The Rest Is Entertainment - Do you have to fish out props that are thrown in the sea?

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

Are productions legally bound to fish out props that get chucked into the sea? Just what is the third act? And, how is Gladiators filmed? A wonderful glut of questions (and answers) on this episode of The Rest Is Entertainment. 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

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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. Hello, and welcome to the Restors Entertainment Questions Edition with me Marina High. And me Richard Osman. Welcome to the Question and Answers Edition. Hey Marina, how are you? I'm very well. Yet again the questions have been terrific. There's some really funny ones and some really intriguing ones.

I think we have my favourite question of all time coming up later. And it was both of ours when we saw it, so yes. Shall we start with this? It is a question from sally ward thank you sally she has three children she says over the years i've been really impressed with the amount of storyline humor and drama that children's tv writers are able to include in a five or ten minute slot e.g ben and holly's little kingdom danger mouse etc i feel these writers have a tough job to pack so much into that small slot her question is do you think children's tv writers get the respect they deserve from the industry that is a terrific question i also love children's tv and having watched a lot of it in when i was young obviously but also when i've had three children

who are still quite small things like hey dougie bluey i mean abney and teal which i absolutely loved what's it called abney and teal oh my I absolutely loved. What's it called? Abney and Teal. Oh, my God, it's absolutely terrific. There's one guy, a guy called Andrew Davenport, who did Teletubbies, In the Night Garden, Moon and Me, which is the most recent one. Oh, the guy who lives in the big golden palace. Yeah, well, Russell T Davies said,

I actually think that Andrew Davenport should be considered in the same breath as Tom Stoppard and Samuel Beckett. First of all, you're so right about the concision required for that type of writing and i always think if you're made to write something short yeah you become a really good writer this is the advice whenever people ask me about journalism i always just say write really small things write something in 500 words really small honestly write really really tiny writing then see if you can write it in 250 words then see if you can write in 100 words and you will not waste a word they do not waste a word in hey doggie in bluey there's so much plot in five minutes i mean there's a lot of plot in five minutes of pepper pig it's extraordinary how they do it and if everyone knew that then you wouldn't

be sitting there sometimes when you're watching something on some one of the streamers thinking jesus christ nothing has happened for 25 minutes. We've got nine episodes of this. This is so indulgent. It's so indulgent. Now, children's television has... Come on, Laura, don't shoot someone. Yeah. Someone, Abney and Teal, which is...

And also the people who work on these things, like Adrian Scarborough, an actor who I pay a fortune to watch in the theatre and have done on many occasions. He does the voiceover for Abney and Teal. A lot of really amazing writers, Russell T Davies being one among among them started in children's television it is the best training ground in lots of ways and lots of brilliant comedy writers uh start out on those shows as well pingu is

brilliantly funny it's such a great way to get into the industry and again the short form versions of it do sort of mean it's perfect for our culture and some of the biggest youtube channels are kids things as well i started years and years ago i used to write with david williams when he was david williams and the first thing we ever did was i think called i hate this house which is on cbc yeah and you know we got into it via there and so so many writers get their first break just writing little short things for for children's tv um you know really properly funny funny people. But that's great. Bluey is like one of the great philomenons of the world. But it's interesting that Sally identifies the concision because I think that is such a good way of becoming a good writer at anything

is to be able to write short before you do whatever people now think of as long form. And a lot of long form journalism is just long. The internet has given people an infinite space and they have lost the art of concision. And I really think that certainly on television, they've learned to write short to anyone writing books as well if you're editing a scene lose the first four paragraphs yeah you know come in as late as possible always come in as late as possible and come out as early as possible and uh you know people will just keep on reading to the next chapter in the next chapter but yeah

kids tv sally you're absolutely right genuinely underappreciated treasure and has been for many many years but if you get it right uh incredibly lucrative i've got one okay from sean freeman richard i wondered about multi-camera shows such as gladiators which aren't transmitted live would a director select camera shots as live during the events or would they cut footage together later the answer is both so if you're making gladiators you know the shots that you want you probably i don't know how many cameras they'd have on that but even on a panel show you've got six or seven cameras they've got a lot of cameras because they have so many reactions and they've got lots of fixed rig cameras and all sorts of things so a director knows roughly what's going to happen they've done rehearsal so he knows what a game is like he knows they're going to go from bradley at

the beginning and then they're going to go up onto the podium and then there's going to be a fight and then one of them's going to fall down and then there's going to be another interview so you've got a rough idea of the geography of what's happening he sits next to someone called a vision mixer and the vision mixer has the output of all of the cameras essentially so at any one time if you go into a gallery if you've seen like on sometimes on tv when you see the inside of a gallery and there's kind of 40 different screens and they've got the feeds from every single camera there um and that's when the director's working out that camera four which has got to get the big high shot it actually needs to go to the left because you're missing something there so the director is constantly working out where those

cameras are pointed the vision mixer is doing a live cut of the show as it goes along so roughly what you would be watching on tv is what the vision mixer does but then all of that footage goes into the edit so you've got that master which is the vision mixer is put together with you know the director calling out various shots so you know if jewel is taking place uh and you need to cut three seconds out of it that's an edit and the edit of course you've got to go to a different camera shot so when you're in the edit you've got to go to a different camera shot. So when you're in the edit, you've got all the footage

from all those different cameras. You've got your sort of master, which has been cut in the studio, and you drop in fun reaction shots from the audience or if there's a brilliant reaction shot from one of the gladiators. So you're always looking for interesting shots which weren't put into the cut in the studio.

So it's an incredibly time-consuming process. Funnily enough, we talked about AI last week. I was talking to a very big entertainment producer, and I said, in entertainment, where's the first place we're going to see AI really make an impact? He said, the edit. He said, AI will be able to sort of drop in all of those shots that you want almost instantaneously.

So that first cut of a show is going to be done incredibly quickly. God, I remember people saying right back in the, you know, when X Factor or whatever was in its absolute pomp and you were almost watching something created by the sort of karaoke, Lenny Riefenstahl. And he had, each quarter of that show

had its own edit. You know, the milking of emotion, this is why I bring in leaveny reef and star trying to make it tug on every nation's heartstrings everyone to react in exactly the way he was managing them into reacting it was so much work that each 15 minutes of the show had its entire own edit team yeah and that by the way i don't like i think that way of doing stuff got found out you would see reactions on that show which you knew were not the reactions to what happened absolutely and a decent show you'll knew were not the reactions to what happened.

Absolutely. And a decent show, you'll be watching through the master, then on your other screens, you've got all the other cameras showing exactly what happened at that time. So you can put in a reaction of what happened at that time. Occasionally, you have to go searching in a different bit of the show

to have a reaction that's the same because you didn't quite catch it. But they would consciously choose shots from different parts of the show and put it in like sometimes they do things like on x-ray or britain's got talent where there's silence you think someone's come on they're so bad everyone's silent you think but of course they weren't it was absolute nonsense and you know they would edit things in a way that i thought was uh cheating the viewer but yeah by and large the vision mixer and the director shoot as live,

cut it as well as they can live. And then an editor has an incredibly tough job of patching that all together, you know, putting the music on, putting the dub, you know, all of that. But it's a real treat to see a great editor at work. And it's an unbelievable treat to see a director and vision mixer at work together.

The speed they work at and the director talking to all the different camera operators also who are brilliant and getting different shots and then being cut up live in a in a gallery it's it's a it's a real art here's a question for you marina it's from henry no surname he probably does have a surname he's declined to include it in this case you know what he's like madonna wherever he lives, like in Ryslip, he's so big. People just go, yeah, Henry. Okay, now tell me what he's asking. Henry says... Oh, nothing. No. Henry says

you often refer to a third act in movies, although it may apply to other formats. What is the third act and why is it so important? A three act structure is a sort of really traditional, but it's a satisfying way of telling a story so in the most traditional sense you would have the setup act one a sort of confrontation

struggle act two and third act is the resolution so when we talk about why the third act if we don't like the third act it's a bit of a problem because it's the tying up of the film first act we meet people we see where we are we see what the situation is people have done interesting things with this like famously the sort of hollywood producers don simpson and jerry bruckheimer in the 80s with their sort of high concept movies really refined and pushed this structure so it was you can almost physically feel it happening you've got like in a very hot first act then a second act with a crisis and a third act with kind of redemption via triumph and probably in the case of their movies like uh days of thunder flash dance a freeze frame ending and it was really

it was you can almost feel it funny enough my um my late father some people it's so ingrained in my late father-in-law was a filmmaker and he used to say to my husband when he was really small when they're watching just when they're watching a movie together and he'd go oh end of act one and so it's my husband's sort of understanding of story kind of grammar really it's almost instinctive and as i say it's a satisfying way of telling a story and by the way this can apply to an episode of lifestyle programming you can yes grand designs grand designs is i was about, is the real three-act structure. Yeah, which is, here's a wreck. Oh, no, they're pregnant and the windows haven't arrived.

Let's take a look at this lovely house. But sometimes, Richard, sometimes it ends in tragedy because that happens. Yeah, listen, tragedy does happen. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, anything, even factual programming can be divided like this, but it is a satisfying way to tell a story. And so when things have problems in the third act it is obviously particularly problematic because that is the resolution of the story and a lot of things kind of can lose their

way i think in the third act but i always think also because books also by and large have three acts i certainly always write you never consciously do but i think there's the setup here's the business here's the conclusion but i'm quite good with Act 1 and Act 3. But Act 2 is when sometimes you think, okay, I know where we are, I know the situation, I know the characters, I know where we're going to end up, and there's this big sort of set PC type thing. And you think, ah, there's 50,000 words in between those two things.

And that's where the fun of writing comes, is sort of working your way through that second act. way through that second net but yeah but once once you sort of know that structure you see it absolutely yeah but it's a good it's a good way of testing i mean the testing yourself as a writer the um brilliant tv writer brian fuller who did sort of hannibal he's done lots of star trek he's an amazing tv writer really kind of eccentric genius and he uh said to me once that oh yeah if i ever i've got a way of that i think with act three would end i always say right i'll take that and i'll put it at the end of act one and then now i've got to because it makes you instead of thinking oh that's how it's going to end he'll make that the end of that one and then

you kind of then you've got got you're getting deeper into it already and so that's it's a way people can kind of play around with it a lot to kind of test themselves and to and to challenge themselves once you know the rules you can you can yeah play about with them but also it's worth saying that in in the sort of big sort of multi-series things that there's all sorts of different structures going on and also with you know shows that have advertising breaks necessarily have to have a slightly different structure than shows without advertising that there's all sorts of different structures going on and also with shows that have advertising breaks necessarily have to have a slightly different structure than shows without advertising breaks.

Yeah, you need to have something exciting before the break. Shakespeare used to have five-act plots. Did he not? There are many different ways. But actually, if you stand right back from the story and think about it, you'll see that there's been a set-up, then there's been a problem, and then there's been a resolution. And almost all stories work, even if they're happy sad whatever will work in that sort of a way if they're satisfying uh that's the end of our act one

should we go for a little break just if you are listening to this we still have our favorite question of all time to come yes best western made booking our family beach vacation a breeze and it felt a little like... Life's a trip. Make the most of it at best western welcome back to the rest is entertainment questions edition this is an answer edition only you can answer this richard steve parrot says Pointless do the winners get a trophy each? Do you know what my favorite thing about this podcast is we go from the entire future of humanity with AI to do people on Pointless get a trophy each and also I know which segment is

more interesting to people and it's this one. Yes they do get a trophy each and I mean it would be crazy if they didn't. i guess sometimes people have been on pointless celebrities have got more than one trophy each i think sean williamson has four um that's a guy with a lot of downstairs bathrooms yeah um so they do get a trophy each how big is the pointless trophy it is surprisingly small however it is bulky it's proper cut glass i mean you could definitely what it means it's essentially unscalable it's enormous it is bulky. It's proper cut glass. And in terms of what it means, it's essentially unscalable. It's enormous. It is the single most coveted trophy in the history of television.

That's the interesting thing with TV shows. Obviously, in the very first script, it said the coveted pointless trophy. And I don't think they've ever changed that script. So it's the coveted pointless trophy. But yeah, it's got sharp edges. It's heavy. It's a proper murder weapon just saying if you ever needed one for your book someone has ever anyone ever murdered someone with a with a quiz award surely at all just all murder weapons i mean look

at an emmy that could take you out i funny enough in my new book we solve murders yeah out in the shops in september but you can be able to know available to pre-order an award is used as a weapon how about that that's a world exclusive very exciting okay yes because if you've ever anyone you're ever holding you're thinking this is simply the sharpest and most dangerous and pointlessly heavy thing that there is yeah so that's spoken to someone who's held a lot of awards I mean I wouldn't know I've certainly seen jeremy kyle hold things that i could uh only journalism awards um but yeah so you get uh yeah you get one each but you only get half the money that showbiz yeah it really is showbiz they light it from like it's a monolith like it's the statue of liberty they put it on a plinth and turn it around that's the shot they

always show so i think when people first see it they think that's not as big as i think it would be but then i think they rather like it yeah don't clip that bit out and put that on tiktok come on guys play fair uh question here from jason swayby no one but swayby in the corner he says the gaming industry is expected to generate over 170 billion dollars this year five times greater than that of worldwide movie box office revenues. Brackets, Source USA Today. I like someone who includes their source in the question. Thank you, Jason. At what point do you think the video game industry

will be taken seriously by non-gamers and recognised as culturally important and as significant as the film and music industries? Yeah, you're right, Jason. It is interesting. It's ahead of movies and music, I think, but it's behind TV and streaming. I think people sort of recognise it as a fact of commercial and business life. Like it's like the sort of, I don't know, the marketing industry or the precious metals industry or something that it's a big industry. But they don't think of it culturally. I think that it wasn't taken seriously for a long time, clearly. Criticism is always an interesting part of it, is that critics have been a big part of making, you know, the new Hollywood was a big part of making the new Hollywood was Pauline Kyle, the kind of amazing film critic who

brought all these filmmakers to people's attention. This is going back to the 1970s. And she kind of created a different way of talking about movies and things were taken much more seriously than they had been necessarily before. The gaming industry has been relatively resistant to criticism in some ways I think and if you look at things like Gamergate and these kind of big horrible kind of online pile on scandal things there is something quite gatekeeper-y about that as an industry that shuts people out also industries need stars to become mega um in that cultural mega way and you notice that all the people who do i don't know voiceovers for games things like that they're coming in from another industry so obviously you'll get this some of the kind of games houses

and the people who make the games people think of them as kind of enormous. But they're like a brand. They're like Disney. In terms of stars, tell me who its stars are. Industries need stars. That kind of cultural industry needs a star to become enormous. Three words. Sonic the Hedgehog.

Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is they punch massively above their weight. Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto. These things are multi, multi, multi-billion franchises. Some of the biggest cultural icons of our time, Mario, Sonic, the Mario movie was beyond massive. You know, Legend of Zelda is enormous. Minecraft is massive. Yeah, I think perhaps because video games came of age slightly after that era where we had the shared mass culture, they've always existed. They've always been slightly siloed off. We grew up with television where everyone watched the same thing

and so television became a massive cultural conversation and video games, which are beyond huge and affect everything we do, affect all the movies we make. Completely and are culturally and artistically incredible in many, many ways. I mean, something like Grand Theft Auto, you just think this is one of the greatest works of art I've ever seen in my entire life.

And they always regarded their competition as movies and not other games. But they put themselves against that to say, these are who we compete with. But I think to answer the question, I think that they don't have the same cultural cut through because of when they came of age, I suspect. I'm not sure any industry will ever have same cultural cut through because of when they came of age i suspect i'm not sure any industry will ever have that cultural cut through again but they seem to be doing all

right without it the first ever show i ever ever worked on was a show called games world on sky which is five times a week half hour oh my god it's bad uh but you know in the early days you know that was you know when with sega mega drive and all that kind of stuff. And television has never really done video games brilliantly, is the truth. But it's its own world. It's its own culture. You know, FIFA is one of the hugest brands in the world. And a generation have absolutely grown up with it. But it's not talked about in the same way as succession.

No, it's not. But weirdly, within the industry i mean managers were saying that they'd seen players and obscure players on fifa for the first time i think that's absolutely incredible we've had like pointless questions where we said name a kind of a spanish premier league team and anyone who's played fifa just could just go through the whole list yeah but i suspect if you're waiting for it to become a lingua franca, that probably isn't going to happen. Time, I think, for our favourite question.

Our favourite question ever, Colin Skivington. When a character in a TV show or film throws something into a river or the sea, are the production team obliged to retrieve it? Or do they get permission or just do it anyway? I remember an episode of Luther where Idris Elba threw something into the Thamesames and i thought surely you can't do that colin epic thank you that is yeah i mean genuinely i hadn't thought about it before um i'm not sure i have an answer to this one i i wanted the question read out because i wanted colin's brain to be represented uh on the show but yeah when someone throws something into a into the sea or river,

what happens next, Marina? I have asked prospect experts about this. Have you? Great. First of all, they would like to say that the things that go into the water are normally duplicates. If you see someone chuck their phone into the sea or something like that,

it is often a rubber duplicate. Unless you're Rebecca Vardy. The agent, please. Oh, sorry, unless you're Rebecca Vardy's agent. And you're just on a classic wag holiday destination, the North Sea. Anyway, if a car goes in, it's had its engine, any oil, anything else like that removed, it has to have before it goes in. And obviously, they have to retrieve that.

Having said that. Health and safety. They don't. Things like, some things degrade if it's photographs or people. You know, people chucking a photograph into the sea. You can see... You know this kind of visual lexicon of shots that you see. Oh, like someone on the back of a ferry just tearing up like a wedding photo. Yeah.

And just throwing it over the side. Into the wake. Yeah, we've seen that many times. I'll level with you, Richard. That doesn't get retrieved. It's not like eight divers going down. Off the record, but, you know, or anonymously, perhaps people will say the only time they retrieve them is if they float because they've got to go for another take

and it's there standing i was like there's already a load of pictures in this sea so someone has got to go on often on a small boat with a pool skimmer and get it out so that the next phone or rubber phone or photographs or whatever can go in and if it doesn't say something that floats well i mean photos float you've just described a situation where you rip up the photo and you know that will float someone's got to go in and then they've got another photo of her that's going to get ripped up again they might do it 10 times you see so you need the pool skimmer you need the guy in the boat or might be a lady if i was the director i'd say you know what actually throw it in the bin actually just just just put it in the bin but

there are a lot of props at the bottom of sea and of river that have simply not been retrieved because you're not going to get a diver to go down there to get you know the phone the rubber phone that you've thrown in these are many of the thames's secrets it's like a lake full of golf balls on a provincial golf course yes connor in fact that's such a great question and i love the fact that you had the answer to it as well i will never see anyone i had to ask props people for this yeah but listen that's uh given their props um i'm struggling to remember ever seeing anyone throw something into the sea i'm not sure i've seen the oh god i have really oh every come on

wedding rings uh photos yes definitely things off the end of a pier how many times bodies yeah i've seen that they have to recover those yeah they have to recover those one yeah i'm assuming those poor actors yeah and there's an episode of cypher where they knock golf balls into the sea yeah okay i'm so going to keep an eye out for that the next time there's like a big drama where someone throws something into the sea everyone is going to remember this episode and remember the name colin skivington colin thank you so much thank you very much more in this vein please and if you do want to send questions in there are so many incredible ones which we'll be getting around to the address is the rest is entertainment at gmail.com and we have a huge repository of questions but please add to it

there's a question that i really wanted to get to this week but i think we've run out of time but we'll do next week which is what is the biggest waste of time meeting you've ever had yes please okay tune in next week i'll give you a week to think about that one uh thank you so much for listening everyone we'll see you next week take care bye