“Don’t confuse cancellation with failure.” That, famously, was the line David Letterman, the bloke who actually built The Late Show, passed to Jon Stewart years ago. And it was the line Stewart hurled back across the Ed Sullivan Theater this week, voice catching, finger jabbing, as Stephen Colbert prepared the wake for America’s number-one late-night programme.

Read that again. Number. One. As in top of the bloody pile, comfortably ahead of Fallon and Kimmel, the most watched chat show in the United States. And tonight, somewhere around 11:35pm in New York, CBS will pull down the shutters, sweep the studio and try to convince us, with all the conviction of a teenager denying he’s been at the cooking sherry, that this was, and I quote, “purely a financial decision.”

Of course it was. And I am Beyoncé.

Let us be grown-ups about this. CBS euthanised its highest-rated chat show three days after its host called the network’s parent company, Paramount, out for paying Donald Trump a sixteen-million-dollar settlement over a 60 Minutes interview. Colbert called it, with the kind of plainness America used to specialise in, a “big fat bribe”. Seventy-two hours later, the man was told he was for the chop. The merger Paramount needed waved through by Trump’s pet FCC sailed merrily on soon after. If you don’t smell something on the breeze, you’ve no nose.

Letterman, never knowingly understated, called CBS executives “lying weasels” and signed off with a parting shot, borrowed from Ed Murrow and inflected with a vowel Lord Reith would not have approved, that I cannot quote in these pages without an asterisk. Quite right too. The man invented the franchise. He owns the moral high ground and he’s busy strewing it with broken set furniture flung from the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater.

For those of us who have written before about Colbert and the slow strangulation of political satire in the age of Trump, tonight is not so much a final episode as a final warning. The message coming out of West 53rd Street is now horribly simple: take the mickey out of the man in the Oval Office, embarrass the parent company in front of the regulators he appoints, and your career, Emmy-bedecked, network-leading, fifty-two weeks a year, is over before the band finishes the play-out.

That is not a financial decision. That is a precedent. And a vile one.

I happen to run businesses for a living. I have spent thirty years arguing that British plc should be tougher, braver, more willing to stick its hand up at the back of the room. So I am the last person to wring my hands when an American media giant decides it can no longer afford a hundred-million-dollar talk show. Late-night is unwell. Audiences are migrating to TikTok and YouTube faster than commissioners can flick the studio lights on. Even my dog has a podcast.

But that is not what happened here. What happened here is that a man told a joke about a man who cannot take a joke, and the bean counters folded the chair he was sitting on. As I argued when Trump’s tariffs began squeezing British exports, this White House treats business as an extension of grievance. CBS didn’t get cancelled by the market. It got cancelled by a sulk.

That is the bit that ought to terrify British boardrooms, not just American ones. Because the chilling effect does not stop at the Hudson. Every UK media business doing deals in the United States, every studio, streamer, format house, news brand, is now reading the body language. Don’t annoy the President. Don’t let your talent annoy the President. Settle, smile, soften the gag. It is, to borrow from another television creation I have written about, Jed Bartlet’s worst nightmare arriving on a Wednesday afternoon: the executive branch quietly dictating the punchlines.

We are British. We invented taking the mickey out of the powerful. From Spitting Image to Mock the Week, Have I Got News For You to whatever Charlie Brooker fancies doing next Wednesday, satire is, for us, a load-bearing wall of national life. A democracy that cannot laugh at its leaders is not a democracy in good health; it is a banana republic with better dental cover.

Colbert, for what it is worth, will be seen off in his final week by Jon Stewart, Tom Hanks and Barack Obama, hardly the send-off you stage for a man whose ratings have gone south. Letterman is right. Cancellation is not failure. The failure belongs to CBS, to Paramount, and to every executive who decided that the easiest way to grow up was to crouch down.

The joke, on this last night, is not on Stephen Colbert. The joke is on the rest of us, if we sit politely and watch.

Read more:
Colbert’s final bow: How CBS cancelled the king of late night to keep Trump sweet

There was a moment, somewhere around 1990, when I sincerely believed that the most important thing my mother did each evening was sit down at 9.00pm sharp to watch the news.

Not 9.01pm. Not 8.59pm. Nine, on the dot, because that was when the news began, because Sir Alastair Burnet had decided it was so, and because the rest of the United Kingdom, including, by the look of it, the entire cabinet, appeared to be doing exactly the same thing. The country ran on a single national rhythm, like a great wheezing grandfather clock, and the people who set the time wore tailored suits and lived in a place called Wood Lane.

That rhythm is now thoroughly, demonstrably, embarrassingly dead. And the people doing the burying are not bedroom-bound teenagers in TikTok-stained pyjamas. They are the very figures who built the broadcast schedule in the first place.

Take Stephen Colbert. Forty-eight hours after CBS finally smothered The Late Show with a corporate pillow, the network insists this had nothing to do with the lawsuit, the Skydance merger or the present occupant of the Oval Office, and we are of course expected to accept that assertion at the value of a Liz Truss lettuce, Colbert popped up on a public-access channel called Monroe Community Media. Then he popped up, rather more pointedly, on his shiny new YouTube channel, with Eminem and Jeff Daniels in tow, gathering 120,000 subscribers in a single weekend. No 11.35pm slot. No commercial break. No procession of Affiliate Sales stations of the cross. Just Stephen, a camera, and the most generous tip jar in the history of broadcasting.

A few months earlier, Piers Morgan walked off the Murdoch reservation entirely, to which I would normally raise a single languid eyebrow, but the man left a reported £50 million on the table to do it. He has called the TalkTV slot a “straitjacket”. He has 3.6 million YouTube subscribers and a four-year arrangement that hands him ownership of his own brand. Trump, Zelensky, Peterson, Ronaldo: all interviewed not for the dignified British 10 o’clock viewer but for a global congregation that watches him in Brisbane, Boston and bed.

And while the talent is bolting for the exits, the institutions are quietly digging tunnels under the perimeter fence. The BBC, that great, lumbering, well-meaning monument to the licence fee, is putting the finishing touches on a landmark deal to produce original shows for YouTube. Why? Because, mortifyingly, YouTube has overtaken BBC One on monthly reach in this country. The corporation that gave us Reith, Attenborough and Bake Off is now obliged to commission content for the same platform that hosts cats falling off skirting boards. The licence fee, it turns out, doesn’t beat free.

The numbers, for those of us who still pretend to be grown-ups, are devastating. Per Ofcom’s Media Nations 2025 report, Britons aged 16 to 24 now watch a startling 33 minutes of broadcast television a day, of which barely 20 minutes is live; they spend an hour and a half on YouTube and TikTok. For someone over 75, broadcast still hoovers up 90 per cent of in-home viewing. For a 16-year-old, it is 19 per cent. We are not, as is so often claimed, watching the gradual decline of an industry. We are watching its will being read.

Across the Atlantic, Nielsen’s Gauge confirms YouTube has now spent six consecutive months as the single largest distributor of television in America, larger than Disney, larger than NBCUniversal, larger than the entire stricken cable bundle put together. YouTube earned $36 billion in ad revenue in 2024, more than all four American broadcast networks combined. The schedule, to put it baldly, has been replaced by the search bar. The time slot has been replaced by the thumbnail.

The business lesson here is not “everyone should start a YouTube channel”. Please don’t. You’ll fail, embarrass your spouse and spend Saturdays editing in your shed. The lesson, for those of us building businesses outside the M25 commentary bubble, is rather more important than that. Ownership, distribution and audience relationship are now the three things that actually count, and the platform that delivers all three at once is winning. Witness Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger Ventures putting capital into creator-led media businesses precisely because the old playbook, make show, hand to broadcaster, hope, is demonstrably worse than the new one. The talent keeps the IP. The talent keeps the audience. The talent, increasingly, is the broadcaster.

The slot, that great totem of the 20th-century media baron, was never about the viewer. It was about logistics, advert breaks, satellite uplinks, union breaks, Carol Vorderman’s hairdresser. The viewer wanted the show. They never wanted nine o’clock. And now, at last, they don’t have to take both.

Sir Alastair Burnet, sleep well.

Read more:
Goodbye 11.35pm: Why linear TV’s biggest names are all fleeing to YouTube

I am not, in the ordinary run of things, a man given to civic exhortation. Lecture another adult on what to do with their Thursday and you tend to end up wearing their coffee, quite rightly.

But indulge me, just this once, because tomorrow is local election day across great swathes of England, and somebody has to say something about the great British shrug that has come to define our relationship with the ballot box at the parish-and-pothole level.

In the last round of council elections, turnout in some wards crept south of thirty per cent. Thirty per cent. Sit with that for a moment. Seven in ten adults, in possession of a franchise their grandparents fought a war to defend, opted instead to put the kettle on, watch a man on YouTube fitting a gearbox, or sit there in a state of low-grade irritation about Westminster as though the council had nothing whatever to do with their lives.

As though the council did not run their bins, set their parking charges, decide whether the vape shop next door could open at seven in the morning, and quietly determine, through the dark art of the local plan, whether a four-storey block of flats will rise next year on the patch of brownfield where their children currently kick a football.

I run businesses for a living, and I can tell you, as readers of this magazine will already know in their bones, that the people who shape your operating costs are not, in the main, the slick young SpAds and ambitious junior ministers preening on the Today programme.

They are councillors. People with names like Peter, Paul and Jane, even I used to be one for over a decade. People with dreadful lanyards and, mostly, excellent intentions. They set business rates relief schemes. They grant, or refuse, your A-board, your awning, your application for a pavement licence so the punters can drink rosé in the rain.

They decide whether your high street will boast a half-decent bus service or a bewildered taxi rank flanked by three Costas and a Greggs. They sign off road closures that can cost a small retailer a fortnight’s takings in a single botched resurfacing job. They run procurement budgets through which billions are quietly dispensed every year, and from which, incidentally, your own firm could perfectly well be eating, were you ever to bother with the tendering portal.

In short, if you run a business, the council is your landlord, your regulator, your customer and your traffic warden, all rolled into one slightly damp Edwardian building with a malfunctioning lift. Ignore it at your peril.

Now. I am not going to tell you who to vote for. I have my views, strong ones, in fact, ones I will not bore you with here because, frankly, they are not the point, and you have yours. That is the splendid, frustrating, occasionally infuriating glory of the thing. You may be a lifelong Conservative who has finally had enough. You may be Labour through and through, a Lib Dem with a clipboard, a Green who cycles, a Reform man who shouts, or one of those magnificent independents who slipped in last time on a single-issue ticket about the duck pond.

I do not care. I genuinely, profoundly, do not care. What I care about is that you put on a coat tomorrow, walk to the church hall, the primary school or the slightly dispiriting community centre, take the stubby pencil they have thoughtfully provided, and put a cross in a box.

Because here is the awkward truth: democracy is a muscle. Use it badly, use it crossly, use it with a heavy sigh and a glass of red waiting at home, but use it. Leave it in the drawer for too long and it withers, and once it has withered the people who do turn up, and they always turn up, get to decide everything for the rest of us. That is not a left-wing observation or a right-wing one. It is simply how arithmetic works in a polling station.

I am told there is a fashionable line these days, much retweeted by sixth-formers and weary executives alike, that “voting changes nothing”. To which the only sensible reply is: marvellous, then you will not object to my vote counting double. Of course it changes things. Ask any small business owner who has watched a sympathetic council slash parking charges, or an unsympathetic one slap on a workplace levy. Ask the publican facing a three a.m. licence refusal. Ask the parent whose new primary school exists because three hundred neighbours bothered to turn out one wet Thursday in May.

So. Tomorrow. Coat on, pencil up, cross in. I am not telling you who to vote for. I am telling you to vote. There is, I promise, a meaningful difference.

Read more:
Local Elections 2026: Why you must go out and vote tomorrow

Somewhere in a damp Parisian hotel in October 1977, a young Geordie schoolteacher called Gordon Sumner picked up his bass, glanced at a faded poster of Cyrano de Bergerac in the foyer, leaned out of the window at the working girls below, and rattled off a small reggae-flavoured number about a prostitute he had never met.

He called her Roxanne. He spent, by most accounts, an afternoon on the thing. Possibly a long lunch. Certainly less time than I will have spent writing this column.

That song, in February 2022, helped Sting hand his entire songwriting catalogue, some six hundred tunes, to Universal Music Publishing for a reported $300 million. Roughly £240 million in real money. For lyrics scribbled on hotel notepads, in the back of tour buses, occasionally in the bath. Even allowing for inflation, alimony and the eye-watering price of his tantric retreats, it remains, in cold commercial terms, the single greatest example of “sweating the asset” I have ever encountered in business.

Consider the original economics. A pop song in 1977 was a perishable: three minutes of grooves pressed into a slab of polyvinyl chloride, designed to be bought for 75p, played to death, scratched by a teenager and replaced by next week’s offering. The label took the lion’s share. The writer, if he was lucky and his manager was honest, he usually wasn’t, got a few pence per copy. And yet here we are, half a century on, and Roxanne is still earning. Every car advert. Every karaoke licence. Every Spotify spin in a Bangkok cocktail bar at two in the morning. Every nostalgic Boomer thumbing repeat in his Range Rover on the M40 to Bicester Village.

Sting is not alone. Bob Dylan flogged his songwriting catalogue to Universal in late 2020 for around $300 million, then sold his recorded works to Sony the following summer for another $200 million. Bruce Springsteen, the working-class hero from Asbury Park, lifted somewhere between $500 and $600 million off Sony for his life’s work. Bowie’s estate, Genesis, Neil Young, Pink Floyd. The numbers are positively obscene, and rising.

Why? Because, according to the IFPI’s Global Music Report 2025, recorded music brought in $29.6 billion globally last year. Streaming alone topped $20 billion, fully 69 per cent of the pie. There are now 752 million paying subscribers worldwide and ten consecutive years of growth. The very technology that everyone solemnly said would kill the music industry, Napster, file-sharing, the iPod, the internet itself, has instead resurrected it as the perfect annuity. Music doesn’t sell once any more. It sells forever, in fractions of a penny, every second of every day, while the writer sleeps.

Compare that to the rest of us. The plumber who fitted my boiler in 2018 invoiced me, paid his VAT and moved on. The barrister who drafted our new sponsorship contracts billed by the hour and that was that. The architect, the dentist, the accountant, the management consultant, all selling time, all watching the clock, all running flat out until the day they retire and the cheques stop. Even the great industrial fortunes of the twentieth century, your Wedgwoods, your Hansons, your Goldsmiths, required factories, foundries, lorries, lawyers, picket lines and the occasional hostile takeover. Whereas Paul McCartney dreamt the melody of Yesterday in his girlfriend’s spare room in 1965, scribbled “scrambled eggs, oh my baby how I love your legs” as placeholder lyrics, and has since banked north of £19.5 million on a single song — the most-covered tune in human history, with more than three thousand versions. The Beatles’ catalogue is now valued comfortably north of £1.2 billion and reportedly throws off £70 to £90 million a year for owners who, gloriously, include almost none of the people who actually wrote it.

This is the lesson British business has been embarrassingly slow to learn. It is not what you make. It is what you make that keeps making. The whole intellectual property economy, software, brands, patents, content, is built on this principle. Microsoft writes Office once and bills you forever. Disney drew Mickey before the Wall Street Crash and is still suing people about him. Coca-Cola scribbled a formula on a piece of paper in 1886 and has paid for four generations of dividend cheques. But none of them, not one, possesses the casual, narcotic genius of the songwriter who spent an afternoon humming and is still cashing seven-figure royalty statements in his seventies.

We business owners should be furious. And inspired. In November 2023, The Beatles even released Now and Then, a John Lennon demo from the late seventies, patched up with artificial intelligence and a bit of Peter Jackson studio wizardry, and it strolled to number one in the UK, fifty-six years after their previous chart-topper. The asset, sweated and sweated and sweated again, and now sweating for a fourth generation of listeners who weren’t born when their grandparents bought the original LP.

So the next time some private equity grandee bangs the boardroom table demanding “operational efficiency” and “recurring revenue streams”, remind him gently that the most efficient business model in the modern economy is a paunchy Geordie with a guitar humming nonsense about a Parisian prostitute in 1977 and banking nine-figure cheques in his seventies. The rest of us should be so lucky. Or, more usefully, so clever.

Read more:
Sweating the asset: How Sting wrote Roxanne in an afternoon and sold it for £240 Million