There’s an old showbiz saying along the lines of, “You don’t rewrite a hit”. And so it is with Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s Take podcast.  

The pair left the BBC at the beginning of April and their new podcast is nothing new, but it’s nice to have them back and bickering like an old married, cinema-­obsessed couple.  

The formula for their trademark “wittertainment” simply didn’t need updating: Kermode passionately praising and picking apart the week’s film releases, Mayo calmly keeping him in check.  

The LTLs (long-term listeners) can rest assured that they haven’t been forgotten: the running jokes still run.  

In fact, the very first review picks up on unfinished business, as Kermode finally appraises Uncharted after months of Mayo pestering him to do so during “them days”.  

The verdict? That it’s a video game adaptation so derivative that it’s actually “solidly charted”.  

The rest of the hit list is as eclectic as ever: Nick Cave’s new movie, This Much I Know to Be True, Danish film Wild Men and Cabaret’s 50th anniversary, among others.  

Given the blurring of the boundary between film and television, they also review select small-screen series – examples of so-called “film-adjacent television”.  

The headline guest for episode 1 is the always-engaging Tom Hiddleston, discussing his role in Apple TV+’s The Essex Serpent.  

The double act reached their 21st broadcasting anniversary this year and you can tell. Like any sane person, I’m inclined to skip the commercials, but so fine-tuned is their dry back-and-forth that they had me chuckling along to a Nord VPN ad.  

Till death do them part.