The Rest Is Entertainment - Auditions, Adaptations and Law Suits

Episode Date: May 22, 2024

Do all actors have to audition and what is the modern audition process? How do you translate a book to a film or even a theatre production? Can it be a simple copy and paste? Plus how do shows such as Mr Bates vs. The Post Office avoid law suits from those that are shown in what could be described as, an unfavourable light? Those questions and more tackled by Richard and Marina on The Rest Is Entertainment. Twitter: @restisents Instagram: @restisentertainment YouTube: @therestisentertainment Email: [e-mail] Producers: Neil Fearn + Joey McCarthy Executive Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/trie It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to another edition of the Rest is Entertainment questions episode. The Rest is Entertainment questions episode. It's traditional for me to absolutely monster this introduction. Welcome, and you are? I'm, oh sorry, I'm very nice. There we go. I'm Rich Dosman, hello. Welcome to the Questions and Answers edition. Yeah. Now Sam Noble writes, with the news that the wonderful Inside Number Nine,

yes, I agree with you, Sam, is moving to the West End, as writers, how difficult is it to move a TV show, book, play, film, et cetera, into another medium? Should we focus on theater, because that's what Inside Number Nine are doing? Yes, and we spoke a tiny bit about it, didn't we, where you did it as a recommendation. Yeah, that will work amazingly,

and many of them almost have, in fact, they have done a live bit about it, didn't you? You did it as a recommendation. Yeah, that will work amazingly. And many of them almost have that. In fact, they have done a live version on TV, which I always love those kind of, absolutely high wire acts of trying to do the whole thing on TV. But I believe someone else is doing an adaptation or a skew on. Yes, yeah, we're gonna do, well,

we started working on a Thursday Murder Club adaptation for the theater. So yes, it's a good question and I think the question about whether you can adapt things. So you get something like Curious Incident of the Dog and the Night Time, which became one of the biggest grossing plays anywhere in the world. And it's that understanding, I think, of who your audience is. So there's a visual thing, which is, you know, you're stuck on a stage. There's the idea of course in a theatre production that you can't suddenly go from a living

room to a car chase to a helicopter chase to a graveside, you know, you have to cut your cloth accordingly. But I think for most creatives, I think actually they rather enjoy that. Now Inside No. 9 is interesting because they do lots of what we would call bottle episodes and a bottle episode is you just got your two main cast members on one set. The one from last week on Inside Number 9 was a bottle episode. It's essentially just set in one house in just recent steam. The first episode was set in one tube carriage. Yes. So they're very, very used to that. They have a stage that they can use. And also, they're such geniuses. They'll subvert it and do all sorts of weird things that you're totally not expecting. Well, that's the thing.

I think as soon as you go into another medium, if you do Thursday Middle Club as a book, okay, I understand what it is to be a reader or you'll listen to it on audiobook. I understand the intimacy of that. I understand that you can go back and recheck things. I understand that you can put it down and pick it up again the next day.

You understand how somebody reads. In the same way that if you're making a quiz show on TV, you understand that people are sitting at home with their family. They're not always concentrating the whole time, but if they are, they want to interact. They want to talk to their family about what they're seeing. They want to answer questions.

So you understand exactly why and how somebody is consuming what it is that you're doing. And in the theatre, again, it's that idea of you have to get inside the feeling of somebody who's come down to London or to a regional theatre on the train, who's had a bit of dinner beforehand, who's now sitting and there's going, oh, someone a bit taller than them in front of them. But just that excitement. You are putting on a show quite literally. It's an event.

It's much more of an event. The second you understand that you start thinking about your raw material, if it's inside number nine, or if it's Thursday murder club, you start thinking about it in those terms is how do people want to see that what's the first image they need to see, what feeling do they want? And for most creators, I think most writers that is not something that frightens them something that excites them yeah you know that's an that's incredibly if you've got something I'll just talk about Thursday Motor Club because I can

think about it from my own experience I know what the material is I know who the characters are the idea it's a different version of it. That's the fun. Exactly. And so, you know, the adaptation has to go through the lens of being in the theatre. Lots of smaller things, you know, it has to be an hour first half, there has to be an interval because that's how theatres pay for things. And then there has to be a slightly shorter second half. But you know, that's not a million miles different to a movie. It's very different to a book.

But I think by and large when you adapt things and change them into a different medium, the technical thing is interesting, but there's a million great theatre producers and I'm doing the Thursday Medical Live adaptation with a brilliant writer called Tom Basden. So you have people who know what they're doing and directors who know what they're doing. But honestly I think the key and it'd be inside number nine would do this brilliantly is understanding you have a live audience and there's a totally different there's an electricity and there's a crackle i should say that every contract i've signed every tv contract at the end it takes so long to you way long ago started writing by the way before you ever get these deals signed and that's completely normal

but there is always a long period where you're like what what if this becomes a stage musical and you're always thinking okay this is never gonna become a play or a stage musical but lots of things actually do. Yeah. All sorts of things you might not expect so it is... Bake off. Bake off. Over the musical of? Yes it's what it's worth going all the way down to the bottom and of the contract and and making sure because it will look after you if it does become... It's interesting on the on the Thursday murder club one exactly that contract thing and because we're doing the movie because it will look after you if it does become. It's interesting, on the Thursday Murder Club one, exactly that contract thing,

and because we're doing the movie with Amblin, which is Steven Spielberg's company, and then we started talking about doing a theater adaptation a bit after that. And if you buy the movie rights, you have certain other rights as well. And so they were saying, well, look, if you are gonna do theater production,

then I'm afraid we're gonna have to put our foot down and say that Amblin and Steven Spielberg have to be involved. And we're like, yeah, that's okay. Listen, we're not going to play hardball. If Steven Spielberg wants to put some money into this. Oh, he wants to be involved, does he? Okay. He is very, very welcome. So that's a very, very early stages, me and Tom are just sitting down and thinking about it and talking about it at the moment. More on that kind of next year, I suspect. But in general, the idea that if,

as we're talking about the boys from Inside Number Nine, the work, insane amount of work they put into that program and the insane amount of imagination they put into that program and the difficulty of filming, the idea that they could put together a stage show which could then run for the next 10 years and delight people everywhere and bring them, you know them money as well for the next 10 years, I think is great. But just the idea of entertaining a live audience for a writer, I think is very, very exciting.

Yes. And others have crossed the other way, the play that goes wrong, which is very successful. They've had all sorts of spin-offs. And they then took it to TV and they had two seasons with the BBC, which was sort of hilarious because the whole point of it's so low budget. When they first started, I think they actually started in the kind of maybe a theatre above a pub. And then it ended up going to West End and it was hugely popular. Yeah. But when it was on TV, I mean, they actually had, some of the sets were hilarious because they had thought, what,

we can have this, we can have some money. We can have a tiny courtroom, an absolute tiny courtroom that no one can get in Yes, we'll have that please but that again you have to think completely differently and they did have a TV studio audience But that again is a slightly different thing and they had to sort of bring that in and make that part of the narrative Of the story and that's the thing because that's why it's such a good question Sam because you immediately go well This why don't we just film the theater thing and just put that on TV. And the thing is people are watching these things in different ways, and people are feeling them emotionally in different ways. And you very, very quickly work out that the medium is incredibly important and that you can have fun with the medium

and change things around. I haven't seen the stranger things play yet, which is supposed to be terrific. Yeah, I really want to see that. I haven't seen it. But again, you can imagine the kind of issues you have with turning something like Stranger Things into a play and apparently they've done it in an absolutely brilliant way. And obviously The Cursed Child has been hugely like just a sort of mega hit. And again, that's the idea of saying, well, do you adapt the book or do you do something entirely new, which they do and you bring in someone like Jack Thorne who's a genius and John Tiffany yeah and you cut your

cloth according to what you're doing you have to look at all these mediums as completely different things movies entirely different to the book theater is entirely different to the movie and when we eventually do Thursday Murder Club the musical that'll be different too. The endless murder verse. The endless murder verse. Trademark. Here's a question for you Marina from Don Ferris. We've got a very similar question from Jordan Rodway.

Actually so Jordan Rodway and Don Ferris. Okay we've got a dual question. Ferris and Rodway. They were like the Hollandosier Holland of the 70, weren't they? A lot of Motown hits. Or maybe they're like Buddy Cops, Ferris and Rodway. You know what? At the start you think they're not going to get along. And at the end they save each other. Ferris has just had enough of Rodway's nonsense, hasn't he, at the beginning? Because Rodway doesn't play by the rules.

No, he doesn't. I wish that he would. And Ferris, you know, he likes to please the DA, but Rod, oh my God, he's an absolute liar. They're going to get their asses busted all the way back down to traffic duty. Exactly. Anyway, so this is Ferris's version of the question, much more straight-laced. Rodway's version of the question is like crazy. And he's like, he's got two guns in his hand as he's asking. But this is Ferris's version of the question. He's going to have to turn in both guns and both badges. Ferris says, sir, respectfully, he doesn't say that at all. Don says, when a movie shows a photograph of someone who is not in the movie, does that person get paid? I saw a trailer recently for the new Exorcist movie, there was a photograph of Linda Blair, would she get paid?

Aha, okay, this is really nothing to do. And brackets, by the way, the DA is really busting my ass on this one. Aha, okay, this is really nothing to do with. Brackets, by the way, the DA is really busting my ass on this one. Okay, the short answer and also to Jordan's question is that it obviously it depends on the contract. If they haven't got the contract, and quite often they don't have the contract properties of nailed down, basically what you do is you own the rights to the character and pass, say, episodes or whatever. So if they've got a still from the, I imagine if you're losing using a picture of Linda Blair it's not necessarily one of her with her head

spinning around or whatever. So you're, if you're trying to just do oh it's a sad family album thing then you might have to pay her again and the Screen Actors Guild was certainly trying to get you paid. There was a thing in The Grey's Anatomy where there was this guy, Isaiah Washington, who's in the early series and he was fired for being homophobic to another cast member. And then in order to sort of explain what had happened to the character,

they showed a picture of him in a local newspaper saying he'd won a prestigious surgeon's award and therefore had to go away. And I think he sued them. If they'd used a still from the show or anything that had been pictured in the show, they would have got away with that. But equally, they don't always do that.

Now, on something I worked on, they wanted a sort of almost like a pub scene but it was just gonna be playing in the background on someone's phone and someone just said, oh, I could just take my iPhone into a pub and just, you know, and the executive producer's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, unless you're getting the back of everyone's head. If one person sees their

face on that, because now people freeze frame on everything. And then they're like, hi, can you please pay me for being in the show? You have to be so careful because of freeze framing. It's a big thing. God, on the thing we would, I've been working on recently, an actor was just going to be waving a bit of script around and me and my friend wrote two pages of script just in case anyone actually. Oh no, so actor was just going to be waving a bit of script around and me and my friend wrote two pages of script just in case anyone actually... Oh no, so it was, yeah, yeah. It's true, there's a brilliant Adam Harry on Twitter who does football cliches. He's incredibly great.

If there's ever footage of a football match in the background of a thing, which sometimes there are, and by the way, you'll always get the cheap, it'd be something from a library somewhere. It won't be Man City winning the league, it'll be some sort of obscure match from 1991 and he sort of goes into the footage, finds out what he goes, oh this is like England under 17s against Chile under 17s in the Toulon tournament in like 1983 just by looking at the kind of the kit and the badges

and stuff like that. Yeah, there's a story, Jonah Hill in 22 Jump Street, they need like an old picture of him, which you often see in shows, which is old pictures of you. And he had a picture from his high school graduation and shooting it and using it. They go, hold on, do we definitely have the rights

to this picture? And he goes, yeah, well, it's my mom's picture. She's paid for it. They go, yeah, but she doesn't own the rights to the picture. The rights are owned by the guy who shot your high school. So suddenly they have to go and find the guy who shot Joni Hill's high school photograph and get the rights off him. You can see why what happens often on productions is they will get people in and they'll pay

you to be in a photograph because otherwise it just becomes this huge can of worms. And also, rightly so, if you take a photograph it belongs to you and you should get paid for it. And that's the idea. If I run the one show and they did a picture of you as a kid, they literally have to email your mom. So they don't email my mom and say, can we use this? And you have to waive all rights for what?

And she's like, oh, of course I'll waive all rights. But if it's taken by- Why doesn't she play hardball with The One Show? I would love it if she did. Really good idea, isn't it? Tell her next time, give her a script. Yeah, and then I go- This is how you do it.

Yeah, and they'll say, do you know what? your Auntie Jan has used one of hers and she undercut you so I'm afraid you lost your money but yeah anything that's even a tiny bit in the background, a snippet of music, a snippet of television, whatever it is, someone has got permission for that often they've had to pay for permission for it as well but there is nothing that appears on screen that a lawyer hasn't said do you definitely own the rights to to show this. And if they haven't and they've had to pay for permission for it as well. But there is nothing that appears on screen that a lawyer hasn't said, do you definitely own the rights to show this? And if they haven't, then that lawyer's in a lot of trouble.

There's things like if you say a line from a song, it's all right, but if you sing it, it can cost like just really quickly $50,000. Just to sing one line from a chorus that someone might be to be using in a line of dialogue. If you say it without the intonation of the singer without specific emphasis then okay you might just get away with it but otherwise you're paying $50,000 at least yeah same on House of Games it's so obviously if you have a question about a

song you know if it's songs about a final countdown there's someone might sing the final count as their answer and you go I'm so we just might have to get you just to say it's the final countdown because otherwise it's going to cost us more than the show yes more cost us more than the show Yes more than literally more than the show, which again is fair enough. You know, it's uh, it's uh, it's So if we were to start singing the final countdown now it would genuinely cost goal hanger an absolute fortune They'd be furious. Yeah, and I imagine we'd be paying It's worth it's worth thinking about don't I think you'd have actually just sung a little bit of it.

I don't think I sang a little bit. I think I intoned it. That's better. But even if people at home, actually if people at home, can you just for the next three seconds sing the final countdown for us starting now? Thank you. Yes, that was great. You've got one over on Europe.

Yeah, unlucky Europe. I hope that now that our listeners are not like sent a bill by Europe solicitors. Singing it in their own houses. Yeah, exactly. If that happens, we will fight for you. Will we? I mean, can we not take... I'm taking on Europe. I will personally go to court for people's right to sing the final countdown on their own in their own house. I've taken on Europe before. I'll do it again. practicing the final countdown in their own house. I've taken on Europe before, I'll do it again. Here is one from Andrew Day, Richard. Is there a difference between reading for

and auditioning for a part? Ah, there isn't, but both of those things are, it's an interesting world as the husband of an actor. The whole world of auditioning is absolutely insane. I mean, all actors do it, and it's an uncomfortable place to be of course and it used to be that you would go to a rehearsal room somewhere in London and you know ten actors would come in and the director

be sitting there the casting director as well. This is what people imagine auditions are like. If you've ever seen one on TV this is what you think an audition is. You know you'll walk in you'll have you've learnt your lines that the people be sitting there go okay just and you'll go through it once and then the director will say or maybe we'll try it like this and you know you do that. What a period piece. What a period piece because now almost all auditions are what they call self tapes so it's saying to actors in the old days you could come into a room you could get

some eye contact you could chat away You know you could show a bit of your personality you do a read you could the director can then say oh Why don't you try it like this so you could do another read you can show what you've got now You are responsible for Filming yourself for lighting yourself for editing yourself You also you don't really get to do a second take where the director says, oh, that's interesting. We thought maybe we could do it a bit more

with lightness of touch, and then you show what you can do. You have to work out, what's the take that's best going to represent me here? So you have to do that. You have to find someone to read in with you. So in a scene, it's almost always a two-hander, and if you're in a room, the director or the casting director more often will read in the other

Lines and you'll react off them. So you have to find somebody reads In so I always Read in with Ingrid and I do the other parts and I love that you do that. I get into it Somebody was telling me once about hearing Joelle when the actor read and thinking I know it was Taylor doing the other Taylor Swift when they Were going out I know it was her doing the thing. She's off-camera, but I know it was Taylor doing the other Taylor Swift when they were going out each other. I know it was her doing the thing, she's off camera, but I know it was her doing the. That's cool, sometimes Ingrid will say to me, you don't have to do the accent. You can be, you're supposed to be quite monotone

as the reader. But we always want your American accent in anything, so I hope it's anything American. I hope we hear you. For sure. And so everything is now on the actor. Everything is now on the actor. And of course also, because everything is on the actor, they can now on the actor and of course also because everything is on the actor they can now audition 40 people

instead of 10 people and you know there's various filters they go through and a lot of actors are thinking I don't think the directors even seeing this so you're putting yourself through all of this which is hard to do. Yeah there's an agent actually told me quite recently that they think it's it's becoming really some unscrupulous agents, when their clients are saying, sorry, why didn't I read for that? I would have been great for that. Why didn't I read? So they know that their clients are going to say that. So they get them to do these self-tapes and then it never, yeah, this is now becoming a sort of thing

that some people think others are doing. So you can say, well, you did do it, but you didn't get it. And then there are some people for whom you would have something called offer only where they don't have to do this. Which is like Tom Cruise but you know it's funny I was we had Phil Daniels on a show the other day and I was talking to Phil Daniels and I was saying you're not surely you're not doing self tapes I mean you either know what Phil Daniels does yeah or you don't right and Neil Morrissey they self tape for stuff and you know they send this stuff off and they don't hear you you know, just big, big names, self taping, editing themselves, sending off.

And by the way, you've got to learn all the lines. Yeah. You've got to, it's all got to be, and you might do so many of these, as you say, because it's made it so much easier. People do many more than they would have done in terms of the old style of auditions. And it's all monologues almost, because they want you to see as much as what you, you know, they don't really want to, no offence to you Richard, but they don't, they're not auditioning you. So they want to, do they?

Yeah, well, if you'd only creep out from behind the camera. I often, whenever she gets a part, I always go, and what did they think of the air traffic controller in the background? Were they interested in that? I think it's psychologically quite a difficult thing to do, and technically a difficult thing to do. So I think actors are fighting back against it, and equity are as well.

And I absolutely get, by the way, why casting directors do it, and why directors do it. It makes a lot of sense economically, and it makes a lot of sense, but I think that it's changing a little bit. And Ingrid, especially, is back in rooms a bit more now. Acting is reacting, acting is being in a room with someone, acting is talking. And so I think it's changing a bit, but certainly Acting is reacting, acting is being in a room with someone, acting is talking.

And so I think it's changing a bit, but certainly I think if you talk to most actors, what's the worst part of their job? Though auditioning has always been the worst part of the job, but we all do job interviews, that's hard, but having to literally do that to yourself all the time in what's supposed to be a creative endeavor, I think has been very, very difficult for people.

Shall we now go to a break? Flight 743 to Malaga you are clear for landing on runway 4. I mean that's good. Welcome back everybody more questions and answers? Certainly more questions and answers. Now this has come to me on Twitter but but actually a lot of people asked me this recently, so I'm just going to read it out. Anna G said, "'Absolutely baffling how there have been so many technological advances in the last 50 years.

The stuff that human race has invented is incredible. Why are satellite delays for live broadcasts painfully slow?' This is a question that a lot of people ask, and it's been a big problem in things like sport with gambling and things like that because obviously if you can bet on, I don't know, corners or things like that, then the time matters. But official terms of this is called latency. Latency is the difference between something happening and you seeing that thing happening on screen.

The latency is almost nothing on the old TV signal that came through aerial or on like analog FM radio. But when it's on streaming, everything is broken up into chunks and they're in like, this is so technical. Most streams are in like 10 second chunks and the streamer needs three of those chunks to start. So that's a 30 second delay right there. And then sometimes if it needs transcoding,

this is adding to it all, people find it very annoying things like Eurovision or anything where they wanted to like watch the TV and listen to the radio commentary, which is what some people still like to do. Or read online comments at the same time. Yeah, and they just can't feel that they can't, so in a second screen world where people wanted to be doing yet another thing at the same time, this is quite annoying, but it sometimes has to go all the way up to the satellite, which is 25,000 miles and then come all the way back down. People are saying, well, what about Zoom? Because, Mike, there's no delay on my Zoom call.

It's like, yeah, but you don't want to watch TV at Zoom quality. Okay, that's shit. It's good for what it does. It's good for what it does. People accept lower latency in a Zoom call. We're not anti-Zoom. No, I'm not anti-Zoom. It's not sponsored. There's not an anti-Zoom rant. If you wanted to sponsor, you could. And, yes, so people will accept lower latency in something like video calls because you don't really care about the quality and in my case

I would like it to look very very jerky and so you can hardly see me in shot or else be shot on the $70 million lighting budget neither of which are apparently one or the other because you get that thing that you sometimes like during a World Cup when People in the house next to you or the flat below you have a different stream Yeah to you like a lower latency stream you hear them cheering a goal it's like five seconds before it happens on you you're like no. I'm not saying the old ways are best but if you do actually want no latency getting it through your TV aerial or analog radio. So is that the thing so literally the lowest latency you can get? It's almost nothing on those things, but because it's broken up into these chunks and they

need like one on, one on waiting and one, then it's always going to be behind. And sometimes really quite significantly behind. Streaming puts the late into latency. But we must, yeah, between us we must be able to get those chunks, but I mean come on. You're always trying to get us to invent something in the show. Last week it was a conversion device for using the gym to power the national grid. Oh, I did that by the way. Oh you did it, great. You can just bring it in next week and have a look. And this one is to get rid of latency. Just do like fixed

streaming. I'm seeing a grey silver box with lights flashing. Yeah. And you plug it into one of the... You're a very aesthetic inventor aren't you? It's very much about the look of the thing. It's the key. And then you plug it into, there's a whole bunch of things at the back of your telly and there's always one phrase. Just plug it into that. What do I call it? I call it goodbye latency. Bring it in next week and we'll take a look at what you've come up with. This is a good one from Roz Clark about book genres. I've often heard it said that in the US, romance fiction makes up about 50% of the publishing industry, but in the UK, romance

doesn't even exist as a genre in its own right, but gets lumped in with chick-lit or women's fiction. How does mystery match up to thriller or science fiction to fantasy? The basic answer I mean you know romance whatever label you want to put it under is absolutely huge in the US and the UK and it's got bigger and bigger in the last few years and romanticy and which we talked about which we talked about all that kind of stuff and Colleen Hoover but the biggest genre in the US and the UK is crime mystery and thriller that's where and it's which makes up about 25% of the market and that's the last I think the last figures I think we're still just waiting on last year's

figures still to come out but so but 2022. Yes a crime and thriller is the biggest market. Thank you, everybody. I was about to say, I can't believe you find yourself in that. And then romance is just behind and literary fiction is really, really a very, very small fraction of the book market without those two, drivers, which are crime thriller and romance, then bookshops would be in a lot of trouble. Of course, you've got non-fiction is in an entirely different world. But yeah, those two genres are huge.

Sci-fi is very, very big sci-fi and fantasy. I say a lot of that has started crossing over with romance, which is why it's quite hard to really say. Categorize them. Exactly, and there's a lot of sci-fi crime things as well. yeah if you took out genre fiction as they like to call it there would not be a particularly big book trade left but yeah genre fiction everything that isn't literary fiction yes so genre fiction is the stuff you can be sniffy about and say oh it's just a it's a crime thing isn't it oh it's just oh it's an airport thriller just keeping the lights on don't worry

about it just keeping the industry's lights on. All we're doing is just entertaining people. I'm so sorry. Just giving people something they want to read. Ooh, that's awkward. My next one is a meditation on loss. I promise you in 15th century Prague. I promise you it is. But yeah, so genre fiction. And of course, like in everything, the stuff that gets called genre fiction is some of that, you know Ian Rankin is a genre fiction writer and is one of the greatest authors we have I mean as John le Carre was Genre fiction, you know what I mean? Probably Patricia Highsmith was back in her day But yeah, it's it's crime is number one then romance then this sort of sci-fi thing

But I think if you add sci-fi and romance together leading into each other. Yeah. They're bleeding into each other. Yeah. I think we'll probably overtake crime. Gosh, that's interesting. Yeah. But crime pays. Hannah Calburn has a question. Her question is, really enjoyed the chat about baby reindeer ethics. I don't understand, though, how this applies to drama shows that openly identify real people and cast them in a villainous light, e.g. Mr Bates versus the post office where various people are seen in a villainous light, Scoop the Crown etc. Can you discuss? It's pretty difficult and actually when even though some people they will have bought up a book in most cases, to say they might have bought up Alan Bates's book for the for the post office drama but Gwyneth

Hughes the writer there, I remember thinking, God, she would have had a really tough one because Paula Venals, who is the CEO of the post office, is going to appear Wednesday this week at the inquiry. And we don't know what will happen after the inquiry, but clearly any of these things could be regarded as potentially incriminating. They were fortunate with her in that she had made some committee. I'm going to talk about her just a little bit because she'd made some committee appearances, so they were able to use those. As a general rule, if it's been in a book, then it has been fact-checked and legaled,

and it's in the public domain. You're pre-covered. Sort of. You could say to them, well, if you didn't agree with it, why didn't you see the book? But there is obviously something so much more high-profile about a TV drama than there is about a book because a lot more people are gonna see it. There's this show that I still want to do that has a lot of real people in it. The Jocko Brothers story. But it would be a comedy drama and nobody in this thing that I still really want to write would be

accused of being anything more than a bit of an asshole. But I mean I had such long conversations with a lawyer about like how we would have to do this. And I was left in no doubt really about the scale of the task, it's doable, but it's really tricky. Something like the crown, that's a very unique situation because they're not going to sue. Once they open that can of worms, the Royal Family,

they can't get into it. I'm sure they think that lots of things are complete misrepresentations or complete fantasy because obviously it is a drama. So would that have been their basic starting position there? Because normally with lawyers you say, well look, Tom Crease is not going to sue us. And they go, it doesn't matter, he might do. But on that they thought there is stuff here that you could get in trouble for.

Well I think there's lots in the crown that you could get in trouble for. But on the balance of probabilities you have to say, is the first time the royal family ever going to sue, is it going to be us? And it hasn't been. Having said that, Netflix have been sued, and I don't know whether the person who's been identified as the real Martha, she says she is going to sue Netflix and maybe she'll have a case. There are a lot of people suing as we've discussed before,

inventing Anna that one, the supporting characters can end up suing. It's harder to sue in the US, but definitely for baby Rondia, I don't know whether she'll have a case at all. I mean, it's hard to know whether she'll, you know, libel depends on someone having a reputation to defend and whether or not you think that the person who's accused of being the real life martyr has a reputation to defend, I don't know. But certainly she has got it, she will, it's possible for her to bring a case. It's possible for Paula Vennells, the CEO of the post office, to have sued ITV over how she was portrayed and therefore they were extremely careful and you can see actually

if you go back and the people who might emerge as the villains and might emerge as the real life villains out of that particular story that you will see that they've been so careful about their public pronouncements and they if you're trying to filter the drama really through the victims of it many of whom you will have paid for their stories. So if we go back and watch Mr. Bates versus the post office, it's interesting to say that because the feeling you get at the end is of Paula Venos as the villain of the piece. But in terms of what she's saying, everything that she's saying, there's either something she said herself or something actually fairly non-committal in a scene and actually because of what's around it, the scene before it and the scene afterwards she's cast in that light but actually they're not actually saying that she did something

or say something. It's very carefully, it's incredibly painstaking and the sense of the impact of some of the things you might sense it's through the prism of the victims. It's not a sleight of hand because that makes it sound like a trick and it isn't but it's a way of telling those stories and of explaining what happened, but without actually libeling potentially or interfering with eventual criminal trial if there end up being any charges brought after this, which is not at all clear. So I think that's us done.

Please keep sending in your questions. The rest is entertainment at gmail.com. Yeah, but anything you want, specific shows, little TV secrets, film secrets, anything you like or just opinions Yes, our opinions on things. Yes, all of them because I love a list and Marina hates the list So if you want like top three top three anything just ask because that would be Three top threes of everything Marina the questions been asked

Lot of people want to know I'm duty bound to create a top three. Okay fine. Your favorite three cartoon mice. And we will see you all next Tuesday. See you next Tuesday. Let me know that you love me