Rob Rinder: It would be difficult to bring back Judge Rinder

He made his TV name as Judge Rinder, known for his acerbic comments, confidence and ability to resolve real-life disputes on the reality court show with his unique blend of wit and solemnity.

But little more than a decade since the eponymous show launched (it ran from 2014-2020), the barrister, TV personality and author Rob Rinder says it would be difficult to bring it back because of the pressure of social media on participants.

“The world has changed in terms of how we can safely get contributors to come on television and talk about their private lives.

“It’s a very different world from coming on television and talking about some of the more intimate aspects of your life or personal conflict you’re experiencing when you don’t have to suffer the tsunami of abuse that you get nowadays on social media.

“Nowadays, just to go on University Challenge, for example, they really have to satisfy themselves that these poor students are able to withstand the potential abuse they might receive online by virtue of showing up to a quiz show.”

Eloquent and intelligent, you wouldn’t imagine Rinder, 47, criminal barrister, documentary-maker, TV presenter and recent BAFTA winner, would ever have confidence issues, but readily admits that he suffered imposter syndrome when he began his legal career.

“I think everybody does, to some extent, other than the most awful. If you stand up thinking, ‘I deserve to be here and I’m fantastic’, then you’re probably not going to be a good lawyer, but in my case I absolutely had a sense that the world of the bar didn’t belong to me, that I was somehow lucky to be there and that there had been a mistake.

“I think that’s true of most people who arrive having worked hard from the type of working class background that I came from, where around you there weren’t really that many people who operated or worked in those worlds.”

But his imposter syndrome didn’t last long, he stresses.

“I realised after a while that it mattered a good deal more what I thought of other people than what they thought of me.”

As a regular host on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, and co-host of BBC2’s Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond The Lobby and Rob And Rylan’s Grand Tour, he’s no stranger to TV, and is also a campaigner for Holocaust education.

He has also produced a series of novels featuring newly qualified barrister Adam Green, ‘a nice Jewish boy from Southgate growing up in a working class community’, based very loosely on himself.

The books are both engaging, thought-provoking and funny, like Rinder.

“It’s a good way of both exploring the spaces and places and people I know, but also sending them up and unpicking the preposterous,” he explains.

The fictional young barrister has to navigate his way around the pretentiousness and sense of superiority among those around him in chambers.

“To an extent he’s based on me, that sense of being an imposter and an outsider in a rarefied world, and what that means and how you adapt when you come to life in chambers with people surrounding you who have always felt like they belonged in the room.

“My pupil-master on the first day sent me out to find his family crests in Debrett’s, then asked me where mine were. I said that I wasn’t really sure they had any when they were fleeing Anatevka and that he should probably go and watch Fiddler On The Roof.”

His third novel, The Protest, sees a world-renowned artist murdered at his own exhibition when an anti-war protester sprays him with blue paint, which is found to be laced with cyanide. Initially, all evidence points to the protester, but Green is tasked with her defence – and as he digs deeper, he finds others might have wanted the artist dead.

At the same time, the young barrister is working on another case, a court martial, defending a young soldier who, in a hugely volatile and stressful environment and lacking training, puts an 11-year old Iraqi boy in a British tank, where he suffocates.

It’s loosely based on a case that Rinder did when he was a working barrister, he reveals.

“I thought it was really interesting for people to get a glimpse into that world and especially that kind of moment in particular, when British soldiers were occupying Iraq, and also that sense of who ultimately becomes responsible for things when decisions are made by much more senior people. I wanted to explore where the buck stops and who gets the blame when things go wrong.”

His fictional novel questions accountability – whether senior people should be held responsible or whether the people with the least amount of power always take the rap.

“How often do we see people in significant power take real responsibility for the decisions that they make?” he asks, citing the treatment of sub-postmasters in the Post Office scandal.

“The more power you have, usually the more insulated you are from absolute justice.”

The other aspect of the novel is the world of art which he loves, as anyone who watched him and Rylan Clark exploring Italy in the BAFTA award-winning series Rob And Rylan’s Grand Tour will know.

Rinder likes nothing better than to make programmes which leave viewers feeling better educated.

He’s choosy about the TV work he takes on and has presented numerous documentaries including My Family, The Holocaust And Me, The Holy Land And Us; Our Untold Stories and Britain Behind Bars: A Secret History, often exploring historical personal family stories with a focus on the human impact.

He has done Strictly Come Dancing and Celebrity Bake Off but wouldn’t consider I’m A Celebrity…, he says.

“I’m not going to eat kangaroo b******* any time soon, not to say they don’t ask.”

Later this year he’ll be presenting a new Channel 5 series, Rich Times, Poor Times, about turbulent moments in history, and is also taking part in a new reality show The Inheritance on Channel 4, in which 13 strangers do various tasks to claim an inheritance from a mystery benefactor known as the deceased, played by Liz Hurley. Rinder is the executor of the will.

“Liz is the ‘deceased’, so I’ve really hardly met her. But it’s a fun and interesting game which asks a fundamental social question about what you believe fairness to be and how much fairness actually costs.”

Away from work he’s stringent about exercise and goes to Barry’s Bootcamp near his home in north London most days, but projects keep him busy and he doesn’t sleep much, he confesses.

He’s already working on the next Adam Green book and has been to India with Rylan for the next Grand Tour series.

“The stuff I’m most proud of is the work that I make where people walk away feeling better informed and feeling that they belong in a room and go into the world with their shoulders back feeling more confident, be it because they’ve read a book like The Protest or watched Rob and Rylan and thought, you know what? I’m going to have a go at classical music or art because it is for me.”

The Protest by Rob Rinder is published by Century on June 19, priced £20