The Rest Is Entertainment - Disney's $100m Mistake

Episode Date: March 30, 2026

What happens when readers suspect a published book is AI slop? What’s the latest in the fallout from the cancellation of the US reality TV show, The Bachelorette? And what has Peter Mandelson got in common with Taylor Frankie Paul, the celebrity at the centre of the scandal? Publishing is finally fighting back as Hachette has pulped thousands of copies of a new book that readers are claiming is penned by ChatGPT. Could this be the same future for Reform's Matt Goodwin - as it's also littered with AI Hallucinations? Richard and Marina also discuss the messy downfall of Taylor Frankie Paul, the Mormon TikTok star that has been dogged by domestic violence allegations. We have the full breakdown. The Rest is Entertainment is brought to you by Octopus Energy, Britain's most awarded energy supplier. Is your door in the draw? Sign up at www.postcodelottery.co.uk People’s Postcode Lottery manage lotteries on behalf of good causes, 18 plus, conditions apply, play responsibly, not available in Northern Ireland. 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: Adam Thornton & Charlie Rodwell 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

The Rest's Entertainment is presented by Octopus Energy. Now, can I tell you something cool that Octopus Energy do if you ring them and you have to be put on hold? Because they know who you are. They know your birthday. The Hold Music is the best-selling single from the year that you were 14. That's quite cool, isn't it? Yes. I love this.

Exactly. I've looked into it for you. Do you want to know the best-selling single in the year that you turned 14? So this would be your hold music on Octopus Energy. It is Yaz the only way is up. What do we think to that? Well, yes, and the plastic population. Yes, and the plastic population.

Oh, of course. Do you know what? I sometimes think the plastic population do not get their due. They don't get there. They don't get their credit, do they? You know, I need to ring it to Octopus now and just listen to it. You can choose to say, oh, I don't want to have any whole music at all. Absolutely, yeah, you can do whatever you want.

Okay, what animals, what monster? Okay, it might be a really bad song, but what monsters don't choose to listen. I have to say. To the song. Yeah. I love that they do. I hope we're going to do this for me in another episode. But then we find out if I, yeah, I can.

I think I'm considerably older than you, aren't I? Not that much. What? It's like two, three years. Yeah. Yeah, you'll be saying, and the best-selling single in the year that you were 14, Richard. It's Cumberland Gap by Lonnie Donegan. Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina. Hi. And me, Richard, Osmond. Hi, Marina.

Hello, Richard. How are you? I'm all right. I wouldn't want to be entertainment right about now. With the grilling we're about to give it. Absolutely. We're preparing to run the rule over it all. We've got quite a few fun things to talk about. We have. We're going to talk about AI in books. Some people are using it. A couple of high profile examples of that. A couple of big falls on the way. We're talking about that. We are talking about big fools. This amazing story. If you know the story, you're going to love it. If you don't know the story, I think you might love it even more. The Star of the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and the new season of The Bachelorette has just bought both of those franchises down in one go. We're talking about how? What a take, Dan. Shall we start with AI in books?

We've got two stories we want to talk about. Should we start with my story? You want to talk about Matt Goodwin? I hope our audience understands that this is a story I find impossible to say seriously at any level. You've virtually been bouncing in your seat all morning because you wanted to talk about it. But Mia Ballard, who is an American author, self-published author, who wrote a book called Shy Girl, which is, I don't know, listeners, if you enjoy your Femgore horror, but it's firmly in the Femgore horror genre

about a character who is kidnapped and kept as a pet by, listen, it's Femgore horror. As I say, she was self-published author, published this, and the way publishing is now, I've spoken a lot about self-publishing. Don't be sniffy about self-publishing because how many of actual publishing hits now come from it. The well of creativity out there is absolutely huge,

and publishers have been going to that well more and more and more to just take stuff that they know already is popular and publish it themselves. So traditional publishing has started going into self-publishing, taking these things off the shelf almost, repackaging them, putting them in bricks and mortar shops and making a lot of money out of that. The other thing that's happening is self-publishing, quite apart from the top end of it, starting to make a huge amount of money for people. The other thing that's happening is it's been absolutely flooded with AI. because this is a world in which you expect to pay 99 cents for a book and you expect an author to do 10 books a year.

These are some of the things that happen in self-publishing. And so it's absolutely rife for AI. Also, absolutely no barriers to entry into this market. Don't have to go through an editor, don't have to go through a publisher, doesn't have to go through anything legal. You just write it, format it, put it on the Amazon store. or lots of other places you can do that as well. So, one hand, all this self-published stuff, on one hand, traditional publishers saying,

oh my God, some of this stuff is really selling. At some point, the following was going to happen. A traditional publisher, in this case, Hachet, one of the absolute biggest publishers in the world, took this book, Shy Girl by Mia Ballard, said, we are going to publish this, published it in the UK. It appears it has been written

or certainly heavily amended by AI and has set have accepted it, palt it, said this is absolutely unacceptable. There's all sorts of other stuff going on in there. Can I ask you a tiny thing about it, which is, I was quite interested in. Okay, so when they take it, they say we're going to publish your book. We're going to properly publish your book. Sorry to use the word proper, but you know, just differentiate here.

Traditionally published. Yeah, traditionally publish. Yeah. They said, we are enjoying refining her book with her. So does that mean it's not the exact text that went self-published? Because you've now got an editor and they're going to say, by the way, it really drags here or something in the nicest possible way. It's going to have to be a bit different for our purposes.

But now you have a book deal and now you're going legit and blah, blah. I mean, as we will discover, it's actually slightly a halfway house. Because it's not one of those ones where the publishers involved right from the beginning and is able to sort of have meetings and is heavily invested in it. But they will do some due diligence edit. And then a light edit. But, you know, essentially they know people like this book and we're reading it. And there is a mood of foot in publishing, which I think is quite right of why would we impose what we think a book is on a book that is already set.

So it's a light touch. But the key thing is there was a Reddit thread started about two and a half months ago that started raising questions about this and started saying, look, I'm reading the first chapter of this Mia Ballard book. and it looks a lot like AI. It's reading an awful lot like AI. Tell me what the signifiers were because we know some of them in nonfiction writing. Yes. Like it's not X, it's Y.

It's exactly the same. So there is an emotional flattening. It doesn't do nuance and peaks and troughs very well other than within individual sentences. Within individual sentences, it can actually go, you know, the light shone like darkness was never there and the darkness shone like light was never to be. It does that sort of thing all the time where you go, oh, you go, oh, hold on a minute,

though. That actually makes any sense. It does. Every single noun will have an adjective. I mean, it absolutely overwrites that sort of thing. Every action has a simile. Every single one of things. It will not leave a single piece of action alone without, you know, describing what it is a bit like.

There's lots of lists of three, something X, something Y, something Z. Now, all of these things, every writer does these things. MDA. Sort of, yeah. There's a lot of Mdash. I think people have worked out now you can just go through and say take out M-Dash before you send it off. Especially for digital natives who've grown up in these kind of world, you know,

worlds. You absorb the writing style. I mean, I hope I don't, but I feel as a journalist, I'm waiting for someone to say, your columns, AI, and it not be. And this is it. I know we'll go to a whole section of discussion on that, but... This is why it's a really interesting thing, because a lot of people will say, yes, but that's how neurodiverse people write.

And particularly that's how neurodiverse people write. And, All of that is true. Every single one of them. And you've been trained on those people? Every single one of these things, these tropes are things that writers use. However, they don't use it all the time on every page, which is what AI does. It does the same thing again, again, again, again.

A human writer will always, at the end of a chapter or the end of a section, just going, okay, how is my reader feeling now? Was that too dense? Do we need a bit of lightness of touch? A real author's going, what move would surprise? is my reader next, what move would, you know, move my reader next word. AI is thinking what word would normally come next. It's all they're thinking.

And so it doesn't differentiate throughout a whole book. So I've talked to a lot of editors and agents this week because part of this whole Mir Ballard story is someone put all of her put this work through an AI, you know, scanner and said, oh, it's 78% AI or something like that. I didn't meet a single agent or publisher who uses one of those AI detection things. They use their gut because they're reading writing all day, every day. And a lot of these people have been doing that for 40, 30, 20 years. I mean, it's just what they do.

They absolutely understand it. They understand that writers can use all of these cliches, but they get to a point where they can read five pages of the text. And this is not working for me, even cover letters and, you know, cover art and things like that. So the Mia Ballard thing, a lot of people have now come out in her defense and say, Oh, no, but if you put Frankenstein through an AI generator, it says it's 100% AI and all of this stuff. It seems that this is a fairly clear-cut case that Hachette went to Mia Ballard and said, we suspect that this is AI generated.

She has said, this is her quote, she said, someone in my writing group offered to help. She'd done a draft, Mia Ballard. Someone in my writing group offered to help and assured me she'd do a thorough job. So I trusted her in the process. She also changed a lot of the wording and encouraged me to lean more poetic because that's my background and I listened. I should have done one final careful pass before publishing and that's on me. Essentially she's saying, I gave it to somebody else and they used CHAPGPT to edit it. She's published previous books which don't appear to have had AI assistance.

So this is very, very different. So Hachette poked it. They said, we're not going to publish it anymore. Hachette in the US, which was about to publish it, has pulled it as well. And it's the first example of this happening. It's first example of these major publishers being duped into doing an AI helped novel. She's pursuing legal action Mia Ballard. So maybe perhaps, listen, perhaps there's an entirely innocent explanation for all of this.

And certainly if there was AI involved, it's not the biggest crime in the world. We don't like it. But to have it escalated like this must be absolutely insane for her. But this world is self-publishing. I follow lots of self-publishing groups, and I find them very, very, very interesting. And you can see the panic amongst them because 19, well, certainly all the human beings are doing their own work. You see the panic where they go, yeah, but I use Grammally to help with my grammar sometimes. Because if you don't have an editor or a copy editor, you know, it's due diligence.

Does that mean it's AI? And on the other side of things that there are people who will type in a prompt, go and make a cup of tea and come back and they've got a book and they'll publish it and we'll do 200 books a year. So there's no way in the future that these books are going to be AI-free because people are going to use tools to help them if they're not in traditional publishing. So it is beholden on our publishers. And I think this is a good news story to keep an eye out for these things. The world of self-publishing is going to be in trouble because there are so much AI stop. And there's so much of it. But there's so much human creativity out there.

there as well. So I just hope people who are self-published are not disheartened by this whole mere ballard thing because it's one thing. It was found out. It is obvious to almost everyone who has read this book, what the situation is. So is this the start of a huge avalanche of AI books that are going to be in your bookshops? I don't think so. I think the exact opposite. I think there's a real kick-up the backside for the publishing industry. I think they're all going, oh, my God, thank God, that was Hachet and not us. Probably talking to behold. Yes, right.

Charges the lightweight brigade. Yeah. We have another thing, which is everyone being accused of using AI, which is something different. And now it's become absolutely a thing that you can beat anyone with. And as you say, these... I'm dreading someone saying it. I've obviously, have never written a column with AI,

but I'm always thinking that someone can just... It's like when someone turns around and say, oh, you've plagiarised this idea or something. It's like the worst thing you can say if you really care about those things. Well, as I say, these detection things don't particularly work. So that's not something... You know, there's no point putting everything through those because it'll... And they're often designed to go.

you to sign up and get met. You know, they're kind of scam. I don't want to say they're all scams, but a lot of them are scams in their own way. But I was speaking to an agent who had a client who had a book out last year, first book, debut books are a really big deal. And in the first week, they were accused of having an AI front cover. So they said, your front cover is AI, which is a huge thing in self-publishing. Lots and lots of AI front covers.

And, you know, the writing community are very good at understanding that if you want to be protected, we also protect artists. And so they're very, very against it. So there was this huge sort of uproar. Fortunately, for this author, the actual illustrator who had drawn that front cover that people were accusing of being AI had done a time lapse photography of her drawing it. Oh my God. So she had absolute proof of doing it. But in future, because this is the way that AI, this is the way that publicly genuinely the only thing that really publishing is really think about AI is can they come up with their own IP without having to involve human beings, give it to a job?

writer, have it written and then own all of everything. So something like My Oxford Year, it was come up with by the publisher, Julia Wadean, who's an amazing writer, wrote it. But the publisher owns an awful lot more of that than they would if Julia Wayden had come to them. So if you are a publisher and you sit at home with AI, and it comes up with Project Hail Mary for you, for example, which is the biggest selling book in the world this week. So it comes up with that for you. You give it to a writer and suddenly you own Project Hail Mary. And so I keep hearing this in publishing that, well, they would just do that one. They would cut out the originator. But, and we go back to that time lapse photography, if that happened, say Project

Halmerie was an AI thing and a publisher sort of came out with it, they gave it to a writer, comes out is a huge hit. I go, I don't think, I'd like to know how you came up with that publisher because you don't, you're not somebody who comes up with good ideas. How did you come up with it? And they go, oh, I just thought of it somehow. No, I need proof because if AI does come up with If AI came up with a Project Halmeri, the publishers would not own it. There is no copyright in something that AI came up with. So I'll just go and do Project Halmeri 2. That's easy.

And someone else does Project Halmeri 3. So this thing of, we are going to have to be in a position, as I say, as we rebuild this industry after this hurricane has blown through, where we find a way to prove that we originate our own ideas. I'm going to wear a GoPro to write my column. But people will... God, that would be on watchable. I've seen some of my watchful things in my life,

but that would be up there with, you know, some of the worst of Guy Richard. But with a simple, we're going to need a simple piece of blue chip software that is able to show it to prove that A, we came up with an idea and then B, that we wrote it. And now I feel very fortunate.

All these writers I've talked to the other day, he said, my God, thank God I started writing before this all came out. You know, I was talking to Lee Chard. He goes, thank God. I mean, he said he'd written all of his books before. came out and he goes, I never have to worry about it. But if you're a younger writer now, you're absolutely going to have to answer this constantly throughout your whole career.

And so just some way, like the illustrator with the time that's photography, just saying, here is me drawing it. We're going to have to have a thing that says, here is me writing it. A publisher is going to have to accept that. The publisher is going to have to sign legally to say, yes, you did that as well. Or if they give you a thing, they are going to have to sign something to say, I didn't use AI to come up with this. But I do think this is one world where we we want human beings. And so we'll just find a little way, a little gold standard of how to say human made, like when you go to a National Trust gift shop, you know, and there's a little pot of jam and the person who made it signs it, you know. It's an artisan newspaper, Colin.

Art is exactly that, exactly that. Can I make one more philosophical point? Yes. Which is the AI industry, I mean, it's sold everyone's books. Okay, so anthropic and open AI, you know, it scraped everyone's books and, you know, has used them in their large language models. There is a feeling of, among some writers still, that what AI is doing is thinking, this is going to be a brilliant way for us to write books. Oh, my God, we've got all these books so we can copy them and we can do our own versions of books. And that's never been the game for AI at all. The reason they scraped all of our books is because they just wanted a huge repository of fairly well-constructed sentences.

They're not in the businesses, oh my God, we can write books here because there is no money in books. If you look at the industries that AI can be going into and are going into, you know, medicine, shipping, all of these things, insurance, these things that are multi, multi-tillion dollar industries. Books, they don't care. They used us. They used us just for our words, just so they can train people out to write emails. And then they moved on. But they've left a mess behind them, which we're going to have to deal with.

and by we, I mean, publishers, writers, self-published authors, but I think we can deal with it. That's the treat of it. Readers want to read stuff written by human beings. Human beings still want to write books. Publishers want to support that industry. So the Anthropics and Open AIs of this world, we're still going to sue them. Don't worry about that. They're absolutely, they've stolen from us. If you're worried that, yeah, but it's going to get better and better at writing novels and soon they're going to be indistinguishable, that doesn't seem to be the direction that AI is going in. AI, its selling point is to be accurate and concise and boring. Its selling point is not to be radical and different and creative. There's no money in that because the shipping logistics industry don't want that from their LLMs. Open AI, Anthropic, they're not interested in books.

It's our business again. And we as an industry can just get on and we can build something that is real and true and human and that people will, I think, value even more because of what's happened. Okay, well, I've got a couple of counterpoints to that in my next case study. This is the business about Matt Goodwin. I'll give you a posseid history of who Matt Goodwin is. He is used to, I mean, I don't know if he still calls himself an academic. He used to be an academic.

He actually co-wrote a really interesting book in a research book with another academic who's great called Rob Ford called Revolt on the Right. And that came out in 2014. By the way, if you read that book at the time, you could basically essentially predict that Brexit was going to happen. It was really interesting. It was like an analytical look at how there have been so many on moorings from traditional kind of voter bases that there was a potential for that. Anyway, since then he's been on a little bit of a journey,

Wrightwood, if those directions still make any sense anymore. He's got a substack, a political substack. He stood in Gordon and Denton and the recent by-election. For reform, right? Yeah, he lost for reform. He lost the Greens. He's sometimes described as reforms in-house intellectual. Anyway, he published, self-published again, which I think is interesting, recently, just really recently, last couple of weeks,

a book called Suicide of a Nation with the subtitle, Immigration, Islam, Identity. And he is saying that it's selling amazingly, because it's numbered 2 on Amazon or something like that. It's now in the realm of Jamie Oliver Cookbooks. Okay, challenge. This is not the air friar and he knows it. Citation needed. Citation needed. Okay.

So a political writer called Andy 12s has suggested that this book is AI generated and it's got sort of, or to some degree AI generated. It's got made up quotes from like Cicero, Livy. I mean, they should be glad people are still talking about them. But anyway. And some of them, by the way, a lot of the stories simply cannot take it seriously. So apologies for all the people who've been taking it very, very seriously for the last week. And that there are AI hallucinations in it and chat GPT sourcing and so on. He did come up with this epic nickname, Matt GPT, which I'm sorry, it's just, it's like one of those Trump ones.

It's like, oh, it's so good. Unfortunately, I can only think of this person in his way now. Anyway, Andy 12th challenged him to a debate on, or maybe Matt Goodwin challenged him to a debate, which happened on Friday night on Gapy News. I know I've used this quote before, but I remember in the night he's watching a dating show, American dating show. And they said to the woman, what sort of men do you like? And she said, I like men who fight in bars. I remember thinking, oh, my God. I don't many challenge each other to debates on news channels.

On TV news. Get in line, girls. And I think it was resoundingly won by Andy 12s. I mean, nobody really watches these things. Probably all the inside Beltway people watch it. But it exists like all of this stuff just to be clippable, which is kind of relevant to what we're talking about here, okay? What I am very much into,

and I pretty much think we're going to talk about Taylor Frankie Paul in this way, Matt Goodwin's just posting through it. He's not, and everyone's like, you know, they try to destroy me. Yeah, no, you have to. They've tried to destroy me. They're making me stronger than ever. My book's now at number two on the Amazon charts, which I'm going to come to you in a second and ask you what on earthy.

Yeah. But people have just been like, oh, he should go away and think about it. I've seen, you know, genuinely people who regard themselves as credible thinkers saying, you know, Matt Goodwin should go away and actually consider what's happened to him. It's like, wake up, okay? It's 2026. Politics has been post-shame forever, okay? This is good for him.

I'm really sorry. People have spent the whole weekend saying he's been totally destroyed. Rubbish, okay? You're so wrong, okay? Nonsense. Okay, it's really interesting how the right has taken so much of what the left did in terms of online stuff. Like the left were, you know, that kind of online victimhood, all of that,

which was originally definitely very much a preserve of the left. The white have now just taken that, weaponised it. They're so much better at it. What even is this book? I remember when my eldest son was tiny, like three months old, he had a cloth book, something about a monkey. You know, it squeaked, it crinkles, blah, blah, blah. And I remember thinking, oh, my gosh, his fat, like he's got a book already.

And then it's like, wake up, what are you talking about? It's not a book. It's like a paginated toy, okay? It's just got some things like this. That's what books are. Yeah. What Matt Goodwin has written, he hasn't written one of these treatises. is even something like Liz Truss's, let's save the West.

It's nothing like that. How's that going? It is just, it's aimed at the Facebook audience, which I mean skews older, if I can put that, but like, and it's a paginated piece of internet. That's all. It doesn't have to be the same as what you think some, whatever book is. I won't sit with my parents this weekend. And, you know, like many people have that generation, up next to the landline on the wall is useful numbers. And it's, you know, it's me, my friends.

sisters, the GP, you know, nice Mark Taxi. Yeah. David Hare, not the playwright. David did cut the hair. He does the hair. Yeah. Ray Plummer, you know, useful numbers. Bray Plummer the playwright.

Yeah. Useful numbers. This is just useful numbers, this book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's useful. I don't even know if they're true, but people don't mind about them being true. This is my counterpoint. No one is going to care about this in a few years time.

But this is not the book industry. No, I know. It's just a random outlier. This is not someone who buy, the people who are buying this, they may also buy some novels a year. I don't know whether they do or don't. I suspect probably not. It's a different type of audience. It's one of the things they might sell in Waterstones, a bit like they might sell all the games and the toys and the packs of cards and the books of stamps. It's a thing.

It's a paginated piece of internet. And also, you know, Matt Goodwin's living is Matt Goodwin now as so many people in this era. So his job, when he wakes up every morning, is I know how much money I've earned last month. I've got a rough idea because I've got this amount of people following me on substack and there's not much churn. I've got a rough idea of how much I'm making next month. Where do I get some extra cash? Look, I'll do this book because, and again, he's not thinking, this is the thing that's

going to make me millions. He's just thinking, this is the next bit of what I do. You know, it's just another way of monetizing what I do. So you do a book and you put it out there and you hope that it blows up and people give you lots of publicity. Not looking at how many he's sold. He's not going to make a huge amount of money out of it, but he's getting lots of... It is not going to be a Jamie Oliver Cook, but let me tell him that right now. Oh, no, but he knows that. He knows exactly how many they've sold. He knows that. So this afternoon we'll get the Nielsen ratings, which tell you actually how many books you've

sold through Amazon and through all their normal bookstores. And if your website, you know, has Nielsen accreditation as well. Can you explain to what the Amazon chart actually means? So the Amazon chart, I saw a thing where he said it's the sixth best-selling book in UK this week. By virtue of it being six on the Amazon chart. And I looked at Amazon. It was actually number three on Amazon. I said you could say third.

The Amazon chart updates every three hours, four hours sometimes. And it just tells you where your book is at any given time. So if you're number six or let's be fairly, it was number three on the Amazon chart, you are number three on one retailer for a four hour period. And that is it. This is not the best selling books of the week or anything like that. But next week we will say exactly how many it's sold. But the AI thing is sort of more interesting.

So, Mia Ballard, I hope it's a line in the sand and that as a industry, as a fiction and novel writing industry, we can grow from there. The Matt Goodwin thing, it shows how actually books now, as you say, 30 years ago, there was some prestige and oh my God, he's published his treatise. And now it's just, it's another, Matt is making his money from Substack. and it's making money from people, you know, hearing whatever he's having to say. And he's posting through it. Yes.

And this is a printed out version of that, yeah, posting through it. Do you think with him, and I don't know enough about him, you know the thing with El Ron Hubbard and Scientology, he was a sci-fi writer and would write about cult and suddenly went, hold on, this seems to be quite a lot of money in this. If he did have a cult, you know, having written that book, which as you say is super well respected, but understanding what was happening online with the right and the agitators and the money there was to be made. did a bit of him just go I mean listen I work really really hard being an academic and I know what I get paid I feel like there might be money here

yeah and Rob Ford who wrote it with him and is now sort of like his mortal foe and he's he remains in the camp in the camp he'll go in the room with John Curtis all the day of the election and he'll be one of the people who creates the exit poll and you know it's really interesting

yeah it's a it's a sundering of I don't think they were necessarily ever politically in the same place at all. In fact, they weren't. But nonetheless, they combined with their kind of discipline and the research to write this book. And then, yeah, in 12 years, it's, yeah, different branches of history. Anyway, next week's podcast will give you the final scores on the doors for Matt Goodwin's book.

Shall we go to a break? We'll be talking about someone posting through it after the break as well. Oh my gosh, she's posting through it. She's posting through it so much. Yeah. And also, and the best thing about it is, it's not in our country, unless you're in America, in which case we have bad news. Yeah, but you've got so much bad news.

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18 plus, condition supply, play responsibly, not available in Northern Ireland. Welcome back everybody. Now, I should say, just as we've been recording, the news has come through that Scott Mills has been sacked from Radio 2 over his personal conduct. We obviously know nothing about that yet, but we will, we will, we will. see how that develops. But yeah, that's literally just happened as we are recording. It feels like that's going to be a big story. Market is developing. Now, we are talking about a lady called Taylor Frankie Paul. One of those names that you could do in any order. There's still been a Paul Frankie Taylor. Sounds like a bassist from Duran Duran. She may need to change it.

Yes, she may indeed. Please, for those of our listeners who are not familiar with her work, I would say she has cost the American entertainment industry over $100 million in the last 10 days. For sure. I think that is, I would have thought, yeah. Okay, so it's interesting. Disney has a new chief exec, Josh DeMorrow, who's just taken over. He's come from the Parks Division, the very, very successful in lucrative Parks. He's now having to slum it in the complex waters of entertainment. Because on something like his second day in the job, this huge scandal erupted involving the start of the new. completed season of The Bachelorette. The Bachelorette is a show based on The Bachelor where, you know, someone has to find love. They've got to choose through 30 different suitors. And it's insanely huge in America. This is like season 25 or something. Yeah, it's an older sort of creaking reality formats from the sort of noughties. It goes all the way back to there. Taylor Frankie Paul, the Bachelorette, they cast for this series because they wanted to kind of revive

that old creaking franchise is Taylor Frankie Paul. Now, so in the Bachelorette, there is one woman and there are a whole series of suitors. 30 guys and they'd go on dates, you know, blah, blah, you've got to choose. The opposite of The Bachelor. Let's hope you find true love. So the person you cast, quite often stunt casting, quite often someone who's been on the other side, you know, who's been one of the suitors in previous seasons. Yeah, they normally bring people out of the format because that's how the...

But it's a huge deal. You're carrying that entire season of that entire show. Yeah. And they choose Taylor Frankie Paul because they already have a relationship with her because of... Because of a new reality format that's been going, I think about three seasons. It started two years ago. It's an absolute mega success. It's called the secret lives of Mormon wives. It's kind of like a

housewives thing, but are different. It's all under the Disney Aegis. It's a Hulu show. And that is a runaway hit. And she is the standout star, you know, with her chaos and her drama. For reasons we will go into it. And they think we'll cross the streams because, and by the way, reality TV has become that sort of a thing. British people complain about the American version of traitors when it first came out because they had all been on multiple different reality formats.

And in the old days, which, as we used to talk about, that you couldn't have someone who'd been on I'm a celebrity, then appear on Strictly. It doesn't matter anymore. Reality TV, you just do the rounds of the shows and actually it's better to accrue kind of more clouds. You become a professional reality show. I mean, so the antecedent for this happening,

for Taylor, Frankie Paul, being in The Bachelorette is another big, big old behemoth of entertainment television, which was creaking a few years ago, was dancing with the stars, which has now, which has been spoken of before, gone huge. And Dancing with the Stars in the last season had two other members of the Secret Lives and Mormon wives in the cast. Everybody loved it. Again, you're crossing the streams. It was a huge success. So you're thinking, okay, well, that seems to have worked beautifully. We've got The Bachelorette. It's not doing great. I think the last two seasons have been the lowest rated seasons ever. We have had success with

the Secret Lives, people going on, dancing with the stars. Everyone seemed to like that. We have this thing, the Bachelorette, that needs a really, really strong presence at the heart of it. And actually, that's what launches this show. And we also happen to have in The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, like a real breakout star, who is Taylor Frankie Paul, so let's cast her. But if we rewind a little bit before the chaos comes about, why was she such a huge part of the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives? Because it was built around her, really.

Yeah, and I mean, I almost find it quite difficult to talk about without giving away what's happened to her, because right from the very start, in the very, very first episode of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, some police body cam footage is shown from an incident in which she's sort of being, she's drunken and being arrested. And there's just a little bit of it anyway. And, you know, she confronts this supposedly and talks about rebuilding and I've done the work and all these kind of. of modern phrases. Reader, she had not done the work. She had not done the work. So she, the whole thing because she starts like this mom talk thing, M-O-M-T, okay, where she starts doing bits of her life and bits of, you know, life of other people in the Mormon community. And it's quite surprising to people, because, you know, amongst the, you know, the things you would expect, it's not the stayed community you might think it is. And her first controversy is she's doing this

mom-talk and stuff. And then she starts talking about how her and her husband at the time and other members of the Mormon community they lived in were soft swingers, which meant they, you know, they swapped sexual partners every now and again. And everyone's like, huh. And her, this mom talk really, really blew up at that point. And everyone in TV is going, holy moly. So you've got this community of Mormon wives.

So, you know, we think we know what we're going to get. But it's like it's a. Real Housewives franchise, but from a really unexpected angle. And so they jumped on this mom-tok thing that Taylor Frankie Poole had started. The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives comes out of that. And she is its progenitor. And as you say, the very, very first thing that happens, the fact that it all comes from a charge.

Anyway, so she's cast in this new season of The Bachelorette. She is on the promotional tour for the new seasons about the Bachelorette. It's completely finished. It will have cost them tens of millions of dollars. And what comes out now, TMZ, the sort of video-ratsy site, gets given, leaked a video, which is the video of the actual incident that led to that the police being called. And this is not, by the way, a video that we have seen on Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. This is new. So we sort of.

This video is disqualifying. This is a video of her. She's very, she's really drunk. She's having some big domestic argument. She's throwing bar stools at her on-off partner and the father of one of her children. She's completely wasted. It's awful. Yeah, it's really awful.

One of the stalls hits her daughter from the previous husband and you hear her cry. And he says, you're not even going to your daughter and she's crying. Now, that cry is basically regarded as the sort of insurmountable horror for the executives. And they have pulled the entire season of the bat. You can't. It's really interesting. a video, there is, obviously we live in a video culture, there is something so kind of obviously viral and insurmountable about actually seeing the incident.

And knowing that every single one of your potential viewers is seen an incident as well. Yeah. And so when you're saying, oh God, who knew? I mean, you should have because it's not a secret that there was something that led to the original police body camera. Oh, so everyone knew about this incident, by the way. So this is, this has been absolutely has been documented on their own channels show. You can kid yourself, this or that, if all you're seeing

is the tiny bit of footage you've seen off the police body down. So they are put in a situation where, and this is where you see sometimes, where you can really visualize a meeting in the entertainment industry. So they have a meeting, and this meeting is what do we do about the Bachelorette

because it probably doesn't have long left. Is there a way we can save the Bachelorette? And I'm going to tell you exactly what this reminds me of, by the way, in a moment. How do we save the Bachelorette? and they go, well, look, how about Taylor? Because we're dancing with the star stuff. She's chaos. She's a train rack.

Yeah, she's chaos. And, you know, and also... Don't forget, she's not in the room, but this is how they'll be thinking. Of course. And they'll go, redemption arc, you know, maybe she finds love. Maybe that's what she always needs. And someone in that thing go, yeah, but don't forget there's the thing with the kid. We know that that happens. Well, they know there's a police thing. And there's a mystery guilty plea. They go, you know, but what about the stuff, you know, the arrest? And also we're aware, you know, it's not the last thing she's done that's being chaotic in the first few seasons of Mormon wives.

And they go, well, yeah, no, I know what you mean. Yeah, it's interesting that. But it just, I sort of feel like, can you imagine when we announce? I mean, can you imagine when we announce it? It's going to be like huge, isn't it? Yeah, well, should we like maybe look into it a bit more because I'm, I'm a tiny bit uncomfortable with her being. Because what if she is sort of uncontrollable? I think, honestly, you know the guys on the Bachelorette. They're pretty good. I think that they can probably have. Let me talk to some of the Mormon wives producers. And they're going, yeah, listen, she's a firework for sure. And they go, tell us more about the arrest. Yeah, you know what? I think that maybe that's sort of in her past a little bit. Yeah, because it's their show as well.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. This is all owned by the same people. But those guys didn't properly relay the situation because otherwise that you're threatening your own show. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. Well, no, but don't figure it also Mormon.

are thinking, because they're just, you know, they're almost like a startup still. And they're incredibly excited. That's who I mean. Two cast members on Dancing with the Stars. And they go, oh, God, now we're going to have Taylor on the Bachelorette. This is huge for everybody. So everyone's got around the table and everyone's kind of gone, is this okay? Maybe this is okay?

And everyone's gone, oh, is it okay? And the fact that they've all kind of gone, well, is it okay that the decision is sort of made, sort of in absentia of any moral thinking, what's wherever? And they go, you know what, let's do it. And it's exactly the same process. that leads to Peter Mandelson being the US ambassador. Don't you think? Oh my God.

Everyone's going, I mean, sort of solves some problems there, wouldn't it? Because like, you know, I guess that he'd be good with Trump and is it really so bad,

this stuff that he's done? And ask him the Epstein thing. Is that okay? And everyone sat around the table and gone, maybe it's okay. This is exactly it. Maybe it's okay. Maybe it's okay to do that.

Yeah. And like Peter Mandelson. He's done the work? Yeah. Has he done the work? Maybe is it, is there more to calm? Is there more to come out here?

I don't think there is more to come out. No, I think it's going to be fine. And it's exactly the same thing. If only someone had lost that phone footage, it's so unfair anyway. She is re-arrested for something else. So please go and visit her house much more recently. And this is the thing that somebody obviously releases this video, because she's back in the news again, somebody releases this video to TMZ.

There are separate domestic violence incidents that the on-off partner has reported really recently. So not only that, I mean, which by the way, should be our primary focus. Yeah. But she's also destroyed the season of The Bachelorette because it's quite, all right, she's with the guy that she's got, she's back with that guy. So I guess none of the 30 worked out, the 30 suitors, because she's back with the guy that she's got,

and there are ongoing reports of domestic violence from him. So I guess we know she doesn't find love. Yeah. So what does this tell us about the state of reality TV days? Well, I mean, what happens now is the big question, which is so they've shot the whole of the Bachelorette. It's all in the can, all in the can to the extent that the production has been paid. The production company has been paid.

Taylor Frankie Paul has been paid her quarter of a million pound fee and does not have to give it back because she's done everything she's been asked to do. Everything that happens after is not her business. It costs, as you say, there were some, I was reading somewhere that was 45 minutes. It's more around $70 million this cost. And that's before you start, you know, any sort of publicity campaign. So that money is written off, or is it, park that for a second. The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives' latest season is also on hiatus because of all of this,

which is another absolutely enormous franchise. So poor Josh DeMorrow, as you say, he's not that poor. Coming from parks where you just thinking, I mean, this is just a business, literally on day two, he turns into the Director of General of the BBC and goes, oh, what? So what now? It's interesting. I feel that they can, you know, in a really, grotesquely cynical way that Mormon wives can probably save it because they can bring it into the format because it's that type of a show.

And, you know, I'm not debating the morality of this. This is entertainment television. But I think that they can probably bring it in. It does say something to me about the state of reality TV, which is that in the old days, the format of all these shows would be the start. And basically, you're dealing with unknowns. And you could get freaks and hot messes and provocative. And the format could sort of take them because you weren't building a show around someone already. And so you could sort of say, oh, you could expel them. They're discrete entities and the next season we start again. But now the formats are built around the biggest outlier characters. People you know, nobody's a nobody.

Everybody's famous in some way, whether it be online, they all come with these huge high-profile platforms outside the show. And so reality TV contestants can be much, much. more toxic and crazy in some sort of way because they actually have a form of power that they never did before. And also they are going to be, they are suddenly returnable. So in the same way that, you know, Peggy Mitchell was returnable in EastEnders, but you were writing her. And if she misbehavior, you could get rid of her. These people are returnable. They're the reason people are watching the franchises, but you are not in control of that person. You can pay that person for sure and you can withhold pay of certain things happen, but you can't control them as a human being because they have other

sources of income and they have other sources of attention, which actually bad behaviour will only increase. A lot like Matt Goodwin, really. A lot like Matt Goodwin. I mean, the absolute Matt Goodwin of Salt Lake City, but she's posting through it. Also, like Matt Good. She's posting through it. Because again, I just, I love to think that these moments culturally are, we now know who you are and you go away with your tail between your legs. In some ways, you get more interviews than you can possibly have. You get more publicity. You get more clout. Yeah.

You get the documentary about you in five years time. Yeah. Shame is just the whole kind of legacy, respectability, politics concept that it doesn't work any longer. And you just carry on. And she's done so many interviews this week that there's no sense that in the old days, I mean, I'm not even talking that many old days. I'm talking three years ago. She would have just gone quiet on her socials and whether or not it would have died down or whatever. Not at all.

She is absolutely... Leaning into it. Yeah, leaning into it. She's leaning into the skid. Yeah, but I would have thought they will try and find a way of building it entirely into Mormon wives because you can't lose to dishes. And I think also the Bachelorette, that whole season will see the light of day because you just do it as a documentary. But by the way, our lovely producer, Emmy, was talking about how all the guys from the Bachelorette who've been on this series. So, by the way, they've filmed this whole thing.

Like, everyone in their hometown knows they're going to be on the Bachelorette. They're going, oh, my God, did this amazing thing. They did this thing. weren't, and I was said to Taylor, X, Y, and Z, they're all ready for their moment in the sun, and suddenly that's pulled for all of them. So they're all currently on their Instagram saying, I'd really like to tell my story. Follow me. I'll tell my story. You know, it's, there are so many documentaries at the moment about the, you know, the biggest loser and just, you know, all these reality shows of that awful era, as it were, the amorality of it. And now the industry about.

And a bit of me is thinking, I'm glad that, you know, things have changed. And then you look at this decision. You go, oh, my God. Of course it hasn't changed. But I imagine that, you know, yes, the Bachelorette, the documentary version of everything that they just filmed will be the thing that's on in a year's time. Because the production company, I think, in 12 months' time, can sell it to whoever they want. You build a documentary around all of that footage anyway. It will be number one on your streaming service.

Yeah, I think that's right. Can we do something next week about all those sort of shows? Because it's so interesting how that early kind of golden toxic, ever era you want to call it of reality TV and the brutal shows like America's next up top model, the biggest loser, and now being kind of revived as the subjects of tell all documentaries about how dreadful it all was then. Can we talk about those? Maybe we can talk about that next any recommendations this week. There is a positive banquet awaiting on new streaming, new UK streaming service, HBO Max. I mean, the pit is terrific. It's very hard.

me to pick something the most thing. But I have to say that the thing I was most looking forward to was, which has only just come out in America, was season three of the comeback. Oh yeah, the comeback has come back. Oh my god, it's a very interesting show. Lisa Kudrow plays a TV actress and it's about, it's so much about the indignity and pathos of being in the entertainment industry. But what's so interesting about the show is the first season was in 2005, the second season was in 2014 and the third season is obviously now third and final. 2026. Valerie Cherish is still with us.

She's still working, trying to work, just trying to make her way in a difficult industry. And I absolutely love it. It's just brilliant. So if you don't know about it and you can go back and see all of it. Oh, yes. Which all three of them. Yeah, because they're whatever, 20, 21 years between all three seasons. I'm going to recommend an HBO Max thing as well.

We're not sponsored by HBO Max, by the way, although if you're listening, which is Rooster, the Steve Carell show, which is just really, really funny from what. And I'll watch Steve Perel than anything, but I won't tell you the whole plot of it, but just watch it. And there's a couple of British actors in there, Charlie Clive and Phil Dunstair and an amazing supporting cast. But it's a really lovely, I mean, oh my God, when the Americans do comedy well, they do it well, don't they? Yeah. Okay. That about Das for today.

We will be back on Thursday with our Q&A. and on Friday for our members, the first in a bonus series about the Spice Girls. Where are they now? They're incredible story, which is a huge amount of fun. If you want to join for ad-free listening and bonus episodes, it's the rest isentatement.com. See you on Thursday. See on Thursday.