The Rest Is Entertainment - Can celebrities dodge jury service?

Episode Date: February 22, 2024

Could you be judged by Lorraine Kelly or Richard Madeley? Is fame a reason to avoid jury service? Does Richard now have enough knowledge to commit the perfect murder, and why is so much left on the cutting room floor of Hollywood? Your questions answered on The Rest Is Entertainment with Richard Osman and Marina Hyde. Twitter: @restisents Email: [e-mail] Producer: Neil Fearn Executive Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/trie It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Peloton. Forget the pressure to be crushing your workout on day one. Just start moving with the Peloton Bike, Bike Plus, Tread, Row, Guide, or App. There are thousands of classes and over 50 Peloton instructors ready to support you from the beginning. Remember, doing something is everything. Rent the Peloton Bike or Bike Plus today at onepeloton.ca slash bike slash rentals. All access memberships separate. Terms apply. What day of the week do you look forward to most?

Well, it should be Wednesday. Ahem, Wednesday. Why, you wonder? Whopper Wednesday, of course. When you can get a great deal on a whopper. Flame grilled and made your way. And you won't want to miss it. So make every Wednesday a Whopper Wednesday.

Only at Burger King, where you rule. This episode is brought to you by Fidelity Investments Canada. Make investing simple. Fidelity's all-in-one ETFs are designed to do just that. In fact, Fidelity does the heavy lifting, including rebalancing these ETFs to help navigate changing market conditions. Visit fidelity.ca slash all-in-one. Getting closer to your goals could start today.

Commissions, fees, and expenses may apply. Read the funds or ETFs prospectus before investing. Funds and ETFs are not guaranteed. Their values change, and past performance may not be repeated. Hello and welcome to another edition of The Rest Is Entertainment, questions edition. Questions and answers edition. I'm Richard Osman. And I'm Marina Hyde. Now, let's have no preamble because I'm dying to hear the answer to this question, Richard, please. It is about jury service. Okay. Robert Buckley says, having been called again annoyingly for jury service i was wondering if celebs are exempt as i can't imagine david beckham or lorraine kelly sitting in jury deciding the guilt of a

shoplifting case how famous is too famous to serve that's such a good question do you know what i i literally i've asked a high court judge that exact question can a celebrity defer themselves service journalism can i just yeah isn't it just now she says that listen if you are like anybody if you're filming a movie or something while this is on and you can prove you are contractually then you can get out of jury duty you can defer a couple of times but she says no there is absolutely nothing stopping a celebrity being on a jury so i went further and and said, so for example, no one would go, it might be a bit weird if Lorraine Kelly is on this jury. And my friend said,

no, unless it's connected to the case somehow, weirdness for everybody is not a ground for dismissal. I mean, if you ever looked at juries, there's much weirdness there. And it doesn't, you know, Lorraine Kelly would be the least of it, I have to say. Yeah, she then goes on to say, I would make a celebrity sit just for badness,. And it doesn't, you know, Lorraine Kelly would be the least of it, I have to say. Yeah, she then goes on to say, I would make a celebrity sit just for badness,

especially if it were you. So I won't be able to get out of it. Isn't that interesting? So you could go there and, you know, there could be Richard Madeley, it could be anyone. I would love that. I mean, not if perhaps if I was on trial. Madeley can have some quite lively views

and I'm not necessarily sure I'd want those brought about in my case because I would only be on trial for something I was falsely accused of If I was on trial and Richard Maidley was on the jury I think every single thing I'm saying I'm directing directly to Richard Maidley Oh yeah, because you know he's the foreman He will get himself elected as that foreman, no question

And I'd be going, well the mobile phone cell I know it said I'm there, but hey Richard, you know sometimes technology right okay it can be wrong and then i say and of course i have forgotten what i was doing that tuesday we can't always remember what we're doing am i right richard just the whole way through well that's quite a sledgehammer way to incept him into thinking that you know you haven't actually done it you try and do it that way but some other thing completely would get inside his head,

something, you know, prosecution or the defence... Or he would say, do you know what? When you walked up, I saw that one of your shoes, your left shoe, the shoelace was slightly looser than the other, and I thought that means you're right-handed, so I think you did it. I go, there's nothing about being right-handed in the trial. What are you talking about, Richard?

He goes, listen, listen, I've listened to everything, OK, I think what I think. I think, Maidley you've absolutely turned this on its head it's perfectly possible by the way that Richard Maidley has been on juries if he has been on juries and you have been involved in any way in a case please and Maidley was on the jury please write in because I want to know if I want to make a 10-part series about it, actually. If I went into court, if I'm standing in the dock and Lorraine Kelly is on the jury, front and centre, if I'm guilty, I know I'm done. And if I'm innocent, I know I'm saved. Yeah, she'll get to the bottom of it, yes, in a way that perhaps I don't quite think Maidly would.

So, yes, as I say. But also, if Lorraine Kelly's been on your jury, do write in and let us know. Yes, exactly. Any celebrity jury, actually. We'll take anything at this point. Who's the most famous celebrity who's been on a jury? That would be the question.

She gives me the name of somebody who got off a jury because he was filming a movie. I won't say the name in case that's sub judice or something. Yeah, that's a great, that's a nice place to start, isn't it? Thank you, yeah. But you can, if you commit a crime, then Lorraine Kelly may well be judging you. And you better hope she is if you haven't done it.

Okay, talking of going on trial and being judged by Lorraine Kelly, Richard Allen has a question. Marina, as a columnist, do you get legal indemnity from your employer against the cost of being sued for something you write? You do, and so you should. If you publish something in a newspaper, it has to go through a number of procedures. I mean, everything I write goes to the legal department. It's so square. And therefore, if it is published by your newspaper or your media outlet of any sort, they should obviously indemnify you. And so if you are sued, which, by the way, legal actions in this country for libel are sort of extraordinary.

Our libel law is really pretty awful. And it costs on average, I think, 140 times more to fight a libel action in this country than it does anywhere else in Europe. And it almost doesn't exist in the US because they have that sort of freedom of speech rights. And it's really quite hard to be considered to have libeled someone in the US. What's happened in recent years is that particularly amongst sort of oligarchs, kind of really extreme kind of kleptocrat business interests, Richard Madeley, for which London has become a complete magnet for,

some of those have taken to suing individual journalists. They've met through the publisher of a book, for instance. There's a great journalist who's actually got a new book coming out, which I'll tell you about in just a second, a guy called Tom Burgess, who used to work for the FT. And he wrote a book called Kleptopia. Oh, I love that book. Oh, it's terrific.

He's got a new one coming out literally next week called Cuckoo Land, which is in the same vein. And it's absolutely fascinating on dirty money and how it gets hidden. And it's really brilliant. Also, Catherine Belton, who was the Moscow correspondent also of the FT, and she wrote Putin's People, which is an extraordinary account of how he rises from being a sort of FSB security, AGB officer, to becoming Putin. A much less good version of Pan's People. Yeah, a much less good.

And both of them were sued. Harper Collins was sued, but they were sued individually by various oligarchs. And that is really very difficult. And both of them won those libel actions, which is really very difficult. Or legal actions. The journalist won them. The journalist won them, which is very, very difficult. There's a second part of Richard's question I have seen, which is,

if so, does the legal sort of indemnity cover your column only or extend to Twitter? Well, this is a much more interesting area. There are social media guidelines, all newspapers, publishers, whatever will have them for their journalists or authors and will say, you know, you need to stay within these guidelines. Because if you write something on Twitter, that is libelous, there's not necessarily a reason, in my view, given how expensive libel actions are to defend, that your employer should automatically stick by you. And sometimes people have been told many times not to say certain things on Twitter because they haven't gone through all those layers that we talked about,

the editing, particularly the legal department. And you're kind of out there on your own, as I think we've said before on this podcast, it's fine to tweet it's absolutely fine not to post have the thought but don't necessarily feel the need to put it on the tell your friends but in those cases it is more complicated and there are some instances where journalists have been sued over things that they said on twitter but not over what was published in newspapers at the time and And I have to say that I think it's pretty difficult. You should probably take responsibility within reason for what you write on Twitter. If it's just about kind of maybe promoting a column that you've written

or you're promoting an investigation that you've done and you get one word wrong, I think reasonably you might hope that your newspaper would defend you in that situation. But in other times, if you're going out on a limb and freelancing completely and really not staying within libel law to a reasonable degree, then I think you have to be quite careful. By the way, I do think that certain things, as I say, I wish it was different. And I wish libel wasn't such a, you know, we're the sort of libel capital of the world. And another great book, sorry, I'm giving you a real reading list on this one,

a book by a journalist called Oliver Bullough, which is called Butler to the World, which details all the kind of image washing, all the legal, they call it lawfare, this type of suing so that you kind of completely silence writers who are writing often quite legitimately about your business interests or your kind of political misdeeds. And London's the sort of capital of it. And we have these whole strata of people who work in London

who probably tell their mothers that they're a hotshot liar and you think, yeah, yeah, but it's like being a lawyer for the mafia. I mean, you should work in something like animal torture or something. It's probably more moral. So with the ones you, sorry, we'll go on slightly longer on this one because I think it's fascinating and it's a fascinating insight into it as well into a world I don't really know. So the HarperCollins, for example, and these authors,

when they fought back, that's quite a brave thing to do. It's quite an expensive thing to do. It's so expensive to defend a libel action. It's, you know, automatically... Do a lot of people just cave? Yes, because sometimes it's a small thing and you just think, you know, I'm going to be...

And what they call these things, you know, that's why it's called lawfare, because it's really easy. You hit people with 25 different lawsuits over different bits of the manuscript of the book. And in the end, you want to get this thing out there. And so it's very, very difficult for publishers who aren't hugely rich in many, many cases. And they have to decide whether they're going to take a stand on it. And both these publishers, the publishers of Catherine Belton's book and of Tom Burgess's book decided to do that. And that is totally to their credit. But you can see certainly with smaller publishers, you just don't have the money to do this.

And actually, newspapers often don't have the money to do this. And sometimes people might accept rather than a really long drawn out court battle, you would take the first legal letter and people might say, OK, well, if it's going to become very complicated to defend this and they're not going to accept this and we're going to end up going to court and it's going to cost us hundreds of thousands of pounds in costs alone, never mind what is awarded as a libel damage, then maybe it's just not worth it. And that is wrong and that's how it works. And the fact that we're the capital of the world for that sort of thing,

I don't speak to our credit at all. So, yeah, it happens in England. It happens in Britain England it happens in Britain far more because of our libel laws our libel laws are sort of unique and as I say it's 140 on average 140 times more expensive to defend it in the UK than in Europe and it doesn't particularly exist in the same way in America and you have to be a UK resident to be libeled or can foreign nationals sue in the UK? Yes, people do that. The phrase libel tourism. And this is why often you'll read books and they will have sort of sensational details in and the British version will not have it in because if it is published in this country, then you can sue in our courts and that will make a huge amount of money perhaps for the person. So things that you

can get away with publishing in America and in Europe, and then the British version of the book will not have those details in. And so it's quite odd. And you'll often be able to look online and see that other people are writing extraordinary stories about the royal family or whatever. And if you read American publications, you might think you know all sorts of details about things that have happened in the royal family in recent years. But you haven't read them here because they'd be libelous and they'd be sued about. And it's hard to prove often those kind of gossipy backstage stories. And people don't want to necessarily speak on the record, particularly about the royal family. But to some extent, maybe these stories are well sourced.

You don't know, but we just don't have it tested because we don't have them published in this country. Richard Adam, that's a good question, isn't it? You don't think you're going to get all that? Great. OK, here's a good one for you, Richard. Musician's Income, Bob Bright asks, How many bands and at what level make a decent living? I know Richard's brother is also an author. Do the other members of Suede have other sources of income? Or does the band provide enough to live on? Is all the cash at the very top end, much like football? asked my brother this question so my brother is in suede has been in suede for 35 years now longer than that maybe uh and he said you know my brother's very sanguine about the the music business and he's an author as well but he's full-time suede still and so suede make money

matt says five percent of bands are making money and it's mainly the legacy bands my brother always said we sold albums in the 90s when that was the way to make money, you sell records, and now we tour, which is the only way to make money now. So obviously at the very top end, your Ed Sheerans are doing very well. Suede and bands at their level, you know, the Mannix, Blur, all those bands, they're making money, those slightly older bands. But he says, you know, these days for a new band, it's almost impossible to make money. You know, you're not getting big advances. There's no older audience to buy physical product anymore. One of the big changes, he said, in the last few years

is touring Europe has become much more difficult and much more expensive. I know, that's such a nightmare. Post-Brexit, so there's no money to be made. Venues now who would take a cut of merchandising, which is the only way that newer bands are making money at all. So it's really, really, really hard for a young band. You could be, so The Last Dinner Party,

who've got the number one album, had the number one album last week, are a very cool new band, but hard for them to make money. So they've sold records but not the sort of sales of records you'd have made years ago. Well, they just have to tour. They have to tour. Well, that's the thing. And, you know, Matt says if you can headline festivals then you're making money so the last is good money is it festivals is great money because people are paying 100 200 quid to go there and there's 40 000 people

going and so if you're a band like suede or blur or or the manics who are big around the world you can do 30 40 festivals a year in different countries you can headline you make good money you make all of that legacy money. And so there's a good living to be made. But if you're a new band, you can't do that. You can't just immediately go to headlining festivals. So The Last Dinner Party, for example, probably can now headline one of the second stages at Glastonbury

so they can start making money. How long before they can tour? How long before a band can tour? Yeah, how long before? The Last Dinner Party, would you think that they could start selling out places already or just? Oh definitely because of the different way that people listen to music these days they've got quite a big following already

so they've been able to do tours but not the sort of tours that can make you money essentially the only way to make money in music is to have made it a long time ago because there was money around or to be big enough that you can charge a lot of money it's like so much of culture isn't it yeah it's crazy the mid the mid-budget anything has gone yeah so

you're either the mega franchise band as it were or you're the kind of low budget whatever and you can make it work that way but the mid the mid-tier of so many different parts of entertainment has just been hollowed out yeah and matt is saying as well when you've signed a record contract now publishers quite often demand a cut of publishing and merchandising. They call them 100% deals. So the pop world, and he's right about this, he says the pop world has basically reverted to the 1950s,

which is like big songwriting factories who are making a lot of money, very pretty people who are making money as well, and that's it. You know, that's where the industry is. You know, actual bands and it. You know, that's where the industry is. You know, actual bands and stuff, I mean, there's not a lot of it about. Matt says maybe about 5% of bands you have heard of are making money,

and all the bands you haven't heard of are not making money. But that is very, very, very difficult these days. You know, you can license your music to films and stuff like that. You can get lucky. But in terms of building a career and matt is right again he's saying look either you're a band from the 90s or you have a day job or you have rich parents and those are the only options left in the music business which is very depressing i mean who knows what comes out at the other end of it yeah you know certainly listen at the end

of the 50s and you know that system you know we had rock and roll and then punk and all that so stuff did happen but it's it's hard to see it happening again when the income stream simply isn't there or the income stream is there but so much of it is being swept into the the record companies it's a hard it's hard to have that kind of kind of creative backlash in the way that also the way you saw with something like universal artists when that that studio is set up right back in the day of the golden age of Hollywood and it set up as a reaction to everyone feeling that they were owned by the big companies but it's really hard to do that against companies that are essentially tech companies now. Exactly that suddenly yeah you're working for a tech business and you know they are very keen for you to make less money than you want to make

but if you're worried about my brother he's doing just just fine. He's okay. And by the way, he is an author and his wonderful book, The Ghost Theatre is out in paperback soon. Oh, and I have read it and it's great. It's really, really good. Thank you so much, Bob. Okay. Should we take a break now? Let's take a break. This episode is brought to you by Fidelity Investments Canada. Make investing simple. Fidelity's all-in-one ETFs are designed to do just that. In fact, Fidelity does the heavy lifting, including rebalancing these ETFs to help navigate changing market conditions.

Visit fidelity.ca slash all-in-one. Getting closer to your goals could start today. Commissions, fees, and expenses may apply. Read the funds or ETFs prospectus before investing. Funds and ETFs are not guaranteed. Their values change, and past performance may not be repeated. Okay, welcome back to the Restless Entertainment questions edition. Questions and answers edition.

Questions and answers. I believe you have a question for me. I do have a question for you. Have you ever been on a jury? We have another Richardard richard myron miran listen myron i'm guessing given that producing movies is so expensive it's a good question actually given producing movies is so expensive why are there so many deleted extra scenes during production you would think the script would be finalized by the time of production

huh yeah i mean like a lot of these things it's not totally logical richard i would say but it's so expensive to make films even if you're making a low budget film by any other standards, you know, you're thinking, oh, I could just be buying a few hundred dialysis machines. It is just extremely expensive. than you need of everything and this is why we do you know people you shoot what's called coverage and you do the scene from how many different angles and you might shoot 20 takes of the same scene for all the different things but what you want to give yourself always because as any anyone not just movies anyone will tell you editing is a huge part of all art forms and you need to be able to cut stuff away and editing is obviously an incredibly creative role in itself and when you meet a great editor, how they can make something not funny,

really, really sing, how they can do little jumpy cuts and suddenly you think you're in the presence of something kind of peppy and smart and cool. And it hasn't been at all. You've actually been given something that's almost dead on arrival.

That is an art form in itself. Also, it's so strange how many times, you know, you've done something scripted and you've written, I mean, 30 drafts of one episode of television, maybe more, maybe 50 drafts of one episode of television. You see this thing shot and you think, huh, it doesn't make sense. And the amount of people who have been involved in every little episode of that. But until it's everybody is part of the film.

And so the act, it's not just the script. The script is one part of it. The actors, it's not just the script. The script is one part of it. The actors, it's always extraordinary. When you start talking to actors at the start of a creative process, maybe you're making a movie or a TV show or whatever, you think, I mean, I've talked to directors about this. You say, God, it's extraordinary. I've been with this film for how long, you know, trying to get it made.

The actor already knows so much more about their character than me. There are so many moving parts that until it's up and running and you're out there and the cameras are rolling, you don't really know. And some things will work and some things won't. And this is why you might have lots of different alternative lines, particularly in comedy that might get shot. But even at the end, you will have reshoots because you will go back and you think, God, after all that process, after years of getting ready, we still need to go back and reshoot this bit because it honestly doesn't make sense. You need that give within what you shoot and what you record and the sound and everything to be able to tighten it to make the final product.

The more money you would have, the more of that you would choose to do. And in terms of the cost implications, it's built into the budget that you will have to overshoot and presumably as well, most of the cost of a film are like sunk costs. You've got your crew, you've got your location. You're going to have to pay for all of those things anyway. And actually adding an extra day or a couple of extra days,

it doesn't exponentially increase the cost of the movie. You're not starting. You wouldn't, for example, say, oh, we need a new scene and it's going to be on a helicopter and it needs to be to be in Barbados that you wouldn't do but you go look we have this set anyway we have these actors on contract anyway can we do an extra day with them and cover something and give the edit something else that they can work with I took this your that's that I agree and this is the ideal version thereof I have to say that actually in keeping with your question, Richard,

there are so many movies now, particularly the big franchise ones, that have almost 50% of time, again, built in for reshoots because what happens is that they decide when they're going to release a movie and they release, they bags that weekend, months, maybe two years in advance,

Memorial Day weekend in 2025. They have to hit that release date because it's really important they spent so much money on this film and they start these films and they repeatedly start films with no third act which is so crazy to me Marvel repeatedly do not have a third act for a movie how does that come about it's because they actors are available at certain times they've got this date that they have to fix and they go through all and they it's now become part of their process that they will just do huge numbers of reshoots sometimes i've talked to people who their reshoots have been twice a lot as long as the original and and that is a fiasco and you should never make movies like that and

it's extraordinarily expensive and it's kind of creatively idiotic because you're constantly working under a really hard time pressure and you're sort of rebuilding the plane mid-flight and it's not an efficient way to do it and it's and many but on marvel they'll say to you oh no no no you need to tell us where your third act is at least going to be set and the directors and the writers be like we don't really know so what they do is they scan they fully scan the scenes and then say right well if we have to go back to this we just do it all on cgi so everything is now so much of it cgi so they'll fully scan sets and whatever and say if we have to go back to it we'll do it like that and then in the end sometimes the producer will just say right you've got choice

of three locations for your final battle because you haven't told us where it's going to be and it's going to be here wow which is again not something a way to make a piece of art in your experience if there is a sum of money on the table to make a film every single filmmaker will spend every single penny oh yeah and then some more and especially on these kind of bloated franchising they go over budget but they are made in a chaotic way and sometimes that's part of the process i mean tom cruise will always say for those missionossibles they deliberately have a tiny amount of script and much of it's you know a lot of things are built around the stunts that he's

going to do and they don't really know what they're going to do but that is part of their process. I think ideally you wouldn't do it like this but it's become so it's become such a trope of those type of movies that they just kind of completely throw the whole thing out while they're making it and try and rebuild it and

you know you can see the creative results another one I really want to ask you Richard Sarah Milton says Richard having written several best-selling crime novels and being generally immersed in the crime genre for years do you think you could commit the perfect murder should the need arrive like should the need arrive

I mean, just... Listen, you never know. Only if called upon, could you do it? She's very much given me the benefit of the doubt there, Sarah, isn't she? Honestly, yes. What? Is my answer. I obviously thought your answer would be no.

Really? Really? Yeah. You don't think... I mean, you could commit a perfect murder, surely. No way. What if we had like four days to plan a murder? Of course you could.

Well, who's investigating? Is it like Jane Tennyson is investigating? In which case, I don't think I'm going to go up against that. I have bad news. It's Lorraine Kelly. Right. She'll get for anything. But what?

You do think you could? Of course. Because, you know, the whole point when you write a crime novel is you have to find a murder that is difficult to solve. But then there's always a fatal flaw, which means you can it so just do that but without the fatal flaw and there's sort of brilliant technical consultants most crime writers uh use so val mcdermott is one of our finest crime writers brilliant stuff and she has a great relationship with this amazing woman called dame professor sue black and i think she's at lancaster, but she's a forensic science. Yeah, she's absolutely brilliant.

Val will take Sue out for dinner and just go, what are you working on, Sue? And Sue will outline to her some new technique that forensic science has got. And then Val will go, but hold on, if I turn that on its head, that means I can get away with murder. And Sue was telling me one time she told

Val something, and Sue was about to go to a conference she had this big new something about human bones that she'd discovered and she was about to, you know, she'd done a paper on it and she was about to give her first ever speech about it and then she read Val's new book and it was like the main bit of the plot

and she said I haven't even announced this yet Val, so you know you talk to someone like Sue Black who can give you various ways of getting away with murder, which is usually how to hide evidence, how to obfuscate evidence, things like that. But it's working out the ways that you can solve murders, which is usually these days CCTV, phone records. It is, you know, DNA, exactly, traces and stuff like that. But once you take all of those out of the equation,

I think it's possible to commit the perfect murder. Don't, by the way. I always think the way to commit a perfect murder, really, you don't have to worry about any of that stuff, is to... Sorry, this is a weird thing to be talking about now. I don't want you to stop, Richard. In for a penny, in for a pound.

Yeah. Also, now I won't ever be able to do this because I'm saying all this. Oh, dear. You're taking your best murder idea. If you're going to... Don't commit a murder. I don't need to say that, do I? But don't try this at home.

We said it twice and I think we're covered. Yeah, we're covered. Legally, we're covered. Yeah. We're not going to get sued for libel. Is to assume you're going to get caught and to commit a murder in such a way that you will get away with it in court. So, you know, for example, if you were to commit a murder and drop a glove that later on the prosecution asks you to try and in court and it's too small for you, suddenly they go, well, I obviously didn't do it. This is your big bit of evidence. I didn't do it. So you would drop a glove that's slightly too small for you, suddenly they go, well, I obviously didn't do it. This is your big bit of evidence.

I didn't do it. So you would drop a glove that's slightly too small for you somewhere. You try it on in a really way that for some reason no one queried and said, OJ, you're not putting your hand in the glove properly. I wasn't thinking about OJ. Oh, right. No, I was. So essentially, you know, just put conflicting evidence.

If the glove don't fit, you must acquit. Also get Johnny Cochran because really that was. Yeah. So, you know, just put conflicting evidence. If the glove don't fit, you must acquit. Also get Johnny Cochran, because really that was... Yeah. So, you know, I think that... But yeah, so in the spirit of the question, I think you spend a lot of time thinking about how people solve murders in these books. And the counter side to that

is how someone else tries to get away with murders. Doing it in the context of a sort of Los Angeles race war would be helpful. So try and think of your cultural context. That's always helpful. Exactly. Cultural context is very, very important. Four police officers have got to offer something.

Yeah, just, yes. Okay, for a police beating. I'm getting too into a specific case, of course, but you'll keep it light and general. Yeah, me. Yeah. Listen, it was much easier in the old days, of course, but that goes for crime writing as well.

So if you're Agatha Christie, firstly, she's a genius, so it's much easier for her. But secondly, the ways you could be caught were so difficult. Because there are no mobile phones and there is no DNA. And so for her police officers to catch someone, it's actually very, very difficult. These days, it's really really really hard to get away with murder is the truth you know someone are we watching a true crime thing this is a slight sidebar but watching lots of true crime things uh and the cold cases where they catch people yeah because the dna from the 70s and 80s was kept and i can't help thinking in a world

where everything is incompetent and everything goes wrong, the foresight to keep all of that evidence in all of those cases, which now leads to hundreds of people being convicted, that's pretty impressive, isn't it? Yes. Yeah, that's good.

That was one of the most efficient things done in the 1970s, across all formats. But it is, though. If you think about everything we got wrong and how stupid we were in everything, the fact that the police were going, no, I'll tell you what, we will keep all of this stuff just in case science catches up with us. And it did. And then the law catches up with murderers.

So listen, I don't approve of murdering. No. I'll go on the record as saying that. I'm never going to commit one. I'll go on the record as saying that, which is legally binding. But yeah, being a crime writer makes you think a lot about how one would get away with murder. But I think by and large it's hard to get away with one

because to be a murderer in the first place, something has to have gone wrong with your logical thinking. And so you wouldn't be in the sort of, unless you're an absolute psychopath, you wouldn't be in the place where you were able to think in that way. And if you are a psychopath, then as always, their fatal flaw is they tell you that they've murdered somebody because they need to be seen as clever. So listen, it's hard to get away with murder.

But as an exercise, yes, you could. I think in real life, I think it might be slightly harder. But if anyone could do it, it would be Professor Dame Sue Black. See you next week, everyone. Bye-bye.