Stewart and Campbell beat Joe Rogan among older UK listeners
Key Points
- The Rest is Politics is the most popular podcast among UK adults aged 45 and over with 6.9% weekly reach in 2025.
- The Joe Rogan Experience holds second place in the UK over-45 chart at 5.2% but tops the all-ages UK chart at 10.1%.
- Goalhanger Films has three podcasts in the UK top ten: The Rest is Politics, The Rest is History and The Rest is Football.
- Weekly UK podcast reach climbed to 27% of adults aged 15 and over in Q1 2026, up from 23% a year earlier.
- Spotify is the most-used UK podcast service at 49% of weekly listeners, followed by BBC Sounds on 45% and YouTube on 38%.
The Rest is Politics has overtaken The Joe Rogan Experience to become the most popular podcast in the UK among adults aged 45 and over.
Former Conservative minister Rory Stewart and former Downing Street communications director Alastair Campbell’s political show reached 6.9% of weekly UK podcast listeners in the 45-plus age group across 2025, against 5.2% for The Joe Rogan Experience, according to communications regulator Ofcom’s Audio Listening in the UK 2026 report.
BBC Sounds title Newscast holds third place on 4.9%, followed by The Diary of a CEO on 4.6% and The Rest is History on 4.3%. The figures come from Edison Podcast Metrics UK and cover all four quarters of 2025.
Among all UK weekly podcast listeners aged 15 and over, The Joe Rogan Experience holds the overall top spot at 10.1% reach, followed by The Diary of a CEO on 6.2% and The Rest is Politics on 5.8%.
The chart in the 15 to 34 age group looks different again, with The Joe Rogan Experience pulling 14.5% reach. Titles including Saving Grace, ShxtsNGigs, Call Her Daddy, Rotten Mango and The Fellas chart in that age group but do not appear in the 45-plus top ten.
News-led shows feature prominently in older UK listening. Ofcom describes three of the top five titles in the 45-plus chart as news-based, with The Rest is Politics in first place, Newscast in third, The Diary of a CEO in fourth and The Rest is History in fifth.
The chart also includes BBC global affairs podcast Americast at seventh on 3.4% reach and The Archers, the long-running BBC radio drama, at ninth on 3.2%.
Goalhanger Films, the production company behind The Rest is Politics, dominates the wider UK chart.
The Rest is Politics, The Rest is History and The Rest is Football all feature in the top ten among UK weekly listeners aged 15 and over, with The Rest is Politics in third place, The Rest is History in fourth and The Rest is Football in sixth. The same three Goalhanger titles also feature in the 45-plus top ten.
Several news titles in the older listener chart have crossed into television. Selected episodes of Newscast and BBC podcast Uncanny are now broadcast on television channels and made available on BBC iPlayer.
Uncanny holds tenth place in the 45-plus chart with 3.0% reach, while 56% of UK weekly podcast listeners now consume podcasts linked to TV programmes more broadly.
Weekly podcast reach in the UK climbed to 27% of adults aged 15 and over in Q1 2026, up from 23% a year earlier, with monthly reach hitting 35%.
Spotify is the most-used UK podcast service at 49% of weekly listeners, followed by BBC Sounds on 45% and YouTube on 38%. UK podcast listeners use an average of 2.68 services to access shows.
“While there may appear to be some concentration around the very top performing podcast titles as measured by Edison, podcasting’s long tail shows that it is still a medium that caters to all sorts of niche interests and audiences,” Ofcom said in its report on Wednesday (20 May).
