think she was working at a nursery she'd finish at four o 'clock, she'd come home everything you could ever want was there and she would rustle it all up and then at the weekend on Saturday morning down the bottom of my old road at Lessingham Avenue there were two institutions, one was the Mayfair Snooker Hall and then there was daily fresh foods so we'd go in there and mum would be looking at just this abundance overflowing baskets of all the freshest produce and And my mum had that thing, which a lot of Indian ladies have, of they pick the best stuff, the ripe stuff.

14:10So they're kind of looking, you do it with an asparagus, I guess, or an okra. You bend it to see if it's going to snap or not. And then you chuck away the ones that aren't quite right. So you pick out the best produce. I now realise, A, how much work she would have put into it. And B, that I was just conditioned to expect exceptional food. And I just think, my God, what an extraordinary woman. Did you have any nicknames at home? Yes, I did. I'm a big fan of nicknames. What's your mum called you? My mum called me hapus. Hapus was a type of mango. I love mangoes. She would call me hapus. Does she still call you hapus?

14:47She does. No one calls me a mole. I mean, it's really weird. I play cricket. Hang on a minute. No one calls me a mole. Does everybody call you hapus? No one calls you hapus. You wouldn't get Nick Robinson adjusted web being like, okay, time for the news with hapus.

15:10let's talk about you at school curiosity seems to have defined your entire career was there any signs of the direction you were going to take as a kid i cannot gauge what you were like at school you were either at the front and got straight a's or you were expelled i wasn't expelled now none of the naughty stuff happened till much later um i was i was quite a straight a guy but i got b in a in gcse geography and food tech and never lived it down because food tech was my best subject man and geography i was wicked at my oxbow lakes anyway i've never lived that down i was i was quite i was um definitely i wasn't a swot but i loved school i loved learning um i love really physics and maths are my big subjects but there's a weird thing about me in school um i was totally absent emotionally because all i wanted was to be a cricket player and i devoted my entire childhood really from about the age of 10 11 when shane warne the amazing australian burst onto the scene and i just wanted to be Shane Warne to the age of about 17 when I just wanted to be a cricket player so I was a very dreamy child really dreamy I was like fantasizing about bowling leg spin for England and fantasizing about all this stuff so I feel like journalism I feel like journalism is something I sort of stumbled into slightly like a drunk man stumbles into a pond.

16:43In 2002 you applied to read English literature at Cambridge Uni your parents have moved across the globe 15 years earlier driven by ambition for you and your brother so this is a seminal moment in all of your lives do you remember the acceptance letter arriving i was at home on my own it said with a stamp down in college cambridge and my mum and dad i'm gonna start crying as i relate this my mum and dad had a little prayer room in their bedroom we had a two-bedroom house me and my brother shared in their bedroom they had the little prayer corner bit where we had a landline phone. And I went up there to the prayer bit because it was obviously quite important.

17:26And I told myself, whatever happens, you know, I'm going to be all right. I definitely really wanted to get in. And I remember the first words were following on from your recent interview. We're delighted to offer you a place. And I rang up my dad. And where was he? He was at work. And it was, I can't remember the specific words, but it was definitely the proudest moment of his life. and it meant everything to him. And actually in recent years, and I've thought about this a lot since my dear dad died, you know, you cling on to the things that you did that would give them comfort and you ask yourself, was I the son I could have been and should have been?

18:03But I know he derived enormous satisfaction from that. And yeah, it was amazing. Apart from your love of ragga, jungle and drum and bass, what else did you discover at Cambridge? I did English literature. I was so interested in other subjects. I was so interested in, still am, in philosophy, politics, history. You had this sudden realisation of who actually runs the country. You have this sudden awareness that educational institutions can have this august history. And you feel this sense that you can belong with a sense of membership within a country's traditions and culture, which historically has been more the preserve of people from a richer background.

18:54I'm fascinated about you. After you've graduated, you joined the Channel 5 chat show The Right Stuff as a researcher. I remember you popping up on screen. Really? I remember the first time I ever saw you. Really? Yeah. Where was it filmed? In that shopping center? White Lune's shopping center in Bayswater. and I ran it as a sort of social services because my job was to be the on-screen audience researcher. So the right stuff is basically, as Matthew Wright would say, it's a radio show on TV. You panel around to an audience and there's meant to be like 30 people there with me in the middle to like stick a mic in their face and say, what do you think about Jordan's, you know, latest headline?

19:35Or what do you think about Iran getting the nuclear bomb? And it was always very difficult to get 30 people together. Actually, my success is in that job. Some of those people in that audience as well. They are. Homeless. They're homeless. And they basically were there because they thought they'd get their travel paid. And I would literally be outside Whiteley's at eight in the morning begging people. I was wearing the Right Stuff t-shirt with my little headset, wandering around Bayswater and Queensway in West London. I'd be like, please, please, please, will you come and be in this live TV audience?

20:02And there'd be like groups of American tourists. I'd be like, yeah, sure. Love to do that. Hey, Ralph, come on, this guy. He's safe. You got to come to this. There's a TV show. It's called The Right Stuff. Yeah. And it was just surreal. You did make that part your own though, because I remember you were on screen a lot. Yeah. And especially on a Friday, because on a Friday, 10 to 10.30 was a little sex clinic with Miriam Stoppard. And me and Corin, who is the girl behind the booth, would have to do these little cartoon Dear Deirdre kind of like cartoon strips. And it would always be about me having bloody erectile dysfunction.

20:37and it was like what is it about stop laughing over there what is it about why are you looking at me and thinking erectile dysfunction would always be like me and be like you know corin's the beautiful like it was quite a stereotype she's like tall and blonde and attractive and here's this like little indian shrimp you can't get any attention from any girls anyway and i was like guys it's a bit close to home and miriam stoppard would come in and be like so amal what i think you need to do you know if you've got it her advice about erectile dysfunction by the way what is It was always the same.

21:07She always said the same thing. She's take sex off the table. Take sex off the table. She said this. I mean, I think trying to do it on the table is probably where you're going wrong. Very ambitious. I realized as I was saying it, that is pretty ambitious. Especially as you get older. Just exhausting. I know, exactly. Doing it in bed, Zadon. I know. Come on. I love doing that show. And I learned a lot. And then the editor of The Independent, a guy called Simon Kelner that you and I know, came on the show. And I walked up to him and asked him for a job. And the rest, as they say, is history. You saw Simon Kalmer on the show and you walked up and asked him for a job.

21:43As he was leaving, he had to walk past me and I was in the way. And I said about that thing. And he said, why do you email this guy? And I did email him. In 2013, age of 29, you're appointed editor of The Independent. Stop smirking. Stop smirking, Grace Dent. I absolutely am not smirking. I'm kind of beaming because, look, you're 29. You're appointed editor of The Independent by Evgeny Lebedev. You are the youngest ever editor and the newspaper's first non-white editor too. This is an enormous moment. I'm going to bring it back to food. these are really long hectic endless days what you eating a lot of pistachios i at the age of 29 i had a pa and denise thompson legendary figure amazing extraordinarily effective competent kind generous wonderful wonderful human being she would often say Amal you're covered in pistachio shells I was eating a lot I was in my late 20s and then early 30s I had such full on days do you know a normal day would be wake up at 5 o 'clock do some work at 5.30 in the morning do a bit of work maybe write a column because I wrote several columns a week one for the I one for the Evening Standard food column in The Independent on Sunday sometimes do Lorraine I review the papers on Lorraine's show at 7.40 8 o 'clock meet a cabinet minister in the Wolseley and you know it's absurd I was 30 people in politics generally and sometimes business I'm going to role play it's about two o 'clock in the afternoon you're in the office you haven't eaten anything Denise has spotted this I'm old you haven't eaten what can I get you I would sense that she would mother you though a little bit yeah she was yeah there was a bit of that what did you eat I'd have sandwiches so my kind of sound is a BLT I feel very strongly about BLT that you should have rocket instead of lettuce.

23:50Not that I was going to, that's about it. Sorry? Rocket, the peppery bite and tang of rocket instead of the - Rocket is just a cruel joke. Oh, great. It is Satan's salad. You've really ruptured our relationship there. Like what's that in the back of my throat? How can you defend lettuce? It's like the cubic hair of the salad bowl. Whereas lettuce is rabbit food. Take your rabbit food away from my salty bacon and mayonnaise. What was I like as a boss? That's what I want to know. Come on. What was I like? I think I always at some level felt I was your boss.

24:29Maybe that's why it works. Maybe that's why it works. Never took it seriously at all, ever. Yeah.

24:43One of your former colleagues at The Independent has recently described you as extremely talented fiercely ambitious a relentless networker and a good guy this winning combination gets you snapped up by james harding the then bbc's director of news and current affairs you become the bbc's media editor and presenter and presenter of the media show how was the transition from fleet street to the bbc it was a hell of a learning curve it was exciting and as we've coming into the independent at 29 i was really lucky with my timing because the six years that i was covering media and technology was six years when facebook and google in particular were really in the news the only thing i'd take issue with that uh into that description is relentless networker never thought of it maybe i was an accidental networker but I never sought to go to those parties.

25:44I think like you, I found them so incredibly awkward and I just hover it at the back looking at my Twitter feed instead. But one of the things about the BBC, the transition, which you asked about, it coincided with a very major life change, which is that I became a parent. And suddenly it was not about me and suddenly my priorities had changed. And I don't always talk about this very much in public, though I've mentioned it a couple of times. You know, my wife and I were going through hellish medical treatment to try and have more children. And that was really exhausting. In fact, the whole time I was editor of The Independent, we were going through, you know, really tough stuff.

26:18And obviously, we've ended up extraordinarily blessed because we've got four kids. And I realize, I really, really, really do realize how lucky we are. I remember talking to you. About IVF and all that. Yeah. And it was almost like you were finding the whole thing not only really hard, but it got to the point where you thought it wouldn't happen. And then I turned my back for two minutes and you have four. Well, we're told it wouldn't happen. That was a thing. There were years and years and years and years and years and years in which it was really tough and a struggle. So there was a lot of that going on when I was at the BBC.

26:52You're a presenter on today Radio Force flagship news program now. We're talking at one o 'clock in the afternoon. What time are you going to bed at? Well, I'm not presenting tomorrow. Oh. I've got a big problem here, which is that I've developed really serious insomnia. I had this massive panic attack before my first stint on the Today program. And it's gotten better since then. But I very, very often do the show having not been to bed, but having had a sleeping pill. By the way, let me just reassure people. I can't believe you're having a sleeping pill. honestly well you develop all these coping mechanisms and what they call safety techniques i'm worried that is dreadful but then you become you're not gonna go i'm not addicted to them because i could do it without michael jackson said and in the end he had to be injected with uh with actual general anesthetic yeah in the end he was having anesthetic yeah so i yeah it's a big big thing and it's partly because i've got four young kids i actually do just wake up very regularly so the answer to your question is i try to go to bed i'd like to go to bed between 8 30 and 9 realistically if you've got four kids just the maths of it is that you're going to be up five or six times because they're getting up because they've had a bad dream a nightmare or because they've wet themselves or because they just wake up or because they've you know need a nappy change whatever what are you eating and drinking to survive this schedule this is where the oat cakes come from it's where the okay it's coming so i if i eat before today I will end up eating almost a thousand calories more on that day.

28:32So I try very hard not to eat before today because I can do without breakfast. So on today, I mainline tea. So I have about three cups of tea. I have three tea bags and three sweeteners and a dollop of milk. That's soup, darling. That's soup. It is soup. It's chai. It's wannabe chai. If someone could make me a delicious chai, but then the Indians, they put, you know, they put so much sugar in and I prefer sweetener. Anyway, I love that chai though. cardamom and vanilla and cloves. So I have three cups of tea and a coffee. And then I try very hard not. I change my cycle route on the way home to make sure I don't go past certain institutions.

29:10For instance, there's a new Gales on Great Portland Street. That's a real problem for me. There's also at the top of Great Portland Street. Gales is just the crackdown of the middle classes. Tell me about it. Come in and have our olive bread. Have you tried the almond? I can't tell you. Here's a lovely chocolate and tahini bite, which costs whatever. Seven pounds. Seven pounds. It's amazing. So I change my cycle route to go through Regent's Park. And I try and keep my eyes closed despite being on my bike. I'm joking. And then I get home and I just try very hard not to mainline any carbs. So I eat.

29:44This is embarrassing, isn't it? I eat cashew nuts, roasted and salted cashew nuts and dates. you eat like me in a way that you've eaten a lot of things out of the packet just yeah walking around i'm not cooking like a giant squirrel exactly exactly exactly i want convenience i want it there in the thing and yeah and if i do that because i then try and sleep for a couple of hours it doesn't always work but then i'll have got to 12 o 'clock and i'll almost feel normal