The Rest Is Entertainment - How To Win Lunch With a Celeb

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Is Spiderman’s box office success a bad sign for cinema? Which podcasting celeb did Richard almost take to lunch? What stars have lost the most from ‘backend’ deals? Marina Hyde and Richard Osman answer your questions on movie star salaries, cinema screen formats and Postman Pat. The Rest is Entertainment is brought to you by Octopus Energy, Britain's most awarded energy supplier. Sponsored by Lloyds. Looking for extra value from your spending? You can bank on Lloyds to help your money go further. Search Lloyds Rewards in your app. Summer sale is here: get an annual membership for a third off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Video Editor: Max Archer Assistant Producer: Imee Marriott Senior Producer: Joey McCarthy Social Producer: Emma Jackson Exec Producer: Ami Bennett Filmed at www.westdigitalstudios.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The rest is entertainment is presented by Octopus Energy. Now, show business is full of people who start out as one thing, but then take on some completely new role that completely eclipses it. And before we get on to how Octopus Energy has done that, a few examples. There are people who start out, you know, bands as singers, as actors. A good example would be Victoria Beckham. She started off in a band, Richard.

She was in a band called The Spice Girls. You're going to tell me next to David Beckham used to play football, before he became an advertising guy. They have earned far more from their second careers, these businesses they've built up, than they ever did in their first ones. So the idea she's a singer that gets her through the door, gets her known, the culture knows who she is, she then thinks, I'm going to see if I can do something else,

and she has the audience who if she does it well goes along with her. But do you know what it reminds me of a lot? Tell me. It reminds me of Octopus Energy, because Octopus Energy has also outgrown its own introduction. It's the UK's largest energy supplier, but is now also one of the country's biggest installers of heat pumps, solar panels and batteries. The list even reaches the driveway with a major electric car leasing business as well. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations

fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time can Brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Restis Entertainment Questions and Answers edition. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osmond. Hello, everybody. Marina, you are still away, but I think it's your final day. I'm very much enjoying talking to you, although I'll be much happier when we're back in the studio together. But have you got some questions for me? Got loads of questions for you. What is the bar?

cafe like at the hotel. I'm not in a hotel. I had loads of questions for you, but let's have listeners questions, shall we? Or viewers' questions? Yeah. Because, you know, that's the kind of medium we're in. Graham R. has a question for you, and it concerns Spider-Man, which I think we'd like to talk about anyway, because it's been such a sensation.

Graham R says, from listening to your show for a long time, I'm concerned about Spider-Man breaking box office records. He's concerned about it breaking box office records. I want studios to be investing in new IP, not superhero slop that has now. and its 10th outing. He sort of has a point. It's an interesting question. Well, yeah.

So this is Spider-Man brand-new day that came out whenever, I don't know, I saw it on that first weekend. It's the biggest opening of all time, even bigger than N-game. The second weekend, it was 143 million domestic, I think, which is bigger than any other movie's opening. So it's extraordinary. I will say about this, I know what you mean, Graham, and, you know, I'm no fan of, like, vast amount of the Marvel output.

And in this case, but remember Sony make this, it is Marvel, but Sony still have the rights to it, and they make this. I think in general, you need, and Hollywood definitely needs some franchise stuff. It's the way world we live in. You need stuff that kind of iterates and goes on. I agree with you on originals, and it's great. We've seen lots of interesting originals. We've seen many more originals this year than we have in any other year recently. This genre in general, superheroes, is not anything like.

what it was back in, say, you know, the late 2010s, nothing like it at all. I sort of loved this story. First of all, I think, you know, the Spider-Man is just a brilliant superhero. For them to have had this, it's lightning in a bottle. They've got these two principles who were cast opposite each other, Zendera and Tom Holland, and then obviously in real life fell in love. They've gone all the way through this and they've just got married. I mean, it's kind of incredible. And everyone likes them, by the way. These are stars that actually are not polarising that people really like. But also behind the scenes,

you never hear a bad word against about them either. Oh my God. I think people love them. Yeah. And it's interesting, various, and it's, there's something about Spider-Bat. When I was watching,

I was thinking, it's so weird, it always remains a kind of coming-of-age story, even though, you know, he's come of age, and they've been through various episodes of this. But things that big coming-of-age stuff, like stranger things that ended,

very cleverly, they bought in Sadie Sink to play a character from Stranger Things to play a character in this. And so I think it really, it just sort of really works. And it was, it, none of these things are, you know, slam dunks at all. I will say that when something is this successful, it helps cinema owners who take half the box office. There are huge, go and sit in the, I mean, that's why Marvel always put all their, you know, trailers and stuff. They have a middle credits trailer at the end and an end credits trailer for something coming up. and in this case, of course, it's all Doomsday, which is coming at the end of the year.

But the amount of people who work on these films, the huge numbers of creatives work on this. This is like a windfall for the whole industry. As I say, the genre is not where it was at all, but this is the best of it. I really like the stars. I think they did a great job on the film, and they preserve something of its essential nature, and it's a great superhero. And so I just think that this is a feel-good story for the industry. and of course I want originals.

And we're very lucky we've had many more originals this year than we have in recent years. But I think that you have to have some franchise things and just to keep things going. Because otherwise you can't get a payday this big, I'd have to say, with an original. I can't see it happening. Yeah, I think that we, you know, I think we were in danger three or four years ago, certainly post-pandemic that the Marvel Cinematic University had lost some of its luster. And so we're in the stage where even the blockbusters weren't really working. and people are saying, okay, we need to invest in, you know, original IP.

But the money wasn't really there because, you know, these studios do depend on these tent poles to bring in. I mean, you know, this is going to make over $2 billion, Spider-Man. And a lot of that is profit. And of course, some of that, you know, will go into the pockets of studio heads and into the pockets of people involved. But a lot of that will go back into new movie making. And I think we were in danger a few years ago of if, if the. these big tent pole movies weren't working. They weren't about to start putting money into smaller movies anyway,

that we were in danger of cinema becoming a declining and dying industry. We talked about it an awful lot, and there are lots of think pieces about it. And as you say, the shares of some of the cinema chains were absolutely going through the floor. And people are thinking there is no future here. The incredible thing we've seen over the last few years is suddenly some of these movies, Spider-Man particularly, but you know, you look at Minecraft, you know, Mario Galaxy, all of those things, are making huge amounts of money.

And that is great for the whole infrastructure. And people who are going to want to make movies. They want to make great original movies. And as you say, things like backrooms and obsessions have been incredibly useful to show that there is money to be made in it. So, yeah, I think it's a huge positive. I think, you know, the more people go into the cinema is a huge positive. Marina, because you are something of a superhero

expert. I have always wondered, I know that Avengers is going to be absolutely enormous, but Spider-Man specifically has seemed to grow and grow and grow and grow. And I know they've made great movies. Is that why it is? Great source material. Then they make great movies. It's interesting. Trying to work out quite why, as I said, it's a bit lightning in a bottle. You've got these two principal actors who are brilliant and have this real-life romance. I do think Spider-Man is one of the absolute very best superheroes, you know. It's so relatable. So I think that's a big part of it.

The way they've made these films, as I say, Sony makes these for Marvel. They're not made by Disney Marvel. They've always had a kind of not, they haven't had that overlaying sort of irony, joking that lots of the other Marvel ones had. There is an earnestness to them because of the character. I think the character is very appealing and always has been. And I think that, yeah, I would say that, and there's been, I mean, obviously they've bought back other ones. There's, they've, older Spider-Men like Andrew Garfield and Toby McGuire, and they've done that very cleverly.

I think the story just will always resonate. But the way they've made them is brilliant. I thought it was very, I thought was great. I really, I really liked it. This is a great film. And also the sort of little team that seems to have been set up for the next Spider-Man movie as well is really, really, really, really. really good. I mean, there's a, no spoilers, but there's a couple of characters in here who you now think, oh, okay, I see that going forward, Spidey's going to have these, a lot of psychics, you

think, oh, yeah, I mean, count me in. It's worth noting as an aside that Zendaya may well have a $5 billion year this year. If you take Odyssey and Spider-Man and June, I mean, she could have, She could have, I think she's already possibly the, had the highest ever grossing year. And she's only going to add to that as well, isn't that? I mean, and that's got to be healthy. Those three are, and actually John Bantelh, who's Tank Castle, the publisher. He's amazing.

He's so good in the Odyssey. He's Menelaus in the Odyssey, and he's absolutely brilliant, really eye-catchingly brilliant in that. So, yeah, I mean, it's, I think in general, it's really good for the industry, is what I would say. I understand your reservations, but I didn't think this was slot. Sam Stevens has a question for you about Postman Pat. You can't say we don't have range.

There's a huge range here. Since you're not allowed to gratuitously showcase one particular company on TV, this is about undue prominence, how did Postman Pat get away with promoting or displaying Royal Mail on his van for all those years? Did the animators do a deal with Royal Mail or the BBC, or did he get away with it because he's a harmless and friendly animated posty? You know what? Thank you, Sam. Someone's finally called this out.

It is, it is when, funny enough, when Postman Pat started, well, firstly, when Postman Pat started, he didn't have any Royal Mail branding. Didn't have any branding at all. He had like a red fan and stuff like that, but there wasn't Royal Mail on the side of it. But I think very quickly from the second series onwards, they did have Royal Mail branding. But that's because at the time Royal Mail was not a, you know, it was a publicly owned utility. So, you know, there wasn't, it wasn't kind of, we didn't used to have FedEx and all that back in the did we? So you were allowed to put Royal Mail on your thing because it wasn't seen as a as a commercial organisation. They had more trouble when they rebooted Postman, but you know they rebooted Postman Pat? Yeah, in a privatised post office world. And a privatised post office world. And there they couldn't

use Royal Mail because by that point, you know, Royal Mail was one of many parcel providers that you can use. So in the in the newer Postman Pat's, he becomes, it's a, it's a quite a big change. He becomes head of the SDS, which is the special delivery service. And he moves to Pencaster, which is, you know, one of the big urban centres. It's sort of like, you know, when Spider-Man

grows up, in the new ones, so there's no Rormo branding because he works for SDS. He has a Jeep. He has a motorbike and sidecar. Jess sits in the sidecar. He has a gyrocopter. Like, everything changes in the new postman Pat. But yeah, it was

this or him being imprisoned, falsely by his post post office buses, I guess. Oh my God, they should have done that. They should have done a Mr. Bates versus postman Pat spin-off. Yeah. That would be a mess. That's like Deadpool and Wolverine. Yeah, that story remains developing,

so don't ruin it out once we've got a final judgment. And so, yeah, it basically wasn't undue prominence because it was a publicly owned utility, and perhaps in the next few years there'll be more of those, so you'll be able to do that. But in the newer iteration, It is absolutely a commercial organisation called the SDS. It's playing off the SAS but for postmen.

They did an interesting, we talked a number of times about attention spans, and we talked about where our culture is going, and this need for 15 second sound bites and things to be incredibly sped up. One of the few really long-form studies they've ever done on that about kids' attention spans and what's happened to them, was actually based on Postman Pat, and they took a bunch of very young kids, and they split some Postman Pat episodes into slow ones and fast ones. So there had some very fast Postman Pat episodes, which must have passed me by.

And they showed these different episodes to kids, because obviously that's a control, which is it's the same character, it's roughly the same storylines, but one is cut much faster than another, and showed them to kids and watched their reaction, measured their brainwaves, all that kind of stuff. And they concluded via this Postman Pat study that it had zero difference. It made zero difference to their entertainment value, zero difference to their concentration. And so, listen, citation needed, of course, but one of the greatest studies on the concentration span of very young children,

it's based on Postman Pat and essentially said, don't worry too much about the speeding up a culture. It doesn't seem to make much difference. I love that. I have no way of knowing how rigorous that was, but I thought it was an interesting conclusion, and I wanted to thank Pat for his service. I remember one of the funniest, we're going to have to get the beep out.

One of the funniest lines we ever had on 8 out of 10 cats was when Danny Dyer came on, and I can't remember why Postman Pat came up, but he did, and Danny Dyer just went, he's a busy, isn't he? That's so unnecessary. which is why it's so funny I really can't

you can't help herself Danny can he that's what Yapsdam called the Neville brothers Really? Busy little c- Did he? Yeah

That's what they should call Stick to Football That'd be a good title On that bombshell Shall we go to a break? I think we better Yeah This episode is brought to you

by Lloyd's rewards Now a big mistake That people make is leaving the cinema As soon as the credits roll because there might be a bonus scene right at the end. There might be one of my favourite things in the middle. Yeah, you never know.

In Marvel ones, it used to be a mid-credit scene and then there'd be an end-credit scene. I remember the first one I really remember, well, two, I remember Ferris Bueller's Day Off where he tells you to go home at the end, but also smoking in the bandit with Bert Reynolds where they would do bloopers. It just feels like a secret little glimpse into a different world.

And it doesn't quite have to be over. Yeah, exactly. And it's just a lovely little added bonus. You've done everything. You've made your show. right, you've given everyone everything. It's just a lovely little extra. Which is also the idea behind Lloyd's rewards, extra value appearing inside something you were already doing anyway, your daily banking. From shopping to streaming, you can bank on Lloyds

to help your money go further. It's rewards like this that make 14 million people bank on Lloyds. Search Lloyd's rewards in your app. Eligibility criteria, terms and conditions apply, retailer offers and cashback amounts may vary. UK residents 18 plus. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business.

The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. The first ever all-electric 2026 Subaru Trail Seeker is the EV for the trail obsessed. With up to 444 kilometers on a full charge and DC fast charging from 10 to 80% in about 30 minutes in ideal conditions. Plus, ample ground clearance and symmetrical all-wheel drive make the 2026 Trail Seeker the most capable EV Subaru has ever built. Test drive it at your local Subaru dealer or visit Subaru.ca. Welcome back everybody, Marina.

Natalie has a question which I think you will have a good answer to. She says, Natalie says, I understand that some actors, instead of an upfront fee, will take a percentage of the box office for a movie. I have heard that Bruce Willis made a lot of money from this for The Sixth Sense, and Marlon Brando lost a lot of money from renegotiating his fee for The Godfather. Who are some of the biggest winners and losers from this? Okay, good one, Natalie. Yes, the Sixth Sense Bruce Willis famously did really well out of.

I think his salary at the time, or he would have got 14 million, but he instead took a back end on it, and he got 17% of the worldwide box office and remember home video profits, DVDs were obviously such a huge market then. So I think he ended up getting between 100 and 120 million. That's amazing. Yes. Great film. Yes.

Now, Keanu Reeves did one of the greatest deals. He maybe took, on The Matrix, he took... He took maybe 250 million across the franchise, like unbelievable. Alec Guinness, we've talked about this before, and I think maybe some of our bonus episodes, that was an amazing deal he did. He took 2.25% of George Lucas's royalties. And over a lifetime on that, that was just beyond, beyond anything. By the way, that's the cleverest way of doing it, because quite often on things, you know,

projects and things you say, you can have a piece of this, or you can have a piece of the back end of this. But the way that backends are calculated, you know, there are people who say, I've got some back end on this movie that has made half a billion, but I've never seen a penny because of the way it's accounted, you know, various things are offset. Yeah. So what Alec Guinness has done there is he's not said, I want two and a half percent of the back end. He says, I want two and a half percent of what George Lucas makes because you know that George Lucas will be the first to be paid in a situation like that.

So that's the clever. But do you know what? I've never heard that before. And I'm going to, that's very, very smart. Well, Tom Hanks did something similar on Forrest Gump. Now, Tom Hanks, he got something which I'm going to talk about in a minute on that movie. But he got 70 million from that. Now, because he took first day gross, which now only one person gets, who we'll talk about. Another Tom. Yeah, another Tom, exactly. And Winston Grum, who wrote the book, he had a net profit participation. And thanks to Hollywood accounting, as they say, you know, like, oh my God, you know, no, Forrest Gump, yet to make any money, so you still don't have any. Anyway, there are lots of people who do. Jack Nicholson and Batman, they said he could have 10 million, and he said, oh, I'll take

six million, thank you. And I'll have back end and participation and merchandise, which he did amazing. You must have got 80 or 90 million in 1989 money, which is crazy. But talking about that first-day gross thing, Tom Cruise is the only person, really, who still gets first-day gross, and he's just successfully always negotiated that. I mean, it really is vanishingly rare now. A few people used to get it. What that means is that you start property from day one.

So whatever it's earning in the cinema is you're getting a percentage of that. You're not waiting for them to say, oh yeah, well, we've now, we pay back the marketing spend. We pay back all of this. Now you can start making money, which is what most back end is. First day gross is now this kind of vanishingly rare thing, as I say. But even on Mission and Impossible Final reckoning, he was still getting first day gross. And then, you know, they've got sort of, there's lots of. of other ones that are sort of fun.

But the biggest losers we will talk about. James Craman offered Matt Damon the role of Jake in Avatar, and he also offered 10% of back-end profits, which on Avatar is pretty good. But Matt Damon was doing the Bourne Ultimatum, and he lost out on however much, I think, hundreds of millions. Now, Sean Connery is a class, John Connery's done a couple of these.

In Lord of the Rings, he was offered something like 15% of the worldwide box office grows as well as a standard salary. And he would have got hundreds of millions from that. But he explained in 2005 why he turned it and I said, yeah, well, I never understood it. I read the book. I read the script. I saw the movie. I still don't understand it.

He also declined to be Morpheus in the Matrix for the same reason. Didn't understand it. Wow. Yeah, I read somewhere that they reckon he may be lost out on $400 million because of the Lord of the Rings thing. Yes. So you can lose out. on a lot, if you don't deal with a Hollywood accounting.

David Pras, who was the sort of physical body of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, he agreed to his back end on net profits. This is a disaster rather than gross revenue. And Lucasfilm just, you know, everything is charged back. And I think he got no dollars

in profit participation from Return of the Jedi. So it is quite hard to arrange. Never ever accept a percentage of net profits from anyone, ever, any one. because it's the easiest thing to give you because there are you know in any business it's very easy to make something not make money because you can borrow against it offset against it put all sorts of costs against it and so if they're offering you it's the easiest thing to offer an actor because the actor thinks oh my god this is amazing i'm getting a share of the back end here and the studio's going i've i can pay him two million dollars less because i'm offering him a share of of net profits and there are i guarantee even if this film is the biggest movie ever made there will be be no net profits to share. Yeah.

Yeah. We'll just get like Tom Cruise's agent to do it for you. It's a good idea. It was nearly done a great deal. Isn't it amazing how so many of the biggest actors in the world are called Tom? Yes. Now Tom Holland's join them. Yeah.

It's like Tom is like the male Olivia. Like our culture is absolutely run by Olivia's and Tom's. Anyway, maybe there's a question in that somewhere. Right. Lots of people are interested in this one. IMAX. Alfie Jackson says, after the success of the Odyssey and the high demand for IMAX viewings, will we see more iMacs films in the near future?

Who do you think we'll turn to iMacs next? I think, funny enough, IMAX is sort of the tip of a slightly more interesting iceberg. So, IMAX is just, you know, one format for showing movies. Obviously, you know, you can show it in much bigger scale and, you know, it's an extraordinarily sort of cinema-going experience. And The Odyssey has made nearly $300 million just in IMAX, you know. So it's a huge deal. but the slightly more interesting story behind it is what they call PLFs, which is premium large format cinema.

So IMAX would be a version of that, which is you go to a cinema, you pay a bit extra, you see something slightly more extraordinary. And across a lot of the cinemas in the States and increasingly over here as well, they are starting to roll out these more premium versions of cinemas. So the CineMark itself, which one of the big cinema chains, has its own version of that, which is XD.

There is IMAX, of course, it's Dolby Cinema. There's AMC has got Prime. So lots of these cinemas are rolling this stuff out. You would think of it more familiarly as, you know, sometimes you'll go to one of the multiplexes and they'll have incredible reclining seats, you know. And that essentially is where cinemas are going. They're going for bigger screens. They're going for, you know, wider seats.

They are going for this stuff where they can really, really charge a premium and all of the cinema chains are working out that this really, really, really works. So, you know, they are slowly or as quickly as they can, but it is slow, converting an awful lot of their screens to these bigger formats. And there's all sorts of companies that provide that for you. As I say, you know, you've got IMAX itself, you've got RealD who do 4xD and lots of the cinemas have their own kind of versions of this. And they are discovering that more and more and more of their income is coming from these premium seats and from these premium screens and from this premium experience. So we are definitely going to see an

awful lot more of it. We're going to see an awful lot more cinemas that have incredibly luxurious seats that have, you know, bespoke refreshments, that have incredible sound, that have, you know, extra bits on the edge of the screen so you can watch films the way that directors want to make them. And they absolutely, they just team up with the studios right at the beginning and say, you know, can you make sure this is shot in this format so that we can show it in these particular screens? But, yeah, we are going to see a lot more of it. It's really going to save cinema in lots of ways because it'll be in fewer screens,

but you can make so much more money each time someone comes into the cinema. If they're in a PLF, a premium large format cinema, it's something that the younger generation absolutely flocks to and loves. because if you are going to go away from a big, big, big home cinema screen or home cinema set up to just a normal cinema, you can sort of see why they have avoided that, you know, over the years. Whereas if you're going to go into something which is extraordinary and which has incredible surround sound and which you are absolutely surrounded by the picture and which your seats shake and your seats recline and, you know, it feels luxurious, then you absolutely see why that for a new generation of cinema goes would be a premium experience that. they're happy to pay a bit more money for. So, yeah, the Trojan horse of Odyssey and IMAX, which kind of shows you what's happening, is actually bringing in a huge amount of other things.

And I sort of think it's rather nice that cinemas are going to become more and more and more luxurious. You will pay more, but not insanely more. You know, in the States, it's $4 or $5 a ticket more than a regular ticket, which if you're taking a family of four, you don't particularly want to do. But if you're just a couple of mates going out, or it's a date movie or something like that, you can see why people are happy to pay that premium. And it's going to be the saviour of the movie theatres.

And all the movie theatres are rolling this out. They're rubbing out their own versions of it. They're absolutely asking for, you know, cuts of films in those different formats. And it's one of the big drivers now behind massive cinema and theatre growth in America. And funny enough, we were talking literally just now about how, cinema seem to be really, really on its uppers. And having these big tent pole movies and also having people happy to pay four or five dollars more for a ticket to sit in an incredible cinema with incredible sound and incredible visuals is also something that's going to save movies and

mean that, you know, we've got another hundred years of cinema to enjoy ahead of us. Let's finish with this one. This is a cute one. And I have a bone to pick with someone when we talk about this as well. Another goalhanger alumni. James asks, over the years I've seen a fair few competitions where the prize involves meeting a celebrity or getting to have dinner with them. Do these actually happen? What are the logistics of doing such prizes? Well, yes, they are completely real. I feel sure you're about to tell us one that didn't happen, but they are real and they are organised normally by specialist fundraising platforms, charity auctions, film studios. It's a big thing. There's a company called charity buzz

that sells and auctions off experiences and items, and they raise money for non-profit. Celebrities, by the way, use that as tax deductible, charitable giving, so let me let daylight in on magic. So charity basketball have organized lots and lots of things, so you might get joining Harrison Ford as his co-pilot during a flight over California.

I just want to say he did crash on a golf course, but anyway, it's just... You remember he had that thing where he did a crash landing on a golf course. I think it wasn't California. That's because he had a member of the public in the co-pilot, so you need let them have a go. Let them have a turn. You're not supposed to let them have a turn. You can crash with Harrison Ford onto a golf course of your choice on any Sunday in August.

Yeah. Now, Private won our tennis lesson with Andre Agassi and Steffie Graff. Oh, my God. A cameo in Superman versus Batman, that would have been pretty good. Pitching an idea to Rupert Murdoch. I've got an idea for him. But you do... We should genuinely, we should bid on that. We should crowd fund that. from our listeners. And we'll, yes, as you say, and then our listeners can say which idea which are pitched to Rupert Murdoch, and then we tape it.

Mine will take literally two seconds. Two words. Winners, you don't get their personal info. They're incredibly managed these things, by the way. And I've been present with various people backstage of different things when you're there for some other reason, either you're interviewing or whatever. It's incredibly regimented and it doesn't last long. And they've done a load of background checks on you. You have all this instructions on how to behave. You know, you're not, you don't touch them unless they touch you. I know, but, you know, it's- Don't touch them unless they touch you. I'm almost certain that's

not in the contract. Well, no, because otherwise people just try and sort of throw themselves and like they want to hug Taylor Swift, you know, if she hugs you, that's great, but if she doesn't hug you, you don't hug her, that sort of thing. And there's a lot of restrictions all around it. Everybody is background checked because obviously you could just be some crazy stalk who applies for every single opportunity to meet the celebrity. And at some point, you'll get close to them. I remember once at a crime festival and there was a dinner with authors the night before and you could bid to sit next to your favourite crime author. I wasn't at this dinner but Richard Armitage was at the dinner and so normally they always run this thing and they go oh that's lovely

and I'll give some money and I'll sit next to Mark Billingham and you know so it's a really lovely thing and then the year that Richard Armitage had written a crime book and he was there They said it was absolutely insane. They said, but it was like Sotheby's. Absolute carnage as people wanted to sit next to Richard Armitage at this dinner. It went for a lot of money in the end. Richard, I believe you have a celebrity meeting story that you would like to get off your chest. I do.

I have to say, I tend not say yes to those things. I'm slightly too introverted for it. I just, because, you know, what if I would just feel too awkward. The charity thing I always do is auction off. character names in my books. That's a thing that I really, really love doing. So I'll always do that as a charity thing. But yeah, there's like an industry news quiz they hold every year where like, you know, all the kind of BBC news brands and the Channel 4 news brands and all the newspapers. And they always have an auction there. And the auction thing is, it's never that thing of,

oh my God, I've always wanted to do that. It's you're there and it's for action for children and you want to give action for children some money, and it's a nice way to do that. So, you know, I'll always bid on something at the auction. And a few years ago, the thing you could bid on, and this is pre-podcast fame for this gentleman, you could bid on having lunch with Anthony Scaramucci. This was when he was primarily known for his 11-day career

in the federal government, I believe. Exactly that. And, you know, he sort of appear on things. And I just thought, well, that, you know, I'm going to bid on something. You know, it's either that or cold play. And I thought it would be fascinating to talk to him. You know, you can, there's stuff you can imagine asking Anthony Scaramucci.

And, you know, you can, you know, I can bring Ingrid. You can, you know, you go somewhere nice and you have lunch and you think, well, that would be a nice thing to do. So I bid on that and I won that. So I was like, I can't remember. But again, that's like just saying I didn't want to spend that much money having lunch with Anthony Scaramucci. I did want to give that money to action for children. Yeah, we've got a contract here is what I'm saying. That's the way to do that.

It's a significant sum and we've got an agreement, haven't we? A gentleman's agreement. We have an agreement. And the action for children, people said, oh, we'll arrange that and we'll get in touch with his people and, you know, who can they talk to? I said, we can just talk to me. I don't really have people. And they go, okay, we'll sort that out.

And then he went back to America. It was like, when I come back over, we'll go for lunch. We'll definitely do that. And then he came back over and I think there was like one date for about 17 minutes he could do. I'm like maybe maybe it was like kind of three in the morning on a Sunday. He said, oh, yeah, Anthony is free and we'd love to meet you for. And so we couldn't do that. And then over the years, yeah, it just sort of went away.

And it was accepted that I wasn't going to have my lunch with Anthony Scaramucci, which is absolutely fine. You know, I can I can get a meal deal myself. But it never happened. And then I think when he joined the goalhanger stable, I think there was talk of saying, oh, we should, we should make that happen. I think he's aware now that he, that money. Yeah. But genuinely, my thought is, I don't particularly want to have lunch with Anthony Scaramucci. I don't mind.

If it was today and someone said, do you want to have lunch? I think, yeah, I'm sure that would be all right. I don't need to. He doesn't need to have lunch with me. So I sort of feel like everyone's a winner, really. But yeah, I would say what I would say to Anthony, I do not need to have lunch with you, but maybe a matching donation to action for children for missing the lunch would be a nice thing to do. Right. Okay.

That does wrap us up for today. But by the way, the first episode of our Bond series, which is really fun, is out for free for everyone. It's going to be for members only from now on. But the first episode is out for free. If you want to join for Ad Free Listening and all the rest and all these bonus, episodes, it's the rest is entertainment.com. Otherwise, we will see you next Tuesday. See you next Tuesday.