How toxic Talk become Britain’s most investigated channel

TalkTV launched in April 2022 with much fanfare and a whopping marketing budget, but managed to lose £150m in two years before ditching linear TV in May 2024, changing its name to simply Talk and operating as a radio station which also streams as video online.

While its video output is not regulated by Ofcom as it exists purely online (it is regulated as an On Demand Programme Service with a more limited set of rules) its sister radio station, which simulcasts its output on DAB radio, does have an Ofcom licence – and its diet of anti-immigrant bile and climate denial have made it Britain’s most investigated broadcaster.

Ofcom has confirmed to Rats in a Sack it currently has 10 open investigations into Talk. Three involve programmes presented by Jeremy Kyle, two by Ian Collins and one apiece by Julia Hartley-Brewer, Petrie Hosken, Alex Phillips, Andre Walker and Mike Graham, who has since been dismissed after the company said he had failed to cooperate with an investigation into a racist post that appeared on his Facebook account.

The most recent two investigations, into shows presented by Hartley-Brewer and Walker, have been launched in the past week.

The first was broadcast on May 19 and saw a guest, Harry Wilkinson of the climate crisis-denying Global Warming Policy Foundation, spout untrue claims about UN climate predictions which not only went unchallenged by Hartley-Brewer but were actively supported.

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Wilkinson – whose foundation’s position of climate denial listeners were not told about – claimed that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s RCP 8.5 – a climate scenario used to model a future with unmitigated greenhouse gas growth – had been discredited, describing it as the product of “junk numbers” producing “a junk result”.

Noted scientist Hartley-Brewer responded by saying its projected impacts were “complete pie in the sky nonsense” and that “it’s good to know they’ve actually dropped this”. (RCP 8.5 has not been dropped.)

Under Ofcom’s rule 5.9 Hartley-Brewer is allowed to express her opinions – but crucially it requires “alternative viewpoints to be adequately represented”. They very much were not.

The second new investigation concerns an even more egregious programme presented by Walker and co-host Ash Gould on July 9 in which the pair of goons attributed collective guilt for terrorism to 3.6 million British Muslims using a fabricated statistic.

During a discussion of Muslim communities and terrorism – a discussion to which no Muslims appear to have been invited – Walker cited a figure of 400,000 British jihadis, a figure he appears to have plucked out of nowhere. MI5 and intelligence sources have consistently cited between 23,000 and 45,000 “individuals of concern”.

Walker then used this false statistic as the direct premise for a collective guilt argument: that Britain’s 3.6 million non-jihadi Muslims “might as well be all in it together” because they would not act against extremists in their community. Co-host Gould agreed, adding

that Muslim jurors “would always vote with their own kind”. This would appear to breach rule 2.3 of the rule’s code which forbids “discriminatory treatment or language” on the grounds of “race, religion or belief”.

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(Rats in a Sack readers may recall Walker as the presenter who was last month convicted of assault by beating and given an 18-month conditional discharge after assaulting a fossil fuel protester at a dinner held to celebrate Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK. As Walker later boasted on social media: “I called the judge a cock and stormed out.”)

Ofcom is yet to decide whether to formally open investigations following complaints about four more Talk programmes featuring presenters voicing hateful views on refugees. Two involve Kevin O’Sullivan, one of which he talks of “the infestation of thousands and thousands and thousands of illegal migrants in this country – it is changing this country, it is changing it beyond recognition”.

In the other O’Sullivan speaks of how “we are involved in the battle for Britain. If we don’t stand our ground, the people of this beleaguered country, we are finished, and Burnham and the gang just want to pollute, infest this country with foreigners who are gonna destroy the nature of this country”.

The other two both involve Alex Phillips (the former Brexit Party MEP who now double-jobs as a policy advisor to Reform) talking first of the country being “invaded by thousands of illegal barbarians from alien cultures who pose a national security risk” and another incredibly saying refugees had been “brought up in brutal, ferocious, bestial cultures where rape is normal” and “a bit like XL Bullies… they are bred to be dangerous”.

Don’t expect any ruling anytime soon, though – Ofcom is a notoriously slow organisation and is still investigating a GB News interview with Donald Trump from almost 11 months ago in which presenter Bev Turner allowed the president to trot out unchallenged his usual drivel about London being governed by Sharia law, among other things.

Richard Wilson, director of Stop Funding Hate, the organisation that submitted several of the complaints said: “Talk’s output isn’t just misleading, it’s dangerous, and now even Ofcom seems to recognise that the channel has serious questions to answer. 

“Advertisers like IKEA – who claim to care about the climate, and say they want to ‘change the narrative’ around refugees – need to put their money where their mouth is and stop funding this toxic channel.”