Everything Is Content - Babygirl, A Scandal in Romantasy & Rooting For Traitors

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

In the famous words of Rebecca Black: "it's Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday!" And we're back with a brand new episode of Everything Is Content!This week we're drinking UP the Babygirl discourse like a tall glass of milk. Were we intolerant to the film, or lapping it up and asking for more? Also, there's drama in the romantasy world and it doesn't involve magical creatures, but rather humans and accusations of plagiarism. Just how unique are the themes and tropes of the genre?And finally, let's sit down around the round table to discuss the only show truly *giving* right now. Yes, The Traitors. Listen to find out how this season compares to others in our eyes, and our stand-out characters and moments. One kiss (consensual) for everyone who listens, subscribes and rates us 5 stars on your podcast player. And please go listen to our extra episode from Wednesday for an extra helping of us.------------Perfect Day podcastMotherlandWe Might Regret ThisDaddy IssuesVogue: Babygirl Is All Vibes, No MeaningVogue: If We’re All So Comfortable Talking About Female Pleasure, Why Are All The Women I Know Still Faking It?Did a Best-Selling Romantasy Novelist Steal Another Writer’s Story?The TraitorsRadio Times: The Traitors season 3 cast expose a big problem that needs fixingTFP: The Girlboss is Sleeping With The Intern Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Beth. I'm Richera. And I'm Anoni. And this is Everything Is Content. We're the podcast that dives into the week's biggest and juiciest pop culture stories. Whether it's TV, film, celebs or internet trends, we're across it all. We're the overpriced ginger shot you lovingly down after a run. This week on the podcast, we're talking about the film the

internet's been salivating over for months, Baby Girl, a scandal in the romance world and the traitors. Follow us on Instagram at everything is content pod and make sure you hit follow on your podcast player so you never miss an episode. And make sure to listen to our special bonus episode on the scandal that tore up the internet last year, the Ethan Slater-Ariana Grande relationship as addressed by his ex-wife for the cut. But first, what have you both been loving this week? I actually have two TV shows, both from the BBC and both from last year. So first one, I hope I've not mentioned before, but it's called We Might Regret This. And it's about a Canadian artist called Freya who moved to London to be with her long distance, slightly older partner, Abe.

She is tetraplegic. And after firing her in-home carer because she is absolute chaos, she needs to hire another one. And when her best friend from Canada, a bit of a free spirit lands on her doorstep she hires her and the whole cast of it is just amazing you have Sally Phillips who plays Abe's ex-wife and the mother of his son who is played by Edward Blumell the leads are played by Kyla Harris and Eleanor Sorrell who I did recognize and you probably will recognize them but this is the first time I've seen them both in something long form. Lolly Adephopia actually is in it.

She plays the leader of a workshop teaching the friend how to be a carer and she's mad. Emma Siddy is also in it and she's brilliantly cast as well. And it's just so funny and so real and it explores this web of relationships, this kind of oddball gang that I guess don't really want to end up together, but they're all thrown into the situation. And all of them have this beautiful relationship with one another. It's really difficult. It's lovely. Sally Phillips' character and the ex have the shared grief that's explored, disabilities explored, and it is just excellent. I think one of the standouts of last year. And I do think, I haven't checked this recently,

but I think it got picked up for a second season. So you should all go and watch this one. Did we talk about this? Have either of you watched it? I have watched it. And I think, not to put you on blast, I do remember you mentioning it, but it's a really good reminder to watch it for people because it is so funny. I worked on the sidelines of a BBC podcast interview where they spoke to the writer and another of the cast members. It's a podcast called Access All. It's really great. It talks about disability and accessibility. Really great podcast. Anyway, did you know that it's based on Kyla's real life experience and she wrote it? So it's semi-autobiographical, semi-memoir material.

No, but I love that. Okay, I'm gonna add that to my watch list immediately yeah you can blast her any weekend if you've got no plans what was your second Beth so my second I don't think I haven't mentioned this one because I've not quite finished it but it's Daddy Issues with Amy Lee Wood another BBC another really good one and it's again from last year and it's about a 24 year old played by Amy Lee Wood who is this fun-loving kind of doesn't know where she's going in her life she a 24 year old played by amy lee wood who is this fun loving kind of doesn't know where she's going in her life she's 24 years old who gets pregnant after a one-night

stand and then a series of events means that she doesn't really have any other options she has to lean on her dad who is a bit of a hapless father figure her mum is off i think in another country she's sort of absent and she has to lean on this guy who has his own shit going on he's in this housing situation which is not ideal he has this absolutely bonkers neighbor and it's a really touching also very funny adventure between the two it's really moving it made me not want to get pregnant but if i was going to get pregnant i'd kind of want to be amy lee wood in this if you have nothing really to do on the weekend and you want to watch some good telly i think you'd watch these back to back just stick on iplay and kind of go for it so those are my two that I think most people would

enjoy you've just reminded me I remember seeing so many trailers that and I love Amy Lee Wood and I remember making mental note and then I just completely forgot about it I also watched this and she is so good she's so charming I think she just has like one of those unnameable qualities that she could lead anything and she just is like so of those unnameable qualities that she could lead anything and she just is like so compelling and so charming and just so endearing and adorable like I really need her to be in a rom-com there is a power that she can harness I agree I think she's so beautiful yeah she's so beautiful she's in the new White Lotus isn't she she is and that's coming out 16th of February so I can't wait for more Amy content I just can't wait for

more White Lotus let me at these horrible rich people and only what have you been loving so I've been loving and again a bit like Beth I'm not sure if I've recommended this before and it's funny because I made this whole thing on Instagram about how I'm going to stop listening to just chit chat podcasts and actually listen to something educational but I have been instead listening to Perfect Day with Jessica Knappett who I absolutely love and it's basically off menu but for your perfect day so she does a perfect morning afternoon evening but often she just gets completely sidetracked and her and her guests just go on and talk about the most random things and they get to like midway through the morning and they

haven't done the whole thing which I love so there are really good guests I think there's 27 episodes now but for fans of Ted Lasso there are Brett Goldstein and Nick Muhammad. And then for fans of The High Low, there's Dolly Alderton. Fans of comedy, there's Romesh Ranganathan and Phil Wang. And then for Beth, there's Tim Key. Because don't you fancy Tim Key?

Oh, he's one of my men. Yeah, he's one of my boys. Oh, I'm going to listen to him first. It's so good. It's really, she's just got, she's so charismatic and she's just so funny. I'm really enjoying it. It's a really warm cup of tea kind she's just got, she's so charismatic and she's just so funny. I'm really enjoying it.

It's a really warm cup of tea kind of podcast. Oh, that sounds nice. I feel like she strikes me as somebody who would just be like quite lovely to hear. Yeah, she's great. Also warm cup of tea sounds horrible. Hot cup of tea, but warm. Luke warm tea.

No one wants to be called that. What have you been loving this week, Richera? So I have watched a tv show that everyone absolutely has already seen i've been watching motherland for the first time it's one of my favorite shows of all time oh my god i'm so jealous that you can watch this and i love it i love it i love it so much it's so funny it's just like i'm sad because i know it's it's ended and And I saw that they're bringing back a spinoff, Amanda Land, based on Queen of the Alphas, Amanda. But I just,

I don't know. I just think this is so magic. I can't believe that they aren't just like, you know, rinse and repeating this till death. I've actually watched it over and over again. And can I tell you something, both of you? I met Anna Maxwell Martin just before Christmas what how and where and why I met her at a carol service that I went to a friend and she's at this party and I was sat next to her and she was the coolest chicest funniest person I've ever met like I cannot explain to you how cool she and also just worlds away from her character on that show yeah she's amazing so now I'm even more obsessed also when I first watched it I was living in Wandsworth and I used to go to this coffee shop

and there was this group of mums who all used to be wearing like leggings and like big puffer jackets and they would all be like sitting around having their coffee obviously just having dropped the kids off and there was this one that was really beautiful that always had a blow dry and she had like the biggest engagement ring and she was absolutely the ringleader and you sent me laugh so much it's called bonsai coffee shop in Wandsworth and i was like i'm sure the writer of this has been to this coffee shop because i swear these are the women in the show oh that's so funny i just like i love how frazzled she is all the time i love how she's like constantly on the edge of a breakdown i love how like all the social dynamics are really bitchy and feel like school i i'm not a parent but the

fact that you've just said that it rings true like it makes me so happy it's so I love the husband who's always off doing like team building days like go-karting kayaking honest I do it's just so masterful and it is I was a nanny in Notting Hill for a few years and there is just this subsect of like wealthy mums it's different but they're so real they are like the way they nail it i think in terms of the dynamics of so many of these women ever since i saw the trailer of nicole kidman downing a glass of cold milk and staring unwaveringly into the camera i knew that this was going to be a very special film. Baby Girls, it's time to talk

about Baby Girl. Directed by Helena Raine, who also did Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Baby Girls stars Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson of Triangle of Sadness fame, a film that we definitely raved about a few months ago, but definitely go see it, it's great. Essentially, she is a corporate CEO and he is an intern and they embark on a workplace affair and explore the world of kink together the film has been so divisive already I feel like I have seen people slate this film but I've seen our community aka the horny online community just like absolutely eat this up I will go down with the ship. I thought it was incredible. While Empire gave it four stars saying it's fiercely erotic, nuanced and raucously funny. Peter Bradshaw, who

JKJK longtime enemy of the podcast, because of what he said about Night Bitch, gave it two stars for the Guardian saying Nicole Kidman sex positive erotic thriller fails to bring the menace. Daisy Jones wrote a piece for Vogue titled Baby Girl is all vibes, no meaning. And it's definitely touched on something that we have grappled with, you know, films like Saltburn. A lot of people called it a vibes based film and said that it didn't have much meaning to it. She posits the idea that there are internet films and she says things like Call Me By Your Name and Saltburn, as I said said require one unexpected soundtrack choice one slightly transgressive sexy scene and one emergent hot boy and she says that Baby Girl is exactly this kind

of film and brings up a lot of interesting threads around sex sexuality and kink but never does anything with them we have literally not even compared notes of what we think about this film so you're getting our first comparison right here. What did you both think? I really enjoyed it, but I agree with Daisy Jones. I thought it was impeccable in parts. I thought the pacing was kind of off. I thought there were bits that I didn't understand, like the order of why they'd done it.

I don't know how far. Can we do spoilers? Skip ahead if you don't want spoilers, I'd say. I saw a spoiler before I went in of the ending, and it really didn't ruin a thing for me so my issues were initially that her infatuation and relationship with this young man in the workplace starts way too off the bat too immediately that kind of stressed me out i see i loved this idea that harris dickinson's character was somehow this like sensual conduit who could feel your feelings that that's a there's the amazing scene with

antonio banderas where he gets him to calm down when he's having a panic attack and I was like that would have been so interesting if in that moment there had then been some sexual relationship between him and Antonio if they'd had a threesome if they'd gone further in that way because I didn't really get the thriller-ness of it either there were I thought the acting was incredible from every single person but there were just parts where I'm like this feels a bit slow it feels a bit lumpy. I think I had higher hopes. I thought it was beautiful.

I thought it was redacted, redacted, redacted. But yeah, Beth, what were your thoughts? I mean, okay, similar. When you said about all the romance happening too quickly, the timeline of the film, I found really confusing and it kept drawing me out of it. And I'm not the only one who said this, but the film opens and it's Christmas and it's Christmas party and there's a Christmas tree up and all the decorations. This whole relationship happens, the ups and the downs and the whole arc of them kind of negotiating their kink based relationship,

the aftermath of if they get found out or not, and then the conclusion of the film. And it's still fucking Christmas. So I was really confused. I was like, am I to believe this happens within like a three week period it's fucking christmas the whole time how have how have we got another psychosexual semi-christmas film starring nicole kidman i love that there are two of these the other being eyes wide shut which ruchira mentioned in an earlier episode and i think we'll talk about so that kept drawing me out i really really enjoyed it i don't know if it was just vibes based for me, but there were a couple of questions for me, but it never stopped me thinking, I love this. I'm locked in. Like my whole body felt electrified. They handled the awkwardness,

the tension, the negotiating relationship so well. Like I came alive in that cinema. I was like, I mean, me and the other four people that were watching it in the Merthyr Tydfil view cinema at 11 30 in the morning were absolutely hooked so vaguely that's my opinion that there was a lot to go off feelings wise I would have to watch it a second time I don't mind doing that to fully realize an answer Richard take it away I completely see what you mean about the timeline I watched it three weeks ago it away. I completely see what you mean about the timeline. I watched it three weeks ago. So I've I completely forgot it literally happens within like maybe a few weeks. That is absolutely mental. In my mind, it's like a three, four month situation. The thing I feel is exactly what you're saying. I just felt like every cell in my body was just electrified

throughout the whole thing. I don't think it's a film that I'll necessarily watch again. But I think it's a film that made me feel like completely just like jolted out of my skin. And also I thought the humor was really funny. I thought that the humor fell in all the right places. Like you said, the awkwardness as they negotiate this new thing for both of them, it feels like he isn't used to being dominant in the way that he is in this situation she hasn't been able to ever explore being that submissive she hasn't really even explored kink it seems like so finding humor in that situation and finding humor in both of them you know donning these personalities and trying it on for size is really endearing and also really funny and I think I've not really seen anything

like that I feel like everything that explores kink and sexuality can be so serious and I don't know it can be quite cringy sometimes on screen the only thing I'm comparing it to is Fifty Shades of Grey that's the only kind of mainstream thing I can think of so I really liked that and also I think it wasn't taking itself seriously at all. For the trailer, it literally started using like jingle bells in the background of it. And I just thought this film is so silly. It's so funny. It's just the rump I need at Christmas.

I agree about the humour. I too went to a screening. And actually, I went to the Everyman in Cheltenham, which is beautiful. And there weren't that many people in there. And everyone was laughing, which I think when it's a smaller cinema as well is even harder to get so I do think the humour is really good the bits I did love were the tenderness every single time that someone cried I so believe it's like showing this childlike vulnerability that we all still have within us and often that coupled with sex I found that really quite beautiful to watch and it wasn't cringe because I think that was the thing I think all of the acting

is really what carried it but I do think that even for me the kind of escalation of them having this first sexual encounter which they don't actually have sex to then kind of like romping in bathrooms and it all being very classic affair Matt Hancock kissing in a lift or wherever he was kissing and I wanted there to be more suspense I don't know there was just parts of it it felt very jolty but I I do agree about the relationships and I'm just obsessed with Antonio Banderas I don't know if you guys came away just absolutely in love with him and it was one of the most sexually wrought tense things I've ever watched that you could hear a pin drop in some of the moments I kind of felt like is anyone looking at me and I sat weirdly like what is happening I was sitting in the same room with my big coat over my lap and I kept thinking if I was a man

I'd get kicked out of here because they would think I was diddling but I was just cold and the guy who was like running the cinema came at one point I assumed just to check everyone's enjoying the Maltesers but I was like hands in the air like I promise I'm not doing anything but it was so it's so interesting that you both said about the laughing because one I read a really interesting piece in the New York Times which touches on this it's so interesting that you both said about the laughing because one i read a really interesting piece in the new york times which touches on this it's called laughing in the dark by marie salise and it touches on when people laugh at what you think are the wrong things to laugh at in the cinema and she says the part in baby girl where she's on her knees e.g romey e.g nicole kidman lapping water from a saucer and there weren't enough people in my

cinema to get a good read no one actually laughed I was the only person that chuckled at any point of the in the film I don't know what was going on and so I was like oh am I laughing at the wrong bits and I just wondered at what points were people laughing in the viewership did you ever feel like people were laughing at the quote-unquote wrong parts of this film the cinema I was in all laughed all the right bits because I totally get that. And I've had that before, especially with films about racism, like American fiction. I was very sus of the people left and right and behind me because the laughs they were doing were not the bits I found fucking funny. Anyway, no, everyone was on good behavior.

I think because I saw it on New Year's Eve and I didn't realize it was an early screening. I think, you know, you have to be quite a sicko to want to go on New Year's Eve to watch Baby Girl and pay you know a bit extra to watch it early that is you and it was me yeah so I think everyone there was we're all the same person really yeah no one in my screening was laughing out of awkwardness or like laughing at things that weren't meant to be funny it was definitely in those moments where it felt like people were meant to laugh it's so interesting because when I went to see Banshees of Inishirin I had such good experience because for some reason everyone in that cinema was like lolling the whole way through so I came out of that and I was like that is so droll and hilarious and funny and then someone else went

one of my friends went to see it and they were like what are you talking about like no one laughed and it's so hit and miss whether or not you get an audience that's bought into the film that you've gone to see that has the right humor and it can really change the tone of how you I've had that before I've gone to see a film and not realized it was funny because no one laughed and then I wasn't in the right frame of mind to laugh yeah absolutely we had that with poor things you were next to me and you were such good vibes during the whole film and I felt like you were leading with the laughs and I think everyone like joined in it was such a fun cinema screening but everyone I spoke to after who hated the film said that it was like a pin drop they could hear in the cinema while they were watching it they never laughed and I think that does really impact it um one thing I

have to ask you about just to pick up on the Antonio Banderas point I've seen a lot of anger from people online about the fact that he plays this husband who can't fuck his wife properly and they feel that he's been miscast and my boyfriend was with me when we were watching the film and he was like I just couldn't believe that he would play that role and that kind of brought him out of the film and yeah I'd love to hear what you guys think because I have an opinion about this well what I found more interesting was that they'd been in this such a long-term relationship I think it's they say it's been 19 years and they clearly have a very ripe sex life and he's constantly trying to sleep with her and the reason I did think it maybe was

believable is because he obviously has this insatiable sensuality about him and so he in all of his bones and his body believes he's good so it wouldn't surprise me if he'd never really asked like are you actually enjoying this because he's so attractive he's so confident and I do sometimes think there is a correlation between people being really hot and not having moves because their hotness is the thing with which they use to create desire and he is so hot my take on it would be 19 years a very long time i don't know if that's the whole relationship or just a matter it's a very long time to have a lot of kind of i guess positive reinforcement e.g the film opens with her faking an orgasm what i found interesting on the whole could antonio and baderis get this so wrong is that in the first quarter of the film she tells

him yes with a sheet over her head but she tells him him, here's what I need to come. And it's not even that out there. It's like, can we play porn? And can you touch me while there's a pillow on my head? She gives him these instructions and then he ignores it in a way like, no, but I just want to see you. He sells it as though like, I'm a good man. I just want to see my wife. But actually what he's doing is shutting her down. So actually he's being given the information to do better and make her come before she eventually you know has this affair before she does all these things and i'm not saying she had no other choice but it's really interesting like he is such a hunk he's gorgeous he's confident he's this theater man i kind of do buy that a man who looks like that moves through

the world like that might fall into that trap antonanderas though I just know that man knows if you know no way he knows everything absolutely every button he has pressed them all three times over yeah no I completely agree yeah no my take is basically pretty similar I think where I think the reason why it works for him to play that role is because it's not about hotness it's about how you get caught in a relationship and also where we've moved to now we are supposed to be more sexually empowered there's still an orgasm gap between men and women in heterosexual relationships I think there's like a disconnect between technically we're all talking about it but a lot of women are still not able to achieve like a fulfilling sex life and also like you said having been together for nearly two decades if you are caught in a pattern it is so hard and it seems like she's caught in the pattern of faking orgasm

so she's giving him false information too so she's not completely blameless but like you said when she tries to open up that dialogue it feels too difficult and it doesn't go anywhere so I think it's more like they're both blameless. They could help each other more, but also they're just stuck. My friend Livvy wrote a piece about faking orgasms and she links it to the film. So we'll link that in the show notes. I think that was really interesting about just how common it still is. But I wanted to go back to what Beth, you were saying about the fact that she gives him all this information and the way that he reframes it.

Because there's this amazing bit at the end of the film where harris dickinson's character samuel kind of writes this wrong and he says no actually you're not being a good man by saying i want to look you in the eyes all you're doing is undermining her and that isn't what we talk about now with femininity and masculinity the rules will kind of be rewritten you're really outdated and it's an amazing bit because it's the subversive truth of female sexuality is that sometimes if the power is coming from us and the decision is coming from the women, then our desires and wants can look very much like quite patriarchal, submissive, outdated desires, but because they're coming from us, it's not. And so it's like, that was a really nice moment, I thought, between those two characters as well.

I adored when he was holding Antonio Madaris' character. And that entire exchange was one of my favorite bits of it, because I think that was the most nuanced element of the entire film. I think everything else, I get what you're saying. It didn't push the boat out in any particular way. The sex wasn't as raunchy or groundbreaking or subversive as we thought it would be it all played it quite safe but that bit I've never seen anything like it where the scorned husband could have been in a fight he could have like beaten the shit out of this guy that's what I thought was going to happen because we've seen that happen so many times but rather it just

descends into two men holding each other and just like coaxing each other through the situation and like learning and teaching I thought that bit was so great actually um and one more bit I wanted to say was right at the beginning of the film the bit that I really loved was showing Nicole Kidman just taking herself into like the bathroom or like her office whatever and getting off on this like I think it's like daddy daughter porn or something I don't think I've ever seen anything like that from a woman in a pop culture thing just like really going there and saying she's stuck in this relationship and this is what she's doing to like get herself off I completely agree and the fact that she's like an older woman in fact this was one of the bits that everyone laughed at in my cinema was when he goes to her you look like a mother I'm not

trying to have you as my girlfriend. Everyone laughed at that bit. Because it's not a love story in a traditional way where you think, yeah, I hope these kids work it out. It's not, and I think of Secretary as the kind of BDSM film of my coming of age with James Spader looking absolutely gorgeous, Maggie Gyllenhaal. That's very much tilting towards a point of fidelity and love and devotion

that this never gets to. This is two people who have needs and they try and meet each other's needs. And it's very separate from love and devotion. She has those things in her marriage. What she doesn't have is what they make together in these private rooms, in these private moments. It's really singular. And I think it's really compelling. I think what the film does very well, it takes these moments and it mirrors them and reframes them. It does it with the Antonio Banderas thing where there's a scene with Nicole Kidman

and Harris Dickinson where they go from wrestling to holding each other to teaching each other. And again, Antonio Banderas does this with Harris Dickinson's character as well. And it does that with the orgasm, with this grunting

orgasm that we know immediately that's her true orgasm there are moments in the film where you get one and then you get the other and i just really liked that you're never invested in them as a couple but i'm so invested in watching them the tenderness i mean the father figure george michael scene can we discuss that because i want to watch just that bit again if not the whole film I want to watch that scene on loop forever I loved it I completely agree and I also completely agree with Daisy Jones take that it is just like catnip for the internet because you can just see that being clipped on TikTok like the lighting the bisexual lighting him just like dancing and like oh it was so good and her in that chair looking like a fucking boss legs like swung over the side in a bathrobe if it is a scene designed to go viral on the internet much like the salt burn murder on the dance floor scene I think there's power in that because it is

just like it's so fun and so I don't know so horny what I also love there was a little bit where he like runs into the hotel room he's like oh my god it's got a living room like there's just these moments where they it's almost like even the characters kind of lose their facade there is this amazing kind of transference between the tension and then silliness and there's a lot of childlike play from every single character and speaking of children her children also I actually loved I loved the daughter who was in a gay relationship who had got with another girl and then after finding out about her mother's affair or intuiting that her mother's had an affair she's like well don't worry Mary forgave me and it's that lovely like intergenerational thing kind of what we were talking about in Wednesday's episode about this

ability to realize that sometimes monogamy doesn't always work and that there are other paths and sometimes cheating doesn't have to be the end of everything. Can I just say a really stupid point, which was really annoying me throughout the film? And it's so stupid, but it was making me think of the substance. Is this woman is a really high powered, extremely wealthy CEO and she's got one coat and it's not even a nice coat. And in the substance, at least her coat is like yellow and really obnoxious. It feeds into the kind of cinematography. But she just wears this like camel cashmere belted coat every single day, no matter where she's going.

I was like, did they run out of money to get her a different coat? There's no way this woman wouldn't have more than one coat. Okay, so I have a theory that I'm going to posit for this. She was really giving me like an amalgamation of all of those famous girl bosses that we know and have become infamous figures like an Elizabeth Holmes who famously had a uniform because she wanted to be like Steve Jobs and I think it was really trying to present this alternative insider view of what these kind of CEOs are like we think of male CEOs as famously having double lives when it comes to their sex life fin doms and getting off on that power dynamic. And I feel like it was kind of doing that,

but the post-girl boss women. That is interesting. I would have preferred two coats though. Yeah, me too. Just at least like a jacket maybe that she wore when she went to see him in his bar that he works at. I get that. I feel like loads of stuff is cut.

This is what I kept thinking. So I was like, that's a really interesting thread. So when the person that works for the young woman is like, oh, I love your name, Romy, where's that from? And she's like, oh, I grew up in a cult and a commune. And I was like, oh, interesting, that's gonna... And there was all these sort of flashbacks to her childhood. And there was clips of her doing EMDR therapy and alluding to the fact that she'd had some very traumatic childhood experience, perhaps even been abused sexually as a child I almost think it would be more powerful to either go all in on that childhood trauma thing really go into where

does kink stem from does it always come from a place of something is it you know is it nature is it nurture or left it out that was something again I kind of felt a bit like I don't know what kind of film I'm watching is this a thriller is it a comedy I couldn't quite work it out I quite liked that she was a bit of an enigma. We got kind of teases of that. And I liked that he was a total enigma because it didn't end up mattering who they were. I think because their affair

was so much about wish fulfillment, it was enough to know that she had this hole that she was searching. And it was enough to know that he was there. And maybe it would have been better for a full-rounded and well-rounded film but i quite liked it especially like that we didn't know anything about him i wonder if you felt that you got anything about him or if you wanted anything

from him because i quite liked that it was all clues it was like how he was dressed for example which was kind of like ill-fitting suits he had a carabiner on his thing and he had these tattoos which i actually found out are his tattoos which makes sense or some of them are his tattoos because I was watching it oh my god I know I was watching it and I was like why does he have a Kez tattoo why would a millennial American have like a Ken Loach tattoo and then I googled it and I was like okay the Kez tattoo and the cherub with the machine gun is his tattoo so I quite I I read into that a bit oh my god that makes me even happy because I was like I thought his tattoos were even happy because I was like I thought his tattoos were so fit and I was like he obviously doesn't have those because like but do you not

think he's so British coded and at times as well his accent did kind of slip for me but that was fine but he his outfits the way he just like the tattoos I'm like I just don't know what part of America that kind of man comes from but I was quite happy to know nothing about him I was so happy for him to just be an embodiment of her desire. And like you said, like a willing vessel for her to like pour in all of her sexual desires and needs and wants. But I did struggle a bit with the drip feed of information. But I understand that, again, you're right. Maybe that isn't what the film needed.

No, I completely agree with you, Anoni, where it feels weird that they peppered that in and they put some like really you know really interesting bits out there but then didn't pick them back up I think I've seen people say that they didn't want to go down the cliche route of trying to explain somebody's like sexuality or their you know interesting kink because of trauma because that's that can be quite like a lazy stereotype and people find that really, really offensive. But then why bring that up even? It feels like, I don't know, this weird halfway point I don't really get the point of. On the topic of her being this girl boss, there was a really interesting piece called The FP. I don't know what that stands for, but I saw it on Twitter and I clicked on it. It was a

really interesting article called The Girl Boss is Sleeping with the Intern. And it was by someone who is middle-aged and she didn't really like the film and she suggests that this trend of middle-aged women like wanting to blow up their lives via lust there's a reason why this is so ubiquitous in culture and it's not for good reasons it kind of signifies she says an epidemic of dissatisfaction among women of a certain age and a certain level of achievement and she says that there's sort of dreamy romanticism of that self-destructive sex in this film which doesn't really reflect reality it's kind of you know women who have sex like men and then profit i guess like lean in affairs sort of and i read it and i will send it to you i'll put it in the show notes i

found it really interesting to hear from a middle-aged woman that they didn't like the film because they thought it was maybe getting something inherently wrong about why this happens and about lust and about this self-destructive sex and lust and, you know, incorporate women. I don't really know how I feel about it, but it was one dissenting voice that I thought I hadn't seen anywhere else. Because she's kind of rewarded. Yes, and she doesn't lose her relationship I actually quite like that they got back together and that Antonio Banderas character had kind of learned something was making an effort you know she was actually getting what she wanted from him I think the thing with affairs which I think it showed really well is like when you're doing it when you're in not that I've had an affair but when when you're in the throes of

the lust and it's going really crazy well you're so hedonistic and it's so heady and out of your mind that you basically she completely she goes insane I mean she's doing absolutely all sorts but the reality comes crashing down when she has that huge come down or she goes to that rave and then she tells him and it's like all of the guilt and all of the stress and and him like kicking out the house because there were points when I was watching I was like god I kind of hope something happens like this to me when I'm older and then that scene happens and you're like no actually I've just remembered why I don't want this because that it really that scene I was like oh my god when he's being so understanding he's

like just tell me what you're trying to say and you could see his like brain working and then he comes to realization I'm getting goosebumps actually thinking about it and then he's like you need to get out of the house I just I went from up here and then i just went yeah yeah it was a complete crashing down she was completely digmatized and just that headiness and like the hotel the hotel room scenes it's like it's just that's what i was talking about in our wednesday episode the you know portrayal of the affair it is like it's i don't even know what to say it's so electric like the best bits of it when it looks so hot and so steamy in that film I had the exact same thing where I was like holy shit this is like living to the fucking max and then it comes all crashing down it's like it is a bit of a fable in terms of no one should be that digmatized no one should be that's funny by the way that is the

exact sentence that popped into my head when I was watching my chair I was like this is what I need to do with my one precious life I'm not on earth for that long to not experience this level of lust and crazy intimacy and I was literally I was literally thinking that I was like this is what it means to be alive but I think that is what an affair feels like I do think that's what it is because it is like taking a drug it's such a serotonin boost it's such a crazy experience and I really so for all of the faults with some of it, I do agree with you guys in terms of sort of like my bodily and sensory reaction to it. I felt like I was on the journey with them.

There was one thing that Helena said in a podcast interview on the movies that made me. She says, the past does not always come back to collect the bill and you aren't always punished for doing something morally questionable. Sometimes you come through it and you've learned something something which I think kind of totally underlines what we said in Wednesday's episode and I guess sort of what we're getting at now in real life actually sometimes there is just learning and you do have to move ahead it's not always here's the moral

lesson you did something quite and quite bad here's the beating sometimes it's it's grey yeah I really like that they didn't punish her because I do feel like that's slightly more interesting not to just have this female character berating herself losing her entire life really feeling the like moral weight of society for having quote-unquote like stepped out I think that could be quite lazy baby girl is out in cinemas now and we would adore to hear what you thought of the film. Did a best-selling romantic novelist steal another writer's story? In a piece for The New Yorker, Katie Waldman looks into just that.

So Lynn Freeman finished her fantasy romance novel in 2010 and tried to get it published but had no success and she gave up in 2014. Seven years later, she picked up a book, a bookstore called Crave by an author called Tracy Wolfe, who it turns out her real name is Tracy Deeb's. And she happened to have shared the same literary agent as Freeman and was published by one of the houses that Freeman had submitted her manuscript to. When Freeman started to read the book, she had a panic attack because she believed that all of her ideas were stolen by Wolfe. Waldman says Freeman's suit rests on hundreds of similarities compiled by Freeman and her lawyers between her own manuscripts and notes and the Crave series.

Walden notes that this accusation is not uncommon in the Romanticist world, which boomed during the pandemic with people searching for escapism and the portmanteau floods book talk and includes the ACOTAR series, which Beth and I have both dipped our toes into. Walden says of the genre, many of the readers are millennials who grew up on Harry Potter and Twilight and expected more of the same once adulthood struck. She then goes on to say, in some respects, Romanticist has the feel of young people's literature. The themes are Pixar coded, the main difference being that they feature explicit sex. And of the legal battle, she says, Romantici's reliance on the tropes poses a challenge for questions of copyright. The wild proliferation of intensely derivative Romanticis has complicated this picture.

The worlds of romance and fantasy have been so thoroughly balconized, the production of content so accelerated, that what one might assume to be a trope, falling in love with a werewolf or a vampire, I say, are actually sub-genres. One of the reasons that I started to lose interest in the ACOTAR series was because I felt like the universe and the fantasy element was so familiar. It kind of almost, lots of it felt like Harry Potter to me me and I don't even read that much fantasy but I found it quite distracting and she notes in the piece that these books now are more focused on their female heroines than the actual world building there were so many fascinating nuggets in this piece and one I have to mention is there's even a cheese shifter paranormal romance by the author Ellen Mint in which

characters can turn into different types of cheese Beth I kind of want to assign you to read this because I feel like you should add that to your list. I can't believe I haven't already. There were so many interesting bits as well about self-publishing and the ways that Amazon and Kindle reward authors for more titles and more pages. But I wanted to ask you both, what did you make of the piece? So I really liked it. I found it very interesting. It's a long piece and it explores romancy in a way that I have not seen elsewhere. I thought it was fascinating. In terms of the case itself, it lays out the evidence very clearly, both sides, kind of lets you draw conclusions as well as doing that commentary on writing of genre fiction and on current trends in publishing, many of which do seem really exploitative and also anti-art I found it really interesting I found it depressing by the

end of it I thought I really don't know where I stand on it it is such a massive massive grey area but it's a great piece I agree with you Beth and I think although the piece starts off about being about this kind of legal battle it more what it just more got me thinking about romanticity as a genre there was bits in it where she was saying that because these self-published authors get rewarded for having like chunkier books they will get ai to write parts of it and again having only read a couple of the akatar books and i do have the third one i might read it it just struck me as it does sound like these all are so similar what do you make of romanticity as a genre on the whole it is crazy isn't it because i can't think of any other genre and

this i'm not saying it doesn't exist it's just that i can't think of one where something like this could happen to the same degree because even with you know romantic comedies there are well trodden pathways there are cliches there are stereotypes you know manic pixie dream girl frazzled woman haters to lovers arc etc but I've never felt having consumed a lot of that content that things have been so similar that it strikes me as a recent ish visitor to fantasyland but I also like you said I dipped my toe that was so generous i have nose dived into this i read the whole of akatar five books thousands of pages in december i don't know how i was obviously not well i was obviously dealing with something but i feel like i've gotten a really good taster of it and you're right there's so many beats so many conventions and it's

like young woman often a teenager she's poor's a human, no one in her real human life recognises how amazing she is until this much older, always a kind of age gap, much older fantastical man steps into the picture, she becomes amazing. I mean, even with Twilight, there's so many. The age gap, there's like the dynamic between the love interest, there's a dynamic between the potential love interest, there's just so much there. If I was writing this, I wanted to write one, I would read all of those and I'd go, what sells? What's good? The hunger and the appetite is there. And so I think someone or many someones in the publishing industry are saying, people like this, let's churn, let's churn, let's churn. And so when you're churning books out in

a matter of weeks, in cases months at tops you are going to get people just picking cherry picking the things that work putting it in that marketing it on TikTok bam done. So the specific publishing house that published Crave actually have on its website like these sub genres which are so specific and apparently these publishing houses will go on to TikTok and see like the search terms it's kind of like an informed way of writing so I think that's obviously part of the issue is you're writing for an algorithm rather than from a point of creativity and one of the things that came up it comes up in Akatar and it made me think of Twilight made me think of Vampire Diaries is this it's so cliched now is that I actually can't do this anymore is the young woman in questions

as you said normally starts off as mortal then ends up being like immortalized. It happens in all of them. They start off going with the man that looks like the pretty boy, the sweet one. And then the other one that's meant to be like the darkness and the evil, but also really hot actually turns out to be a better boyfriend in the end. It's this sort of like Jacqueline Hyde, but actually you've got it wrong. It's so funny. And I was like, God, I can't actually bear this. Like it goes on all the time. The other thing that I really stuck out to me in the piece was a bit where she says the most prominent romanticist authors are white a reductive but not entirely spurious industry archetype has emerged of temperamentally if not politically conservative women often mothers who find their writing a means to success

outside a traditional career path twilight the precursor to today's paranormal romance novels transformed stephanie meyer a mormon stay-at-home mother of three into a millionaire yaros is a a traditional career path. Twilight, the precursor to today's paranormal romance novels, transformed Stephanie Meyer, a Mormon stay-at-home mother of three, into a millionaire. Yaros is a mother of six and a military spouse who began writing when her husband was deployed to Afghanistan. And I again find that quite interesting that you have these politically conservative, perhaps people who have uphold certain views about things that happen in the real world being quite open-minded when it comes to these fantastical worlds that they build it's interesting because I listened to a podcast

by Alan Helen Peterson and her podcast is called Culture Study and she had a romanticist writer come on who was a woman of color and having heard her experience of writing romanticist books she was really complimentary about how the genre has offered a platform for a lot of people of color to write and compared to the publishing industry as a whole she was very complimentary about this genre really hosting more diversity in its tracks but when I do think of the really massive franchises that have done really well, like ACOTAR, they are obviously still white women. And I don't know, it's interesting to have that disparity.

I don't really know what I think about it. On the one hand, it does feel very democratic to have internet platforms be a kind of platform for all writers, because then you can have voices that have not been heard in each genre coming to the forefront, building their own audiences and selling books. And then on the other hand, you do look at who rises to the top and it is white conservative women. And even in their fiction, even if it is romping around and women are useful on the battlefield, you will often find marriage is important. Premarital sex sex even in the matter of twilight like they literally cannot have sex because he will kill her so they have to get

married at like 19 18 there's they're having children and it's they're carrying these children to term even though in multiple cases and this is a theme in in a book that i'm reading at the moment having the baby could kill them that's a whole thing in twilight as well and it's like how is kids and marriage and fidelity so key in these fantastical realms it's because they're being written by christian american mothers and in a world where more and more people are right wing where the world looks a lot more right leaning it's just interesting that that genre is parroting and mirroring those views at the very top it's always always the youngness. I always find that so weird that the female heroine is always very virginal, very young. And the man that she falls in love with is more often than not like 800 years old,

but looks really young. They're always like centuries and centuries old. It's so fascinating to me. One thing this reminded me of was, did you see at the end of last year, there was that lawsuit with one influencer claiming that another influencer had stolen her aesthetic and said aesthetic was really really fucking beige I think there is like going to be a whole genre of legalities that come out in the next few years because I don't think we've really seen much of this but can you really claim an

aesthetic when it is the most dominant obvious fucking aesthetic on the internet well this is kind of taking us back a bit to the conversation we had when we were talking about coco mellas and james messiah and her taking his intellectual property but we also moved into that area of like we forget how many times or how often in life we are all absorbing the same information living through the same cultural shifts the same zeitgeist and so quite often we will come to the same conclusions at the same time privately in our own homes and it's just because we're now all connected on the internet that we find out that our original thought isn't our original thought it's like the way that every generation will be saving up this baby name from the age of like 10 or whatever I don't know what age you start thinking of a baby name then you'll

go to start talking to your friends and it turns out that everyone has the same baby name so you're like what the hell has happened and generationally because we're always like reacting to or recovering from I mean the beige furniture thing is just so funny it's not only in other homes exactly the same they're also hideous and also just beige it's like the internet has now bled fully into real life everything we think everything we're doing every industry wants to kind of supercharge themselves via the horrible miracle of the internet at listen to christian on twitter said booktalk has turned publishers into the sheen of book world where it comes from and it's actual writers that paying the price guys these books aren't just trash they're dangerous

and it does feel very like we're all fighting and everyone's mass consuming and it's all very late stage capitalism and it makes me feel very protective and sad for fantasy which is so distinct from romanticy as to they're just such separate genres fantasy has a long history of being an allegory for imperialism and fascism and the good guys and the bad guys and now it's kind of being used as the backdrop to just be shite and I do feel a little bit depressed reading the piece and everyone should read the piece if they have I don't know 40 minutes because it talks about the tiktokification of everything it talks about how everything is literature by numbers now and I'm very protective obviously of writers and writing and literature and reading

and they talk about the way that these books are put together by hordes of writers who are horrible deals and get no royalties someone makes money and it's not the artist and it just leaves a very bad taste it's such a good point about fantasy because very good fantasy is always subversive it's always looking at the cultural political social climate that we're living through and finding ways to tell that story through it makes it simplified so you're reading anything it's just a nice interesting fantastical story then you're going oh my god that's just explained like you said like imperialism or whatever the reason that I then stopped with Akatar was I was really enjoying I was like racing through it and

then the more I was reading it I was like I actually feel a bit unsettled because I'm consuming this in the way that I would binge eat. Like I'm not actually getting anything from it. I'm not really enjoying it. Other books that I enjoy, you like sit with them, you savor them, you're nourishing them, you're coming away and having conversations. I was just inhaling it to get to the next juicy bit. Like it's great book to read in the bath or like if you just really need to get out of your brain. But I actually don't think that's what books are for or should be for all the time I think they're great in small doses but I do think there is something hyper consumist about it that chimes with the rest of the way the world is going with just fast pace immediate serotonin boosting but

ultimately completely lacking in any kind of nutrients. And to end, The Traitors. I mentioned this at the top of last week's episode and I have been gagging to discuss it ever since. So for anyone who has been living inside of a rock, The Traitors is an adventure game show and psychological competition where 22 strangers come together at a Scottish castle, Claudia Winkleman is there, to build a prize fund that only some of them can win.

At the start of the show, some of the contestants are picked as traitors, leaving the rest as faithful. The faithful's job is to figure out who the traitors are and banish them. Stay disguised as faithfuls and stay right to the end of the competition where, if any have remained will steal the entire prize fund throughout the game they also murder a player every night it's amazing it has been quite frankly my reason for living for the last three januaries the uk version has had three series i'm going back and i'm re-watching one and two with my mom it's beautiful this series is just as juicy as it's ever been. I'm totally hooked. I know that you've both watched some or all of it and I've just wanted to discuss this ever since it began. Before we get into it, I should say we are recording this ahead of this week's episode

drop of three new episodes, so we're not going to be totally up to date forgive us what I think we should do is some quick predictions for what we think has happened between recording this and Friday where I think there'll be two more episodes what do you think this week has to offer I'm going to contradict myself it feels obvious that Linda has to go but and I say with this with all due respect I think the faithfuls are so shit at this, I wouldn't put it past them to just turn on each other and eat each other all over again. I am not fully caught up, but I agree about Linda. But there was a really good piece in the Radio Times, which it was titled, The Traitors Three Cast Exposed a Big Problem That Needs Fixing.

And it's basically about how everyone's kind of playing the wrong game like the faithfuls aren't that likable but also the traitors before like we had paul he was universally loved by absolutely everyone so even though we knew that he was such a machiavellian kind of traitor and we were like loving the fact that he was so two-faced and we knew what was going on and maybe the game is too well known which does happen with shows it's like they're kind of all too in on it and playing too fluently in a way that I think is warping how it's working you're right there's a level of self-awareness Charlotte coming in with a fake accent people lying about their jobs all of that kind of stuff that made me bristle at the beginning because I

don't like that self-awareness but saying that there is still a level of naivety that proves that people haven't learned enough like right at the beginning there was that woman who was an academic so she was an expert in communications and you know really put forward that she's gonna be so good at this game and I just thought how can you be so smart but so naive that you telling every single person, their dog and their son, on the first day that you're this person that you won't just be banished? And she was. She was murdered. I wish that people weren't coming in with game plans because it feels less, it feels slightly less authentic. But saying that these game plans aren't working,

Charlotte's accent hasn't done anything for her. all the people who are meant to be the smartest left week one and week two so yeah I do think I really want Mina to win because Mina's playing a fucking good game 100% can we talk about the bloody accent because honestly it's the funniest thing I just cannot what on earth I it's so funny like what she say that she think I get it like Welsh accent is really friendly and she is good at her welsh accent and if i had to pick an accent to do it would be welsh but it is just the most random especially because she's not a traitor it just it's i i'm obsessed to be honest it's it is a behavior but the very first traitor in serious one was was a welsh woman so i just don't think you want to be putting that into people's brains you'll just think of Amanda I love that she's doing though it it's a level of sort of theatrics that only Linda actually can match the way her head spun around when Claudia said the traitors the way

that she's like who's gonna come next like I saw the BBC put up a billboard in I don't know where it is Times Square no what's our one I think it's piccadilly circus or something with like the award for like best theatrics in the traitors with her face there so funny and i think the pr of this has been really funny the contestants themselves are quite joyless and i think it's because of what you're both saying they're coming in with a level of awareness and a level of gameplay strategy that they've forgotten to have fun and that's why I would love Mina to win maybe with Fosia I know that she's not a traitor that we know of I would love Fosia to win Fosia and Mina yeah they're the only ones giving me some fucking joy in this game you're so right there's never been this many tears I've seen quite a few publications pick up on this I know

Grazia wrote about it it is just like so many faithfuls breaking down at the round table and I only saw series two I never saw series one but you really just felt like this isn't that serious it's serious but it's not that serious with this series I feel like I'm getting traumatized looking at how they're turning on certain people when they turned on Kaz and it became really fucking personal and they were like oh you're a doctor by day killing by night you just have this smirk about you you have this like sparkle in your eye it's so savage in a way that it's never been and they're really taking away the silliness and really making it quite high stakes in a way that I don't know if I if it is like this next series I think I would get quite uncomfortable there was a really interesting conversation between Jake and is it Dan after the the challenge where

they had to do the ring of fire and Jake gets really upset because he gets off with Charlotte and they sit on that first podium and he comes in he's like look I feel really hurt because it wasn't a team player and Dan just replies to him like I don't know what game you think you're playing but it's not and I thought that was such an interesting human thing because it was so sweet that Jake was like we're meant to be all playing the same game and I do enjoy those pockets of sort of looking at the way that people react and that is why it's such a clever good game because you there really are kind of two types of people the traitors and the faithfuls people that are even if they're faithful still people that are able to be part of a team but also understand that they're going out for themselves and people

that are just bonded to community and being on a team I always find that really funny I've seen the wrestlers entertainment Richard Osman say that the game is quite flawed in the way that all the smartest people are ejected in the first few weeks and you're left with the people who like brazenly have no gameplay openly are the quietest if you are really smart you'll be quiet tactically as a faithful if you're not then you're like booted out and I don't know what you guys think about that because I can see both sides I really wish that academic who was an expert in communications had stuck around she would have been really interesting but she ruined it for herself and also I remember with series two I can't remember her name now and I don't mean this with any disrespect but she was one of the quietest

people and she was in the final Molly Molly that's it and she was lovely absolutely lovely but I think it does have a flaw in the system where some of the most interesting characters don't make it very far yeah it's definitely it's personality definitely a popularity contest as well it really shows how easily led a lot of people are and how easily people are riled in a situation where and i would be too essentially they're being called a liar and they're not and it takes them out of the gameplay because it becomes they find it very personal sometimes it is personal and you mentioned Kaz earlier and I totally agree if it took me out of the game I thought I'm not enjoying watching this I kind of can't believe that it went down the way it did like he was isolated to the point where he would walk in a room and people would

stop talking he said at the round table look like no one wants to spend time with me and Fosie at that point when guys and she'd just come in after being in a cage and she nailed it she was like people are making this puzzle and that is not nice I think that is a real shame because and you should watch the first series they go at each other's throats but they do seem to be having loads and loads of fun and I will say of this series it's not as fun in the interactions and a lot of people said that it seemed like there was some unconscious bias going on. There's been a few other conversations. I think we talked about this last year about Ant being perhaps targeted because of his race. It's inconclusive, but a lot of people are watching the dynamics and going,

okay, this is a South Asian man. The optics of this look really bad. It shouldn't have got to that point where it looks like bullying, where he has to sit by himself in the castle. I found it really sad, to be honest. And it's just not, I think, what was magic or can be magic about a game like this, where a bunch of strangers come together for a kind of shared goal. And it's like a murder mystery. It's very fun. It's lacking that a little bit bit I guess it just shows that herd mentality works and that if you've got people that are willing to kind of act in that way then people will follow that lead whereas if you've got a camaraderie people going no actually we shouldn't be acting

like that then that'll be swayed and so it's easy it I mean the whole the kind of like psychoanalysis concept of it is really fascinating but it is really distressing when things like that happen I really just I I don't think I could be a traitor because not only would I have one glass champagne and drag someone into the loo with me and be like I'm a traitor on the first night I just I would have been Linda my head would have turned around I would have looked up I just think and also as a faithful as well I think I'm so loud that they'd be like oh she's obviously really nervous or like she's just I would be out I'd be out you know when they get rid of two people before it even starts up with me I would be absolutely shit at being a traitor I'd be so

fucking shit I know I know I cannot do it I know this from having played this game with my friends who I've known for a decade plus I was a faithful turns out my friend who's a traitor led like a group of three people to turn on me and I just lost it I completely lost it like I literally went upstairs to cry I would be so upset and angry because I just hate being called a liar if I'm not I would be around that round table I'd be dashing my chalk at people they would have to take me out of there in a straight jacket I just would not tolerate it or I would do that and I would have a breakdown and they'd still have to take me out of there in a straight jacket I can actually see now why they aren't having fun it's probably not very fun

at all also can they fucking learn how to spell each other's names it's pissing me off like they never ever get it right what is that it's so funny funny you say that richard i could definitely be a traitor with my friends because i'm not afraid to lie and manipulate with my friends but i would be really worried with people i don't know because i really would want them to i'm such a people pleaser so i'd be so self-conscious about i would just be watching myself too much with my mates i'd known forever i could lie to those bastards a good sign do you know apparently the u.s traitors which is airing alongside this one with celebrities is very good bob the drag queen is on it and i think one of the one of the twaters one of the traitors and is systematically voting

off all of their cast of who have been in like various real housewives things and people are like that's crazy what you're doing it's very shakespearean i want to watch that one when this one is finished because i love bob also chruchel is in it and i think hopefully we become so famous they ask us to go on it oh my god how did i forget tom sandoval's in it there's pictures of him like literally sweating through his shirt and somebody was like he's not used to being faithful oh my god also really obvious point but i'm just obsessed with claudia winkelman looking like a raven just like stomping through the castle her friend it's her birthday this week i just love her so good oh my god when she was on those shoulders she was wearing fluffy fairy boots and like a fairy jacket she called them her sons and they're just these like

masked hunky men i would love to be her i probably won't be because i don't really like having a fringe but i would just adore to be like her. If no one's, if you haven't listened to her off-menu episode yet, you need to listen to it because I already loved her, but I fell in love with her a million times over. I've never cackled so much in my life. She's amazing. Immediate download after this.

Thank you. Thanks so much for listening this week. If you've've enjoyed the podcast please do leave us a rating or if you really want to spoil us a review on your podcast app five stars is preferred thank you please also follow us on instagram and tiktok at everything is content pod see you next week bye