Late Night Live — Full program podcast · ABC Australia

A portrait of the powerful right wing commentator Tucker Carlson, and celebrating Winnie the Pooh

·54 min·3 clips

Carlson's own on-air framing compares 1950 city demographics with today's numbers.

Late Night Live opens with a portrait of Tucker Carlson. David Marr speaks with Jason Zengurli about his biography, Hated by All the Right People, an Unauthorized Life of the Far, Far, Far, Far Right Pundit. The conversation starts with a title Carlson seemed to hand himself in Budapest in 2021, when he was toasting Viktor Orban and praising him. Marr keeps pushing on the contradiction of a man who rails against elites while moving so easily among heads of state and billionaires. The interview treats that tension as the main story, not a footnote. Zengurli argues that Carlson's power comes from attention as much as argument. The discussion then moves to Carlson's interview with Vladimir Putin. Zengurli says the interview itself was not the issue; the issue was how Carlson handled it. He says Carlson let Putin steamroll him and filibuster, and that he either was not prepared or did not know enough. The Moscow footage gets the same treatment. The grocery-store segment, with its claims about cheap produce and the quality of everything on offer, and the subway footage, framed as a kind of utopia with no trash or homeless people, are described as pure propaganda and ridiculous, even if they were effective. Marr then asks whether Carlson ultimately serves power. The conversation uses that question to test the gap between criticism and complicity. After the politics, the show shifts to Winnie the Pooh's centenary. Giles Brandreth joins to mark the bear's hundredth year, while Marr returns to the childhood memory of growing up with the books and finding that the plot, the creatures, and the drawings all came back at once. The episode ends by setting a hard-edged media biography beside a gentler literary celebration, which gives the program its familiar balance.

As heard by us

From Winnie the Pooh's centenary to Tucker Carlson's orbit of power, the hour keeps two different moods in play.

Late Night Live moves from a centenary nod to Winnie the Pooh into a hard edged talk with Tucker Carlson, and the shift gives the hour a useful pulse. The Carlson interview has the sharper bite.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want Tucker Carlson unpacked in a long-form interview, not a brisk news hit.

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