The broadcaster has bullet-proof confidence as he departs the BBC. But his first YouTube show with Gareth Southgate is nowhere near as radical as you’d expect – and he sounds like yet another tech guru
Whatever you think of Amol Rajan, he can’t be accused of not dreaming big. In the clip trailing the launch of his YouTube project The Amol Rajan Connection, he acknowledges the seismic volatility of our times but locates himself firmly at the heart of them. “We are about to get 100 years of change in a single decade,” he says. “And that’s scary. But maybe I can help.” Big talk for someone who somehow managed the singular feat of being outlasted by Richard E Grant in The Celebrity Traitors. But joking aside, Rajan’s bulletproof self-confidence remains titanium-tough.
The branding of The Amol Rajan Connection features a mock-up of the poster from The Harder They Come, a Jamaican film about a renegade insurgent whose reckless defiance of the establishment’s rules culminates in him dying in a hail of bullets. But however he might see himself, it’s impossible to regard Rajan as an outsider. From his editorship of a national newspaper, via University Challenge and Today, he has shown an uncanny facility for arriving, briskly, at the very heart of one national institution after another. The sponsors of this show are two world-bestriding tech corporations, one of Britain’s largest banks and an upmarket supermarket chain. He soft-launched with an appearance on former Tory chancellor George Osborne’s podcast. Rajan’s connections are clearly being worked very efficiently.
