Andrew Neil reveals format of his flagship GB News show

By Neil Wilkes, Editor-in-chief | 1h

Andrew Neil, the chairman of GB News, explains the format of his flagship programme on the upcoming news channel.

Andrew Neil has discussed the format of his new flagship primetime programme on the upcoming GB News channel.

The veteran broadcaster, who is chairman of the new venture, will host an hour-long show on the station four days a week when it launches in the coming months.

Talking to Radio 4's The Media Show, Neil lifted the lid on the format of the show, which appears to draw on some elements from BBC Two's The Andrew Neil Show and his long-running BBC One show This Week.

"It's going to be an hour, it will be on between 8 and 9 o'clock at night, four nights a week," he said. "It'll be pretty segmented, so it can be replayed in digital format, and digital slice-and-dice as much as possible.

"We'll have a monologue to begin with, [then] we'll have a cover story, a main story. I'm going to have 'WokeWatch' - I think we'll have a lot of fun with things like chest-feeding and that police thing about 'being offensive is an offence' - a lot of that wasn't properly covered.

"We'll do a main interview, if we can get one - we won't do an interview if it's only Minister for Paperclips - and I want to do 'MediaWatch', including a MediaWatch that holds ourselves to account. I think when we get things wrong we've got to put our hands up and say 'we got this wrong', but also hold other media to account as well.

"And then I think we'll have regular guests - what a success [Diane] Abbott and [Michael] Portillo were on This Week for many years - so I think each night we'll have an equivalent of that, to be able to chew the cud on the main news stories."

The ambitious new channel expects to launch in the coming months and has already secured transmission on all of the UK's main broadcasting platforms, including Freeview, Sky, Virgin Media and Freesat.