Issue 152: Finally, a podcast! (2025)

Hello and welcome back to The Fourth Wheel, the weekly watch newsletter that this week has finally taken to the airwaves. There will be no change to your scheduled email programming; TFW continues every Friday. But in a joint venture with one of my oldest friends in this business, a former QP Magazine colleague and one of the people who really helped me to see the enormous potential in writing about watches, I am now… puffs out chest, straightens tie… a podcaster. Read on and I’ll tell you all about it.

The Fourth Wheel is a reader-supported publication with no advertising, sponsorship or commercial partnerships to influence its content. It is made possible by the generous support of its readers: if you think watch journalism could do with a voice that exists outside of the usual media dynamic, please consider taking out a paid subscription. You can start with a free trial!

Here’s a little taste of what you might have missed recently:

A… Podcast!?

I won’t beat around the bush: the first two episodes of The Watch Enquiry are live now on all the main podcasting platforms, and if what you want more than anything is just to listen to them without dwelling any longer on my words, then please, have at it. For once, I want you to click away from this newsletter and discover it, so without further ado here are the links for Apple and Spotify. If you are minded to read on, I’ll tell you a little bit more about each episode, and what you can expect from the podcast going forwards.

Episode One

Episode Two

So, what’s The Watch Enquiry all about?

If you’ve listened to either of the first episodes you’ll have a bit of an idea, but I think it would still be worth giving you a bit of a backstage view of what this is, what you can expect, and why we’re doing it.

I recognise that we’re reaching a point where the plural noun for watch enthusiast is ‘podcast’ but with The Watch Enquiry we do think we’ve got something that’s not represented in the current landscape. Besides, I sort of reject the notion that the watch world can only sustain a small number of podcasts; there are a great many writers and Instagrammers and YouTubers out there and podcasting is just another platform for us to try and do something journalistic and interesting.

That said, we had no appetite for creating another podcast where two guys get in front of a microphone every week and say “right, what do we think of what’s just launched?” You’ve got a lot of people already doing that, some very effectively, and it’s not our bag.

Another question that might be springing forth as you read this is “why isn’t this just The Fourth Wheel podcast?” I’m not saying that’s never going to happen, but this came into being as a joint venture between myself and Tim, and neither of us had much enthusiasm for a model where I owned the show (literally or metaphorically) - we wanted to be equal partners as well as co-hosts. It is a vehicle for a very different kind of story-telling; on Substack I can still react very nimbly to the story of the day, whereas for TWE I want to take a similar approach to a finely-crafted magazine feature where we’ve gone out and done research, done interviews, organised our thoughts and tried to construct a piece of work that stands the test of time1.

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That brings me to one other point where TFE is both similar to and distinct from TFW (yeah, I know I’ve created two three-letter acronym projects beginning with ‘The’. Such is life!). Editorial independence is really important to us on The Watch Enquiry and you will notice very early on we clearly aren’t interested in buttering up brands. We won’t be asking CEOs on for interview just to hear them promote their latest launch. But it also costs money to make, and requires a substantial investment of our time. We didn’t want to put it all behind a Substack paywall - although there may be some podcast perks coming for my paid subscribers - so the podcast will be taking paid advertising. We won’t carry ads from any company we’re discussing - in fact, we’ve made it a ground rule that we won’t carry ads from watch brands full stop2 - but it’s a business all the same, and you’ll hear us promoting companies we think are credible, interesting and worthy of your attention.

If you don’t know Tim Barber, my co-host, check him out on Instagram. He’s been in this business a little longer than I have; we actually worked together at QP magazine from 2014 to 2017 and it was Tim, really, as the editor of QP at the time, who converted me from a part-time watch writer still dabbling in other things to a full-time one. We’re both magazine journalists at heart, so while the act of printing something out and binding it together every month is something of a dying art, we still want to tell the same stories.

In Episode One we ask “What Became Of The Concept Watch?” In the 2000s and 2010s - not coincidentally the era in which Tim and I started taking an interest in watches - brands like Cartier and TAG Heuer, but also Jaeger-LeCoultre, Audemars Piguet and many others were pouring their energies into technological masterpieces that, they said, were going to inform the everyday watches of the future. That last part is crucial - for Cartier in particular the pursuit of high tech solutions to watchmaking’s centuries-old problems of friction, lubrication, exposure to the elements and so on was not an abstract exercise in problem-solving and nor was it simply a way of making super-expensive limited batches of wow-factor watches to sell to top clients. It was their genuinely-held belief that within a generation they could revolutionise the everyday watch in terms of reliability, efficiency and longevity.

Of course, it didn’t happen. So we wanted to get stuck into that a little bit, explore a strangely-forgotten chapter of watchmaking’s recent past and remind ourselves of watches that were fun, futuristic, truly innovative and often slightly mad. Cartier is the main focus, with a sideline into the LVMH Institute, TAG Heuer and Zenith’s own forays into high-concept watchmaking, but we also touch on the LAB-ID series from Panerai, Breitling’s Chronoworks, Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Master Extreme LAB, Patek Philippe’s Advanced Research Division and others too. It’s a really fun, geeky conversation that we hope reminds people of a time before heritage dive watch reissues.

Episode Two is a different type of historical journey. In it we go back to a time neither of us has personal experience of: the 1930s and 40s and a little up-and-coming Geneva watchmaker by the name of Patek Philippe. One strand that you might say runs through a lot of TWE episodes is a focus on why and how brands attain the positions they hold (or what certain brands could do better), and the narratives that inform the status quo as we both experienced it over the last 15 years or so. There is arguably no more universally accepted position in modern watch culture than Patek Philippe’s supremacy among volume manufacturers3 and it interested us to ask: how did this state of affairs come to be? That’s a pretty huge question - as in, you might as well write a book if that’s your opening gambit - so we pared it down and thought about whether it could be possible to say that all of today’s power and status and expertise and prestige could be traced back to a single year in which the stars aligned and Patek Philippe laid the foundations for greatness.

As you will hear in the episode, we are not trying to oversimplify all of Patek Philippe history; there is obviously a before and an after to everything, a context that cannot be so completely stripped away. But we felt strongly enough that having done the research, the case was strong enough to at least pose the question: “Was 1941 Patek Philippe’s Most Important Year?”

Vintage fans will probably already know which watches are key to this hypothesis: the 1518 and the 1526. But we look at how those two references came to be, the social, political, economic and cultural context in which Patek Philippe was able to rise above all others and carve out a reputation as the pre-eminent fine watchmaker of the 20th century. I loved recording this episode; I learned a lot and feel that even in a discipline as well-trodden as Patek Philippe history, we’ve added a perspective that you may not have encountered before.

That’s more or less that for now. I hope you enjoy the podcast. Episodes 3-6 will follow in the next few weeks, and that will conclude series one. In them you’ll hear us talk about what collaborative designs have done to the industry; which watches we think have been game-changers in our (professional) lifetimes, and which complications we think have pushed the boundaries of mechanical watchmaking more than any other. You’ll hear about each episode right here on The Fourth Wheel, but please do subscribe in your preferred podcast app and follow The Watch Enquiry on social media to make sure you never miss a thing.

And Finally…

I haven’t been shouting out the cool stuff I see across the internet as much recently - the brutally honest reason is that while I enjoy it, it takes a long time and I know not that many of you are clicking on it. That’s not a criticism - I’m learning what you do and don’t want. So many publications say they’re data-driven but really they’re ego-driven. (I’m such an egomaniac I created my own publication but I still look at the data.)

However, from time to time I will still share things I thought interesting.

First, check out True Patina on Instagram doing a close analysis of GMT-Master ‘Blueberry’ bezel inserts. I’ve always liked these and would be heartened to know they’re real.

Secondly, I have been holding off from talking about the new Breguet, but know that I really do want to. I would recommend Velociphile on Instagram for trenchant observations about the movement; my knee-jerk reaction from the launch is that Breguet might have learned the wrong lessons (or I guess the right ones, depressingly) from brands that are energised and exciting right now. I’d like to see the watch up close before trying to decide whether it could possibly be worth nearly £50,000.

Lastly, if you aren’t sick of my words, you can read me dissecting the notion of horological Brutalism for Country Life. I liked this topic more than I expected to, drawing on a chat I had last year with Phil Toledano. I came to a similar conclusion as Jack Forster’s column on the same topic from last autumn, and since the piece was published I’ve continued thinking about deliberate roughness as a style in watchmaking - it was a thing two or three years ago, if you remember Panerai’s deliberately-aged steel, TAG Heuer’s jagged Carrera diamonds, Montblanc debuting the Iced Sea, obviously bronze in all its forms, but I come back to the same thought: watchmaking, or luxury in general, can only ever achieve a sort of imitation, Disneyland Brutalism, where roughness and texture can be permitted within closely defined parameters. Anyway, this is running the risk of developing into a whole new essay… but I’d be interested to continue this one in the chat, if anyone else has thoughts along similar - or contrasting - lines.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Chris