Matt Cooper: 'My ambition is to be as popular as Vogue Williams and Joanne McNally'
Matt Cooper is one of the participants in Cork Podcast Festival.
The seeds of Matt Cooper’s success as a broadcaster were sown at an early age, when he was a schoolboy at St Joseph’s NS in the Mardyke, Cork.
“I remember there was a couple of us who had a pretend radio station that we used to do during breaks when we were in second or third class. I was listening a lot to radio at home with my parents, and I was reading newspapers avidly from an early age. I always had that desire to be a journalist.”
However, Cooper, who grew up an only child on the Lee Road in Cork, was initially dissuaded from pursuing journalism as a career.
“I got diverted for a little while, as I was told that I would never get into journalism without knowing somebody. My father was a confectioner in the Marina Bakery and would get on his bicycle to go to work at half-past five every morning. I think he would have wanted me to have learned a trade after my Inter Cert, as it was back then, but I was hopelessly ill-equipped for anything of that kind. I did a commerce degree in UCC but in my final year, I started to focus and I knew that deep down, what I wanted to be was a journalist. I was able to use my commerce degree to move into business journalism.”
The childhood game of pretend in St Joseph’s eventually became reality for Cooper in 2002, when he left his role as editor of the Sunday Tribune to take over from Eamon Dunphy as presenter of The Last Word on Today FM.
“I remember my last day editing the Sunday Tribune, November 9, 2002, because it was the same day my third daughter Millie was born. I was taking a big chance because I loved newspapers, and I loved the Sunday Tribune, and the people I was working with. But it allowed me to move to a medium which has prospered over the last couple of decades and it has given me enormous enjoyment to put a programme together every day and bring it to listeners.”
There may have been an element of destiny in his eventual career as a broadcaster, but his success wasn’t a certainty from the start.
“Did I think I’d get to 21 years? Not when I started out initially, and to be honest, I think a lot of other people didn't think I’d ever get near 21 years. So I’m sort of glad that I stuck it to them as well,” he laughs.
Since January, Cooper has been hosting a podcast, Path to Power, with former politician Ivan Yates, who he worked with previously on The Tonight Show on Virgin Media. The show will be going live at the Opera House this Friday as part of the Cork Podcast Festival — as well as Cooper and Yates discussing the political issues of the day at home and abroad, the show will also feature some “heavyweight political guests”.
Cooper says Path to Power was inspired by the hugely successful The Rest Is Politics podcast, hosted by former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell and ex-Tory politician Rory Stewart.
“In the middle of last year, I was in bed with covid, which developed into pneumonia. I must have been somewhat delirious at the time because I started thinking about doing an Irish version of The Rest is Politics. So from my sick bed, I texted Ivan, and in fairness, he immediately jumped at the idea.”
He says that contrary to a lot of what we hear about attention spans shrinking, the explosion in audio content triggered by the advent of podcasts highlights how many people are hungry for intelligent current affairs output. “I’m fascinated by the way that podcasts have developed as not an alternative to radio, but as an add-on. It’s amazing the amount of people who are out there who want that depth. This belief that people want shorter pieces in newspapers — I don’t necessarily agree. They'll read a long piece if it's well-written and interesting enough.
"What podcasts show is that for a sizeable part of the population, they want to hear things examined in detail and in depth, but also in an enjoyable fashion. That's what I think Ivan and myself have managed to do with the Path to Power podcast — to bring people into serious issues and discussion, but do it in a way that is entertaining and engaging.”
We are constantly hearing that we have reached peak podcast but the appetite for audio seems to be stronger than ever. “There are a lot of podcasts that won’t pay their way, and maybe they are hobby projects for people, in the way that in the early years of the internet, blogs were all the rage. So I think the numbers of podcasts in time will possibly fall away. It's a question of putting together a good enough offering to engage and attract people,” says Cooper.
While Campbell and Stewart may be the template, there’s another podcasting power couple nearer home that Cooper aims to emulate.
“My ambition is to be as popular as Vogue Williams and Joanne McNally. I have an individual podcast as well, an interview series called Magnified, and at Electric Picnic a couple of years ago I did an interview with Miriam O’Callaghan in one of the tents, there might have been 100 people at it. And then I went over and watched Vogue and Joanne, and there were thousands of people there, they were spilling out of the tent. I thought, oh my God, there’s definitely something in this podcast game if they get that many people to go see their stage show.
"That said, I was quite taken aback when I saw one of their props was an inflatable male doll. I can’t imagine two men ever getting away with, or wanting to get away with, having an inflatable female doll on the stage with them. And I can guarantee you, Ivan or myself will not have that in the Opera House.”
According to Cooper, Path to Power has been doing strong numbers and the plan is to add a second weekly edition for subscribers. “It is one of the most listened to podcasts in the Irish market. I’m very comfortable with the numbers that we have achieved,” he says.
As for whether the traditional medium of radio can survive as more people listen to streamed content, Cooper believes that both can continue to co-exist as long as people are still engaging with news and current affairs.
“I'm actually quite surprised and very happy to be told by younger people that they’re listening to the podcast, although I'm a little bit worried that they're not telling me that they're listening to the radio. So, I keep trying to encourage them to listen to the radio as well. Overall, I’m happy to hear that people want to be engaged, and that they are interested. So if they're listening to radio, listening to podcasts, reading newspapers, reading websites, then that’s for the good — at least they're engaging with the issues.”
- Path to Power with Matt Cooper and Ivan Yates, is at the Olympia in Dublin on Weds, Sept 11; and also as part of Cork Podcast Festival, at Cork Opera House, on Saturday, Sept 13. See corkpodcastfestival.ie
