Mike Tindall, James Haskell and Alex Payne: ‘We’re pale, male and stale. That won’t do much in 2024’

They are 299 episodes into their rugby podcast and have amassed three million listeners… so why are they worried it could dry up?

Somehow, in the midst of a supposed crisis of masculinity, three men have created a veritable behemoth of blokeishness. ‘Society needs people like us,’ declares James Haskell, self-styled ‘Archbishop of Banterbury’ and one third of The Good, the Bad & the Rugby, a chart-topping podcast that revels in its skewering of today’s hair-trigger sensibilities. ‘Being strong, masculine, protective, loud, dominant: men like us play a role, you can’t deny it. I’m unapologetic about it now. I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.’
Haskell is the type of person you can hear long before he even enters a room. Brash, strident, often wilfully provocative, he handles most subjects in the same way he dealt with opponents in his 77 appearances as an England flanker, flattening anything in his path without heed for the consequences. His two sidekicks in the studio live in perpetual terror about what he will say next. 
‘If you work with him,’ says Alex Payne, a clean-cut former Sky host who glues the operation together, ‘you’re never quite sure which one’s going to be the last show. It could be any week.’
The final member of the trio, Mike Tindall, holds twin distinctions as a Rugby World Cup winner and the husband to the 21st in line to the throne – he too says it is futile trying to curb Haskell’s excesses. ‘I can’t,’ he smiles, wearily. ‘He has to live his life.’ 
They make a motley crew, all told: where Tindall plays the straight man to Haskell’s court jester, sighing at certain anecdotes, Payne brings the polished production values that have helped turn 90 minutes of weekly whimsy into a phenomenon, recorded everywhere from The London Palladium to Windsor Castle.
We meet at Canterbury Court, a converted Kennington warehouse beside the Oval, decked out with burnt-orange sofas and trendily exposed pipework, where they are preparing to launch the podcast’s fifth series. They constitute a brand these days, with their disciples able to buy GBR hoodies and corporate clients hiring them for clay-pigeon shoots and Ibiza cruises. Now, perhaps most surprisingly, they have written a book.
According to the subtitle, this is their ‘unleashed’ version. But after 299 episodes, myriad legal cases, and a seemingly insatiable lust for controversy, do they have anything still to unleash? For Haskell, the answer is an emphatic yes. 
‘I jumped at the chance. I was always keen to tell a journey about where we came from, some of the darker times. We’re men, we’re parents, and we’ve all gone through all sorts of issues. Many of those experiences – separation, retirement, the births of our children – have been played out in the media glare. So it was important to describe them unashamedly and honestly.’
‘We are three pale, male and stale blokes,’ Payne adds. ‘Which, in 2024, isn’t doing very much for anybody. But we’re keen to do what we want to do. If people want to come along for the ride, great.’
Rugby’s podcast market is a saturated one, but their unreconstructed alpha-maleness is critical to their appeal – along with their fearlessness at covering subjects others won’t touch, like the debate around biological males competing in women’s sport. 
In the book, Haskell tackles the subject head on: ‘Whether you think trans women are actually women is kind of irrelevant, the fact is they have biological advantages, which makes them competing in women’s sport completely unfair. 
‘I know science is a dirty word these days as feelings are more important than facts. Imagine what would happen if I changed sex, took T-blockers, got some boobs and took up a combat sport against women. It would not be fair or end well.’ 
But the podcast has also hosted some regal guests. Courtesy of Tindall, they secured a 50-minute fireside chat at Windsor with Princess Anne and the Prince and Princess of Wales. Negotiations were hardly fraught: Tindall, who has three children with Zara Phillips, simply asked his mother-in-law. 
He enjoys a good relationship with the family. As he writes in the book: ‘Believe it or not, marrying into the Royal family was pretty easy for me. They were always nice to me, and I was always nice to them. Simple really.’
Still, the delicate protocols were almost upended when Haskell introduced himself to William ahead of recording with the words: ‘All right Boss.’ 
Haskell also admits to being disappointed by the reality of life in a royal castle. ‘I expected big trays loaded with scones and exotic fruit tarts. Instead, I got a couple of broken rich teas and what appeared to be a half-eaten malted milk – a leftover from a box of Family Circle biscuits… Luckily, I’d brought along an M&S sandwich, but when I started eating it, someone appeared and shooed me into a corridor. They’d been on red alert since our MD spilt coffee on what was probably a priceless Chippendale cabinet.’
But the sheer incongruity of the set-up, with three rugby obsessives sitting opposite three of the most senior royals, brought a portrayal that was genuinely refreshing. One comment by William and Catherine – that they had never finished a tennis match against each other because they were too competitive – made headlines. Such an insight was revelatory to everyone besides Tindall. 
‘It just came from seeing them in their most relaxed environment,’ he explains. ‘These are the conversations we have when we’re just talking to each other anyway. With Princess Anne, it’s the conversation we have about rugby at Gloucester, or about Scotland after every Six Nations game. A lot of the time, it will be about a player. She’ll say to me, “Should he not be doing this more?” And I’ll think, “You’re actually not that far off.” We were asking the same questions I had asked them before, but this time they were giving the answers to the public, rather than just to me.’
Some of the ribaldry inevitably ended up on the cutting-room floor. When William discovered that his inquisitors would be spending most of last year’s World Cup entertaining on a ship docked in Marseille, he asked Haskell: ‘What on earth are you doing that for? Are you going to be the anchor?’ ‘Well, it sounds a bit like anchor,’  Haskell replied. ‘Yes,’ Anne interjected, wryly, ‘I see that.’ Payne still wishes that the comment could have made the final cut. ‘It would have been an absolute sensation.’
Haskell was left impressed. ‘Princess Anne knew more about sport than almost anyone I’ve ever met,’ he writes in the book. 
As for other members of the family, Tindall’s bond with Prince George is particularly close: ‘George loves his football. I’ve played numerous times in the garden with him. He’s passionate about Aston Villa, too. Wherever he is, he’ll sit down and watch that game. They’re just a family who love sport. Catherine loves her running.’
But the episode also served as a reminder of the line that Tindall has to tread. On the one hand, he is the face of a highly irreverent podcast, with listeners desperate for juicy royal anecdotes. On the other, he is duty-bound to keep the confidences of the most scrutinised family in the world.
It is a tension, you sense, that Haskell loves to exploit. ‘Some say to me, “Can you ask Mike if they’re part of the Illuminati? Are any of them real lizard people?”’ On the road, he has been known to embarrass his co-host by cracking jokes about Prince Andrew ‘sweating up a storm on the dance floor’. Tindall weathers the bombardment with stoicism. ‘He’ll pick up on something that I say,’ he laments. ‘And then, if you look at the cesspool of Instagram, I get dragged into it.’
Haskell takes a pointed swipe in the book at Omid Scobie, obsequious chronicler of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, calling him a ‘very odd bloke’. ‘Royal fans can be mental,’ Haskell adds. ‘We all know that American royal fans are f—king nuts, especially Scobieites.’
Scobie fuelled a pile-on against Tindall when, in 2022, he criticised the former England centre for ‘cashing in’ on his royal connections by appearing on I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!. ‘I don’t even have access to my Twitter,’  says Tindall today. ‘I just [get] tagged in by anyone who’s talking about anything. It’s so random, what I have to sift through. 
‘If there’s any story about me or my kids, it will get entangled into a web of something else, and I’m tagged into reading all this crap. That’s the world we live in. Some have got nothing better to do than bag people.’
Haskell has his own experience of being part of a famous family. Last October he separated from Chloe Madeley, daughter of former daytime TV fixtures Richard and Judy, after five years of marriage. Tindall knew her, having appeared together on Channel 4 series, The Jump. ‘She’s basically a female version of Hask,’ Tindall writes, ‘which made for an interesting relationship.’
Haskell learnt quickly about the perils of attracting the paparazzi. One evening, after a performance at the Palladium with his two confrères, he was pictured in close proximity to a woman who was not his wife, sparking the headline: ‘Haskell and mystery blonde’. The lady in question was Payne’s sister.
‘It was the most extraordinary example of how the whole system works,’ Payne says. ‘We were actually underneath a sign showing us as The Good, the Bad & the Rugby. I had my elbow in the picture that was used. 
‘When I was still at home, it was a case of, “Oh, it’s another woman”,’ Haskell reflects, ruefully. ‘I had to say, “Look, I’m not with any of these people.” I’ve become hyper-aware as a result. I’m quite loud, and I see people trying to take photos. A guy walked into a restaurant the other day, pretending to look around, but he was filming me with my daughter. At London Zoo, I had to stop two women from doing it. It does make life difficult sometimes.’
Then there was the time when, during a lockdown in 2021, he got into a spat with a man after Haskell took his Labrador, Bertie, off the lead near his Northampton home, in an area where two sheep had recently been attacked. The exchange reached Farmers Guardian. 
‘People were threatening to shoot me, shoot my dog, offering me out for a fight,’ he recalls. ‘Basically they were going to plough me into a field if they saw me. Again it all came from something taken out of context, sensationalised. But by alienating farmers, I lost Chloe a sponsorship deal. She wasn’t overly pleased.’
So unfailingly does he attract controversy that a chapter in the book is titled ‘Upsetting Women’. In one incident, they were listing England’s most-capped male forwards during an episode of the podcast and a female player highlighted how World Cup winner Rochelle ‘Rocky’ Clark had more caps than any of them. ‘Do better,’ she wrote. ‘Please stop disrespecting women’s rugby.’ ‘Have a day off,’ Haskell fired back. ‘We have done more to champion women’s rugby than anyone else… Pick your battles and try to be positive.’ Cue mayhem, with Haskell accused by many women in the sport of symbolising an out-of-touch patriarchy, and a GBR sponsor ordering him to apologise. He is still sore about it: ‘I was forced to do it, which is the antithesis of everything I stand for. It was a politician’s apology.’
Payne winces slightly at the memory. As the most outwardly buttoned-up of the three – ‘He probably gets around by penny farthing,’ taunts Haskell – he is less inclined towards confrontation. But he rushes to defend the honour of his co-presenters whenever they stray. 
It was only when he saw himself decried as an ‘insufferable snob’ in a message on YouTube that Payne bit too. Clicking through to the person’s bio, he discovered that he was a wedding photographer and found his mobile number on his website. ‘I couldn’t resist phoning him, and he made the mistake of picking up,’ he recalls. ‘He tried to argue his way out of it, but after about 15 seconds he said, “D’you know what, Alex? I’m so sorry. I’ve been at home on my own for three weeks and I’m feeling very lonely. I don’t know why I said what I did, it’s not me and I feel really embarrassed.”’
For Payne, it was a salutary lesson. ‘It just reminds you that those shouting abuse at you often have their own issues to deal with.’
And yet they’ve no plans to dial down the machismo. Tindall, in particular, regards it as an immutable element of his personality, with his perspective on the issue sharpened now he has a three-year-old son, Lucas, after daughters Mia and Lena. Hours before the interview begins, Lucas has appeared in newspapers taking karate kicks at Lena during a day out at Burghley Horse Trials. ‘You can’t stop him,’ Tindall grins.
‘He wants physical contact. He wants to be wrestled. He imagines himself as a ninja, and he just walks around with sticks whacking people. He’s such a typical boy, you almost have to run him into the ground with exercise, like a dog, otherwise he won’t sleep. You’re built that way. So, being fully masculine, which a lot of rugby players are, is not a bad thing.’
But he is also conscious that this idea of men congratulating each other on how manly they are will not be to everybody’s taste. ‘Guys want camaraderie,’ he shrugs. ‘And sometimes that comes out in the wrong way.’‘If you don’t want to like us, you won’t like us,’ Haskell chips in. ‘And that’s fine.’ 
But with three million listeners tuning in and counting, it’s clear who is winning that battle.
The Good, the Bad & the Rugby: Unleashed is out on October 24 (HarperCollins, £22); pre-order a copy at Telegraph Books