The Gentleman‘s Journal Podcast

Michael Murray is the CEO of Frasers Group, which owns some of Britain's best known retail brands — including House of Fraser, Sports Direct, Flannels, Jack Wills, and Gieves & Hawkes.    Appointed to the role in May last year at the age of just 33, Michael has overseen an impressive leap in fortunes for the company, at a time when the high street seems in greater flux than ever. In a conversa...

When young men, starting out in life, their eyes wide and dreams un-crushed, say they wish to ‘work in the movies’ (whatever that means), it is because they hope one day to have an office like Charles Finch. They don’t make them like this any more — the office or the career. It is a serious room. A study in the proper sense. An accidental curation. There are wooden models of sailing yachts; hand-w...

People sometimes describe Tom Straker s a “TikTok chef” or an “Instagram chef,” and yes, it’s true that he has millions and millions and millions of followers on Instagram and TikTok, and that he’s known across the globe for his mesmeric butter-making videos, among many other things. But Tom’s also the real deal — a chef who trained at the Ledbury, the Dorchester and headed up the kitchen Casa Cru...

It's remarkable to think that Reggie Yates is only 39 years old. In a career spanning more than three decades, Reggie has been a presenter, actor, radio host, screenwriter, director, and documentary filmmaker — but also a sort of spiritual older brother to the nation; a friendly, dependable, permanent resident on our screens.  Today, in a wonderfully open conversation, Reggie talks to us about: Th...

To celebrate Gentleman's Journal turning 10 at the end of last year, we thought we'd invite, Harry Jarman, founder of Gentleman’s Journal, to sit down in the hot seat. Harry takes us on the meandering, rollercoaster journey the publication has been on from a small bedroom start up (and one that everyone said would fail) to an established and hugely successful media brand.  We speak about how the w...

This is the last episode of the podcast for 2023. But fear not — we’re going out with a bang. Or a roar. Or whatever the noise is that Formula One cars make. Because our guest on today’s show is Christian Horner, the Team Principal at Red Bull and one of the sport’s most compelling ambassadors. Christian has petrol in his veins. He was a talented driver himself as a young man, before he set up his...

Tim Brown sometimes talks about how much he used to dread dinner parties — and especially that moment when the conversation would turn to him and what he was up to for work. The truth was, Tim wasn’t entirely sure. A former professional football player in New Zealand who went to the 2010 World Cup, by his early thirties Tim had retired and embarked on what many people (including himself) though wa...

Our guest on today’s show is Giles Coren, the Times restaurant critic and columnist. We recorded with Giles for an hour, but it felt almost like we got two hours of content — and often at times, listening back to the recording, I was convinced I had my player going at double speed, such is the pace of Giles speech and mind. So, in a wide-ranging, highly entertaining conversation, we touched on the...

Our guest on today’s episode of the Gentleman's Journal podcast is Labrinth, the musician and super producer. We first met Labrinth back in 2019, just after his last album, 'Imagination and the Misfit Kid', came out — but before the wild, runaway success of the giant HBO show Euphoria, which became the most tweeted about program in history during its second season earlier this year. A huge amount...

Our guest today is Maro Itoje, the England and Saracens rugby player and Frieze London committee member. Maro has won four English Premiership titles with Saracens, three European Rugby Champions Cup titles, three Six Nations titles, and has played in a world cup final — that agonizing defeat, of course, to South Africa, which we talked about a bit during our conversation. On top of that, he’s bee...

“My phone was exploding, mainly with texts from my kids: ‘Donald Trump knows who you are — do we need to leave the country?!’” Jon Sopel was the BBC's North America editor from 2014 to 2021 — perhaps the most eventful seven years in modern American history. Last year, he announced he was leaving the BBC after more than three decades to start The News Agents, a new podcast with former BBC colleague...

"The older I get, the more I am interested in simplicity..." To celebrate the launch of our Summer 2022 Issue of Gentleman's Journal, the wonderful celebrity photographer Tomo Brejc talks us through his shoot with cover star Tom Hiddleston — and tells us how we can all take better portraits, no matter who we're shooting. 

In this episode of 'Overheard at the Clubhouse', we sit down with writer and editor Dana Brown to discuss his new book, Dilettante: True Tales of Excess, Triumph and Disaster, which is excerpted in the Summer Issue of Gentleman's Journal. The book is brilliant. Charting Dana's clamber up the formidable masthead at Vanity Fair across the 1990s and 2000s, it's a wonderfully revealing romp through Ma...

"Men will always find a way to show off, no matter how uncool it makes them look..." To celebrate the launch of our Summer 2022 issue of the magazine, we sat down with Ed Cumming (a regular contributor and Senior Feature Writer at the Telegraph) to discuss the unlikely return of the mullet and the nauseating rise of the LinkedIn Man — two recent developments that may well be intertwined...  

George Ezra is a singer, songwriter, and perhaps the loveliest and most thoughtful man in pop music. He is about to release his third album — The Gold Rush Kid — a record he says is his most personal and honest yet. But it is also a huge amount of fun, of course — that sort of sun-baked perfection that George does so uniquely well. In a highly enjoyable conversation, we spoke about the origins of...

Munya Chawawa is the brilliant comedian and satirist whose viral videos have skewered the likes of Matt Hancock (in a memorable cover of Shaggy’s ‘It Wasn’t Me’), Piers Morgan, Will Smith, Nigella Lawson, vacuous influencers, American YouTubers, and most of the current cabinet. He is also the host of Race around Britain, a documentary series for which he was nominated for a Bafta just last week, w...

On the latest episode of Overheard at the Clubhouse, regular contributor Harry Shukman talks us through his piece about Oligart: a story of how the art market helped launder the reputations of the kleptocratic classes — and created a modern monster in the process.    

Ollie Dabbous is the head chef at HIDE, the beautiful, Michelin-starred restaurant overlooking Green Park in London. Having worked his way up through some of the most renowned and intimidating kitchens in the world, Ollie burst onto the scene with his eponymous restaurant Dabbous in 2012 when he was just 31, quickly becoming a truly darling of the London food scene and gaining a reputation as one...

Oliver Bullough is the author of Butler to the World: How Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals. The book does exactly what it says on the tin, as they probably don’t say in Moscow: it tells the story of how, as the British empire declined, we found a new role for ourselves — as a Jeeves to a series of oligarchical Woosters: laundering their reputations, hid...

Our guest on today’s episode is Freddie Blackett, founder of Patch Plants. Freddie set up the company back in 2015, after discovering that he couldn’t find any decent plants that would survive on his small balcony in suburban London. Since then, Patch has become the purveyor of a very particular millennial status symbol, dragging the houseplant from its 1970s doldrums, and transforming it into a c...

The use of Performance enhancing drugs — or PEDs — may well be the movie industry's worst kept secret, according to contributor Harry Shukman. It's the only way that many of today’s leading men could cook up those superhero abs at such short notice, as a host of industry insiders reveal. Today on Overheard at the Clubhouse, we discuss the effect these treatments can have on the stars themselves; t...

NFT: the three most befuddling and bemusing letters in the modern English language. Depending on who you ask, that pesky acronym either contains the future of all financial security, innovation and investment; or is simply a passing fad, characterised by geeky internet artwork, the worst kind of speculation, and a thousand dinner party bores. The truth, of course, is much more complex and much mor...

"I never felt sorry for a homeless person in my life. You've got to use that energy trying to sort them out..." Lord John Bird is the founder of The Big Issue — the revolutionary street magazine which turned 30 last year. Lord Bird’s story is fascinating. He grew up in one of the roughest slums in London, was homeless at the age five, and found himself in and out of prison several times before the...

Francis Bourgeois is the trainspotter turned TikTokker turned overnight national treasure, and our February 2022 cover star. Here, photographer Isaac Marley Morgan tells us what it was like to shoot him. Choo choo! Overheard at the Clubhouse is our new series where we tell the stories behind the stories in Gentleman's Journal magazine and beyond. 

Tom Molnar is the co-founder and CEO of Gail's — and thus, indirectly, the man behind the finest cheese and ham croissant in the history of the world. In a start up culture that values innovation and disruption at almost any cost, it is heartening to learn about the incredible success of Gail's — a bakery that has always made the quality and taste of its food the number one priority, from first sh...