The Rest Is Entertainment - How To Create Movie Sex Sounds

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

What are the unassuming every day items that foley artists, those who create sound fx, use to create iconic moments of sound? Spotify Wrapped has become a cultural moment, how does it work? Eating scenes on screen. Do actors really eat a load of food and how do they deliver their lines clearly with their mouths full? Another peeks behind the curtain with Richard Osman and Marina Hyde on this Q&A episode of The Rest Is Entertainment. Join The Rest Is Entertainment Club for ad free listening and access to bonus episodes: www.therestisentertainment.com Sign up to our newsletter: www.therestisentertainment.com Twitter: @‌restisents Instagram: @‌restisentertainment YouTube: @‌therestisentertainment Email: [e-mail] Producers: Neil Fearn + Joey McCarthy Executive Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to this episode of the Rest is Entertainment Questions and Answers edition. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osmond. How are you? Well, I mean not my most competent clearly, but other than that. It's because we still haven't got over Toffee Pennegate from the last show. Well for me there's nothing to get over and I'm sorry it's dogging you perhaps you're thinking about it too much because you realize you were wrong. Oh no I think sometimes when you realize you're in the room with the killer you know what I mean and you're like oh no.

Calls coming from inside the studio. Yeah there's an amazing we were watching Prime Suspect the other day. It's an amazing thing where Hedda Mirren is at the opticians and she knows the optician is a murderer. Yeah, that's a great one. Oh my God. Well, that's how I feel at the moment. Right, okay.

Shall we get straight on to do some questions? Let's do it, go on, hit me with it. Simon Elchringham has a question for you. He says, you're not serious, I hear about Toffee Pennies. He doesn't say that. He says, Radio 4 was on in the background at the weekend and a saucy bit occurred during the archers. None more, rest is entertainment than this.

During the recording of a radio drama, would actors get up close and personal in the same way as a screen stage actor or are they simply sat in a chair with a script making lip smacking noises whilst a sound engineer shovels some bed sheets by a microphone? Beautifully written question.

That's a beautiful, thank you Simon. First of all, all those kinds of sounds are actually made by what's called a Foley artist. Just named after Jack Foley, the person who's the pioneer of all kinds of sound effects. Because most things you hear or see in movies or as it began or then on television, they don't make the right sounds. Most props don't make the right sounds. And it's often to do with a sort of human element of the soundtrack. And also the actors are the ones who are really closely mic'd

and so actually something that doesn't, noise doesn't happen the same way on a film set that it does in real life. A door closing is sort of closing slightly off mic. It sounds like it's a mistake in the background. You have to close the door afterwards in post. Correct. If we can get down to this nitty-gritty. So the way that this sex scenes in the archers would... This is this is rumpy-pumpy nitty-gritty. Yeah that kind of nitty-gritty. There is actually there are various interviews about how people have had to record sex scenes in the arches so you're able to find out that and then I'm gonna come on to wider use of sex noise. Is there a lot of

sex in the arches? There has been over... not much but yeah I, I mean, yes. You know, the whole of life is there. So, Jolene, who was played by Buffy Davis, was with her adulterous landlord, Sid Perks, in the after sex shower scene. Now, she once talked about this at the Radio Times, and she said, we had 12 minutes to record it. The shower curtain was actually an old plastic raincoat, somehow even more sleazy.

Alan Devereux, who played Sid Perks, and I stood in baking trays, and all the squishy noises were done using baby lotion while I said silly lines of dialogue that led you to believe the soap was in an interesting place. Okay which I love. Okay but for on-camera stuff too you have Foley Artists and actually at the weekend spoke to a producer who's a big producer who does a lot of TV drama and talked to me all about how Foley artists will do this. Skin to skin contact in a sex scene the Foley artist really just rubs or slaps their hands together. Creaking beds and sofas really help so they always make those kind of noises. Lips you just kissing

the back of your hand for the kissing noises because even when an actor is kissing on screen that is not the noise of your kiss you're hearing. You're hearing like a teenage girl kissing her hand in her bedroom you're hearing a foley artist kiss their own hand and they one of them said quite often they will put a sort of dress shirt, a kind of stiff cotton shirt on their arm so that they can make the noise of sheets against skin. Okay. You know you know when like things win like the best screen kiss of all time yeah there'll be a foley artist somewhere going Yeah, got quite literally looking at me and the back of my hand

Yes, so sometimes they do it afterwards But quite often if they're doing a sex scene They will record it with a mic in the studio where that scene is being shot always a guy called Mike Yeah, and and they'll be doing it on a slight delay, almost as if they were signing. So you're watching what the actor's doing and then you're creating those noises on a slight delay. So the foley artist is doing this, okay. Now some sounds are literally enough to change the rating of your film or show. So you have to be very, very careful.

If it's too squelchy, you could honestly bump yourself up a rating which you probably don't want. Yeah, so it's exactly the same with your Uber rating. Yeah. Same thing. Yeah, if you've ever squeezed a grapefruit in the back of an Uber, which is one of the techniques they use. Yeah. Is that right? One of the things the Foley artists say is that you want it to sound appealing.

It's not trying to recreate the exact sound because in lots of ways, like maybe sex is messing and make stupid sounds, you want it to be appealing and seductive in the way that the things we see on screen, we want to, you know, we w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w chamois leather, chamois leather and that is always used for skin but they also use it in fight scenes so when you hear people being smacked that's chamois leather. In horror they wrap it around carrots if you have to get broken bones wet it, wrap it around carrots and then you snap it and that's the sound of bone snapping and again as we always say most props are not recordable and particularly human props like this but there's some funny ones of all the other different amazing foley artists and you can see if you go online you can watch wonderful videos of Foley artists like the Foley artists who did Raiders of the Lost Ark when they

actually opened the Ark of the Covenant the actual Ark of the Covenant that they used was obviously made of plastic so it doesn't in any way make the right sound and he thought for ages about how he could make that sort of you know sound of something being sort of this lid being scraped and prized off. And in the end, what he did was he got the lid off his loo cistern and he dragged it across some garden stone. So when you hear that noise of the Ark of the Covenant being open, you can just go and watch the YouTube clip. He said, and actually long ago got rid of the loo, or maybe it's in that big warehouse that they have at the end of Lost Ark, but he has kept the lid of the cistern because he sort of feels like it's part of film history.

Must be worth a lot of money. Yeah. That is literally the closest we have to the Ark of the Covenant. Yeah, definitely. And all the snakes, you know, obviously, Andy Jones hates snakes, that was his wife's macaroni cheese and him just sort of pushing his hands through the macaroni cheese. Her macaroni cheese recipe is the noise of those snakes. Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. Foley artists are incredible. I bet we'll go back to

talking about them and how they created some other sounds another time because every single one you hear about you're like oh that's fascinating. And that all came from Sex on the Arches. Thank you so much Simon. Richard let me do this one for you because it's about Spotify wrapped. Okay Joe Joe Grant says, Spotify wrapped season is upon us. It is now, it's like the red cups at Starbucks. Yes. Is it a thing? I know.

What were your top artists? How does Spotify come up with these genre matchups? For example, February for me was surf, crush, permanent wave, Britpop, and September, academic American football rap. Sounds very AI Jim playlist to me. Thank you for that call back to a previous question. Yeah I love Spotify wrapped it is one of those things that sort of crept up on us and people are genuinely kind of looking forward to it. It's like like the darts you think Christmas is about to begin

because Spotify wrapped is with us and an incredible marketing tool and I imagine enormously complicated to do I think it's someone's job like the whole year round to do it but yeah this year one of the big new things is they've got all these incredible different genres. And funnily enough looking at Jo's one there which is surf crush permanent wave Britpop. My June was surf crush Beatles-esque Britpop. So they get very very close just putting Beatles-esque instead of permanent wave. So Jo we have similarities there. The former chief data alchemist at Spotify is called Glenn McDonald.

He categorized all of them. There's over 6,000 categories, millions of, you know, all these genres that didn't exist before, but we sort of know what they mean, if that makes sense. He has a website called everynoise.com and you show every map of all of these different genres. Technical, black metal, this Icelandic experimental, Gothenburg hip hop. Charlie XCX for example is now Recession Pop Blingcore. That's actually perfect. But great names, so great people who come up with those names. And yeah, it goes month

by month. It's funny because you can sort of tell who you were in certain months. That's the fun of it. A lot of my writing is between January and March. So actually between January and March, all I'm listening to really is classical music, soundtracks, things like that. So January was my Spotify, was my light academia fantasy soundtrack phase. Do you always listen when you're writing? Yes, I either have complete silence or I have classical music or soundtracks. The second is lyrics, I can't help but listen to it.

So March was your Victorian soft piano classical season. And it says, you were all about artists like Camille Sanson and Joanne Sebastian Bach. Yeah, I was all about them. So yeah, sometimes it can tell where your year is, but it's such a brilliant marketing tool and it tells about ourselves and then you have your kind of most played songs and stuff like that. Do you want to play guess my biggest band of the year? Which band did I listen to most? Oh's hard right? Yeah it's really when I hear that things like that it's throwing everything off. I don't know tell me.

Forget that it was Vampire Weekend. Oh was it? Okay. Yeah which I take. Yeah. Listen I think I think that's sort of fine. My number two is John Williams. Is he? Of course. Because of the amount of soundtracks I'm having to listen to. It's so weird isn't it? Yeah. I think both of those do you great credit. Also, I just love everybody of a certain age. It just goes, I mean, this is literally exactly the same as it would have been 25 years ago. It's like, okay, it's Springsteen, right? It's the Stones, it's Madonna, okay? We really don't change much and however much I'd like to think, no, I think there's quite

a lot of new stuff this year. I'm listening to a lot of experimental stuff. And then, you know, you look on this you go crowded house Maybe maybe I don't listen to what I think I listen to but I genuinely think it's an absolutely extraordinary Piece of technology is really good fun for everybody involved It obviously takes a huge amount of work and it's an incredibly good marketing tool and I like lots of other brands sort of try And copy it. I remember like train Line do your Train Line wrapped now, which is places you've been, I think they're doing- Let me remind you about the train jetties

you've had this year, no thank you. I think to their credit they do it ironically, but it's quite- And it's not their fault. It is not their fault. Whatever happened on those trains, and a lot of bad things happened on trains to me this year, it wasn't the Train Lines fault.

Spotify wrapped if you haven't checked. So you haven't checked yours yet? No I haven't because did it come on the day of the Albert Hall show or the the day after? So I was in such a sort of crazy bubble that I haven't and I will do and I will report back. And next week we'll reveal your number one artist unless it's someone. If you had to guess now who do you think it would be? Taylor Swift. Okay. I think probably. It was Bruce Springsteen.

Yeah. Like everyone else. Oh, I love this question. Kevin G. Conroy. I love someone with a middle initial as well. Kevin G. Conroy asks, what are your top three worst best English accents done by American actors?

Dick Van Dyke is not allowed. Oh, okay. So you vetoed the classic Mary Poppins performance of Dick Van Dyke, which I find very charming. Okay, hang on a second. I think they're dividing into all the bad ones are men and all the good ones are women, but I don't know what that means. Listen, we don't make the news with you, I support it. Okay, the worst, and I'm having to put him at number three, but I'm not sure he's quite deserves to be.

Sorry, he's the worst, but you're putting him at number three. No, the list of worst thing is no, don't do this to me. So he's the third worst. He's the third worst. Yeah. He's not the worst. He probably should be high, but he's Keanu Reeves. So I'm giving him a break.

Okay. Keanu Reeves in the Drac, in Bram Stoker's Dracula. That's not great. No, hang on actually. I don't think it is actually worse. At number two, we've got Don Cheadle's Cockney in the Oceans movies. I mean, that's extremely bad and should potentially have even been dubbed over by Dick Van Dyke. I know what my number one is. I wonder if it'd be the same as yours. Is it Big Rusty Crow in Robin Hood? No, go on. wonder if it'd be the same as yours. I wonder. Is it big rusty crow in Robin Hood? Cause that is an incredible...

Okay. His accent in that is he's walked out of interviews when questioned about it. He listened to a lot of audio of Michael Parkinson, someone we were talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, who is obviously famously from Barnsley and Nottingham. He listened to a lot of audio of that. Would I, I'd say it was Irish, New Zealand, and maybe some Yorkshire. Okay.

There's nothing Nottingham about it. And it's terrible. And also because he walked out of interviews and asked about it. I'm going to put it back up there at number one. All that, actually, hang on. I've in theaters. I once heard a terrible one, which was Frank Langele. I saw on Broadway and Noel Coward play it.

So already I'm making a big mistake. Someone gave me the tickets and it was a Noel Coward play. It was present laughter. And Gary Essendine, he's the main character and he's a sort of, you know, basically a sort of avatar of Noel Coward himself. Frank Langella doing the sort of English act, clipped 1930s English accent was a big mistake. Was it? Yeah, it was. I'm going to do a top three, but none of my people, they're all terrible English accents, but none of them are Americans.

Oh, okay. But they're all three from the same episode of the same show. And they are, of course, Daphne's brothers from Frasier. They are Anthony La Paglia, Simon, who goes towards, it's awful. But then two of our greatest actors doing terrible British accents, Richard E Grant and Robbie Coltrane, both just come on and absolutely the three of them. It must have been a dare. Frasier can do almost no wrong.

It has some of the greatest writing in history, some of the greatest performances in history, some of the greatest farces in history, some of the great story, character arcs, you know, every time a new guest comes on it's extraordinary. But their treatment of the British accent is it's sort of the grit in the oyster that makes Frasier so beautiful. You think, oh, you can do stuff wrong. So but Anthony the Paglia, Richard E. Grant and Robbie Coltrane in Frasier, I'd say, are the worst three British accents ever committed to film and two of those people are British. Okay, best. A special mention I'll give to Scarlett Johansson in The Prestige. Third best is Gwyneth Paltrow in Emma. Very good. Second, Emma Stone is very good. She's in the favorite

in Cruella, in all of anything she does in English accent, she's very good. But undisputed is Renée Zellweger in Bridget Jones. It is so good and she so sounds exactly like girls like that who work in publishing in the UK in that particular era. And funny enough, one of my sister's friends who was a girl like that who worked in publishing in that particular era. And funny enough, one of my sister's friends, who was a girl like that, who worked in publishing in that particular era, when Renée Selweger was rehearsing that role, I can't remember which publishing house it was, but they found her a job and she came into the office to get the accent. She worked around all those people and my sister's friend Kate said to her at one point, this is my middle sister, said to her, there's someone in her office who looks so like the girl in Jerry Maguire. And yes.

No, she was in her office. And yeah. Wow. And she was, you know, that accent is completely, completely faultless. It is amazing. Okay, I'll go for the best three. And again, I'm going to go all from the same production. Three Americans, Hank Azaria, Mike McKean and Christopher Guest in This is Spinal Tap. How did I not say it? Yeah. Christopher Guest has got a whole English connection. Yes.

In fact, yeah, he eventually became a hereditary peer for that five minutes. He's Lord Hayden Guest, isn't he? Yeah. Yeah. So, it's just a joke. But Nigel, I mean, those reactions are amazing. A for this. And exactly for that particular type of person who would have been in one of those bands and yes you're right, okay. Yeah. So there's some brilliant ones out there. By the way if anyone wants to ask me the worst Brits

doing American accents I will think about that for next week. The best one by the way is when people had absolutely no idea that Idris Elba was a British actor when he was a stringer bell. Oh I should have put him in because that isn't actually okay I put all the all the girls in I was about to say chicks but never mind. Where did that come from? I don't know okay can I make him equal with René Zellweger. Yeah so you got a three three chicks and a hunk. Yeah three chicks and a hunk. Yeah that's a Christmas movie. Yeah right take me to a break quickly before I say something else ridiculous. Absolute bombshell. In the move towards electric vehicles Hyundai isn't just in the race

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Charlie O'Reilly says... That's a Charlie, isn't it? It's a man Charlie or a chick Charlie? I was just thinking... Which one? I was just thinking that. We have always wondered what the deal is with sets in cooking shows. Are these the TV chefs kitchens or do they find an amazing kitchen in a posh house? It depends on the people really and the idea is that certainly when you have like a, if you've got a Nigella or something like that and the brand is built around cooking at home and friends coming around and things like that, the idea is that you do do that at a house. So Nigella, she did used to do it at a house.

Now she's there in a studio, in Park Royal, I think. Because the whole point is, a TV set is quite hard because you do need quite a lot of cameras and they need to be able to move. And also, if you're cooking food, you want to light it beautifully. In a normal domestic kitchen, you can't hang the sort of lights that you want from the ceiling because the ceiling is not high enough. And also you want to be able to see the ceiling.

So usually you'll find yourself in a set that can be lit from above and lit from the side and cameras can be all over the place and cameras can go behind the cooker hood and shoot from all sorts of different angles. So it's one of those TV trickery things where actually you think it's funny, isn't it? Because if you actually were in Nigella's house for a dinner party and it was being filmed, it would look cramped because of the way the cameras have to film and you don't

want it to look, you want it to look beautiful and inviting and you want it to look glamorous. And to do that, you have to make it unbelievably unglamorous around the outskirts of it. There are obviously those like Saturday Kitchen and Sunday Brunch where you can see that the kitchen is inbuilt. But there are certain chefs who will just film at home. James Martin often films at home, Mary Berry, where you can tell they've got a massive kitchen

because they live in the country. And so you can film through the windows there, but almost always kitchens are sets because it's just very hard to film inside someone's house. It's also very hard to get insurance for fire and things like that when you're inside someone's actual house. But yeah, it's that beautiful thing of you can make

a kitchen look so stunning and you can make food look so amazing if you have industrial studio lights. It's always going to look better than if we were to cook in our own kitchens at home. So a little nest of homespunness in the middle of quite a big studio like that. And also you can have side kitchens and you can have food prep areas. Like Kim does. Kim Kardashian's got the actual kitchen. Yeah.

The front of house kitchen and the actual kitchen. By and large, the last thing ever you want is a film crew in your house. I mean, God bless them. I've worked with many film crews and I love them. But there's a reason that studios are massive. It's because film crews should not be in a small room. Whereas huge rash of amazing cooking things on TikTok and Instagram Instagram they by and large are in people's kitchens because you want it to look low-fi and low-tech and you want to be sort of

banging drawers and sort of losing things and you know the lighting aesthetic is very very different. So for TV things like that it'll be a set. Plus your phone doesn't take up much space on a little tripod. Yeah a phone takes up less space than than eight camera operators for sure. And talking of kitchens Lorenzo Gomez, good name Lorenzo, asks how do actors prepare for eating scenes? What if they don't like the food? I always think that because there's loads of foods I don't like.

I couldn't be in this film. Or do they have a say? Do they starve themselves beforehand? Do they spit it out rather than swallowing? Lorenzo finishes. Okay. Often if there's food they will also need to talk in the scene. So you basically can't have any food in your mouth for that

bit. So they're really good at faking it. They have a tiny piece in their mouth and there's a funny video actually somewhere which I remember once seeing, I don't know if it's still available on her Instagram, Jenna Fisher explaining herself eating a taco. Jenna Fisher from the office, Pam from the office, the US office. And she's got this teeny little piece of something in her mouth and she looks like she's taking an enormous bite of a taco, but you're not taking it at all. And then you have this tiny thing that you can sort of masticate while you're talking and it doesn't cause a huge thing.

But the reason they don't eat as a rule is that you could be have to eat 30 mouthfuls of this thing, if not more. Because once you've done the scene from every angle and everyone's coverage and you've still got to eat this thing in it so what they do have and this is the standard procedure is a spit bucket so you'll notice when you ever see someone eat in a scene the camera cuts away to the other person or whatever it is straight after and always look because you'll see and then they're spitting it out. But very occasionally an actor will sort of commit to the bit to get a

laugh and there's an episode of I think of Parks and Recreation where Chris Pratt, this is by the way before Chris Pratt honed himself into an action adventure leading man and when he was this is the sort of kind of goofy schl schlubby boyfriend, I don't think they gave him any lines in it, and he had to eat a rack of ribs, and he eats 12 racks of ribs. He was just trying to make all the cast laugh, and during the filming of that scene, he ate 12 racks of ribs, but he didn't need to. Julia Roberts, actually, I've just remembered this in Eat, Pray, Love, when she was filming Eat, Pray, Love, they did the Italian bit, the eat bit first, and the character does put on weight in order for her so she would just eat all the things and so there was one day where she said she ate many, many,

many, many slices of pizza in the recording of one thing because she thought, oh well I'll just put the weight on doing this particular section and when we get to Windia for the next bit I will be ready to go. See that's the other difficult thing is if you are eating the continuity also has to has a big job because if you're doing the same scene eight times and you're taking a bite of something you can't then shoot the scene again in a mid shot and have a bite out of the piece of food. So the food has to look like it looked before you took the first bite out of it so you constantly have to replace the food with uneaten versions of exactly the same food, which can take an enormously long time.

You even do it sometimes on a panel show with your water levels of water. If you do a pickup at the end and there's no water in your cup, you go, just fill up your water cup. Cause your water cup was full at the beginning. Because the idea that somebody looking in will see an edit where someone's water goes from full to empty to full again and will have their evening ruined. People absolutely and also viewers love this now you can pause everything the whole time you're like they always want to see the joins so it's a it's better if you just keep the thing exactly it is and you have this tiny thing in your mouth that you're chewing and also you've got to get the lines out

so they're really good at making them it look like the most enormous mouthful and it's actually a tiny little thing in their mouth. But also actors always, lots of actors have to have a thing. Lots of actors are food actors. If you let an actor have something in their hand, they are never happier because they're like, oh, yeah, I've got like a doughnut. I'm not eating it, but I'm sort of look like a mite. And I've got coffee in my other hand.

And I'm occasionally like that. It's like dance plays. You've got to stop your my other hand, and I occasionally also go like that. It's like dance plays, you've got to stop your brain talking to your hands, that's what you've got to do. And actors, if you give them something to keep them busy, it just really relaxes their brain and they can become their character far more. And you'll see it time and time again,

certain actors who will always, cup of coffee actors, who are like, if they can have a cup of coffee in their hands at any given time, they will. They don't want to drink it, they just want to have the idea of, yeah, me, I'm just a guy with a cup of coffee in the morning. I've got it. I found the character. Yeah, that's who I am. Right, Richard. For you from Jennifer Green.

I'm curious, says Jennifer, how do TV presenters and hosts have the time to read and watch all of the books, films, etc. that their guests are plugging on the show? Like they state, love the book, etc., etc. Surely the likes of Graham Norton don't have that much time on their hands, are they just briefed ahead of time or do they really put in the time and effort? Shows like this morning have a revolving door of guests promoting things, it just doesn't seem possible. Yes it is and you can always tell as an author if they have read the book or if they haven't read the book which which I always find fascinating. If you do something like Between the Covers which is the book show that Sarah Cox does, everyone has

read all the books because it is a show about books. If you do something like Between the Covers, which is the book show that Sarah Cox does, everyone has read all the books because it is a show about books. If you do like an hour-long interview with somebody on, you know, Five Live or something like that, by and large they will have read the book if they're talking to you at length. Yeah, if you go on BBC Breakfast or This Morning, you don't expect them to have read the book. Somebody would have read the book, someone on the team would have read the book, and in the same way that, you know, if you're on BBC Breakfast, you know, Charlie and Naga haven't read all the research about Ukraine themselves. But someone has said to them, this is the situation, this is what's going on.

They'll get a briefing on it. And in the same way that... You're lifting the curtain now, let me tell you. But if I've written a book, someone would have written it. And they'll have prepared a briefing note on it. They'll prepare the briefing note, they'll know about it. Sometimes you'll go in and they have read the book, which is great, but they will always tell you, they just go, oh my God, actually, I read a briefing note on it. They'll prepare the briefing note, they'll know about it. Sometimes you'll go in and they have read the book, which is great, but they will always

tell you, they just go, I read it, I loved it. And then those are great interviews because they can be genuinely enthusiastic in a way that I think viewers really recognise that they have. And obviously if you've written lots of books before and they've read your previous books, but you will, if you're doing a big show like that, you've got about 10 different things, you won't have read everything. Graham Norton, you know, if Tom Hanks has come on and he's written a book, Graham is reading that book and some hosts love reading books. But you can always tell and you'll do interviews

with journalists sometimes. And within the first question, you know, if they've read the book or not, they all say they have. And they'll go, I just read the book, I loved it, blah, blah, blah. And they'll then ask a question and you go, if they've read the book or not, they all say they have and they'll go, I just read the book. I loved it. Blah, blah, blah. And they'll then ask a question and you go, Oh, I think you actually have read the book and some doing an interview. You should read the book. You should read the book. I don't expect anybody who's presenting a show because they, as you say, they

have so many people come through. But if you're sitting down with someone for an hour and talking about things, you should obviously have read the book. But no, instead you'll, you'll just get get Wikipedia type questions or questions that they've read. You always know if something's been written. Sometimes someone will interview you and there'll be a weird little bit and you think, I don't remember saying that and it's not really what I think. And that will get repeated back to you. Of course you're a big fan of so and so and you go, oh, you've just read an article rather than read the book. So you can always

tell if someone has read the book or hasn't read the book. But yeah, a lot of presenters don't have time, especially if it's someone's like, you know, if it's an autobiography of somebody where you really can read a prairie. And you've got to remember that very often they've got three minutes of air time from this. Sometimes you're not maybe when you come on because you're quite a big booking, but with other people who are very glad to have their book published, they don't mind, they don't expect it, somebody's read it, but you're only gonna get three minutes of airtime

in total, so it's quite a long way to go. Yeah, and so I'll make sure that I say the things about the book that I want to say. If they have read it, it's great because they can be really enthusiastic. If they haven't read it, it doesn't worry me at all because they will just ask questions about, so what's this new one about?

And how is it different to the other ones? And you get the chance to pitch your book. But if you do something like start the week on Radio 4, which is one of those, there's a few shows that sort of really sell books. And if maybe I only went on it once, but you get everybody's got a book out who's on it. And so you get sent the three,

maybe there's four guests and you're one of them. Then you get sent these three other books. And I've had some really complicated ones on that. like someone had written about The Secret Life of Cells, I think. It was so interesting. It was a lot. Yeah. Like a really complicated book about Iraqi history and there was all this other stuff. So everyone had read everyone else's books, but I was like, hi, my books about celebrities. So it didn't take you too long. I'm such a slow reader.

I really, you know, my eyesight, all sorts of things. And I love listening to books. And quite often, if you go on a show, it's books that haven't come out yet. And so there isn't an audio version. So you have to read it. Last time I went on Between the Covers, BBC two book show, I bought along my book,

but the book of the week, I thought, okay, I'll definitely read it. It was The Kellebee Code by Johnny Sweet, which I had already read. I was so happy. What a dream. When it came through I thought oh I don't have to. I've already done the homework. And I loved it. Perfect. Yeah and I loved it already so that's absolutely perfect. But yeah if ever you go on shows

you know you do get sent the books and you must read them. But if you're a host on This Morning you're absolutely allowed not to read them and the thing about having a great team is a great team will read the book, write great notes on it. And quite often when you talk to the researchers on those shows, they're the ones who have read the book. And actually that interview is really, that's fun because you get to talk about the book and stuff like that. And when you go on and see Dermot and Alison, it's a different interview, but it's a lot of fun, but you get to be the person presenting what the book is. Well, on that note, please keep your questions coming. The address is therestisentertainmentatgmail.com

and we will see our AAA members for a special episode dropping about the movie Die Hard. The whole backstory to it, the production, whether or not it's a Christmas movie. Lots of fun facts. Lots of fun stuff in that. And we'll reconvene next week for two more episodes, won't we? We will do. That'll be a lot of fun. See you next Tuesday. See you next Tuesday.