The Only Agony Aunt I Trust Is a 75-Year-Old Man Who Admits He’s Been Wrong About Everything

I have, over the years, developed a deep and entirely justified suspicion of anyone offering life advice with genuine confidence. Confidence, in my experience, is usually inversely correlated with actually knowing what you’re talking about. Which is precisely why I was so delighted to discover Ill-Advised by Bill Nighy, a podcast whose entire premise rests on its host having absolutely no business dispensing wisdom to anyone, and doing so anyway, with tremendous and deeply reassuring deadpan commitment.

Nighy, 75, and a man who has spent several decades perfecting the art of looking faintly amused by his own existence, describes his own credentials for the role with a candour I find genuinely rare in this business. His qualification, by his own account, is having got “almost everything almost precisely wrong” in his early life. This is not false modesty. This is, as far as I can tell, simply an accurate CV, offered up front, so nobody can later accuse him of false advertising.

The show itself, as Nighy puts it, is a refuge specifically for people who are “clumsy and awkward,” who “don’t get out much and can’t handle it when they do.” He’s been admirably clear about who need not apply. “If you’re socially adept and enjoy healthy relationships,” he says, “there’s nothing for you here.” I have rarely felt so immediately, specifically seen by a piece of promotional copy.

What follows, once you actually press play, is Nighy fielding listener dilemmas, bathroom protocols, how to hide successfully at a party, the general catastrophe of being a person among other people, with the same unhurried, dry authority he’d bring to narrating a documentary about failed Antarctic expeditions. He has described his own particular talent as “squandering time,” which is, I think, one of the most honest job descriptions I’ve ever encountered, and also precisely what a really good podcast ought to do with your Tuesday evening.

It is, for what it’s worth, not simply a vanity project. The show won Best Podcast at last year’s Broadcasting Press Guild Awards, beating out, among other things, a BBC history podcast with considerably more institutional firepower behind it. One attendee at the ceremony recalled a friend telling Nighy that listening to the show was exactly like sitting at his kitchen table, minus the obligation to nod along. I cannot think of a higher compliment for a piece of audio entertainment, nor a more accurate description of what a genuinely good podcast should feel like.

Why I think this is exactly right for this particular readership

Here is my actual pitch, beyond simply enjoying the thing myself. I think there is a very specific sweet spot of listener for whom Ill-Advised was basically engineered in a laboratory, and I suspect a great many of you reading this fall squarely within it.

You’ve lived long enough to have a genuinely healthy scepticism toward anyone offering advice with total certainty. You’ve likely got your own extensive back catalogue of things you got “almost precisely wrong” along the way, and have, with any luck, arrived at the point where you can laugh about most of it rather than wince. You remember Nighy from roughly four decades of reliably excellent supporting work, Love Actually, Shaun of the Dead, that extraordinary turn as Davy Jones, so there’s a genuine, pre-existing fondness to draw on, rather than having to warm to a stranger. And frankly, a dry, unbothered Englishman in his seventies telling you, with total seriousness, that his superpower is squandering time, is exactly the kind of company that improves a cup of tea.

It is, in short, an agony aunt column with none of the actual agony, hosted by a man entirely unqualified for the role, who knows it, and leans into the bit with more commitment than most people bring to jobs they’re genuinely good at. I’d call that essential listening. New episodes, apparently, arrive weekly, which strikes me as precisely the correct dosage.