Such was my initial upset at the announcement that Kermode & Mayo’s Film Review was coming to an end, I actually pretended it wasn’t happening. Given that the final edition of the self-proclaimed “flagship film programme” will be broadcast on BBC Radio 5 Live on April Fool’s Day, I told myself that the story was meant as a joke. This was surprisingly easy to do. As the hosts themselves are fond of saying, “everything will be alright in the end, and if it isn’t alright, it’s not the end”.
In a sense, of course, it isn’t the end. Since the news broke of the decision to call time on a show that has been part of the schedule (in one form or another) for 21 years, both Simon Mayo, the programme’s host, and Mark Kermode, its film critic, have been dropping comedically heavy hints that their wildly successful enterprise will continue beyond the confines of its weekly slot on publicly-funded airwaves. In other words, a new home beckons.
To which I say, thank God for that. Since expanding into its current two-hour format (often longer for the Podcast edition), Kermode & Mayo’s Film Review has attracted a large and committed international audience of which I am a member. Over the years it has become a significant and cherished part of my life. For “LTLs” like me, the show’s companionable rhythms are close to irreplaceable.
Certainly, the apparently innate chemistry that exists between the hosts is vanishingly rare. Thrown together by the BBC in what Simon Mayo once described as “a marriage of convenience”, today the two broadcasters share the finest conversational groove on radio. Voluble and even hyperbolic, Kermode’s knowledgeable excitability is counterbalanced by responses from Mayo that can at times seem comically disengaged. The critic’s favourite film is The Exorcist; on point of principle, the host refuses to watch it.
In moments of magic, shovelings are executed with bloodthirsty panache. In what by now has been defined as a “Kermodean rant”, the characters in Sex and the City 2 were described as “American imperialist pig-dogs of the highest order”. Anyone who paid money to see the any of the first three instalments of the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise was “bringing down the collapse of Western civilisation”. Sometimes the venom is infectious. Recounting his experience of watching Entourage, Simon Mayo was moved to remark, “I thought, ‘If the apocalypse comes now, at least this film will end’”.
