The Rest Is Entertainment - Is Social Media Dead?

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

Has sexist A.I slop killed social media? Why is Courtney Love the most diss-track'd person in music? How would Richard save the BBC's new quizzes?Social media platforms are haemorrhaging cash and users are leaving in droves, Richard Osman and Marina Hyde attempt to unpick why these websites are now failing - and if we should celebrate their demise.From Charli vs Taylor, Drake vs Kendrick to Courtney Love vs the entire industry... we explore the checkered history of 'The Diss Track'.And finally, we take a critical look at the current Saturday night telly offering.Recommendations:Marina - The Librarians (BBC 4, Storyville)Richard - How Are You? It's Alan (Partridge)Join The Rest Is Entertainment Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus content, ad-free listening, early access to Q&A episodes, access to our newsletter archive, discounted book prices with our partners at Coles Books, early ticket access to live events, and access to our chat community. Sign up directly at therestisentertainment.comThe Rest Is Entertainment is proudly presented by Sky. Sky is home to award-winning shows such as The White Lotus, Gangs of London and The Last of Us. Requires relevant Sky TV and third party subscription(s). Broadband recommended min speed: 30 mbps. 18+. UK, CI, IoM only. To find out more and for full terms and conditions please visit Sky.comFor more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.comVideo Editor: Charlie RodwellSenior Producer: Joey McCarthySocial Producer: Bex TyrellExec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by our good friends at Sky. Now, whether it's Scorsese and De Niro, Brits and a queue, or Glenn Powell and a slow-motion entrance into frame, some things are just better together. And Sky and Netflix do just that. Two heavyweight storytellers side by side on the Sky Essential TV package for just £15 a month, all in one place and on one bill. Call it the full ensemble. Sky Originals bringing gangs of London and the Day of the Jackal, Netflix delivering global obsessions like Squid Game and Wednesday. Sky Atlantic, Discovery Plus and more than 90 other channels to that list and you've got the kind of line-up that bends the week around it, turning ordinary evenings into events.

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This episode is brought to you by Pelhamx. A new era of fitness is here. Introducing the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus, powered by Peloton IQ, built for breakthroughs with personalized workout plans, real-time insights, and endless ways to move. Lift with confidence, while Peloton IQ counts reps, corrects form, and tracks your progress. Let yourself run, lift, flow, and go. Explore the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus at OnePeloton.ca. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Resters Entertainment with me Marina Hyde and me Richard Osman. Hello Marina.

Hello Richard. How are you? I'm okay. I just got back from a country. You might have heard of called the United States of America where I did a lovely book tour and lots and lots of people out there. So hello to all of you who listen to the podcast. A man in St. Louis said please say to Marina that she's right about everything. I said my friend, she already knows. I would have liked to have come along on your tour Some of the places sounded actually wonderful, fascinating It was great, honestly, I loved it

I loved going out and doing book talks over there Yeah, so it was really, really lovely But I amazed at how many people Listen to the podcast as well Which is great, you just think, I mean, I mean, we talk about last of the summer wine Is that interesting to you? I guess, I mean, a lot of the Sue Pollard talk

Must go over their head, surely Well, during the really mad Brexit years When I was writing, you know, And it was the sort of really intricate machinations and dysfunction of our politics. I used to get emails every single week from people in America who'd say, I don't know who any of these people are. I just enjoy the story. What are we talking about this week?

Right. There have been many, many, you might have seen lots of stuff recently, sort of either declaring the death of social media or hedging the bet and asking, is it dead. So we're going to talk about that, where it's going, what's happened to it, from where it just started out as a way to connect with your friends. Yes. And it's become something very, very different.

I came home on Saturday evening, watched a bit of Saturday Night TV, and there are a number of shows on Saturday Night TV this week that I thought were told an interesting story about where we are in mass entertainment, and there's a couple of particular shows I want to talk about. I'm dying for that. An audit of Saturday Night Television. I'm dying for that. I have various questions to ask you. And we're also going to talk about disc tracks. Taylor Swift dropped a disc track, widely believed to be about Charlie XX in The Life of a Showgirl. and also the Drake's case against Kendrick Lamar for sort of defamation has been thrown out.

Do you remember they had their mad week and lasted longer of kind of retaliatory discracks? Drake has been mopped up as a pool of water on the floor. I'm also going to tell my favourite ever disc track story during that section. They're a lot older than you think. They are a lot older than you think and some of them are very funny. Shell, we talk about social media. Now, when we talk about social media, I think what we're talking about is this idea of, in the same way that when people say reality TV, they mean a certain thing, which is what reality TV was when they first heard of it. And social media, I think Twitter is Facebook.

It's that thing where we collect a group of friends. We then start collecting a group of strangers. We have interactions. We can all talk about strictly together. A community of people, a community of people that we choose to follow, that we curate. and a world that kind of brings people together. What we're really asking is, is that dead? Is the thing that social media was dead?

That's not what we think of any more of social media. I think we think that it starts as friend feeds, then it became sort of famous feeds, then it became the council wars, and then it's AI sludge. So meta this week, which is Facebook, Instagram and all of that, there's a filing in American court, There's, you know, various kind of legal things. But in the submissions of META, META have argued that they do not have a social media monopoly because, and this is META, this is Facebook, because they are not a social media company.

That is not what they are. And they give all sorts of evidence in this findings. This is not the stuff they say publicly. This is the stuff that's in the legal findings. 17% of Facebook interactions are people consuming content from friends. 17%. So 83% is consuming content from unconnected people that we have not asked to follow. On Instagram, it is 7%. We knew a few years ago that meta, essentially changing every single one of their algorithms, Twitter changing every single one of their algorithms to try and be TikTok,

to try and essentially just be a place where you are engagement farmed. It was a sort of a dream, you know, lots of people who got work through it, lots of people who met. to people through it. My first ever interaction with Ingrid was on Twitter. You know, all of these stories that are coming about. Greg Wallace got two wives of it. Exactly. He got two wives. He got more... One last question about asparagus and one about Rubel. Is that right? Wow.

So... For one of your quizzes, Richard. That's amazing. Main course and dessert. Yeah. We're trying to heart back to that time still, I think, I'm trying to recreate it. So it could be threads. Could it be blue sky? This idea that this utopia has been taken from us by the money men, I would say this, which is the money men were funding the whole thing in the first place and allowing us to do all of these things.

And eventually they had to cash in. Can I start with a stat of my own, not of my own, but because I think it's quite useful. And we're doing it in descending order, because you might as well, the most popular as right where we are now. Yeah. Still the most popular social network is Facebook, then YouTube, then Instagram. WhatsApp is now the same size as Insta. Yeah. TikTok. Then we've got WeChat, Telegram, Facebook Messenger and Snapchat. Snapchat's still growing. I don't need to tell you that TikTok's still growing.

LinkedIn, it's obviously so much smaller, but it is growing and it seems to have grown in significance because of the die-off of what people enjoyed about the other, lots of the other network. So, again, it has a curation rather than an algorithm which it essentially sends you videos of people who work in other businesses. 64% of the world's population now uses social media. And the new platforms... Certainly sounds dead. Yeah. So Sora 2 is the latest version of OpenAI's visual version of something like ChatGPT, where you can type in a prompt and it can create a video.

And it's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. By the way, Sora 1 came out 10 months ago. I mean, there's anything you can possibly think of. I saw, you know, of course, immediately it's degraded into like someone has got actual female Olympians in the Olympic stadiums somewhere competing to bring men beers, washing up. It's like, oh, okay. I know, it's like, okay, that joke again.

Oh, yeah, that joke again. Yeah, in a new year, okay. So, SORA, too, is a social network. It's a form of social media and it's a sharing site. This is what Open AI really want to be. They want to be your sort of default homepage in a way that Facebook was for a period. You know, you can already buy things within it. You can already do, there's all sorts of things.

As with all of these social networks, their ultimate goal is that you never have to leave the platform. Subscribe to the FT. John Byrne Murdoch is always brilliant with data and he did a good one saying that showing how sort of 2020 was kind of the peak of what you're talking about of that type of social media. And then, funnily enough, young people cut down first on the time they spent on the platforms become less social, I guess. It's much more mindless time filling really. He includes a mate, John Byrne Murdoch, as you say, is always worth following. He always takes interesting angles on things, but he shares a chart that I think takes social media from 2014 to 2024. And roughly when we start 2014, he identifies five areas that we use social media for.

To meet new people, to keep up with friends, these are the things we're talking about, to share my opinion, to follow celebrities and to fill spare time. Those are the kind of five things. in 2014 they are in similar places those five things three of them have collapsed almost entirely to share my opinion has collapsed almost entirely to meet new people has collapsed completely this i guess because you know we recognise we can't do it and to keep up with friends has absolutely collapsed two things have gone up enormously and and this is the key thing to fill spare time has gone up enormously and this thing social media which actually was when it started an attempt to to broaden the world and attempt to connect, attempt to make our world slightly bigger, has genuinely become a vehicle to fill time. I never believe. I look at that. You look at Zuckerberg.

I mean, who was it? Does it Jimmy Kimmer who said he now dresses like a Chechen Molly dealer, which I love. But back when he didn't, and he was in the pool, slides, or whatever. Okay, that guy, I know. Oh, they all knew. Yeah. They all knew. We didn't know.

And also, we failed to understand other things. We failed to understand, in lots of ways, people failed to understand. understand, spent a very long time saying with Musk that buying Twitter was, oh, look, he's halving the value. It doesn't really matter. By the way, if you're that rich, it doesn't really matter. Forty-four billion isn't very much. It was a political project, which got him what he wanted. I would say the jury's out on the medium term of that project for him or whether it got him what it wanted, but it may turn out down the line that it has been the greatest 44 billion he ever spent. And listen, he's still the second richest man in the world, so he hasn't gone

completely mad. So I think it's one of those things where we have to forget it even. existed and we just go, where do we go next? The start of like Usenet forums and things like that, people will always tell you, oh, this always happens in online communities. The same process of kind of social degradation into Nissan, civil war, etc. happens. And it always happened and it happened when I was on a tiny, not me, a notion or I was on a tiny group about, you know, ZX spectrums restoring them right back in the early days of the internet or something like that.

They were talking, you know, they'd say, and actually it was brilliant. and I had this amazing community and then it degraded completely. And this is the journey. Except if you were on 4chan a long time ago and then you think and it ended up with we now control the whole free world. So sometimes it works.

Yeah. To me it almost occupies the same psychological space as a commute. It's a sort of thing you have to do each day. It's annoying. It might involve diversions and delays. Do you have to do it? You're constantly asking yourself,

do you have to do it? Is there another world? I really do think we have moved in this stage where literally everyone knows it's harmful and just because they can't, just because they're not logging off doesn't mean that they don't know that they should and it's like other forms of harmful and addictive behavior

in all of our lives. I think people are getting down on themselves for not being able to quit it because they really understand it isn't what it was but there's still that little kernel that they can just chase every now and again and I think you're right. I think with these things

literally been made to be addictive. It's been made for dopamine we know all of this stuff. So if you are still in that position and just going, oh my God, I'm wasting all this. time on my phone, just let it die off, just slowly let it go. But in that time, it has massively changed in such a short space of time in two decades.

It's changed absolutely embedded things about our society, our culture and the human psyche in lots of ways. I really remember, honestly, it would have now been about, I never have been on, I've never been on Facebook or Instagram. And the reason I wasn't, and I realize I'm old, the reason I wasn't was because I thought I would not like to put things about my life online and I felt I was very private and I didn't like the idea of it. And I remember reading all these things about what young people valued most and you could just see year and year, privacy just trending so quick. I mean, dropping like a stone out of the top 10.

They didn't value privacy and staying connected was like rocketing up in the other direction, whatever that means. And actually, I don't think anybody now would say even, you know, really young, would say, oh, people have realized, but belatedly, the idea of mystery and privacy and things like that have come back. And people are much more interested in being in semi-closed chats, semi-closed kind of groups where they feel. And they also have seen, we've lived with the real-world consequences about this. People have not got jobs because of something they said online or lost jobs because they something they said online. They can see how harmful it's been to their children, they have lived with, you know, they have been the testing for, they're the long

studies, we've lived the long studies. And we sort of said it at the time, but, you know, in 30, 40, 50, 100 years time and the historians look on this era, it will be a blip. But it's amazing, it takes a good 10, 15 years for us all to go, oh, okay, this wasn't anything. And now we can see it for what it is, which is an advertising medium. A lot of the most creative and hugely successful, creative people who I know have never been on it. God, they must be feeling smug now. Well, yeah, some of them have, you know, like Instagrams that are run by their record label or whatever it may be.

But in general, people thought, oh, I don't like that. And I'm really surprised by how many people thought, oh, I realized very early on, before they even became properly involved, thought, oh, this is a huge time suck. And you think you're being productive, but you're not. Every time I would hear people like Elon Musk interviewed on the radio or on TV or whatever, you'd hear them. And they were always treated as these kind of slight wizard-like figures, not in the same way that you'd treat a politician, which of these, I mean, the degree to which they are more powerful than politicians can't really even be overstated. So like about the same thing happened with him. And they're kind of treated as odd, slightly eccentric geniuses.

and it's really interesting to hear what they might have to say about the world. By the way, I mean, you know, these people have zero cultural Hintland, zero cultural Hintland, and they have nothing to say about that side of the world. I read in your column about Sam Altman. I like to how you describe his favorite books. I mean, his favorite picket, that is the business philosophy section of the airport bookstore. No one said to him, he keeps releasing his reading list. It's like, you know, I've also heard of thinking fast and say, just go into a bookshop and look at it.

It's on the table. I mean, come on. he's what's your favorite jane austin sam they don't have this kind of a world and again started off people saying oh he's the real genius and look oh you know oh dear he's been asked by the board now they're going to let him back oh i mean you know he wants to make this technology available for everyone it's like oh now he doesn't now he wants to be a trillion dollar deal every week and as you say now he wants open ai to be a network now he wants everyone sort of they want them to be the front page of the internet yeah exactly they saura is

We'll grow and grow as a social network. I mean, SORA, too. This is a sidebar, but it's literally insane what it can do now. Did you have a good look at it in the States? I mean, it is unbelievable. It's so darn because you can't see it here. It's the stuff you can fake now. And Hollywood has finally gone, oh no, hold on, this seems a bit much.

You go, oh yeah, sorry, because we kept saying that they're going to be able to recreate everything in real time and like incredible quality. Hollywood has finally sort of put their foot down and said this doesn't feel appropriate we're watching endless videos of you know Robert De Niro in a film that he wasn't in all the stuff that we said was going to happen is almost like the kind of the Uber app I don't mean the Uber app as in an app for the car Uber

I mean Uber as in above all app that transcends everything it's the final end game which is just an endless supply of slop created by machines and pumped it into to your phone, which is a machine, via another machine, which is the AI algorithm. But, yeah, because the shock of the new has completely worn off.

The novelty has gone years and years and years ago on social media. But it's interesting that the growth thing, some of the gross stuff, a market for the brain rot, the AI brain rot. Well, because for years, the one thing that Twitter and all these things had to rely on was people actually using their thing and creating stuff and creating their own content for them. And for many, many years, the content on Twitter and Facebook was user-generated, and, you know, you relied on a small amount of users who pumped out a lot of content that people enjoyed. Now you're even cutting them out of the equation because the machine itself can just pump out endless content of... But it's so jaded and awful. It's like, oh, I want to see, like, Wednesday Adams as a trad wife or something like that.

And it's just because you can't... I remember when I was young, I knew this guy and he, like, he always used to take acid at Alton Taz. And it's like, I mean, like, is it? Alton Tart should be good enough, right, without doing acid on top of it. I'm not saying, you know, well, I could say, I am saying, don't do acid. Oh, my God. I'm not saying, I don't even know I'm saying. I'm not saying, kids, don't do acid at Alton Tass.

God forbid, I would say that. I'm just saying Alton Tash should be good enough without doing acid. But now people are so sort of jaded. And, you know, like, it's like some sort of sexual perversion that becomes so baroque and disgusting in the end. Like, if you're a Hollywood studio, you can have anything. In the end, the things you're asking for are just beyond the realms. And this isn't, people can't even, you know,

It's like, oh, Wednesday's not good enough for me. I need to watch Wednesday in some kind of really kind of horrible frank and AI video. I find it very, I do think that people's brains are the next thing to become slop. I mean, in fact, they already have become soft. It is degraded IQ. It is degraded literacy. It's degraded everything. So where do we go is the question?

What happens? So, well, I mean, that's the question, isn't it? So the people who wanted to make money out of it have made money out of it and continued to make money out of it. and a huge amount of it. There's two worries on this social media, as it is now, is what is it doing to me and what is it doing to people? Okay, what is it doing to our society? And there's only one of those things we can do anything about.

I think social media has given us a slight illusion of power that actually maybe I could just say the one thing that would turn everything around. Well, the government could regulate all sorts. I mean, Trump is not going to regulate any of this stuff, but also leaving it up to schools to have to try and deal with these things. It's very, very difficult. You know, if you look at a school in the US and what's increasing being, people are constantly suggesting, you know, the teachers should effectively usher in AI regulation, social media regulation. They should also be marksmen and snipers because in case someone tries to shoot them up, we should arm teachers.

It's like, my God, I mean, it seemed to me like teachers have quite a big job on its own. Can I read you something? There's an amazing substack talking about this idea of, you know, the post-literate society and how we've all got done my. And it's from a professor just talking about some students he's dealing with a guy called Paul Musgrave and that the substack is called systematic hatreds. And the whole thing is brilliant, but I'll just read you this one bit from it. He says, I will add one more observation that is pertinent, but not directly linked to this line of argumentation. When people say that it is the job of college professors to keep students engaged,

but that we can also not ban devices. I want to sigh performatively, how exactly am I supposed to keep them hooked when Hollywood can't keep them hooked, even on my very best days, which are very good, I'm just not able to supply the methadone equivalent to self-nervous systems addicted to endless novelty and engagement and denying that we're facing a planetary crisis of concentration while expecting us to soldier on stoically is not helping. I love him.

Yeah. Isn't that great? Yeah, I mean, the one thing that people are aware of, but the enemy has become so powerful. People like Mark Zuckerberg have become so powerful. Another thing that actually was in, maybe it will, I assume it's the same court filing, was people was that they said

we can't really even selected the META's council said we can't really even select a jury because you see we can't find anyone hardly in America

who doesn't hate Mark Zuckerberg in fact what he did he's in court Meta's own lawyer again it's their own lawyer saying these things cited a Pew Research study

that said 67% of Americans have an unfavourable of Mark Zuckerberg I mean that you know I know he still thinks he's connecting people and in many ways he is

he's connected 67% of America, which couldn't agree on anything, to agree on that. That's a hell of a WhatsApp group. Yeah. Like 67% of Americas. We hate Mark. Yeah. The guy who makes you feel like he invented friendship and connection clearly has absolutely none.

That's why you had to pay them all at the start. There's a really good book called The Boy Kings about, sorry, with a digression, about the early years of Facebook. It's written by this girl called Catherine Loss, and she's like employee 43 at Facebook. And he really quickly, like, buys a beach house. or rents a beach house where everyone has to go at the weekend and everyone just has to stay there and everyone has to add themselves to each other's feet

and you never leave it reminds me of that that line in Goodfellows where Karen says I mean there were never any outsiders ever and after a while it got to feel normal they never want you to leave any of those people at significant value they never want people to leave the office because it's the first time they've had friends the thing I will say is you do have friendships

there are ways of doing those without giving money to people you are addicted to scrolling on your phone but that can be dealt with don't be hard on yourself and you have the power to go into communities and to make real life friendships and things like that's the only power you have is control over yourself and control over the way that you consume the media everyone else we have to just hope that they make the same decision that we do but I do think it's worth noting that this thing this era where we had social media And it meant a certain thing. We know the thing that it meant, which is connection with strangers,

is, you know, strange opportunities, being entertained by strangers, sharing strictly with people. That, I think, is dead. Yeah. I mean, there's another theory that the entire internet is dying and that all of it, the dead internet theory, and that it's smart devices talking to the network. Huge amounts of internet traffic quite a few years ago. It was like 60% with smart devices. So there'll be a podcast in 20 years time, two devices talking to each other.

20 years? I used to love it when it was just, I don't know. I used to love it when it was just fridges talking to soda streams. And now it's like this is all AI, isn't it? It's a shame. The Alistair and Rory of devices. And as AI Rory and AI Alistair would say, shall we go to some adverts?

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It has been a busy week in disc tracks. Drake and Kendrick Lamar are both on Universal, the record label, and they had a, dueling volley of disc tracks about each other, which grew progressively more unpleasant, and not like us, which was to sort of sit down one. Listen, it felt like a sort of fair fight at the beginning, Drake versus Kendrick. But yeah, not like us was probably the greatest blow ever landed by one human being on another human being, the biggest track in the world. Well, if you can say those things.

So let me, okay, so yeah, it's the biggest track of the world. Drake's position is that he was defamed by this track. Now, bear in mind it contains underage sex accusations, suggested people should turn vigilante to get justice against Drake, put an aerial of his house on the artwork. I have to say, if he had sued in our courts, he would have had a much more pleasant time. A judge in the US has thrown it out.

And Universal have said, you know, bear in mind, they are both on the same label. This should never have been brought because it hampers kind of creative freedom. I must say that maybe he would not have wished to sue in our courts because, you know, it can open a can of worms. Let me just say that, Richard. And so he might not have wanted to go through the whole court case, Drake. Let me just move on to Charlie X, X, X, X, because as we know in Life of a Showgirl,

Taylor Swift has put a disc track on that for definite, which most people think is about Charlie XX, although she's tried to sort of slightly fudge at Taylor Swift. I have to say, I went and saw the official release party, official launch party for Shogar in cinemas. The stuff when she's singing that song, because it's obviously not a proper video and it's really heard just looking into the camera. That question that we asked the week before, you know, is she punching

down? I think it's impossible for it not to be reviewed, just punching down that. It's really like, okay, I think it was a little bit much. Yes, and it's fascinating because and it comes from, Charlie XX did a song on her on the Brat album which Taylor took to be about her. In fact, there's two tracks on that album,

both of which seemed to take aim at somebody. One is about Taylor and one is about Lord. Both of them are sort of more sort of Charlie XXXX. How about Charlie X-E-X, right? ...turned in on herself. Yeah. And so two ways to react to that is what Taylor has done, which is she's, you know, reacted in kind and done this song.

What Lord did, the thing about the Lord song, the Charlie X-C-X album, is about female friendship and about feeling uncomfortable around people. And Lord literally heard that song, rang her, said, The voice note. I had no idea you felt like this. He said, but thank you for saying it. She then immediately recorded her own verse for that song. They did a collaborative song, which, like, lyrically fascinating and about female friendship and stuff like that, and created this new piece of art and a firm friend, which is the way to react to that.

Now, Taylor, who, as we've said before, rarely puts a foot wrong, seems to have gone the opposite way, which is, despite being the most powerful, I would say, musical, megastar on the planet, has decided to respond in kind, which possibly she shouldn't have done. And that's all I have to say about that. It's not being cool, is it? It's not been cool. But she does, yeah, she rarely puts her foot. wrong. So she will have her reasons, that's for sure. But when you look at what Lord did,

you think, oh, that's interesting. There are different ways of dealing with it. The term diss track was first coined as a term in hip-hop in like the 80s. They were called answer songs. And right back in the 30s, there are answer records, response songs. Jimmy Rogers and Louis Armstrong had a sort of jewel. There was, you ain't talking to me and you rascal you. Paul Williams, a Huckleback, so many people did answer songs to that and said you've stolen his riffs. I mean, all of these things that seem very modern were not. Hank Thompson, country singer in the 40s,

did one called The Wild Side of Life, in which he sort of blamed women for leading men astray. And Kitty Wells recorded a kind of response track to that. It wasn't God who made honky-tonk angels saying, calling out sort of misogyny in country, all of this sort of things. Lots of people answered Elvis songs, did answer songs to Elvis tracks.

Actually, you know, and sometimes people would even be sued, which suggests to you that there was always money in this type of beef, which we also didn't call it back then. That literally just meant meat. And then so 60s, there were songs, you know, Dylan Positively 4th Street, Bob Dylan. I mean, that really goes for a friend or a critic. We don't know. The Birds did that.

So you want to be a rock and roll star, which is all about people like the monkeys, that kind of the trend for manufactured groups at the time. Leonard's, Sweet Home, Alabama is a direct response to Neil Young's, Alabama. Yeah, I mean, the world of music is quite small. and people are constantly listening to their contemporaries and if their contemporary does something they're like and everyone's always thinking of an idea for a song and everyone's always resentful of every other act

who are around at any given time selling any records at all so it's a febrile atmosphere yes and I mean the biggest one the 70s John Lennon how do you sleep about Paul McCarthy but there were lots of sort of funk and soul answer songs people it is a way of kind of getting the creative juice like you've been given a note It's like, okay, I'm going to kick back at the critics. It's like an old version of having a podcast. Yeah.

Hip-hop, rap, take it to a whole new level. I mean, we've talked about this, actually, when we were talking about rap beef in the past. But the whole Roxanne was. Amazing, the real Roxanne and Roxanne Chonte. Yeah. I mean, there are about 100 songs, tracks. Going back and forth. Just going back and forth.

And in the end, there was a definitive track of people just say, okay, that's it. No one's going to talk about this anymore. We've got to put an end. We've got to bury this. And also, and by the way, almost all hit. pop battles. 90% of them are just very funny and done incredibly tongue and cheek and 10% of them ending gunfire. And it's difficult right at the beginning to work out which is going to be which. But they sold huge amounts of records. I read one stat that said like almost the second

track in the Roxanne Wars, so really early on in that, sold 250,000 copies in the New York area alone. That's amazing. But then there were also things in the 80s like Carly Simon, you're so vain. I mean... That's a Warren Beatty disc track. Or is it? I think she says it's... Different verses are about different people.

Well, because the second verse is literally talking about someone in an apricot scarf with his like a hat just tipped beneath his eye. You think what I mean that you are literally describing Warren Beatty? It does become much more commercialised, but it has returned to pop. So now, you know, Taylor's done them, obviously many. Olivia Rodrigo, Miley Cyrus, lots of people. It's big in K-pop. It tends to be...

I was talking to someone who's... much more of an expert in K-pop music it seems like it's absolutely ripe for it and it's a bit more nervous they tend not to do that whole disc tracks but there are lines in songs so it's much more that kind of

Easter egg-ish like we've talked about a lot before the kind of detective culture the tailor stuff yeah but some you know some of those are like a whole song about a thing whereas there's little lines that it's like oh hang on that's an oblique aside to whatever

oh if you kind of cross-reference it to this you know the whole detective one are you referring to stray kids Yeah. The detective work of the modern fandom is, it rewards that. It's true that statistically there are many more now, even accounting for those kind of hip-hop things than there were before. And I like, there's certain people who've been the subject of very much more than one disc track, which I always see is quite interesting. Axel Rose has been the subject of a number of disc tracks. Nicky Six from Motley Crew has been the subject of a number as well. The clash have, the clash did a distra sort of did a disc track. Six has been the subject of about...

Oh, Mickey's six. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, like a whole bunch. The Clash did one about the Jam. The Jam did one about the Clash. The Mekons did one about the Clash as well. The person who I can find the most disc tracks about in history, I'm going to give you the name of some songs, and they are all about the same person.

So Violet Brews by Babes and Toyland. Two Cool Queenie by Stone Temple Pilots. Stacked actors by Foo Fighters. I'll Stick Around by Foo Fighters. Starfuckers, Inc. by Nine Inch Nails. And Hollaback Girl by Gwen Stefani. All about the same person. Who?

Courtney Love. Every single one of those songs. I think I must have once known now. It was about Courtney Love. And Hollabat Girl being very much the biggest of all of those. Courtney Love once said that Gwen Stefani was like a cheerleader and that she was one of the cool kids, you know, behind the bike sheds. And Gwen Stefani then go, right, I'm going to write a song. I've never been a cheerleader.

So I'm going to write a song as if I am a cheerleader. And it's going to be about you and I'm going to make a billion dollars out of it, which is exactly what she did. So that's a lot of songs about the same person. Now, nine-inch nails, who were there as well, my favourite ever disc track story is Trent Reznor for nine-inch nails, did a sort of discrack about limp biscuit, Fred Durst and Limp biscuit. And Trent Rezner is a great deal cooler than Fred Durst. I mean, they both sold a lot of records, you know, both very, very successful. But he wrote this thing, and Fred Durst, the thing's right, I'm going to reply in kind. So he does a disc track about Trent Rezner and nine-inch nails called Hot Dog.

and like you were talking about K-pop there in order to really make people understand that this song is about Trent Reznor and how much disrespect he has for Trent he includes lots of names of 9-inch Nail songs lyrics from Closer, all sorts of things just so you're under absolutely no illusions that Fred Durs is really getting one over

so on the album Chocolate Starfish and the hot dog flavoured water the song Hot Dog which is all about Trent Resner but it includes so many lyrics and song titles from Nine Inch Nails, that he is then forced to make Trent Rezner a co-writer on that song. And that album became, I mean, the biggest selling new metal album of all time. I mean, multi, multi, multi, multi, multi-million seller back at a time when writing a song on a multi-multe, multi-million seller made you an awful lot of money. So Trent made

a huge amount of money from Fred Durst disc track. It has obviously been hugely helped by something we talked about a little further up in the episode by social media because they're kind of designed to go viral and they want people to kind of share and take sides and be team this and team that there was obviously no barrier to release now in the old days you were actually going to have to go and record

this and put it on a record and put it out as I often have to remind myself if only you'd count to 10 if you're just having a frenzied to and fro over the weekend and just laying down a track and putting it out which starts by the way with the sort of rock sand walls and all that the hip-hop in the early 80s

where they could just go and record stuff very, very quickly, sticking out on a cassette and distribute it. And then distribute it that way. But there's even less barriers. You don't have to get clearance from the label. You don't have to have any. Everyone has a direct link to fans via some form of social media.

There is no barrier to distribution and you can get it out there incredibly quickly. And it's that sort of, you know, that meme about someone being wrong on the internet. That's what really happened over that weekend. I was thinking, oh my God. I mean, if only you were, so incredibly rich, both of you would actually have some stuff to do. You just have to do

the big shop. You'd have to do, and you'd just have a chance to, like, get out there in the world. But because they didn't, because Drake didn't have to do the big shop, eventually he goaded Kendrick into, not like us. One of the greatest tracks and one of the most successful tracks of all time. Because of that, they don't have the cultural purchase and hooks that they used to have these tracks. In the same way that people became media literate and they started being able to spot staged paparazzi shots, which for a long time they couldn't at all. but then very quickly thought, oh, I can see that.

They've set that up, blah, blah. Now people just think, this is so commercialised. You're kind of milking us. There's a sense that it really does grind people's gears now. And I don't think when anyone saw that Taylor Swift thing, we're thinking, oh, great, more conflict. I can't wait? Just thinking slightly like, yeah, do you have to?

Can you not ring her up? As we've always talked about, any way that you can get people to talk about your stuff where you don't have to take out any form of advert is what you need to survive in modern entertainment media. And Taylor's album is the biggest selling first week of her entire career. So, you know. Right.

Now, can we please talk about Saturday Night Television? Yes. I returned from America in time for Saturday Night TV. And, of course, in America, they don't have a history of a tradition of it at all. And so I'm sat there slightly jet-lagged and watching it. And there are a number of shows on Saturday, all of which I take a slightly different thing from. I want to talk about what I want to talk about strictly. I want to talk about the 1% club.

I want to talk about a show called Win Win and I want to talk about a show called The Inner Circle, all of which are on Saturday Night Television and all of which tell us a story about what Saturday Night Television used to be and what it might become. I've forced you to watch all of these as well. What are you beginning with? So Saturday Night TV is traditionally that thing again. We have it in the UK. We don't really have it in many other countries.

Europe, they don't really have it. America, they certainly don't have it. But for us, it's when the family get together or watch something together. you know, you get a takeaway or something, everyone sits around, you've got something that kids can watch, parents can watch, grandparents can watch, that's traditionally what Saturday Night TV has become. And it has fallen away a lot in recent years, you know, ratings go down and down and down, but we still see the existence of that folk memory, at least, in Strictly. So Strictly is getting six and a half, seven and above million viewers. Live, not on capture. Live.

And so there is still an appetite there, I think, for. Saturday night television. And strictly year after year after year, we have the traditional thing of, oh, God, look at this cast, I don't know any of them. And you sit and watch it and you think this is absolute perfect family viewing.

I mean, it's on for a long time. Yes. It was, I think this one was almost two and a half hours. Yeah. I think largely because Cynthia Arriva was there as well, so they had to have her opinion on every single thing. It shows that there is still a heartland out there and there's still an appetite for that sort of appointment to view.

As you know, I'm obsessed with comments on newspaper websites, and I always notice that whenever the Times writes, quite often we'll write a negative story about Straitly, but the commenters beneath, the Times commenters always like, nobody watches this anymore, this should just be rested, it's so tired. It's like, do you even know that it is by, it's like the most popular show on British television and that people really like it?

It's so odd. Well, there's that dissonance. There is a group of people who, been told now that nobody is woke. And so anything that seems like it has a kindness to it, that it literally doesn't compute in any way that it could still be popular. Because if your feed has been telling you time and time and time again that this turns people off and no one's interested in this, no one's interested in inclusion, no one's interested in, and suddenly this happens. It's like, well, one of two things can have happened here. One, everything I've been

looking at for the last five years is a lie or this is a lie. So I guess that this is a lie. So I guess that This must be, no one's really watching it. And it is, it's enormous. People hate this. No one watches it. Really, it's the most popular show on British television, but thanks. I don't know any of these people. I mean, they don't know you. You know, it's okay.

I think I saw some of the comments, which I love, for celebrity traitors. I think I've recognised two of these people. Okay, well, I'm really sorry. I mean, that's bad. So strictly, it's huge. Shows there's an audience there that will sit around a television set on a Saturday night. In the same way that Eurovision is so huge in the UK, because we put it on Saturday Night and Saturday Night TV.

is a big deal for us. The big question is, can you grow Saturday night? Can you put other stuff on Saturday night that, you know, appeals to the same audience? Now, what you have with Strictly, in the same way that ITV have with Britain's got talent, is you have a thing that used to be huge on Saturday night, which is you would have like a protective umbrella. So you could put something before it, which people would watch, because you'll always, you know, sit the TV on 10 minutes before,

or your pizza turns up a bit early, so you're watching the show before. or after it you can put something on as well and build an audience for a new show. And that seems to be dying a little bit, I would say. The one show that really has broken out and the shows you can do it, because Strictly is old, is the 1% Club. And the 1% Club is on ITV,

the LeMack Quiz Show. We've spoken about it before. Really, really neat format, which is sort of general knowledge but isn't. So everyone can play along, kids can play along, all this stuff. It's IQ, really, isn't it? Yeah, and what the 1% club is very good at,

and we're going to get onto a show called The Inner Circle, which the BBC launched this week, but the 1% club is very good at is it doesn't muck around. You are very quickly into questions, you're very quickly onto the next question, and the in-between bit of the questions is not someone explaining rules or someone saying, and where are you from?

It is a comedian doing crowd work. Famously. With lots and lots and lots of people. There's 100 contestants, we should say. And, you know, we know something about all of them. So Lee can talk to four of them and, you know, you'll pick the best two bits. So you're either being asked a question or you're being made to laugh all the way through that show. It's massively done.

There is no spare seconds. So the BBC launched a quiz show called The Inner Circle and there was a second episode tonight. Well, can I say that this is quite unusual, right? Because they've launched the daily in the week and they've gone straight to a Saturday night's celebrity version, is that quite, it used to take a while for that to happen. This whole thing comes from a, what the Americans would call a bake-off. We would call a tender. So the BBC, two years ago, said, okay, we're going to launch a tender for a new daytime quiz show. And daytime is an amazing place to grow formats for the BBC. So where repair shop

came from, point this, all of these things that... You can turn them into prime time eventually. You can turn them into prime time. Things like Bridge of Lies came out of a previous tender. So anyway, they've got this two attender, 45 companies all trying to create quiz shows. So this is the thing. It's a long, long process. Lots of companies putting a lot of money into it. Now, the process, I think, is a good one because what the BBC is saying is we want to really extend the field of people who can pitch us quiz shows, because it's the usual suspects making quizzes because it's quite a specialised industry. So they're saying, no, we want to open this field out. So we want everyone

to be on an equal playing field. And we particularly want to hear from people making shows in the nations and regions, places where we, over the last few years, the BBC have built up really, really big production bases. And so people who work there and live there can, they don't have to move to London. But it's a big opportunity. And they are saying, we want something that's going to blow our socks off. We want something new. We want something different. And this show the inner circle that people watched it. I watched it. What was your take on it in terms of this being the big new thing? Well, the big new thing. Oh, well, I thought that it was very derivative. I thought that there were huge gaps in it in terms of things not really happening. Again,

there was a huge amount of explaining of rules and what was happening. You've said to me before, just like get on with it and people will pick it up. You know, there's that Reagan quote about politics if you're explaining you're losing. It's just like, you know, there's a quiz element of it. And then it goes to an end game, you know, split or still. split or shaft, split or steel, share or shaft. I'm using all the different terminology of this because they literally come from other formats. I didn't like the fact that how much you run in the quiz section of the show, it can all just, the whole thing is completely pointless for this one final decision.

That to me is so flawed as an idea that I've got to sit through whatever, however many minutes is something that I know is going to end up being potentially, you know, basically completely pointless because it can all be overturned in the final little bit of the end game. Yeah, which, by the way, could be a positive. Could be a positive. So, yeah, so you got this end game, which is split or steal, which is the old prisoner's dilemma of, let's say, there's £5,000 in the bank.

If we both decide to split it, we get £2,500 each. If I decide to steal and you decide to split, I, as the steal, get all of the money. However, if we both decide to steal, no one gets anything. It's neat. And it's so neat we've used that a number of times. On Golden Balls, we used it, the bank job, we used it, shafted with Robert Kilroy Silk.

Or we say who it's presented by. Yeah, we used it as well. So it is, as you say, a very, very, very traditional end game. I would say you can't use it if you spent two years on a process saying, we're going to come up with the new thing. I think then you cannot. Listen, no one is set out to make a bad show. No one ever does.

I don't think you, I think that's unacceptable. I think it's definitely unacceptable to use it on a show where there's very, very little money involved. It doesn't work. Golden Balls. Well, that was big money. 100,000 pounds, shafted 300,000 pound. But also, you have to accept that it is quite divisive. It's not feel good, split or steel.

So you have to be making a certain sort of show in order for that to be okay. And this is not that show. And by the way, you don't have Amanda Holden presenting that show because Amanda Holden is so likable. You want her with Alan Carr doing uphouse. You want her doing something incredibly warm. And you cannot do a warm show that has a spit or steel ending. You just can't do it.

More importantly, you cannot do it when there's no money involved, really. So the maximum you can make on the show is like 9 grand or something, which I know is a lot of money, but in terms of if you're jeopardy when you're watching us, well, I certainly haven't seen it happen in the episodes I've watched so far. They haven't got anywhere near that. They don't know how much money each other has got. There are very small variations in the money that the people could have.

So a show that's about strategy, there is no strategy that you can use in this show. And anyone who is a quizer watching that understands that. And anyone who's not a quizer watching it just feels it, because they kind of know, like no one, you can't, you kind of can lie, but not really, it doesn't do you much good if you do. A two-year process and lots of people pitch for it and a lot of companies watching that are like, say, well, I don't really understand what we were pitching for. This is the show you were put together. And by the way, I look at the names on the thing.

And there's lots of good people on it who I think have been drafted in last minute to try and get it on to air. Well, as the celebs? No, no, no. Oh, to producers and what have you. But this is the show. if you had given me 72 hours to say we've got to put a show on on Saturday, we have no format. You would put this together. You go, okay, let's have the voting off element from the weakest link.

Let's have the where's the money from Chase the Case, which is another BBC daytime show. And let's have spit or steel. So these are all. I wonder what AI would suggest for quiz shows. I mean, it would be this. It would literally be this. And as I say, made by good people and no one's making a bad show. And the names and the credits, you think, yeah, listen, I know what you all,

I know what you're doing here. I know what's happening. But that will happen sometimes. Certainly happen in the old days when there was lots of pilots and lots of things. But for this to be the end of a two-year process that is set out to say, let's find something new, something distinctive,

in a world where the younger generation are watching television in completely different ways. And we still have a show that's, oh, this is the show where let's meet our players. We've still got what would you do with the money. This is one of the few shows where you could have that because you say, what would you do with the money before the share of shaft?

You could sort of do that because that, gives it some jeopardy. They don't even do that. They do it after the split or shaft. So it's, it has that old-fashionedness to it, which it seems to me a wasted opportunity. I will say that. And I'm absolutely certain that everyone tried their best all the way along. But you're not going to grow Saturday night television by doing the same thing you've done again and again and again and again. You have to find a new way to do things. You have to find a new way to present things. You have to find a more intimate way to present things. And as you say, they've done this celebrity version. of it. And for the celeb version of it, they've just put a celebrity with each of the players with

nothing to do. And I know a few of the celebs on it and you're lucky you're thinking, this is hard yards for you because there's nothing you can do. There's even around where actually they sort of asked quite an interesting question and either so they could be helping out. But they say you've got seven seconds to answer this. You think, oh, this is the one point where you could have slowed it down instead of speeding it up. And it's the one point where you sped it up instead of slowing it down. Speed up all the stuff that says, where are you from? What do you do? Speed up the, the, all the kind of, do you believe this person telling the truth or lying? Because the answer to that, in every case is,

I do not have any data to be able to tell you that or not. And also the difference between them telling a truth and lying is like £500. So it's sort of meaning this. So just all of that stuff and all of that stuff here happens, I've made a million shows like this, where you just kind of go, you know what? We've almost got it, but we haven't quite. And I say, okay, we move on and we'll learn some lessons.

But I think at the end of a two-year process, you probably have to be presenting something that has a bit more to it that is a bit more unusual that's trying to do something different and whether this was the last minute panic which is what it feels like to me or could be absolutely wrong people involved in the process

could tell me it feels like at the last minute they went oh my God we just need to make this like a normal quiz show because this bits of it are not working it's so old fashioned look at the 1% club now the 1% club has a huge amount more money there's a huge amount more money But if you're the BBC, the one thing you know is you do not have big prize money. So do not make a show that is about how you split the prize money.

But having mega prizes can also go wrong. Because can we please talk about win-win, Richard, which is on ITV? Yeah, which is on ITV. It's Men and Sue from the People's Post Code Lottery is actually a pretty good format. I didn't like this format. Did you not? So it's based on a big survey of people. And again, so it's not general knowledge.

It's, you know, what's the most embarrassing thing you can do at work? It's like that family fortunes type dynamic. And it's, you know, you... Rate the most, the best bit of a Sunday roast. You try and beat the people either side of you and you try and score points. So what I mean by a good format is, A, it's inclusive. B, it makes absolute sense. C is how it has lots and lots of moments of actual proper jeopardy.

As in, if you get it wrong, you're out. If you get it right, you're in, which the inner circle doesn't have. All of those things. On Saturday, it gave away. one million pounds. I think the ratings are 1.5 million, you know? And it's against strictly, so it will be. But it's fascinating to give away 1.5 million, which 10, 20 years ago would have been a huge story. To my view, it's a really good show. I really, I thought as well put together, since I would have changed a better course. But it's a well put together

show. It's giving away a million pounds. But there is not that audience anymore that will default to watching something on a set. It's against strictly anyway. So strictly we have the example of there is still an audience for Saturday Night TV. One percent club, we have this example that if you do the right thing in the right place, you will get an audience of four million people to come and watch that, which is a huge audience. From nothing, you've created a, from nothing, you can grow it. It is possible on Saturday Night TV to do show and get away a million pound with a perfectly decent show and nobody to watch, which tells us something about the softness of what Saturday night is. And then you have this opportunity of a show

just before Strictly where you could grow something. So, you know, the weakest link with Romish Ranganathan, that reboot, I think, is really, really terrific. The hit list works in that slot as well. You know, there's stuff that's working there. But what an opportunity to throw away as well. You've got to be so gentle with these things, and you've got to throw stuff at Saturday Night TV that a newer audience will watch and understand and fight away into,

and that largely is understanding. They watch TV in a different way. You can't do a process that says we're coming up with the next, big new thing and do something that's so generic. You can't do it. It's not, it's not fair on everybody. I've made so much generic TV in my time. If you need someone to make a generic television program, I'm the ones because I'm not preaching in any way whatsoever. I've made these shows a hundred times, but not at the end of this process. Not when you're putting it on Saturday night before strictly. Not when you've had 45 companies, all of whom have

furious, you know, all of whom have put all this work and effort into it. I just think it's, it's not a great look and I think it's a slightly wasted opportunity. I'd love the next tender process to come up with a show that isn't. Welcome to the show where. Let's meet our players. What would you do with the money? Let's do something completely different. Let's do a quiz that's completely different. I'm not entirely sure they will do another tender after this, but if they were to do it. I certainly don't think many companies would take part in it if they were. But it is a good thing to do. You need to do tenders because you do want new voices

and new companies making these things, but it's got to come up with something that isn't this. And I know everyone knows that, so forgive me everybody, but, you know, it ain't right. Recommendations, Marina? There's something that's beautiful and it's always there, which is the story of Ulstrand on BBC 4, and there's so many great documentaries on that.

And I just chanced to watch the librarians, which is about librarians in the US, dealing with people who want to ban various books. It's so good and it just makes me think, oh gosh, why don't I just make it time for Storyville every single week? It's so good. So that's BBC 4 and you can watch it on iPlay. I will recommend Partridge is back and Partridge is good. How Are You? Which is Alan Partridge's examination of mental health, except it isn't. It's just a series of sketches. I would say it picks up and picks up and picks up. The first one I think is the weakest

but it just, there's some brilliant, absolutely classic Partridge as he allows himself to go further and further away from the initial premise of his documentary about mental health and there's six parts of that on IPlayer. We'll be back as usual for a questions and answers episode on Thursday. We will indeed. Our bonus episode will be about a very behind the scenes man.

Someone who is a guy called Mike Darnell who is the godfather in every sense perhaps of what we, the reality TV. American. It's a fascinating story. Some of the shows are so beyond what we were considered the pale Until Mike would just, you know, transgress his own norms even With each new show and it's some quite dark stuff emerged from that era

But it's a very funny story If you want to be a member, ad-free listening on all of that It's the rest of the entertainment.com But otherwise, we will see you all on Thursday. See you on Thursday. This episode was brought to you by Sky. Skyglass is the new television from Sky, the kind that makes your old Teddy feel like a dress rehearsal. This is the big screen premiere right there in your living room.

Because it's not just about pixels and settings, it's about the experience. Skyglass has auto-adjust, which cleverly adapts to whatever you're watching, and the built-in Dolby sound makes dialogue sharper, footsteps nearer, storms louder. Take the secret world of sound on Sky Nature, frogs croak like brass sections, bats click like castanets and even the hush between feels designed for surround sound it's less like nature recorded more like nature remixed and then there's david attenborough his voice warmer than central heating turning baby caymans and prowling hyenas into shakespearean characters that's when you realize skyglass doesn't just show tv it was built to collaborate with it the unsung producer behind every great scene visit sky dot com requires relevant sky tv subscriptions broadband recommended minimum speed 30 megabits per second. 18 plus, UK, Channel Islands and Isle of Man only. Alastair Campbell here from The Rest is Politics. Now, we've just released a series on one of the most controversial and consequential people of the past 50 years. Rupert Murdoch.

I think you can argue that he is the most consequential figure of the second half of the 20th century. He holds power longer than anyone else in our time. And it's meaningful power. It's phenomenal power. Power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages. This is where he becomes not just a newspaper owner, he becomes a major newsmaker. Fuck Daker publish. There is always a premium on bringing him gossip. I don't know what you mean by down market and upmarket. That is so English class-ridden snobbery when you talk like that. How you get it doesn't make any difference. Actually, to be perfectly honest, whether it's true or not doesn't make much difference. There is a massive, massive scandal brewing.

This was industrial, illegal activity, and that I think is what really cuts through to the public and things you people are really, really bad. I would just like to say one sentence. This is the most humble day of my life. There is no Donald Trump without Fox News. His dream was always to elect a president of the United States. The bitter irony is that that turned out to be Donald Trump.

On the end, he detests. He is conquering the world. There's nothing less than this methodical step-by-step progress to take over everything. To hear more, just search the rest is politics wherever you get your podcasts.