Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode’s BBC Radio 5 Live film review show is perhaps the UK’s most influential. As they launch a book dispensing moviegoing advice, the pair bicker about what makes the show work

Simon Mayo, the radio presenter, and Mark Kermode, the film critic, live together in a knocked-through house they enter through separate front doors. Each year, they go on holiday with their wives, “Good Lady Potter” – Mrs Mayo, Hilary, a ceramicist – and “Good Lady Professor Her Indoors” – Mrs Kermode, Linda Ruth Williams, a professor of film studies – and their children. Sometimes, on these trips, Kermode and Mayo wear matching jumpers and one of their favourite activities is tramping, that is, jumping on a trampoline.

The pair also host an annual cruise for fans of their weekly Radio 5 Live show, Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review, and hand-picked guests: recent attendees have included actors Michael Sheen, Mark Strong and, as regular listeners would expect, Jason Isaacs. The itinerary changes, but Liam Neeson can be relied on to drive the boat.

The above is not strictly true… most of it, anyway. But it is a testament to the popularity of their show, which, according to figures released last year, has been downloaded more than 50m times, making it the fourth most popular BBC podcast of the last decade, that devoted listeners have created an intricate, imagined world the two men live in when they are not broadcasting together on Friday afternoons. There is a comprehensive website devoted to Kermode and Mayo’s in-jokes called Witterpedia, named after the tagline for the show: “Wittertainment”, and a surprisingly extensive range of unofficial merchandise.

“The question we’re always asked,” says Mayo, “is, ‘Do you hang out?’ or, ‘Do you go on holiday together?’ People have this vision, which we do encourage by talking about the cruise, that we’re like the Beatles, all living in the same house, my family on one side, yours on the other.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mark Kermode reviews Entourage on 5 Live.

“That is what it’s like,” adds Kermode, who is also the Observer’s film critic. “So it’s like the house in Help!.”

So, what’s the answer? Do they spend time together off-air then? “It isn’t that we don’t ever hang out together, but it is surprisingly rarely,” says Kermode. “It’s not that we don’t like each other. I hope.” There are practicalities involved: Mayo lives in north London, while Kermode is in the New Forest; when they get a chance to escape, Mayo goes to Suffolk and Kermode heads down to Cornwall. “But if we’re ever in the same place,” Kermode continues, “of course we have a perfectly civil time. Although you are a grumpy old Eeyore.”

Mayo interjects: “Pot. Kettle.”

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You can almost hear the hairs on Kermode’s neck crackle and bristle. “Pardon me? OK, but that’s the one funny thing. The idea that the chemistry of this relationship on-air is that you’re the everyman, you’re the cheerful one… ”

“I am,” Mayo butts in again.

“And I’m the grumpy bloody film critic! But in real life, it’s completely the opposite.”

Mayo concedes: “What you call being Eeyore, I call being realistic about life and the media.”

Kermode groans. “In real life, I’m much more nice and bouncy, as you can tell from this interview.”

The tone of this mildly narky but good-natured exchange will be familiar to listeners of Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review. The uninitiated might need to take a couple of steps back. Mayo and Kermode first broadcast together more than 20 years ago on Radio 1. Mayo had just moved from breakfast to the mid-morning slot and wanted to do film reviews; Kermode was doing that already in the wee hours on Mark Radcliffe’s graveyard shift on Thursdays. The station’s controller, Matthew Bannister, decided to put them together: four minutes on new movies, four minutes on the video releases – yes, this was the mid-1990s. According to Kermode at least, the pair effectively met live in the studio: “And there was a long period when basically everything we had said to each other was on air,” he says.

When I first saw Blue Velvet, I had to walk out of the cinema Mark Kermode

They separated for a few years when Kermode left Radio 1. This memory inspires another back and forth: “Mark went home and did nothing,” says Mayo. Kermode huffs: “I made umpteen documentaries for Channel 4 and for the BBC.” But then, in 2001, Mayo moved to 5 Live to present an afternoon show and wanted to bring back Kermode. “I rescued you,” says Mayo. And that was where Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review was born and, despite Mayo’s transfer to Radio 2’s Drivetime slot in 2010, continues to thrive. It became available as a podcast in 2005, won a Sony award for speech programming in 2009 and another Sony award for Kermode as a critic the following year.

Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review has few bells, no obvious whistles. The first hour is typically devoted to Mayo counting down the week’s top 10 films, with embellishments from Kermode and from listeners; then there’s usually a conversation with an actor or director done by Mayo. Kermode admits that he’s not much of an interviewer, in large part because he feels he is compelled to be unflinchingly honest with the subject about their film. “It’s a pathological thing,” he says. “I’m a big fan of David Lynch but when I met him I went straight up and said, ‘When I first saw Blue Velvet, I had to walk out of the cinema.’” (At the time, he hated it, but now he considers it a masterpiece.)

In the second hour of the show, Kermode is unleashed on that week’s film releases. This section has become renowned for his “rants”: notably 10 minutes without coming up for air on Sex and the City 2, a review from 2010 that has received more than half a million views on YouTube, and recently an enraged eight-minuter on the Entourage movie. Kermode is adamant these savage assaults are unplanned and says he is a little uncomfortable about the attention that they sometimes receive. “It slightly troubles me that people go, ‘Oh, I love him ranting about things.’ Because actually I praise movies a lot more than I damn them.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kermode’s rant about Sex and the City 2.

Anyway, that’s it really. Film-review shows are notoriously difficult to make effectively, even on television, which has the advantage of also being a visual medium. But here’s one that is just two hours of old-fashioned broadcasting, one man talking to another about what’s on at the flicks, listened to by half a million people live, with 2m downloads every month. How is it then that the most influential movie show in Britain is on the radio?

Mayo shakes his head. “What you can’t do – and what TV and radio executives try to do – is to assemble a double act,” he says. “It just can’t be done. If you were setting up a movie show now, you would go, ‘Well, we’ll have a bloke and we’ll have a woman definitely, we’ll try and mix the races, we’ll mix the ages, because we want them to look nice.’ We’re hardly representative of modern Britain.”

He makes a reasonable point. The two men in front of me today are both in their 50s – Kermode is 52, Mayo a hard-to-believe 57 – and are public school-educated and have degrees in the arts. One of the recurring jokes in Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review is a puffed-up rivalry between Manchester University (where Kermode studied) and the University of Warwick (where Mayo went). Both have PhDs, hence the title of their new book, The Movie Doctors, but Kermode is reliably sniffy about the merit of Mayo’s qualification. As he says: “I’ve got a real PhD and Simon’s been given a fake PhD by his university because… ”

“Honorary doctorate is the official term,” corrects Mayo.

“Honorary doctorate for the simple task of still being around all these years later,” concedes Kermode.

So yes, not very modern Britain. But the appeal of Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review is the differences between the pair. Even though it’s on radio, an obvious place to start is with how they dress. Mayo takes his style cues from teenagers: T-shirts, skinny jeans, Jack Purcells. He bought a rack of suits when he was presenting Blockbusters, but he would never wear them out of choice. His iPhone 6s is always close at hand. Kermode, meanwhile, is a technophobe who alternates two outfits. Today is a “TV day”, so he’s in the one suit he owns with a couple of natty flourishes: a silver tie bar and a lapel pin of a double bass, the instrument he plays in the Americana skiffle band the Dodge Brothers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Samuel L Jackson and Pam Grier in Jackie Brown, the watershed moment in Quentin Tarentino’s career, according to Mayo and Kermode. Photograph: Moviestore Collection/Rex

Kermode, whose off-duty uniform is a Harrington jacket and Dr Martens, began wearing a suit regularly after he was on Newsnight Review and someone idly commented that they were surprised to see him wearing one. “I was so outraged by that suggestion that I have worn a suit ever since then,” he says. “Partly to demonstrate that I can carry a grudge for years. Also it’s the thing that says, ‘I’m working.’ But, with Simon and I, it was never contrived: oh, one of them’s got a suit and the other one looks like Tintin.”

Early on, Kermode and Mayo fell into a distinctive patter on the radio. Kermode was the cineaste, intense and highfalutin; Mayo represented the cinemagoer who just wanted to go out on Saturday night and munch through a tub of popcorn. “I’m there to represent the baffled,” says Mayo. “There’s a rule that whenever Mark says, ‘You know, Luis Buñuel… ’ No. ‘You know that… ’ No, I absolutely don’t. But the thing is that although the show is rooted absolutely in movies and movie criticism and actors, it’s not actually about movies. In the same way that Top Gear was never about cars, our movie show is not really about movies.”

Kermode listens and begins winding up his riposte, but Mayo catches him off-balance. “As Roger Ebert” (the renowned American film critic) “said, ‘It’s about life.’”

“You’re quoting Ebert?” says Kermode, shaking his head. The pair start laughing. “I can’t believe you quoted Ebert at me.”

My job is to light the blue touchpaper and stand well back Simon Mayo

The Movie Doctors is written jointly, in one voice. This, given Kermode and Mayo’s difference of opinion on most matters, could be confusing. But it turns out not to be, really: the long, erudite essays on film history and culture are clearly Kermode’s passions; the shorter, more whimsical sections are probably by Mayo. Or, as Kermode explains: “The short way of dividing it is that anything that’s nice and funny and genial and friendly and all the rest of it is him. Anything that’s grindy and miserably and whingy and probably quite dull is me.”

The conceit of Kermode and Mayo as the Movie Doctors is twofold: first, there are films that the authors believe require “medical attention” because, perhaps, the running time is too long (anything post-Jackie Brown by Quentin Tarantino) or they have been abysmally miscast (notably Meg Ryan, a perennial Mayo favourite, as a helicopter pilot in Courage Under Fire); then secondly, there are feelgood classics that they believe will cure the reader of whatever affliction they are suffering from. The book ends – don’t fear, this is not a spoiler – with a pair of recommendations for films that “will cure all your ills”. Mayo puts the case for Amadeus, the Mozart biopic that swept the 1985 Oscars, while Kermode chooses Local Hero, Bill Forsyth’s 1983 comedy, and his second-most beloved film after The Exorcist.

“I’ve said in the past, there are some films that are deal-breakers as far as friendships are concerned,” says Kermode. “Mary Poppins is one, and I think probably Local Hero is one. But Simon loves Local Hero, too. In fact, that was one of the early points of agreement for us. We did bond over the fact that it was No 2 for both of us.”

For all their bickering – “lively interchange,” says Mayo – it is not hard to see why Kermode and Mayo are so enduring as a partnership. There is clear affection between them and, even though it is begrudgingly expressed sometimes, obvious admiration for the other’s skills. “Simon is the best presenter on radio,” says Kermode, “and I’ve said this a million times, but if you put a talking donkey in a room with Simon, he’ll make them sound good. And in my case, that’s pretty much what they’ve done.”

Kermode and Mayo also seem often to share a moral sensibility where films are concerned. Mayo has never seen The Exorcist – “it’s funnier if I don’t” – and he’s unlikely to spend his weekends at a Georges Franju retrospective, but they do find themselves agreeing on their distaste for a certain kind of Hollywood frippery. Entourage, the film continuation of the long-running TV series that was released this summer, is a case in point. On this occasion, Mayo saw the film before Kermode, because he was interviewing the star Jeremy Piven, and he suspected instantly that Kermode would detest it. When it came to recording the show, Mayo just sat back and enjoyed the fireworks. “With Entourage, my job is just to light the blue touchpaper and stand well back,” he says. “It’s not to get in the way or say, ‘Can you clarify that?’ My job is just to shut up.”

Kermode has identified himself as a feminist and a “God-bothering liberal critic”, so, do his reviews come with a moral agenda? “Here’s what I think, put very simply,” he starts. “In the end…”

In the case of Entourage, I’m sorry but it’s just sexist crap Mark Kermode

“The answer to that is yes, by the way,” intercuts Mayo, “but here’s the long version.”

“Inherent in any movie, any movie, is a set of values,” Kermode continues. “Now it’s not just the case of saying, well if this movie reflects my values, I like it, and if this movie disagrees with my values then I don’t like it. Heaven knows there are Lars von Trier films that I really like and partly I like them because I find them so confrontational. But casual misogyny I just don’t find entertaining or funny. I just don’t. It just rattles my cages. I can’t pretend otherwise. And I can’t pretend that I’m entertained by blokey humour. It’s archaic. So in the case of the Entourage thing, I’m sorry but it’s just sexist crap. Quite apart from all the other things that are wrong with it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peter Riegert, Burt Lancaster and Peter Capaldi in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero. Photograph: Alamy

He’s not finished. “It’s when movies come along that feel like they want you to agree with that life, that’s the thing. It’s movies going, ‘Yeah! Ehh! Ehh! Ehh!’” Kermode makes the sound of a group of jeering, leering, idiotic men. “It’s the Michael Bay thing: ‘Ehh! Ehh!’ And I just want to go, ‘No! Really? Really? No!’ So to answer your question that’s what I think. It is fair enough to say that there are certain things that you just find fundamentally unacceptable.”

Wait, there’s more. “In any week, you’ll see a range of movies,” Kermode continues. “Some of them will be big, bloated Hollywood blockbusters and some of them will be movies that had to be smuggled out of the country they were made in because the director has been under house arrest for four years. And you’ll see them one after another, and it’s almost impossible not to go, ‘Well, this is admirable and that is consumerist crap.’ Sorry.”

Kermode slumps in his chair and we sit in silence for a few moments, before Mayo does what he does. Deadpan, he intones: “So ‘Yes’ is the answer.”

The Movie Doctors by Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode (Canongate £20) is published on 22 October. To order a copy for £14 click here. Details of the Movie Doctors tour can be found here