Matt Chorley, who starts his new BBC Radio 5 Live politics show today (Monday 2nd September), spoke to RadioToday about his life, career and what we can expect from the new programme.
Both a comedian and journalist, Matt is also an established radio presenter having launched his broadcasting career at Times Radio in 2020.
After leaving school in Somerset, Matt’s first job was with the Taunton Times. He was also interested in comedy and at around that time, formed a sketch group with two of his friends.
Hoping to make it into comedy, he moved to London in 2004 but ended up with what he says was a terrible job.
“Then I managed to move sideways into Parliament for the Press Association in 2005 and that was when I sort of got a proper job,” he says. “I carried on doing the comedy for a bit, but it fell by the wayside, and I’ve been in Westminster ever since.”
In 2018, while working at the Times, Matt was approached by someone from the Cheltenham Literary Festival, which the newspaper sponsored.
“It was at the height of the Brexit madness, and they said, “we know you used to do stand-up, so would you come and do an hour at the festival explaining what’s going on with Brexit” but I’d never done stand-up before, but I’d always liked the idea of doing it,” he said. “Since then, the two things have been alongside each other, I’ve now done three tours, so they complement each other.”
Although Matt says he always liked the idea of working in radio, from the age of about nine he wanted to be a journalist.
“When the Times was launching its radio station, it was like the perfect mix – I knew politics, I’d been doing stand-up, so had that bit of performance, I’d done a podcast, and all three things came together, and it turned out, the thing I love doing is being on live radio. I never had a plan, but it has worked out ok so far,” he says.
With his new 5 Live show, Matt brings 20 years as a Westminster “insider”, where he’s seen people move from being brand-new backbench MPs to becoming Prime Minister and then out the other end.
He wants to open up the world of politics to listeners because he thinks that sometimes people in politics, both politicians and journalists, conspire to talk in a particular way about the subject, which can seem exclusionary to those on the outside.
“I hope what I’ll be doing on the new show is opening up that world a bit, realising it’s not a foreign language – all we’re talking about is how the country is run. I hope I bring a different perspective by being “looser” and more casual in the way we cover it, but with a total understanding of how this thing works.
“It won’t tell you how to vote or what to think about it, I’m telling you, “This is how its working” so people can follow it and understand it.
“Maybe one of the things we’re seeing in politics is that a lot of the coverage over the last eight to ten years has been a bit breathless with all the Brexit stuff, then Covid, Partygate and I feel like everyone needs to calm down a little bit – not everything has to be an outrage, a national crisis, a resignation – we could just talk normally about these things,” Matt explains.
He says that after he’s been on air for a few weeks, he hopes that if something big politically blows up and it’s a bit complicated, that listeners will tune to his show because, “Matt will explain it and I’ll know what’s going on”.
There’s a lot for Matt to talk about in his first few weeks on the show: “We’ve got the return of Parliament, Tory leadership contest, party conferences, budget and then a US presidential election all within two months of me going on air,” he says. “There’s also lots of interesting stuff – getting into policy areas which haven’t been talked about for lots of reasons over the last few years, and how they may play out, so I don’t think we’re going to be short of material, he adds.
You can hear the Matt Chorley show broadcast live from Westminster, each weekday afternoon on BBC Radio 5 Live, from 2-4pm.
5 Live Matt Chorley
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