I am a Jew. I live in a council estate in London where considerably more than half of my neighbours are Muslims. These people aren’t my friends, but we get along fine: I pick up their parcels; we coordinate complaints to the council about the strange, blue-tinged fluid that sometimes drips from everyone’s ceilings, as if someone in the penthouse had decided to fill their flat with jelly. Elsewhere, our distant cousins are doing terrible things to each other. It’s increasingly hard to imagine a world in which these distant cousins can live together, intermingled but mostly minding their own business – but that’s exactly what we do every day in London. Over the past six months I’ve started feeling extremely grateful for that.

I’m glad I can live in peace with my Muslim neighbours without any of us being tempted to start a podcast

Lately, though, I’ve been very grateful for something else too. I’m glad that I can live in peace with my Muslim neighbours without any of us being tempted to start a podcast about it.

David Baddiel and Baroness Sayeeda Warsi are not as strong as I am. Their podcast is called A Muslim & A Jew Go There, and it’s not very good. A typical exchange has Warsi saying ‘I see you, I hear you, I feel your pain,’ to which Baddiel replies: ‘Yes, that’s fantastic.’ The title of the thing sounds like Baddiel’s invention. He used to be a comedian, but these days he’s mostly just a professional Jew. (That’s his Twitter bio: ‘Jew’.) It’s always very sad when people over-identify with their ethnic identity; you get the sense they don’t think much of their other qualities. At some point, Baddiel must have looked over his life’s work and decided that what he really had to offer the world was his lack of a foreskin.

What’s really notable about A Muslim & A Jew Go There is that they do not, in fact, go there. Critics have gushed over how reasonable and well-tempered their conversations are, even when they bring out the topics that make a lot of perfectly ordinary people go insane. Israel, Palestine, Gaza, the war. And it’s true: they don’t raise their voices, they don’t lob accusations, they just calmly say the same thing over and over again. ‘I might have to push back on you there,’ Baddiel says. ‘Yes,’ replies Warsi, ‘but let me push back on that for a moment.’ And so they spend an hour of your time announcing that they’re going to push back on one another while forgetting to actually push.

Apparently, this is what people like. The British public has decided it wants to hear two public figures, from opposing sides of some important fault line, talking genially to each other on a podcast. I suppose we can blame Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart for this: two years ago, they launched their podcast The Rest is Politics, powered by the thrillingly just-above-zero partisan tension between a Labour apparatchik whose signature achievement was the Iraq War and the sole Tory Guardian readers like; now we live in the sludge of their imitators. Maybe the worst offenders are Ed Balls and George Osborne with their podcast, Political Currency. Not for the content, but what happens beforehand. Like a lot of podcasts, this one has adverts. For six years, as chancellor, Osborne determined whether certain people would live or die; now, he does strangled fake banter with his one-time opposite number, hawking Specsavers etc. Even if, like me, you’re no fan of Osborne’s record in power, it’s a miserable spectacle.

The latest addition to the genre is a podcast from Sky called Electoral Dysfunction. Every episode begins with about two minutes of cheerful, upbeat, but bafflingly grating and unpleasant music. This is then followed by thirty minutes of the cheerful, upbeat, but bafflingly grating and unpleasant voices of Sky’s Beth Rigby, Labour’s Jess Phillips, and the Conservatives’ Ruth Davidson. In the first episode, Phillips introduces herself as a ‘socialist firebrand’. I’m not sure why. She is not a socialist firebrand. She is on the right of her party, and Davidson is on the left of hers. They don’t even bother to disagree about anything. Instead, Phillips says she calls her local lesbians the ‘cliterati’. She gasps at the fact Davidson hasn’t watched Succession. They’re trying to banter like comedians. Even the name is a lame attempt to be irreverent. But they’re not comedians, they’re politicians. They are not funny or insightful. They are drab weirdos with holes where their souls ought to be.

The usual complaint about these shows is that the presenters are too chummy. Politicians claim to represent different interests in society, but really they’re all one mutually masturbatory podcasting cabal. I’m not sure that’s it. There’s nothing wrong with friendships across political or religious divides, but one of the joys of real friendship is that you can, in fact, go there. When I argue with my friends over a genuine disagreement, I can go for the jugular: I know that afterwards we’ll still be friends. I don’t need to be nice. It might be more interesting to hear that kind of exchange from Baddiel and Warsi or Phillips and Davidson, but they can’t do it: they aren’t actually friends.

It’s sad for them, performing fake bonhomie. But it’s sadder for you, the listener. Podcasts are sometimes described as a ‘friendship simulator’. You don’t really pay attention to what’s said; you just let the ambience of happy chatter wash over you while you do something else, alone.

It’s almost like being among people. But with these podcasts, you’re not even simulating friendship. You’re simulating a tedious, shallow, stilted conversation with someone you vaguely know but don’t particularly like.