The Rest Is Entertainment - Blake Lively Bombshell & Beast Games

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

What happens inside a Hollywood smear machine? This week Blake Lively filed a legal complaint which revealed private messages detailing an alleged campaign to tarnish her, after she accused director and co-star Justin Baldoni of misconduct on the set of “It Ends With Us.” Where does this leave both parties and what does it tell us about the dark arts in Hollywood PR? MrBeast aka Jimmy Donaldson released the much anticipated Beast Games on Amazon. Known for his big budget YouTube gameshows, Amazon gave him a reported $100 million to create a gameshow. Is it good? Does he manage to transfer from YouTube to streaming? What does it tell us about not just entertainment, but the world in which we find ourselves? And lastly, some festive cheer. Richard and Marina look back on how linear TV bagged huge audiences as we all came together for Xmas viewing. Will Gavin and Stacey roll back the clock and deliver a multi-million audience? Recommendations: Marina - Inside No 9: The Party's Over (iPlayer) Richard - Black Doves (Netflix) Join The Rest Is Entertainment Club for ad free listening and access to bonus episodes: www.therestisentertainment.com Sign up to our newsletter: www.therestisentertainment.com Twitter: @‌restisents Instagram: @‌restisentertainment YouTube: @‌therestisentertainment Email: [e-mail] Producers: Neil Fearn + Joey McCarthy Executive Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Finding the perfect gift is hard, but sending a Pressy? Well, that's easy. With a wide range of gift cards, there's a Pressy for everyone and every occasion. Digital gift cards that arrive instantly or can be scheduled for arrival when you want via SMS or email. Pressy, bringing the world's best brands to inboxes across Canada. Anytime, anywhere. Search P-R-E-double--E-Z-E to shop now. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And me, Richard Osmond.

Not just any episode, a Christmas Eve episode. That's it, so unless you're listening to it at another time. Well, here we are ready for you on Christmas Eve. We wish you all the most merry of Christmases. Some people might listen to it on Christmas Day. That'd be nice. Just get away. Just get away. Just tuck yourself away in an upstairs room. So you, you know, you've got to find a receipt. Yes, and aspects of the subject matter will be challenging and potentially

non festive. Some of it will be festive. Yeah, it'll be fairly festive, but great stories today. What are we talking about? We are talking about Blake Lively's bombshell lawsuit against Justin Baldoni who was her director and co-star in It Ends With Us, the adaptation of the Colleen Hoover book. Absolutely laze bear. The stuff that happens in Hollywood in a way I've never quite seen before some days. I'm stunned that it's happened in the way it has and we're going to unpack every piece of that. I cannot wait to hear your take on that. We're also going to talk about the most expensive game show ever created, Beast Games, which Mr. Beast has launched on Amazon Prime.

I've got a lot of thoughts about that one. And we're also going to be talking about what's on Christmas Day tomorrow or today, depending on what day it is, or yesterday, depending, you might have left this a couple of days, and why it is different from years ago, and why the ratings are very, very different from years ago. So that's Christmassy. But Blake Lively... Well, let's start with that. So it ends with us. This was, as I say, the Colleen Hoover adaptation in which Blake Lively starred, and which was a really big hit. Huge hit.

It was a huge hit. And anyway, Justin Baldoni, the director, got the rights of Colleen Hoover himself in 2019. Whatever he said to her, and she said, oh, he wrote this email and you know how he understood the domestic abuse message of all of this. Yeah, many sharp intakes of breath will be forthcoming. Anyway, Blade Lively, in a move of absolutely pure drama, has now filed a lawsuit accusing him of sexual harassment and retaliation, a spate of smear campaign, a coordinated attempt to destroy her reputation.

So this is the absolute basis of this story is she complained about a series of things on set that she felt were out of place. Instead of actually putting those right, it is alleged that Justin Baldoni and a couple of other people involved in his company deliberately orchestrated a smear campaign using PR companies to ruin her reputation rather than address what she had said and she has now come out this week and laid all of that bare. And what we do know is that there was a huge backlash. One of the things she accuses, apart from the hostile work environment, is astroturfing, some sort of internet campaign. There was a big internet

backlash against her for relatively small infractions, but there seemed to be this big groundswell of stuff against her. Anyway. And astroturfing, they call that, do they? I mean, if you look at Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, there were all these thoughts that were denigrating Amber Heard. And there can be these coordinated campaigns. By the way, that's not the last time you're going to hear Johnny Depp's name in this. This lawsuit was given or leaked to the New York Times, which in itself is a massive power move because it's like the sort of America's paper of record rather

than like one of the trade publications. And it contains, amongst many, many other things, messages which Blake Lively supposedly got under subpoena. Text messages have been a crisis PR who is engaged by Justin Baldoni's team called Melissa Nathan. And Justin Baldoni's kind of usual publicist team who included someone called Jennifer Abel, who writes to Melissa Nathan, he wants to feel like she can be buried. And Melissa Nathan replies, we can bury anyone. I mean, you know, don't forget, this is a movie about domestic violence. So please remember to believe all the lovely stories

Hollywood tells you in their creations. Anyway, Melissa Nathan worked with this crisis PR who'd formerly worked for Johnny Depp. What's so interesting about, I mean, there's many interesting things about this, is that you can see from the emails and the messages that she's offering PR packages and one of them is $175,000 for three to four months including full Reddit, full social media account takedowns. Oh dear. It's fascinating, it's one of those worlds, we'll get on to how it started in a moment, but it's one of those worlds where people

go, oh no, there's bots and people employ bots. And, you know, this happens. There is absolutely black and white documentary evidence proof of how they do it, why they do it, what they charged for it and the effect that it has. Extraordinary to have it out in the open. I should say that Justin Baldoni says these are just people sort of wargaming ideas. We don't know that this actually happened. It's like, OK. Yeah, I'm sure you'll outline the allegations that Blake Lively made against Justin Baldoni, but it seems like he pressed the button on I'm going to get some crisis PR in an unbelievably

2024 move when Ryan Reynolds blocked him on Instagram. As I'm sure everyone knows, it's Blake Lively's husband, who is a big star. And quite liked as well by people so he got blocked and immediately starts going is this going to be a problem when the film comes out do we think let's get ahead of this problem right now. In another plotline they are both or were both we'll come onto this again in a minute represented by the same agency WME. During the film we discover that there have been all that you from this lawsuit you discover that they've had a crisis meeting in which I think even Ryan Reynolds attends where they're saying no one can walk

into Blake Lively's trailer and find her naked no one can discuss pornography it's all about Justin Baldoni and the other producer. Yeah so so so Blake Lively has seen behavior on set and has a series of rules series of ground rules saying none of the following can happen on set from here on in. Now listen as we say say, this is a hit movie, for obvious reasons, I think they all think it is going to be successful, and it might be a surprise hit. Clearly, everything is tried to hold together

for the press campaign. And bear in mind, this movie opened second behind Deadpool and Wolverine, starring her husband. But that was one of the biggest movie openings of all time. And as I say, this is a huge,'s the highest-growing romance since A Star is Born. It ends with us. It's a big it was a big big movie but it does have a troubled press tour for its biggest star who is not by the way Justin Baldoni. He's heavily involved certainly if he has a lot of power over this film.

However much power Blake Lively might have as a big star and enormously well connected, Justin Baldoni is the king of this project. You need Blake Lively for it to do as well and to open like it did. There's simply no way it would have done that with anyone lesser than that. People are not going to see Justin Baldoni movies. No, I mean who? So there was dissent on set, there was difficulties, there was clearly there was trouble. We see that Justin Baldoni and his people went to a crisis PR.

What form did these apparent smears take? How were we first aware that perhaps somebody was attacking Blake Lively's reputation? Supposedly people on the internet didn't like that she launched a haircare line at the same time because this movie is about domestic violence. There were old clips that surfaced, just one or two of her being a bit grand in interviews, one when she was pregnant, one I can't remember, but you know, nothing enormous. But they kept being surfaced and they kept being shared multiple times. Really a huge backlash built and the narrative of the backlash against her was enormous.

It was like, live breaks cover amid the backlash, all of these things. And there's a certain momentum when there's enough social media sort of churn. People, news outlets will start carrying stories about the backlash, which is what happened. But what you see particularly, which I think is interesting, is that fans have become incredibly media literate. They noticed that they didn't pose together, Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively, at any point on any of the red carpets on this press tour. They noticed that the other cast members also didn't pose with him. People have become so medialis- they can read images and also the sort of general Easter-eggy obsession

of our age where you're always trying to get to the real story behind the story behind the thing that's being presented to you. There's a secret only for the initiated or for those who know where to look. But the backlash... If I was a crisis PR, I would rebrand myself as like, you know, cozy PR. Yeah. Just say, oh, that's nice. Justin Beldon, he's got himself a lovely cozy PR. I just do flowers.

I just, I'm a florist. I do flowers. I will also, of course, kill your opponents. Even the CEO of Sony, Tony Vincerequera, jumped in, which is quite significant at the time of this press tour. Remember, nobody wants to really go to town because you think we can't do well this movie, which we think is actually going to do really well. But this is what he said. He doesn't mention Justin Baldoni at all in his statement. He says,

we love working with Blake and we want to do 12 more movies with her. Last weekend, this is all blown up. Leaked to the New York Times that this lawsuit is happening. I mean, as I say, this is sensational. How many women actresses have worked with, and we'll tell you later in interviews, we've worked with nightmare directors, nightmare co-stars. Often those men were more powerful than them. And they therefore just over the years, decades,

even now, don't say anything. You just have to grit your teeth, get through the experience. You can tell everyone afterwards. And you can be someone like Kate Winslet who gets very, very powerful and can get projects off the ground herself who will say, this terrible thing happened to me, and in later years you give all these kind of, I'm not saying she's in a later years, many years later you give interviews saying these awful things happened to me on movies and I think it was disgusting, and then everyone wants to listen to you because you're a powerful woman now. Most people suck it

up at the time. She has not done that. A sort of hurricane strength wind is blowing and I am minded to believe all of the accusations that she makes, although he denies them, because there were these crisis meetings. He hired a crisis PR. All the cast don't want anything to do with him. Colleen Hoover even this week has said, you have been nothing but honest, kind, supportive, Blake Lively since the day we met. Thank you for being the human you are. Never change. Never wilt." They're both, as I said, they are or were both with the same agency, WME, ultimately run by Ari Emanuel, who's like one of the most powerful talent agents, one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. At the weekend, Justin Baldoni was immediately dropped by,

like literally dropped by WME. I mean, that is, let's face it, you've got to drop one of them. And even if these things weren't is, let's face it, you've got to drop one of them. Even if these things weren't true, I'm sorry, but you're still dropping the one who isn't married to Ryan Reynolds because Ryan Reynolds is also with WME. As I say, by the way, I believe these allegations because they're so detailed and the rest of the cast is clearly involved and even Colleen Hume is making. It's got a tone similar to the Brigg Wallace allegations, I would say. That thing of men in the workplace constantly just doing the next thing

and the next thing and the next thing, none of which are quite enough by themselves for you to get fired. But every time you're not fired, you move it up a notch for the next one and the next one. And then if they fire you for that, they go, what for that?

You just fired me for that? You think, well, no, you've been constantly like this. This set has a certain tone to it led by you. And that feels like that's what was happening on this movie. There was a slightly unpleasant, sexualized atmosphere on set. All the time. And also on a movie with a message which is about...

Domestic violence. Domestic violence and abusive masculinity. Often you hear these stories about backlashes against stars and you think, oh, you know, they're probably just ignoring all this and rising above it. Stars are delicate and they worry obsessively about what people think of them. And even if they say, I never look at social media, even though they say all of those things, they do. And they feel they've built something and it can all be taken away

and it's a specific thing about that kind of star mindset that it always feels precarious. Well if you're a lumberjack you worry about wood and if you're a star you worry about what people think of you because that's your business. And behind closed doors they've gone nuts about this backlash. It's interesting the way it's pushed the business of crisis PRs right out into the open. Which is great, isn't it? Because you do need to know, we all know we're manipulated and this and that. It's lovely sometimes to have the receipts just to go, no, this is the person

who did it, this is how they did it, this is how much they got paid, this is what they said about it, this is what they promised they could do, this is how much they laughed at the person you're trying to smear, this is the day they did that. It's lovely to have those receipts just so every single time you read stuff, you can kind of go, oh, okay, they would do that. We talked about how people love to hate on women. There was a message from one of his standard publicists to the- Justin Baldoni's.

Justin Baldoni's standard publicist, yes, yes to the crisis PR that says it's actually sad because it just shows you people who really want to hate on women. It's like, yes, you're paying for this person to stoke all that. There are certain people who very vocal posting communities just don't like. And I'm sorry to say that even after all of this online, people are still saying about Blayte Lively. It really helps, by the way, if those people are women. Other women are very pleased to hate on them,

as we can see here. And it's interesting that both of the people in this, who lead kind of publicist alleged villains are both women. There are still people who are saying, well, Blayte Lively is being ridiculous with all of this. And these tiny little infractions that she's supposedly done, like snapped in an interview, are weighed on the same level as, in my view, allegations of quite serious sexual harassment on a set.

That's the absolute playbook of our times, isn't it? And the reason those things work is because most of us are not paying that much attention most of the time. You know, it's not often in my week that the name Blake Lively comes upon my radar. And certainly any time it has done in the last couple of months, it's been someone slagging her off. And then more recently it's been, ah, isn't it, who's this guy who I'm hearing about? He sounds like a vidin. And then, you know, we're not paying that much attention, so it doesn't take an awful lot to get someone's name muddied and sullied in the public realm. But I think one of the great things,

listen, it's all kind of been a court case, I'm sure we're just talking about our view of what we believe might have happened, which is a woman is on a set that she felt uncomfortable on. That's what we think has happened here. Fortunately, she's a very smart, powerful woman and kept every single receipt. And now the tide is going the other way. But this book, it ends with us written by Colleen Hoover, who we've discussed before, was a self-published author, who's become the biggest author in the world and has a very, very, very powerful female fan base, puts a very powerful female in her movie,

and it feels like at the end of this film, what's gonna happen is gonna be a huge win. Colleen Hoover played Lively to get a win over some guy who's never really directed very much before. And two mean girls in the publicity industry. Yeah, it's quite a story. Because Colleen Hoover rejected a lot of people who wanted to make this movie first time round, and Justin Maldoni found the right form of words to make our thing. I would love to read the email.

He actually has the rights to It Starts With Us, which is a sort of prequel version of it, which I don't want to call it too soon. I just don't feel Justin Baldoni will be acting underacting in. I wouldn't have thought so, but if he owns the rights, someone's going to have to pay him. I worry there's been a lack of Just Desserts in the last couple of years. You know, I worry that we've slid back and it'll be lovely to see this play out in the same way that we had our own Colleen over here, Colleen Rooney, and someone got their Just Desserts.

It'd be lovely if Colleen Hoover starts this thing where there are some Just Desserts in America next year. I mean, it's really fascinating. It is sort of it is basically unprecedented to sort of in the old days, all of this was done on a wink and a nod. And now you can actually subpoena things and they've got messages and everything. I mean, it's much easier. If I was a crisis PR, the one thing I'm doing is deleting my emails.

Shall we go to a break? Let's do that. And then we'll talk about the spectacle that is the Beast Games. Welcome back everybody. It is Christmas, you may be at home with a family, there may be younger members of that family and they may be introducing you to Mr. Beast for the first time. Regular listeners of this podcast will be very familiar with his work. But if you are about to be introduced to his work via Beast Games, we have watched the first few episodes for you.

We have an opinion. What do you think people are going to make of it? It dropped on last Thursday on Prime. They've dropped the first two episodes and they're going to do one a week. They're after it's the most expensive game show ever by a long way. And then some about a hundred million. Well, I have a view on whether it cost them a hundred million. I think it cost them a lot more than that.

Okay, then let's talk about that in a minute. Biggest jackpot, which is five million. The most contestants, they sort of whittle it down. Yeah, they actually whittled from 2000 to a thousand, but the sort of craziest prizes along the way. There's sort of random Lamborghinis, a private island just given away. Even the village he built for the contestants to live in cost something like 14 million

dollars. The show itself is an extraordinary spectacle and it's presided over Mr. Beast. It's a Squid Game knockoff. It is. It is what it is. A lot of people come somewhere. It is unbelievably derivative of Squid Game. I mean, it really is sensationally influenced by Squid Game.

The aesthetic of the first stage is the colors. The game marshals are like the guards in Squid Game with their faces covered in that sort of way. I mean, Hwang Dong Hyuk should really, who is the Squid Game creator, should genuinely have a credo on this show. But it is an extraordinary spectacle. You've got a thousand people in long, long rows in, I mean, the most enormous warehouse. And there's a sort of elimination device. He's dropping the rows. There's a huge amount of betrayal in it.

It's one of those sort of classic American dream shows where contestants say things like, you know, I'm a veteran and I'm living in my vehicle. What I noticed about this, it constantly requires people to demonstrate altruism or else everybody dies. Not everybody dies but everyone isn't in the game anymore. So you're constantly saying, okay, one person in this row has to volunteer to just go home or else the whole row goes. So they're all sort of screaming and arguing with each other about, you know, who deserves it least and therefore should just do one. It's interesting. It's a series of different rounds where you lose an amount of people.

That's the point. It's got a thousand people. It's a traditional game show structure where you're going to get down to one at the end of that one person is going to win five million. Now, some of the time it's done via games, trivia games, things like that, physical games, sometimes, as you say, it's done by volunteers. If you leave now, then the rest of your team are saved. Or if you take a sum of money from me now, then the rest of your team will go home.

So there's lots and lots of different devices, all of which we've seen before in various different forms, to try and whittle people down. Yeah, the altruism ones are interesting, which is if you just go home, everyone's saved. And some people, the few nice people in the room are kind of going, you know what, okay, I guess I'm not going to win five men in any way. Genuinely, Bitsway said, I'm going to give you $20,000 if you leave the show now, but it means all your teammates will leave as well. And they go, no, no, no, never, never. 50,000, 100,000. They're going up to like a million to get rid of people.

Can we talk a little bit about the YouTube of it all? Because obviously this is a show on a streamer, it's on Amazon Prime, and I'm definitely going to talk in a minute about what Amazon want from it all. The YouTube of it all, MrBeast is, as I say, the biggest YouTuber. Interesting to see him transition from doing his... He does a lot of... Every week he does some sort of amazing stunt on YouTube. Sometimes it's like, I'm going to live on this tiny little platform on the ocean for a week and see if I can survive. I think it said, whether or not this is correct, he says he spends about 50 million a year on his stunts. And this costs 100 million, or does it? We'll come to that.

The YouTube of it for me was that it moved incredibly fast. The show was quite short. You know, when you spend that much money, you think, surely I'm getting an hour out of this. The first episode is like 39 minutes. Two minutes, 35, I noticed on the clock, I think he'd already given away a million. And you're like, right, I'm not in Kansas anymore now.

Honestly, on Only Connect, they're still getting an anecdote about someone meeting Derek Griffiths with a trombone. And yeah, they're already giving away a million. Anything that would have been strung out over an entire show in a traditional game show was done in absolute moments here. There's also, though, at the same time, a lot of upcoming. Don't get bored because in a minute we're going to do this. There are masses of cameras. I don't know if he's... how many world records he broke. He's got lots of Guinness World Records. He talks a lot about the records, the amount of money. I think it's 1100 cameras or something like that. And you think virtually every boast you can make on this show is saying there's

a lot of money behind it. It's got a really big budget. There's not a single boast which is no one's ever thought of this before, or you won't believe the trick we're about to play that no one's thought of everything is. No one's ever given away this much money in a first episode was one of the things they said. Wow, well done. The contestants were different to the ones you see on traditional game shows. They behaved in a way that people behave on YouTube and not the way that someone does on a traditional game show. Don't forget there's a thousand of them and they're only picking the ones who serve. So in the way that people behave on YouTube and not the way that someone does on a traditional game show.

Don't forget there's a thousand of them and they're only picking the ones who, you know, serve. So it's the producers really are choosing the contestants who emote in a way that they want them to. Everyone has real main character energy all the way through because it is that thing. If you're one of a thousand people, you are not going to win, you are not going to win five million pounds. It's almost statistically almost impossible.

Of course somebody is, but that's like, you know, someone's going to be the king. But the whole way through it is that cult of the individual and it is that kind of, like someone gets knocked out and she goes, this wasn't supposed to be the way it ended for me. Everyone now is, as you say, main character energy. They do think of themselves as a character and a thing. I must say that in terms of how Mr. Beast made the transition, I found him far less likable in this highly produced format, even though of course his stunts are highly produced

because they involve a lot of stuff, but on YouTube he has a sort of goofy your mate energy. And he's a creature of the medium as well. And he's a creature of the medium, and he's kind of laughing and giggling away into the camera, and on this I found him a much more sinister sort of impresario much more like Coriolanus Snow in the Hunger Games all characters you know fictional characters much more like evil Wonka

than happy Wonka yeah and his glee was quite alarming he kept shouting things like people all over the room are like talking about trust as though it was the stupidest thing and then saying and shouting everybody has a price and you know what he reminded me of it as I say it's so heavily influenced by squid game this reminded me of a clip a very old clip probably from this before mr beast was born of alan partridge in the bar saying I love that song sunday bloody sunday you know really encapsulates the boredom of a sunday you know you get get out, you got to mow the lawn, you got to, you know, read all the papers, you just think Sunday, bloody Sunday, and then someone says, Yeah, actually, it's about a massacre in Derry.

And he's like, what? Mr. Beast is like the partridge of Squid Game. I love Squid Game. It's such fun. It's like, you know, it's about like the absolute vicious brutality of late stage capitalism, like the homicidal psychopathy of it all. It's like, what? I think we're actually going to talk about Screw Game in the next episode, aren't we? We are going to talk about Screw Game in the next episode. That's coming out. But it really shows a different side of MrBeast, which is if you're doing a YouTube thing, it's almost like gonzo journalism. And actually on television, you have to be a presenter. And he doesn't quite fit into those shoes, I didn't think.

He doesn't quite have the power to sort of, the charisma to kind of corral a whole television show together. So when it's him and his mates just doing little asides here and there, you can kind of see the DNA of where he's from. But on the bits where you go, I know I need a front man to really kind of be the voice of this show.

He can't quite do that. Should we talk about what Amazon want from this? Whether or whatever it cost, Jeff Bezos is supposed to make one hundred ninety million dollars a day. So if this costs one hundred and just himself, this is a rounding error for them. It doesn't matter what they want. What every single show on Amazon is a mechanism for capturing data. That's it. It's great if you happen to align with

a creator who's got some thing, some story they want to tell, but really every single show that they put on is to get data so that they can sell you stuff. And that's everything from, you know. And by the way, that's not cynicism on our part. That's they would be the first people to say it. That's the first to say it. From books to toys. Lots of great creative people who work there and they make lots of great shows. But the idea of Amazon is we want as many eyeballs as possible.

We want the information behind us. It's purely the only reason they're in television. If shoes were the best way to tell the most you could about someone, then Amazon would just be pouring all their information. Just shoes. Just shoes. The thing is that there is nothing, there is no better way that we know of really than people's media habits, what they like to watch, whatever. You can tell so much about a person from what they watch,

and then you can get the data and you can predict what those people will buy. And that's everything from toys to groceries to life insurance to healthcare. Okay, Amazon's going to provide it all. They want to be the everything. They want to trap you in an Amazon governed relationship for every single part of your life. And with younger audiences, which is what this show deliberately is aimed at, that's most particularly true.

You have the most lifetime value to Amazon if they get you young. They can sell you things all the way through and they'll be providing mortgages soon enough, I'm absolutely sure. They go all the way through. So the lifetime value of a young audience is massive and that's what they want. It's not that they don't do this for other shows, Clarkson's Farm, also on Amazon Prime. They'll have a market map. They just want you for your data.

An awful lot of people will be watching it this Christmas, I suspect, and they may be coming across Mr Beast for the first time ever. So it just has an idea of what they might expect. It is a huge spectacle. It looks amazing. It is very, very visually watchable. I would say two things. Firstly, it might be the bleakest thing I've ever seen, but actually it's better than I thought it would be. So both of those things exist in my head at the same time. When you do any game show, it's what's the ethos here? What are we trying to reward?

And a lot of shows it will be, we're rewarding, you know, general knowledge, we're rewarding, you know, lots of quiz shows and game shows, or we're rewarding who's the funniest, even something like Deal or No Deal, funnily enough, although it has this random element, it is about risk reward. It is you are actually testing something. That is what that show is about. What is this show about? Certainly for the first two episodes, there's been almost zero skill required to get through those.

It's almost entirely luck. And yet the self-belief of people all the way through is absolutely front and center. That's the thing that's being edited in all the way through. As people say, no, I can do this. I look after children and this is this money is going to be for them. And you know, people will be offered huge bribes to leave and go, no, of course I'm not going to leave. So I'm going to win this money. So what it is about is throwing an enormous amount of money at essentially a mass psychosis of I am the main character in this thing.

And it's never leavened at any point. The reason I love Squid Game is because it's also about that, but it's made with some heart. It understands humanity. It understands what it is that it is showing you. It understands the moral quandaries that people put themselves in. It understands what greed is and what greed does for us, what greed takes from us.

And this show doesn't at all. I really quite enjoyed watching it. I am gonna say that. It's mesmerizing. Right from the beginning. And this show doesn't at all. I really quite enjoyed watching it. I am going to say that. It's mesmerizing. Right from the beginning. And I thought there's some very clever bits in it. There is not in the first two episodes, there is not an ounce of warmth in it of actual humanity. You keep hearing people saying, I'm a vet, I'm this, I'm that. But no fellow feeling, you know, Mr. Beast is not kind of interested in that.

No one's kind of taking anyone, you know, you know, putting their hand around the shoulder. He's interested in the betrayal and in everyone having a price. And there is zero, zero wit. I would say it's vanishingly difficult to make this show and not make it funny because it's absurd. I mean, someone's given you, I would say it's closer to 200 million and 100 million across the 10 episodes. I can't believe they've made it cheaper than that. They've given you all of that money. They've given you some of the best teams in the business.

There's some proper TV people behind that. You can really tell. And you can't be bothered to be funny. There's no mechanism for actual genuine wit. Well, we've brought some warmth to it, as you say. Please. I mean, and they really... They really don't. Here's what I find the most arresting thing about all of this, okay?

The three biggest series, this Christmas and New Year, are all basically the same show, okay? Beast Games, Squid Game and The Traitors, okay? Yes. Now, one is a tech giant data harvest. Beast Games, Squid Game and The Traitors. Yes. Okay. Now, one is a tech giant data harvest. One is a non-Anglosphere grim dystopian horror drama. And one is a public service broadcaster game show.

But you know what? They have an incredible number of similarities. Okay. All of them explore and demand human betrayal. They demand it. The format demands the betrayal. All have started looking at how familial relationships make or break within those games.

And all are looking at whether the possibility of collective action can ever kind of win out against sort of rampant individualism. And all at their darkest are in, you know, and I put the traitors in this advisedly, can feel occasionally like a sort of race to the bottom of human nature right they are about the same thing and I think that has to say something extraordinary about the times in which we live that the three biggest series are and as I say they're all very differently done

But they are all about the same sort of thing and if that isn't the most on-the-nose message about the times We're living in then I don't know what is. Profoundly depressing in that way but I will say this which is however much you know I mean I'm banging on about it and people have their own opinion when they watch it these views of the contestants saying no I can feel it this is it's for me and you know this is my destiny. A lot of that is because they watch a lot of Mr. Beast on YouTube and they understand the thing they are they're supposed to say. If I ask someone on a game show, have you had a good day?

They know they're supposed to say we had such a good day, you know, gutted. I didn't win, but we've really enjoyed ourselves. We've really been looked after. And if on Beast Games, you're said someone says, why are you here? You know what you're supposed to say. You're supposed to say, it's my destiny. I got to get, I got to have that five minutes. It's all good.

It's going to be for me. Whether the second the cameras go off and they go and sit down, I'm guessing 95% of them go, Oh guys should have taken that 20 grand. Now I think about it, shouldn't I? But yeah, I didn't. You get institutionalized. It's easy to watch it. If you are watching it over Christmas and despairing, you know, human nature.

I think a lot of the people who are talking on that show understand more to watch it if you are watching over Christmas and despairing, you know, human nature. I think a lot of the people who are talking on that show understand more about what's going on than they're letting on. I think I think they're excited to be there. I think they can't believe they're there with who for them is the biggest star in the world. And they're thinking I'm part of it. I'm part of the show. I understand how that works. I'm part of the entertainment here. And so there's something going on, which I don't think you would necessarily understand if you were not an obituary of YouTube. You should watch it because it's a huge thing of our time.

So it's one of those sort of cultural things that, you know, don't let it go by you without, because you'll learn something from it. It's really interesting. Yeah, but I would say watch it as a triptych with Squid Game and with The Traters and think, hmm, I wonder what sort of age we're living through. Shall we talk about more traditional television, the sort that we grew up with and is now disappearing? Well, I want you to talk at me about the Christmas schedules because I obviously have my radio times.

Yeah, you very kindly brought me the double issue. It, of course, used to be the biggest TV night of the year and enormous ratings. And one thing about Christmas day is you'd sit down with the family and watch whatever BBC and ITV had in store for you. Do you know the wonderful George Michael Christmas song, the December song?

Yes. Which is, I think, one of my absolute favorites. And the chorus of that is, there was always Christmas time when Jesus came to stay, I could believe in peace on earth, and I could watch TV all day. And that is absolutely that thing of, oh my God, we can actually have TV on like during, we can watch the top of the Pops Christmas special. We can have that stuff on during the day. And then in the evening, everyone, the whole family are going to sit and watch telly. And the ratings were commensurate with that

people always famously say that you know Morkham and Wise in the 70s got kind of 28 million um if you look into that it doesn't really stand up because the BBC did their own um ratings in those days oh did they yeah there's i think the 1977 Christmas special which was the real like absolute kind of peak Mork common-wise popularity that almost gave Eddie Braben, the writer, a breakdown because everyone expected such incredible things every Christmas. I think the BBC said that got 29 million, and ITV, who did their own ratings, said that the Mike Yalwood show got 29 million as well, which is, you know, he was big.

Which certainly exceeded the population of Britain at the time. Yeah, pretty much. That's the sum of the two figures. So it's hard to know if those figures really, really ever existed. In the 80s, you had Dene and Ange, that was the... That's on EastEnders, by the way. EastEnders, of course, yes, sorry. Yeah, sorry, yeah.

He served her divorce papers on... If you're catching up with Boxer, a spoiler is coming. He served her divorce papers on Christmas Day. That's like one of the all-time great soap episodes. All the soaps were massive. The soaps were massive. There's a few people in their 50s now going, oh thank God they're talking about Mr. Beast and they're talking about Den and Andrew again. What did that get? Did people say? Well, it got 30 million, but that was adding various transmissions of it together. So again, it's not really an official, about 21 million

is probably what the one episode of it got. 21 million, by the way, is what the coronation of King Charles peaked at. So that's just as a sort of modern comparison. So that is the biggest thing that was on TV even compared to football. It's a lot. You had the Den and Ange one, then when Hilda Ogden left Corrie the next year, that was 20 or 20-odd million as well. So you used to be able to get to 20 million. I think absolutely the peak was the Only Fools and Horses in 1996, which got 22 million.

It actually got more for an episode three days later, but in terms of Christmas Day, getting over 20 million. So that's what we remember culturally. That's in our bones. But it hasn't happened for a long time. And last year, the biggest show on Christmas was The King's Message, and it got 5.9 million. So that feels like a big dip. And it feels like we've lost of lost something along the way.

We've lost that communal thing. We've lost that kind of everyone sitting down and watching the same thing at the same time, which I know we all mourn in various different ways. But I would say that a light shines yonder. What is that up in the sky? It's our friends Gavin and Stacey. Yeah. Because in 2019, they got 17 million, which when you think back, you know, to

the kind of the glory days of the 80s, that's not far off. No. It's really not far off in a world where everything is atomized and everyone can watch anything they want to at any given time in a world where your Netflix viewing is huge and glass onion got enormous ratings over last Christmas. And in a world where, you know, everyone over last Christmas. In a world where everyone's playing video games, in a world where there's so much more you can do, to get 17 million was extraordinary. This year it is back for a final, final time. The people's normal people. The people's normal people,

yeah. I would not be beyond shocked if that touched 20 million by the time all the viewers are counted. And it's worth saying. Well, it's kind of got an open run at it. But it doesn't. I mean, it's got an open run at it in terms of, you know, ITV are not going up against it, BBC Two and Channel 4 are not going up against it. Yeah, because... The whole of the rest of culture is going up against it. MrBeast is going up against it with five million pounds, you know, given to some random person. You know, the entire video game industry is up against it. The entire world of TikTok and Instagram is up against it. And if

it can get anything close to 20 million in today's climate, then that has to be such an extraordinary phenomenon. And a reminder that however atomized we are, there's still an opportunity to sit around and by the way, it's terrific. If you've never liked Gavin and Stacey, you're probably not going to love it. If you like Gavin and Stacey, you are going to absolutely adore it. And how lovely that Christmas and terrestrial television can still pull out those numbers. It feels like the ghost of Christmas past.

Is that a good thing? No. It feels like an echo of Christmas past has come back. It feels like a white Christmas or something. Yeah. The other thing I think that's really interesting is sort of new Wallace and Gromit. But I think that that, it's really interesting if you look back on the overnight, just over the last week, they've repeated some of the old ones, which by the way are always there on iPlayer if you want to go and have a look, but they have rated

unbelievably in the top 10 just old things. The Grom Trazz has been out for ages, but they've rated really, really well when they've re-screened them. Because it's one of the very rare times of year when parents or grandparents, there's something about everyone being locked in the same rare times of year when parents or grandparents, there's something about everyone being locked in the same house together where a grandparent or parent is allowed to say, no, we are switching this on. It's on BBC One now. Yeah, I'm watching it now.

It's at three o'clock and you hear a continuity announcer and say, and now back a few years for Wallace and Gromit. And kids are like, what? Huh? What is this? This is cool. What's this weird new channel we've never seen before? And I feel like it's the last opportunity to introduce other generations to the fact that sometimes it's okay to be captive and to watch what someone puts on for you.

Like when we used to go on Coach Holidays when I was a kid and they would just put on Smokey and the Bandit on the one TV screen at the front. And you're like, oh my God, this is amazing. you just put on Smoky and the Bandit on the one TV screen at the front. What a great choice. And you're like, oh my God, this is amazing. Yeah. I couldn't ever see it, but I can hear it. Whether it's the last hurrah for terrestrial television or the sign of things to come, I do think there's going to be a lot of people really, really enjoying Wallace and Cromit,

really enjoying Gavin and Stacey. And as you say, the other channels have sort of given up the ghost because there's no longer if Gavin and Stacey is getting 18 million there's not five million viewers left for everyone else so you know you might as well put a repeat of vlog it on. Well no spoilers but we'll certainly be discussing the matter of new year next week. We will which new year's day funnily enough is now the biggest tv day of the year. We'll be discussing why and discussing what's coming on, including the traitors. Do you have a lovely Christmas recommendation?

It will not be a surprise to people. I love Inside Number Nine and I loved the documentary Inside Number Nine, The Party's Over, which just went out on BBC Two, but obviously you can get it on iPlayer. It was such an extraordinary show. I'm very excited about the stage show, which I've got tickets for next year, which I think is called Stage Fright. But anyway, which I'm hugely excited about.

But to see those two guys, Steve Pembroke and Maurice Shearsmith, discuss how they did this, how they make, I still think the miracle of how they make you care about characters when they're new ones every week is amazing. And obviously, if you partly just because of them, but it's an extraordinary achievement.

And it's really... If you're into the show, it's really interesting seeing behind the scenes and how they did it all. And just like the way they filmed things like Sardines, you know, the wardrobe one, the first one. It's really good. Oh, I'm definitely watching that. And a lovely thing to watch with lots of people as well.

And also nice to celebrate the fact that that show actually came off air this year and it's worth taking a step back and recognizing what they achieved, isn't it? It's just genius. It's really amazing. Really amazing. I'll recommend on Netflix Black Doves, which I really, really enjoyed. It is a riot.

It's the one with Sarah Langaesheer and Keira Knightley and Ben Wishaw about shadowy corporate spies in London. It is such a laugh, I have to say. If you listen, if you if you're a plot hole fan, you can there's there's loads there, but it's not about that. The actors are loving it. It's beautifully written. Joe Barton wrote it. And it's just one of those.

It's so propulsive from start to finish. I really, really loved it. And so that might be a nice Christmas thing to watch with everyone. Quite violent, but a lot of fun. I wish you a Merry Christmas. And you a very Merry Christmas. And to listeners, listen, if you love Christmas, have a great one. If Christmas is a hard time for you, have a quiet one and a peaceful one. But we'll be back fairly soon after Christmas with a Q&A. With a Q&A, absolutely. Excellent. But have a wonderful time, everyone, and see you after Christmas. Absolutely. Bye-bye.

Bye.