The Rest Is Entertainment - Bad Bunny, Bondage & Dragon Sex

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

Why did Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance rile MAGA up? Who’s to blame for the bloodbath at the Washington Post? And why do all the spiciest TV shows feature a cottage? Richard Osman and Marina Hyde discuss female desire on screen, why film studios have been slow to capitalise on it, and what they’d title a gay hockey romance. Bad Bunny’s halftime Super Bowl show angered Trump, but what does it tell us about the NFL’s plan to draw in new viewers? The publisher of the Washington Post has stepped down - what does this tell us about Jeff Bezos’s plans for his media empire? And should you ever fire someone over Zoom? The Rest is Entertainment is brought to you by Octopus Energy, Britain's most awarded energy supplier. Join The Rest Is Entertainment Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus content, ad-free listening, early access to Q&A episodes, access to our newsletter archive, discounted book prices with our partners at Coles Books, early ticket access to live events, and access to our chat community. Sign up directly at therestisentertainment.com For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Video Editor: Joey McCarthy & Adam Thornton Assistant Producer: Imee Marriott Senior Producer: Joey McCarthy Social Producer: Bex Tyrrell Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by our friends at Octopus Energy. Some people in the entertainment industry are successful, but a much, much smaller number are genuinely admired. I was trying to think in TV, who everyone likes. I mean, Attenborough. In movies, Julia, Merrill, you will not hear a bad word said about any of those people. But there are actually very few that no one is rude about behind their back. But those two are certainly two of them. Can I tell you about a company that no one is rude about behind their back and that people admire?

Would it shock you to learn, it is our friends at Octopus Energy. Octopus Energy has ended up being named Britain's most admired company, 2025. That's nice. That's really nice, isn't it? I'm sure companies are like Hollywood, just absolutely vicious behind each other's backs. But to actually be elected, most admired, it's pretty good. All the other companies just sitting around going, should I tell you I met the other day? Octopus Energy, actually, you know what?

lovely bunch really really lovely bunch all of them the most admired company in the UK 2025 which is why we're very very happy that they are our sponsors hello and welcome to this episode of the resters entertainment with me marina hi and me richard osman hi marina hello richard how are you yeah i'm okay do you have a nice week a nice weekend i'm doing a lot of work at the moment oh no oh my god are you okay yeah i'm you know struggling through my struggle we don't worry we won't be talking about we won't be talking about my struggle today. Okay, that's good news. What are we talking about today, though? We're talking about female desire, Richard. No, but actually. Wow. Which is very much my struggle. We're talking about female desire across all the entertainment industries and the sort of slowness

of the realisation that there might be billions and billions of dollars in us. Yeah. Yeah. There's money in hotness. There might be as much money in it as male desire. Who would have thought? Okay, that's crazy talk, but we'll get there in a minute. We're also inevitably going to be talking about the Super Bowl bad bunnies half-time show, which I thought was amazing, and a little bit about, which has a slight Super Bowl angle attached to it, so I'm going to shoehorn it in what's happening at the Washington Post. Oh, great. That segue I look forward to you very much indeed. I mean, listen, the subject is always this on this podcast, but shall we talk about female desire?

Yeah. Yeah. Running like a golden thread through this podcast. But female desire is strangely beginning to having a moment across lots of different industries, entertainment industries. But I do think there has been a sort of cross-entertainment failure to appreciate or a slowness in appreciating that female desire is good business. Yeah. The female gaze pays. Yeah.

I think there was probably a delay in. in believing it existed at all. Yeah, in the world. Yes. But particularly romance on a sort of sliding scale of explicitness. For me, I think we have to start with publishing because so much of it comes from there when you think about IP and what gets made

and what gets adapted and all sorts of things, I sort of feel like publishing is the kind of patient zero of this. Yes, I think so. I mean, you can go all the way back to 50 shades of great. So Firtis of Grey was seen as an outlier. They were like, oh, there's this Twilight fan fiction written by El James, who'd worked for many years as a production manager and TV, and sold 150 million copies worldwide in various different forms

and various different sequels and prequels and so on. And then the movies were absolutely huge. But essentially self-published? It was essentially self-published, like almost all the big publishing sensations of the last 20 years. Such an interesting industry. It is an interesting industry, isn't it? You think, oh, you missed that one as well. Anyway, so self-published, 50 shades of grey.

Yeah, it took, you know, female erotica always existed in publishing, and this was very much sort of gone over the top and become very mainstream, and you could read it on the tube and what have you. But definitively, it was labelled as erotica, and it was like, oh, wow, that was a flash in the pan. Let's do a couple of absolute copycats. They've had their fun, the ladies. Yeah, the ladies have had their fun.

I don't think this need detain us any further. Meanwhile, underneath that, what was happening is huge amounts of self-published erotica. And erotica, fan fiction, all sorts of things, ways in which women could find their way into writing about female desire. Because there weren't the publishing contracts that said, would you write this for us? So they were going, well, I'll write it for other women then. And lots of it was fan fiction. and, you know, people like Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yaros were sort of sitting at home writing stuff. And those two, if you haven't heard, the names are now the two biggest writers in the whole world.

There came a point where when mainstream publishing got comfortable with it or found a route into it is when it sort of got bolted onto fantasy. So fanfiction is sort of fantasy anyway. You know, 50 Shades of Great comes from Twilight fan fiction. So there was always an element of fantasy. but when it got bolted onto traditional fantasy fiction which men were comfortable with and became romanticity. They're happy with dragons. If there's a dragon in it, they'll allow it.

Yeah, allowed. And the women are saying, great, if my heroine is allowed to have sex with that dragon, I am also comfortable. And suddenly... Dragon sex is massive, by the way. So I hear. And so this genre, Romanticy took off

and is now the biggest genre. in the world by quite some way. It's kind of a sub-genre. It's one of the... Although it's enormous. Enormous. Just like outsized and bigger than many of the other genres.

But yes, it's a sort of romance sub-genre. And as so often, when publishers go, I tell you what, why don't we get more people to write cozy crime books? Because that was successful five years ago. And actually, it was all... This is the stuff. The stuff, it's...

For something to be big now, you have to have started writing it five years ago. You can't... There's absolutely no shortcut. And this stuff was being written all the way through the last decade and into this, and is absolutely beyond enormous now. And a lot of it was driven by Book Talk,

which I think is slightly waning now, which is interesting, but it was massively driven by it. And it was reframing it from erotica, interromantici, and then, you know, this expression, spicy starts existing, and, you know, there are levels of spiciness, and, you know, booktok, it becomes a communal experience.

And, you know, and by and large, it's women, either enjoying men having sex with other men or women enjoying women having sex with mythical beasts tends to be one of the kind of a very interesting sociological through line. I mean the biggest audiences for these MM stories, male male stories, are women and there's all sorts of reasons why that might be the case, but it's quite clear that people want to have like desire and hotness

but they feel so much emotional baggage having as I said been the kind of object of the male gaze rather than be the subject in romantic stories, that almost women being removed from these kind of intimate situations completely allows them to just experience the desire on a kind of conceptual level and not bring their own baggage or their cultural baggage to it. Yeah, and the fandoms as well of the people who read these things, because they have some control. It's almost like they are a director of this as well,

which gives them another form of control over the action. This is the thing. this is where it crosses over. So it becomes absolutely enormous on booktop, becomes absolutely enormous in publishing a huge amount of money to be made from it. And these increasingly small, smaller and smaller subdivided subgenres start popping up, as they do in traditional pornography, right? It's like more and more and more, you know, specialist things.

And so one of the things that crops up is gay hockey porn. Yeah. Right? Romance. Gay hockey romance. I'm so sorry. Not porn. Of course it's.

I mean, course they're having sex with each other, but it's not pornography. No. It's romance. Yeah, it is. With a lot of banging. Okay.

Yeah, fine. Yeah, banging heavy romance. I call it. B.H.R. So Rachel Reed, who is, you know,

an author thinks I, you know, I want to do some BHR. And so she starts writing heated rivalry. And again, an awful lot of this, like almost all phenomena, is just someone doing the thing

that they want to do. In the same way that when I started writing the funny crime books, it's because that's what I wanted to write, not because it was out there. So she was writing what she wanted to write. And she shared, funnily enough, on Instagram the other day, the DM she got from a publisher saying, I don't suppose anyone's got the rights to these books. I don't suppose you'd be interested in someone buying the rights.

And her just going, oh my God. I mean, firstly, that's mental. But secondly, of course I'd be interested in someone buying the rights. Well, they are very business-minded. I think that's very interesting about these women who write these things. that there's a sort of open, I saw someone describe it as an open elite community. And to give you an example of what people also thought was an open elite community, which was something like Silicon Valley at the start,

where these guys who were sort of outsiders, but they all shared a lot of ideas. You know, they didn't keep stuff hidden because they wanted to share in order to disrupt all these things. They say that a lot about these women who write these books, that they're very good at kind of engaging with people sort of below them on the rungs and trying to reach down and pull them back up. And sharing how. they sell because they're not being published by traditional publishers because traditional publishers were looking elsewhere,

they have to find their own ways of monetising what it is they do. And by monetising, we don't mean, oh, I want to be a millionaire. It's I want to keep writing these books. So I want to find a way to fund myself. And I can do that by finding these communities and serving those communities and by amplifying other people in those communities. Colleen. Colleen's like never offer. She's always interacting. It's interesting. Harper Collins, they've just reported a 6% sales increase. And they specifically. specifically cited heated rivalry. Yeah. I mean, it's an absolute phenomenon, but again, comes from somebody not trying to work out

what the market is, but writing the thing they wanted. And at the heart of this is female desire. And the heart of all of these huge hits has been that female desire has not been represented. I don't want us to think we're just talking about money here, because if you think for one second that I'm thinking about money when I'm watching a compilation of all the kisses and heated rivalry on YouTube, then do you even know me? Okay, I'm not, I'm not, I'm literally not even in my trance. Seriously.

Not in my trance. No, it's not in my trance. Which, of course, is the title of your new ice hockey novel. And so, you know, if you're Rachel Reid, who's just right the stuff that she loves to write and engaging with a community and sells the rights not to a huge network or to somewhere where you think, oh, this is going to be the biggest show in the world. She could sell it to Crave, which is this tiny streamer that, with respect, like almost nobody has ever heard of this Canadian streamer. Because, as I said before, you know, you need a. rink for a couple of days and otherwise it's hotel rooms and you it's not expensive romance is not expensive apart from period romance which we'll get to it's not expensive to make and essentially because

they have these really engaged fandoms it's almost enough if the fandom really show up and they always do which is why again it's odd that people don't understand that these are kind of quite bankable the fandom show up and then a bit more ripples out that's enough okay as happened with this show it's so incredibly nuts how how mad it's gone. Yeah, I would say, and it's wonderful. In publishing's defense, this is quite a difficult area to predict.

You know, if you were to go, you know, 18 months ago and go, okay, which book or, you know, online blog is going to be enormous and you said it's going to be heated rivalry,

that you would be some sort of sage to work that. It is quite hard to work out which is going to be big. But the thing is when something in this area does go big, it goes absolutely crazily enormous. And this is off the back, by the way, of the narrative has been for a few years now that millennials and younger generations are less interested in sex. They don't want to see it on their screens.

They don't want to read about it. They don't even want it in their lives particularly. That's what they tell surveys. By the way, boomers and Gen X tell their doctors they drink 14 units a week. So we all say stuff to surveys. Everybody says stuff to surveys. They do want sex because if you look at shows like Keyt Drive Re tell me lies, which is absolutely massive with later Gen Z and also Millennials.

These kind of spicy, if this word's show, people absolutely are obsessed with them and they have these incredibly engaged fandoms. But I think if we talk about TV as well, because I think there's reason in the kind of current era why romance has felt difficult for TV, and it's partly because they tend to end romances. They tend to sort of wrap up

and so you're looking at a limited series rather than you're looking at what people want, which is always, I've made this investment and I kind of want something to be returning. But period romance is expensive, but then look at Bridgeton, you know, and they've found a way to kind of follow it, almost anthology style, different stories.

Or nobody wants this, or Emily and Paris. These are all romances, essentially, of different types. So you know it's still growing in sales as a genre. and something I did hear which I thought was really quite sad is that it's much harder to sell the rights to current romance series

that people are writing right now because teenagers, YA stuff, people are reading so many fewer books and so the things that make it really big are things like the summary term pretty which came out in 2009

because those things have these kind of built-in fandums and people remember them But the series being published now have smaller fandoms amongst kind of, particularly the sort of Y-A star. Yeah, well, I think possibly because this genre has been ignored. And so actually there are. But also because they're reading fewer books and that's just a sad reality. But there are a lot of things on the shelf that weren't picked up at the time, which are still. Oh, you can go back and get them.

Which are provable. There will come a point where that pipeline sort of comes to an end and, you know, the newer stuff gets sold. And listen, we'll all have moved on. But I wonder, you know, so this idea that. the younger generations are less interested in sex, they don't want to see it on screen, and now it's the biggest phenomenon in the world. And I wonder if because desire was traditionally seen in Hollywood as male desire, and even female desire was seen through the lens of what men would like female desire to be.

Yeah, women are the objective desire, not the subject of it. And so, you know, throughout the 80s and 90s and Brookheimer and everyone, there's a million movies that are sort of about male desire and, you know, would bring young men into the cinema. And then I think because the... next generation of young men were absolutely super served with pornography, which is the thing that they were after in the first place, you know, was not titillation aside. There's no point hinting at it for me, you know, just showing me pornography.

And so that entire generation of young men no longer needed, you know, to see Sharon Stone uncross her legs in a movie and that be the kind of a highlight of their year because they were absolutely super served. Their desires were completely super served. And so because male desire was Hollywood's and publishing's point, it disappeared because that audience was completely being served and they weren't interested in that stuff anymore. And meanwhile, the female desire was... Can I remind you of the other sex? Had gone nowhere. Yeah. Yeah. And because it hadn't been served at all. And they show up. Those audiences show up. It's really interesting when you look, you know,

just speaking and thinking about those kind of romance titles. They found, you know, when they see that women are buying like one of these books a week. So they really show up and they really continue to sort of, you know, they do it regularly. But it is a cultural thing too. I do think that something like heated rivalry, first of all, the male-male thing is interesting. There's, as we say, the male gaze is what made a lot of it. But I think that the biggest audience for male-male stories, written stories, either online or in books, is female. And there's something about where we've got to that women actually prefer it if you take women out of, you know, or not prefer it or like it as much if you take women out of the picture completely

and they don't bring all the emotional baggage of imagining themselves in whatever situation and they can actually just experience the kind of desire as a kind of general abstract concept. Well, that's because the idea of men is so often so much better than the reality of men. I mean, God bless us. But not all men, of course, and there's lots of terrific ones out there. I'm related to some of them. but you know what I mean. But yeah, no, I, and also, but it has fulfilled something like heated rivalry,

a sort of cultural yearning. It's really interesting that I can't remember which it was. One of the sort of entertainment sub-stackers or newsletters or someone had an interview with the casting directors of heated rivalry, which you think is like quite a niche back that, you know, last week or the week before. And the amount of new subscribers so that people could read about the casting. of heated rivalry is extraordinary because that is so deep background as it were

but it was very interesting they had done the chemistry reads on Zoom which I thought was incredible to be able to get that yeah so and people just wanted to know you know how was this thing done to me people understand that it's lightning in a bottle but they want to know how it's done for me to me yeah the audience wants to know

the industry really wants to know yeah how have you made all this money by spending so little money yes because by the way these things as I keep saying don't have to be expensive some of them are But the things that are kind of... Next series will be.

Yeah. Well, it's very interesting because it won't be HBOed. They'll be tied in for a couple of seasons. Yeah, you'd hope. Because HBO have still got the same license. The money they paid to license it will be the same. So they're doing really well out of this. But I think that something also that I've noticed in that there's something like that other

juggernaut, Bridgeton, you know, in heated rivalry, there's a cottage features very heavily. And I'm not going to spoil it if you haven't seen it. But also in Bridgeton, this idea of, they kind of retreat to somewhere he calls the guy in it calls a cottage. And this whole thing, it's funny that these two massive juggernauts at the moment have that idea of like retreating from the world to a place which does. It's like a pastoral idyll. I mean, obviously this has been going on since antiquity, but removing yourself from the world where you don't have to think about the Epstein files or like a pussy grab as the president. You have to think any of these things. Just an innocent world where a couple of men are banging each other for your entertainment.

There's a fire pit or located at Bridgeton. It's actually like a massive estate, but it's called a cottage. It doesn't matter. But there's a sense that people want these kind of, this withdrawal from the world, from the horribleness of it into a sort of, I don't know. It is a form of pastoral iddle, whether you can completely retreat into it. I don't know. I mean, a lot of writers have had a lot of things to say about that across the centuries. But.

I mean, and the question. The question is, of course, it is huge now. And funnily enough, I mean, Romanticy's always been, has been enormous for a few years now, has made a huge amount of money. But sometimes publishing is not quite the lightning rod that the whole of culture, but, you know, you can still talk about Romantasy and people have not heard of it. Yeah. Even though these are the biggest authors in the world. Whereas heated rivalry, I think, is finally the thing that is the lightning rod where suddenly brought sheet newspapers are allowed to write about, hold on, what's going on here. Yeah, they can do a thing. I mean, I'm doing one right now.

I don't know why I'm usually to talk about it. Listen, you've got to have a catchphrase. Where is Hollywood and all this? Where are movies in this idea of female desire? Well, that is, I find this quite interesting because rom-coms are, to all intents and purposes, pretty dead. Every now and then you'll get one like, I don't know anyone but you, or something that comes along and it does, you know, but it's not like everybody's seen it. The big one that is coming and it's not a rom-com is,

Wuthering Heights, which opens on Friday, which is Gothic romance. We'll be talking about that next week. Come on. It is, that is really, I think it's tracking to open maybe 40 or 50 million. That I think is going to be massive, as I've already said. But I think there's a lot of people thinking, I wonder what will happen with that. If there are two incredibly hot leads that people show up for. And obviously Emerald Fennell is someone who just,

I think she's so finds a way to just make... She gets some zeitgeist, right? Yeah, and people just can't start talking about it. And, you know, I couldn't care less about people foaming the mouth about, you know, what she's done to this book. Grow up. It's a book. Adapt it a different way if you want. It's just...

You're welcome. You're welcome. It's in the public realm. Do your own movie. Yeah. Anyway, so I... But I think that will be interesting. And if people feel like, oh, my gosh, you know, again, yearning kind of S&M, bondage, whatever.

If there's a sense that there's some sort of thing happening. and they can't quite put their finger on it, but they think it might involve females in a time. Then let's see what happens after that. You imagine the bad movies that are going to be made in the next few years. Yes. I mean, I can. But also the good books and the good, you know, that's the thing, isn't it?

Yeah, but the one, okay, there's one sort of entertainment industry that I don't think is slow on this, because it's always been built on this, and that's music, they've always known that female fandoms and obsessive female fandums, I mean, now it is being monocytes, We talked about things like K-pop and about all this kind of structure around that. But buying merchandise, buying all that stuff, that is an industry that has always been very forward on this. And I can't really fault them for, you know, it's now the women are all the biggest artists in the world apart from a couple. And so I don't think we can fault music.

And the other place that you cannot fault for this because it's a billion-dollar industry that's built almost entirely on female desire is microdramas, which we've spoken of before, These little vertical dramas, you watch them on your phone and they're like two-minute episodes and eventually you have to pay to watch them. And it's hard to overestimate quite how obsessed Hollywood has become with these now. It's like AI and Silicon Valley microdramas are for Hollywood. Everyone is setting up their own microdrama department and spending hundreds of millions of these things.

I've seen it not, this is not my line, but I like this line. Micro dramas described as only fans for women. Which is, yeah, because it's fun. me, the sort of, the big tropes in them are, you know, whether or not you like it, are secret boss relationships, kind of billionaire, alpha male, really old style mills and boon stuff. There's a lot of, you know, can I, is warwolf of species? I don't know, interspecies romance. Yeah, so there's werewolf stuff.

Vampires, which have had a bit of a cultural lull in terms of other stuff. No one wants to bang vampires anymore. No, they do with microdramers. Oh, do they, they back? Oh, they don't want to stop banging white. Oh, really? They love vampires, werewolves, all of that. Okay.

But also what you see in microdramas, which is sort of interesting, if you think how long Hollywood or traditional TV takes to play out stories, people want quick intensity. And it's really interesting that heated rivalry was in development, I think, with someone else, not crave for a long time. And, you know, that was a much more conventional form of development. And they said to the guy, the director, a guy called Jacob Tierney, who wrote and directed it,

There's no way they can kiss before episode five. And obviously within like the first 15 minutes of the series we have now, they're having sex in about 15 minutes. So it's sort of interesting that in micro dramas do that. Like you get to it really quickly. People don't want, there's a sense of people don't want stories to hold out on them. They want what they want. They want to know what they're getting.

And by the way, I don't mind that. I often think that there's, you know, you can make millions selling courses on how to write screenplays and how to write and how to construct stories and things like that. And it's always, the beats are always exactly the same. You hold back this till kind of halfway through. And you hold back this till two thirds of the way through. And this is where the jeopardy comes. And this is, the audience must know this.

And you must know this. And that to me seems to be changing. And I quite like the fact it's changing. You know, we grew up on that diet. And so we intrinsically understand it. I can't watch a movie if someone is falsely accused of something. I can't. This is why you can't go on traitors.

This is one of your real hang-up. But I just, I mean, you just like, I can say, Harrison Ford has been cues of this, the bad guy's going to get away with it. I know that two hours in, it's going to be fine. Yeah. But I have to wait two hours for that. I don't want. For Harrison Ford to be exonerated.

I don't want to wait two hours for that. And it's the same thing as, look, I know these two guys are going to bang. Yeah. You know, and who wants to wait two hours for that? Exonerate for Harrison Ford in the first 15 minutes and then let's have another movie. Do something else. You know, make it something, you know, you can do other things. But I do genuinely think that the way that Hollywood tells stories is changing and that

actually micro dramas are ahead of that curve. that you just, you have to give different beats. And it's, you know, a beat every three minutes is very, very different. You show kids' old films. They're like, what is this? This is unbelievable. And I kind of get it. You know, we'll always have test cricket.

But it's kind of nice also just to see something you think, oh, you're just trying to entertain me every three minutes. Yeah. This is great. It's like, that's why I like comedy. It's comedy, there's only one rule, which is tell me a joke, tell me a joke, tell me a joke, tell me a joke. And drama hasn't been like that, you know. And for good, you know, most of the great dramas in the world are because we delay, we delay the moment and then, you know, it hits us like a truck. But you can make, you can write books, you can make entertainment, you can make movies, you can make TV shows that give you what you want all of the time.

And it just means that they become slightly different things. And in the hands of creative people, it's interesting to say to them, no, just entertain me all the way through. Yeah. Just do that. And the amount of people, I've said before when you talk about microdramas, every single writer, and almost all actors go, oh my God, that's amazing. Oh, I'm really interested. Because it's a different way to do something.

And it's so boring being told you have to write something in the same way every time. Yes. I know that's less to do with female desire, but it's indicative of the same thing, which is we tell different stories in different ways now. Yeah, absolutely. And I suppose the sort of big takeouts of all of this are that people, yet again, that's low to wake up. But I definitely think that yearning,

is an actual genre now. Absolute yearning. But also almost immediate satisfaction of that yearning. Yeah. Well, unless the kind of bondage and the kind of edging of it all, if I may, is a thing, which surely it's going to be in Wutherland Heights. I mean, I've seen the trailer a few times and we'll have to see. Yeah, there'll be some yearning in that.

There'll be some unresolved yearning in that. Yeah. But what people want, they do want anticipation. Again, but sometimes, as you say, they want to get into it very quickly. They want emotional safety. They want fantasy but with some form of control, female control. And they want intimacy and not just sex for definite. And they have not seen intimacy in movies for how long, really.

They see a lot of sex, but they don't necessarily see intimacy in the same day. And all it took all along was a great big dragon. Who would have thought? Who would have thought? But it is. It is, you know, it's a fascinating story in 50% of the entire population of the world sort of being culturally and creatively ignored. And then riding in to save a lot of industries.

The money you can make when you kind of go, oh, perhaps I will serve that audience. Fine. You'll get your turn. Will I get my money? I'm looking forward to whoever, whichever celebrity, When a celebrity writes the first romantician novel. Yeah, why hasn't that happened? Well, because they're too busy getting them to write crime novels. Yeah.

I wonder if someone's out there doing one. It must be. Let's go for a break, shall we? And after that, talking of female desire, we're going to talk about bad bunny at the Super Bowl. We will do. Investing is all about the future. So what do you think's going to happen?

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Welcome back, everybody. We're talking about Bad Bunny and we're talking about the Super Bowl. Should we do, does anyone not know who Bad Bunny or the Super Bowl are? Let's remind everyone, the Super Bowl is America's biggest sporting event. And biggest TV event. And biggest TV event in their football. It's marked, as always, by more people talking about the ads in the middle of the game,

occasionally talking about the scandal of the halftime show. One day they'll talk about, guys, you'll get there. One day they'll talk about your sport. It was boring, though. It was a boring match. Yeah, thank goodness in our big sporting events, we don't talk just about what happens in the gaps between it happening. Otherwise, it would just be,

did you hear what Mark Chapman said to Dionne Dublin? I could not believe. Mark Chapman is very much our bad bunny. But the Super Bowl is beyond enormous in America. It's not the FA Cup final. NFL games are far and away. I mean, I think 80 of the top 100 broadcasts of the year are NFL shows. It is enormous.

It is enormous, enormous, enormous. And the Super Bowl is the biggest NFL game of the year. And as you say, culturally now you have these adverts and you have this halftime show, which make it an entertainment spectacle as well. It is probably the biggest entertainment event in America by some way. I would say it's almost impossible to think of anything that even comes close to the impact of this all at once. A lot of people have a lot of opinions on it. and that is no different this year, thanks to Mr. Bad Bunny.

Yeah, Bad Bunny did the halftime show, which I have to say, I absolutely loved it. The staging of it, beyond phenomenal. As a technical masterpiece, though, whoever did the Steadicam, give them the Emmy already. Unbelievable. Is there a Stead Cam Emmy? The blocking the camera work, the amount of people involved. It began with a little film section in kind of the fields in Puerto Rico, where Bad Babom. He is from, very high grasses in the stadium as well.

There were so many people involved. People playing dominoes. There was a market, having their nails done, all these kind of everyday things. The Casita from his tour, which is he has become a part of his sort of iconography, a little Puerto Rican. Yeah, sort of like the home he grew up in, essentially. There was a real wedding during it. Everybody was waiting for this performance to be some kind of political thing.

Well, let's talk about that. So, you know, the reason we're even speaking about it, is that Bad Bunny was announced as the Halftime Act. Apple sponsor the Halftime Act. Jay-Z is the creative director of the Half-Time Act, and the NFL, of course, have control over who does that show. And it's very, very important to the NFL. So they chose Bad Bunny.

President Trump and various people who jump when President Trump tells them to said this is, I think Trump said this is absolutely ridiculous. Whoever made this decision deserves to be fired. Now, they're saying that because they say it's anti-American. They say Bad Bunny. The whole show is in Spanish. It is anti-American and they had various alternatives, which will go into. Now, this is the reason this is...

We'll go into them because I've watched that show too. Quite so absurd is Bad Bunny is the single biggest artist in the world. He was the most dreamed artists in the world, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2025 as well, the most streamed artists in the world. Bad Bunny is from Puerto Rico. There's various ways of defining if you're American or not if you're from Puerto Rico, but you are. You're an American citizen.

And by the way, Rihanna has done the halftime show. No one complains. She is not American. The weekend is Canadian. He did it. Paul McCartney has done it. He, I don't know if this is news to anyone in America. Breaking.

He is British. Bad Bunny did it four or five years ago when Shakira headlined. Yeah, Shakira, by the way, is Colombian. Yeah. So there is a long history. You do not need to be an American to do this. We were better not wetting our pants four or five years ago. The Super Bowl is not a representation of America.

It's a representation of the NFL. Which, by the way, can I just say historically and, you know, always, a fairly conservative in some ways organization. You know, they will always do the fly past. There's a lot of military involvement in it. The idea you're doing with the entertainment colony out there, you know, and their awards ceremonies, all the things that happen over in Hollywood, forget about it.

You know, this is the absolutely square in the center of American culture. Well, this is it. And the NFL also, it's so enormous the NFL. They recently said, you know, they want to attract more Latino viewers to the Why do they want to do that? Because they said it is now mathematically impossible to grow the NFL any more than it's already grown without Latinos. Yeah. Taylor Swift to help them with the women. Yeah. A lot more women came in and now, strangely. Badd money. Now they've got absolutely everyone. So if you're the NFL, you think, oh, literally the biggest artist in the world is a Latino artist who happens to be an American citizen and has said, yes, I would love to put on a show at half time at the Super Bowl.

and is going to do it amazingly. So it would be the most idiotic decision in the history of entertainment. You can't get much more American than Bad Bunny as well. When they're sort of saying he's anti-American, what they mean is he's criticized Trump a couple of times. When there was the hurricane in Puerto Rico, under Trump's first administration,

I think Bad Bunny tweeted, are you a president or are you a Twitterer? He's been a WWF wrestler. I mean, he couldn't be more American for someone they're accusing of being un-American. He's literally been a WWF wrestler because that's his first. favorite thing in the world. He won a title, which he then relinquished, he said, in return for

some stone cold Steve Austin memorabilia. He's so American, he dated Kendall Jenner, and he's a Calvin Klein model. Trump was whining on his own little... He said, worst show ever. Yeah, he hated, yeah, he hated the dancing. He thought it was really unseatered, but it's like, oh, I don't say anything. Stop wessing your pants, you sad old man. But they had an alternative show, which I noticed he wasn't watching. Are you even a Patriot? The other half-time show was involved Kid Rock and like three country stars. Turning Point, which was the organization, the sort of campaigning organization, founded by Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated last year. And they put on this show, which we don't yet know the numbers for the Super Bowl broadcast.

It'll be over 100 million. It will be well over 100 million. For Kendrick Lamar, which is the biggest halftime show of all time, which beat Michael Jackson, I think he got something like 133 million, okay? Just to put this in perspective, that's last year. this year this alternative one that was supposed to go on X but they couldn't get the rights issue sorted and so at the last minute it was just on YouTube the most they got was something like 5.6 funnily enough when kid rock was on it went down to 4.2 or something so we can see that

some of that one of their big you know like the big mega kind of influence is a complete conspiracy a guy called Japosabiac he said he saluted to patriots he stepped up to watch this show you did your duty for the nation wow Wow, way to make it. Is that entertainment? Yeah. Is that doing your duty? I mean, even Donald Trump couldn't be bothered doing his duty for the nation

because he had to watch the bigger rating thing. Everyone has waited. Mike Johnson, who's the majority leader in the Senate, he said it shouldn't be bad bunny, it should be Lee Greenwood. Now, NFL are going, okay. And Lee Greenwood is a country star. He was the most famous for God Bless the USA. He was the guy who a few years ago, so his song, God Bless the USA.

He produced his own Bible, his own version. of the Bible, which had an American flag on the cover, the American constitution inside it, and his handwritten lyrics to God bless the USA as well. And it was printed in China. So that's the, that's the grift there. Historically, we'll look back and you know the trick they're playing and the trick they're putting. And it's kind of, it's tie sermon, it's playing to a very small amount of people, but we have to listen to it. But this is a, this is such a perfect example of the biggest artist in the world. Clearly a really, really good guy.

And, you know, he said nothing about ICE or Trump or anything in this. He was so just absolutely just said, you know, love is better than hate. America is better together. All of, you know, just positivity. He's in Happy Gilmore 2, for God's sake, Bad Bunny. I mean, you know, he is the biggest star in the world. He named all the parts of America, which included all the Latin American, South American countries, whatever.

But I'm sure conservatives will find a reason to complain about it. But by the way, they keep saying they want to annex all those countries or install public governments in them. So where's the mistake? I'm sorry, I'm not a Spanish speaker. But I was saying to our producer, it made me feel like if I'm in Spain and I'm drunk when I think I am a Spanish speaker. I'm like, yeah, I understand everything that's being said here, even though I don't actually speak Spanish. Yeah, exactly. I was on a sort of high.

All the Spanish I have is from Desposito, almost. That's all I've got. But, you know, Jay-Z is absolutely who is the creative director of this thing. And he's right all throughout all this noise, he just said, they love him, don't let them fall you. Can we talk us so briefly about the adverts because they always think there are a really interesting kind of cultural snapshot of where America is at time. There was so much AI advert. By the way, there was 70 or 80 ads during the game. Yeah.

And by the way, during. Because it's not just a halftime ads there's that, you know, in. No, it's all the way through the action. But in the same way they say you can tell where the power is in any era of world history by what's the tallest building. So the churches were the biggest building. You can tell where the money is in a society by the Super Bowl ads. Yeah, you had Meta, Oakley SquareSpace, Microsoft co-pilot, Coinbase, Google, Gemini, Ring, Open AI. I mean, literally, companies that if you looked at those names 10 years ago, you go, I have not heard of any of those.

Where is KFC? Yeah. So they had that. They had Oral Wagovi. A lot of AI, Oral Wagovi. Oral Wagovi. Which is the title of my other new romance novel. Rod and Bolt in Oral Wagovy.

The Trump Child Savings account. Yes. Where, by the way, they didn't mention Trump or show Trump at any point, which is interesting. And then the sort of nostalgia ads, they had an amazing Dunkin' Donuts one just for all the stars. But it was real like 80s, 90s, naughties stars, sitcom stars and sort of Ben Affleck in a kind of Dunkin' Donuts. No, just some de-aging as well, didn't they, they did age? Yeah, Ted Danson was really de-age. He was sort of behind the counter.

Right. comes my bad link, Richard. Oh, great. Someone who was at the Super Bowl is a guy called Will Lewis. Now, he's one of ours, as in he's British. He is a newspaper executive. He was until quite soon after he was spotted at the Super Bowl, the publisher of the Washington Post.

And I just want to talk for a tiny, tiny bit at the very end of what's going on with the Washington Post. I've read a lot of stories about how the Washington Post has been going 150 years about how it's now close to Clubs of Ball. by Jeff Bezos now it's close to collapse. What is the truth behind that? Okay, so what happened last week? Obviously, all news organizations are to some degree in trouble.

Anyway, the Washington Post last week had huge layoffs. Will Lewis is the publisher, by the way. He's not the editor. They cut a third of the staff. What does that mean publisher? Across the business of the thing. It means more, it's even more important. It's like a really senior executive.

They cut a third of their staff, 300 of the 800 journalists. were laid off. They've already gone through a lot of cuts over the last few years. Literally the least classy redundancy I've ever seen. They did it on a Zoom. Will Lewis didn't even turn up to. So there are so many bad stories, but like their correspondent in Ukraine, he's like in the middle of a war zone, found out she was laid off in the middle of that war zone. So Will Lewis, by the way, he went over to the US. He used to be the editor of the Telegraph, most notably famous for when they did the MP's expenses story, which was obviously, huge. He then went to News International, which is now News UK, which is basically all the

Murdoch papers. And he dealt with the response to phone hacking there. As for how he dealt with it, I don't know. He was accused in the high court of authorising the targeted deletion of millions of emails, which he denied. Anyway, but he was photographed at the Super Bowl festivities by a former Washington Post sports reporter. They shuttered the sports department completely, by the way. As of Saturday evening, he made a... very abrupt departure. I don't know whether Bezos fired him or what he did, but Bezos didn't mention him in the sort of email

that went out after his firing or resignation. What I'm interested in is just the whole way this is being reported because they keep saying, Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013 and he was really hands off at the start, and it seemed like, okay, he's a billionaire. He wants one of these kind of billionaires toys, but it's great because you have influence,

but it's a prestige. He said, I think democracy dies in darkness. Well, he allowed that slogan to be created, Democracy Dyes and Darnes, which now appears on the masthead. So it was worth it to him as a sort of organ of influence. But he stayed hands off at the start. Which is the title, by the way, of my next gay hockey romance. The sequel. Organ of influence.

Rod and Bolt, organ of influence. Yeah. When Trump came back, or it looked like he was coming back, as far as I can see, the calculus changed completely with him. And he then starts interfering as an owner, which is never great. Just before the last election, he wouldn't allow the paper to endorse a candidate they would have obviously endorsed Biden. The fact of doing that lost them 250,000 subscribers.

Then he said, oh, I want right, for one of a better phrase, right-wing opinion on the opinion pages only. So they lost even more subscribers. It's quite interesting. I think what we're starting to see, by the way, in news in general, is that there is a constituency out there that will pay for news. And they are essentially around the centre ground. Either their centrist or their centre right or their centre left. those people will pay for news. Other people just don't care.

So if you make it really right, they can get free news anywhere else. So why would you want to pay for this stuff? And I think that all the people who are doing well with subscriber models or like The Guardian has as a membership model is that people, you know who you're trying to sell it to. And there's no point trying to say to the right or the extreme left pay for news because they won't. The whole reporting of this is ridiculous, I think,

because what they're saying is this guy's so rich. Say the Washington Post loses 100 million a year. You know, he earns more than that in a day. It doesn't make any difference. He could go through various lifetimes. This is exactly the same as people saying, same company, Amazon. Why did people pay for the, why did they pay all that money for the Melania project? And again, the week before I watching journalists say, I don't understand, why would you do this?

Sorry, what do both things show us? Although he doesn't care about money, okay? He cares about what it can do for him. He's become a pragmatist. For me, he's almost running like a catch-and-kill operation. It would be so much more worth it to him to completely collapse the Washington Post because then that's just one criticism of Trump that's, you know, dealt with and it caught and killed. He wants things like defense contracts.

He doesn't care about the paper. He wants to defend. 75 million on a Melania documentary. I mean, this is so cheap at the price. shudering the Washington Post, even if you don't care about things and you have no heritage and you have no code. Who was at one of his Blue Origin space facilities last week? Pete Higgs, the Defense Secretary. These are the things he wants.

He wants that sort of money. All journalists now are saying, I don't understand what Bezos is doing. It's quite simple. He will do anything to ingratiate himself, I think, and spend money or not spend money in a way that suits the regime and what will get him bigger contracts. all of these things are political projects and should all now be reported as political projects because of course rationally otherwise it doesn't make sense. So people saying, oh, it doesn't make sense. Yes, it doesn't make sense at all if you think of it as a media project or it's like,

but he bought a paper. Why didn't he understand that he had to spend lots of money on it? Of course he understood all those things. His calculus has changed now completely. And that's the way we should be looking at all these stories as political projects, not as entertainment stories, not as media stories. The end. Very good

Recommendations I don't know moving to a boffy in Scotland Putting barbed wire around the perimeter I would like to recommend I've sort of course up with a few movies last week But I'd like to recommend Is This Thing On Which is

Oh yeah Yeah it's really sweet It's slightly like a movie from a different time I will Well I recommend The Apprentice Which is back And it's amazing that it's again two so wrong-headed firings in the first two weeks

and also Mock the Week is back. TLC are now putting it on. You can find it somewhere on your free view. The only difference is there are adverts, but I have to say when I watched it, the first advert and the first ad break was for Mock the Week on TLC. It's targeted. I will give you that. That about wraps us up for today. We will be back on Thursday, as always, with a Q&A.

and on Friday with a second part of our deadly sins romance episodes. Yeah, the worst Hollywood couples at all time. The worst Hollywood. Or sometimes the best. Sometimes, yeah, just the biggest stories. If you want, after you listening, if you want to get those bonus episodes as well and get to the Q&A early, you can sign up at therestesentertainment.com. We'd love to have you.

If you are not, then we will see you on Thursday. See you on Thursday.