The Rest Is Entertainment - Is Strictly Come Dancing In Trouble?

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

In what should be a celebratory 20th year for Strictly Come Dancing, the show instead is marred in controversy with allegations of misconduct in rehearsal spaces and around training methods. How has one of the BBC's crown jewels ended up here, and what does it's future hold? Elsewhere, BBC radio is facing criticism with a proposed spin-off of a Radio 2 oldies station plus Marina & Richard go through a recent list from the New York Times on the top 100 books of the 21st century. Sign-up to The Rest Is Entertainment newsletter for a link to that NYT story and further recommendations - www.therestisentertainment.com Twitter: @restisents Instagram: @restisentertainment YouTube: @therestisentertainment Email: [e-mail] Producers: Neil Fearn Executive Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/trie It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest Is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And me, Richard Osmond. Hello Marina, how are you? I'm very well, how are you Richard? I'm not bad, how has your week been? It's been good. I'm preparing to go on holiday so I'm super excited about that. But other than that it's the classic week before holiday where you have to do a million things. Does that mean you won't be doing the podcast for the next few weeks? Surely. Richard, this isn't always on podcast which means that I will be doing, I'm

actually going to be doing it one of the episodes from Corfu. That is quite something. Yes, it is quite something. I like the fact you said you'd always do this podcast and it's always on. And what people can't see when you talk about starting podcasting on holidays, that Gary Lineker is behind you with a comedy truncheon. Yeah, he'll wrap me on the head if I step out of line, but it won't hurt. Do you know what? It's only because he cares.

Yeah. And it's only because I'm a professional, Richard, that you can't see through it. Exactly that. Now, what are we going to talk about this week? We are going to talk about what has now become a spate of strictly in crisis stories. This is the business of the training methods of various dancers and the alleged trauma of various contestants that has sort of been building up and is now at the sort of classic BBC story crisis point. Has it become Strictly Gate yet? It has not been fitted with its gates suffix yet. Let's do it.

Okay, Strictly Gate. So we're talking Strictly Gate? Strictly Gate, yeah we're talking Strictly Gate. Is that okay Gary? Oh he's nodding, yeah. We are also, the New York Times have spoken to lots of different people and listed what they say are the top 100 books of the 21st century, so we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about those books and also about why lists are important or unimportant, why awards might be important or unimportant as well.

I have a view, you can imagine. And we're going to talk a little bit about about the BBC have said they're going to spin off a Radio 2 kind of golden oldies station during some howls of outrage from some people who think that catering with their stations to disenfranchise Radio 2 listeners. So more trouble for the BBC. I'm sorry. Yes, it's not it's not a special. Shall we talk about strictly? Let's talk about strictly.

This whole story started rolling. Amanda Abington, who's the Sherlock actress and many other things, she left the show rather abruptly in the middle of the last series. There was reports that she'd fallen out over the training methods. She said it was allowed to be known that she was suffering from mild PTSD and her dance partner, the professional with whom she was paired, Giovanni Panucci, is not going to appear in the next season of the show. At first, I suppose people didn't necessarily, the story didn't gain huge amounts of traction, but then too early of Giovanni's partners, Laura Whitmore and Ranveer Singh also spoke to the BBC, we're given to

understand as part of their investigation to this and now this is really turbocharged it. Zahra McDermott, the former Love Island contestant who appeared in the season prior, Who We Love, she was spoken to in the course of the BBC investigation and they reviewed footage that was taken within their rehearsal room and approached her and some of this footage is apparently very very disturbing. He has been let go we understand by the BBC so he had already been announced as one of the dancers for the next season and is now not going to appear. He initially released a statement saying his drive to win may have affected my training regime and Zahra McDermott herself

has now released a statement in which she said, you know, people are probably wondering why I didn't speak out before. And she said, I was scared about the public backlash. I was scared about my future and I was scared of victim shaming. Obviously, such is the way we live now that all of these are now happening. Some people of course have said, oh, these people should just toughen up. You know, it's a demanding show and it's called Strictly for a reason. Yeah, it's not called Strictly for that reason. Nevermind, nevermind.

It's called Strictly because of Strictly Ballroom for the Australian film. Yeah, and of course the other thing, the old law, that the longer a story about a show on the BBC runs, the probability of that story becoming about the BBC approaches one. So this is now a sort of- A singularity.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we see people talking about things like duty of care So this is now a sort of singularity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so we see people talking about things like duty of care and the culture of a show and how come it's taken so long for it to come out. We should say, you know, this is the biggest show on TV. It is immensely popular as we say it's coming up for its 20th year anniversary. I suppose the persona of the show in general is that it's an extraordinary place. It's part of the story we tell ourselves about diversity and acceptance. And it's a dream factory. Yeah, it's a dream factory.

People go on these amazing journeys. They say it changes their lives. I think what's kind of slightly significant is that for me, it's changed. And part of the reason it's changed is part of the reason why it's very successful because you'll be the first to say that these big formats these amazing shows that continue to be relevant and super popular after 20 years say something about their times they reflect society which they also delight and when Strictly First started it was a lot more amateur. Yes and gentle.

Because these are amateur dancers who are being paired with professionals and I think there's something about that that something has changed. For me I think it's interesting first of all what we should say is that it's really very very hard some would say brutal to become a professional dancer and all of the professionals many of them left their families when they were young, they are subject to brutal training regimes. It is normalized to some extent that within the performing arts and I have a lot of friends who went through different

things like this to try and go professional. Also you know we see the same thing with athletes. And what might be sort of one person's complete brutality semi abuse is another the way we've always done it. I mean, this is I think that's the crack that has been fallen down here. And I'll give my reasons why Strictly has the ability to get through this. But the crack that's been fallen down is, as you say, strictly sells dreams. That's the beauty of that show. There's glitter and there's stardust and it's just a journey and a delight and just seeing

people really express themselves. The world of dancing, as you say, is a brutal one. Now two other worlds that are absolutely brutal are the world of cooking and the world of military training. Now when you do a cooking show, you call that cooking show Hell's Kitchen, or you call it Ramsey's Kitchen nightmares, because you are saying this is brutal, this is tough, this is the world we're in. When you look at military training, it's SAS, are you tough enough? And people are literally screamed at and thrown

off cliffs and things like that. But that's the point of that show. It's about, are you strong? Are you tough? It's not about, can you dream your dream and wear a glittery dress. Now Strictly, for a long time, has managed to have the best of both worlds, which is it has all these professional dancers, all of whom, as you say,

have been through fairly brutal regimes to get to where they are and to get to the incredible skill level they are. And it brings in lovely amateur celebrities. And we sit- You're with someone from it brings in lovely amateur celebrities and we sit and watch and they get a bit better and they get a bit better. The last few years, it's so competitive now and people come in and the level of dancing is absolutely extraordinary. And to get to that level of dancing, if you're a celebrity and you come in, which is by the way what most people I know would do, most people at home, you go and say, I'm going to absolutely go for this as much as I can. I want to get

as much as I can out of the Strictly journey. That's what I'm going to do. If you do that and say that to a dancer, the dancer only has one way to respond to that, which is, oh, well, I know how to get the most out of someone who dances because that's what happened to me. This is what was done to me. This is what was done to me. And so suddenly there's this raising my... Never did me any harm. Never did me any harm. And by the way, I was talking to a Strictly Dancer about this who shall remain nameless, but they were saying exactly that. If you want that level, then you have to do the things that I did by that. And this person is not a bully in any way whatsoever. And but it's

just saying it is really, really, really difficult. And when you get those two forces coming together, which is someone really a celebrity, really, really wanting to come and do their best and a dancer who maybe has been raised in an environment where they were taught in certain difficult ways, you are going to get the issues that they have now got. So this is a fault line that was waiting to open up. It's a fault line that was waiting to open up and good on Amanda Abington for saying, I'm not was waiting to open up and good on Amanda Abington for saying

I'm not going to stand for it and good on, I mean Zara didn't come out with it but a BBC crew member reported the footage of Graziano, so good on that crew member for doing that as well. But you can see with Zara... But strange in a way that it should be nine months after the event. For sure. You would have thought that that would be surfaced to the very top and the fact that it hasn't been is going to be...

So maybe it's more endemic. Is the issue. And also by the way, Zara's statement about I didn't want to make a fuss, she is, of course, if you go into a show that everyone tells you is a dream and that everyone says, oh my God, this is like the most magical journey and for you it isn't, the first thing most people would do is internalize that and think it was their fault and go, oh, I'm letting everybody down. I'm not going to complain.

This is just the normal way of doing things. You see that in relationships in all sorts of areas and it's no different here. So I think the brutality of what it takes to be a dancer is something that's never been confronted on that show. Occasionally they go, oh my God, it was a really tough week this week and we had to do two dances and I was really put through my paces, but it's never been confronted on that show. Occasionally they go, oh my god it was a really tough week this week and we had to do two dances and I was really put through my paces but it's never really made clear and now it has been, I guess it's the BBC's move as to what to do about that.

Another part of it I do think is the change in the show. I read in an article by Michael Hogan in The Guardian, this extraordinary statistic, I think this is mind-blowing, that in the first series ever of Strictly, one ten was given as a score, and in the last series that we've had, 69 tens were given. Now you could say, oh maybe they're just chucking them up, but they're not at all. The standard of dancing has improved beyond, and I think that there's something interesting about that. As I say, formats have to evolve and shows evolve if they were to stay relevant. You shouldn't go for 20 series is the truth. It's very, very unusual that a show would

still be right at the top of its game after 20. You know, X-Factor didn't last that long, but Strictly has been very good at changing its clothes. I agree. But don't you think it's saying something covertly about our culture? You see that fun amateur things now are, if you look at the world of fun amateur sport, it is just awash with performance enhancing drugs. There's an epidemic of this stuff. People who would once have spent, that type of person would have once spent maybe an hour a day in the gym, now will spend three hours. Obviously, lots of this is being driven by social media but the sense of like high performance that is applied to things

which were really just leisure and amateur fun is across the board. It's interesting that this has become so much more of a tough dancing show. Back in the day you know you remember John Sargent being dragging his partner across the floor but perhaps he saw that that was coming because he resigned from the show in 2010 because he felt like, oh, it would be taking a joke too far. He already felt that sort of sense of hype because the judges didn't like it. The other thing, I think, because the longer a show goes on, the more the buildup of people who say it changed their lives is, and you get this flywheel effect where people are thinking, oh it's changed my life or it's made me feel whole or all these things. And

so to some extent, some of the people who may be drawn to that are people who may feel they wish to have their life changed or need to be made whole. So it may draw to some extent vulnerable people with a vulnerability of some type or another, which when you put it in that particular fire pit can easily explode because as we say it is so brutal. It's interesting therefore that unlike sort of best practice across almost all the other reality formats now, they have psychological evaluations that decide whether you're able to do the show and they don't have that one strictly, because in some ways it's part of that story, as I said,

that we tell ourselves about diversity and changing lives and all this sort of thing, and why would you need to have, but I think you do need to have that. They tend not to have it on celebrity versions of shows, is the truth. They have it because they were made to have it on regular editions of shows, but on celebrity versions of shows,

it's a wave as a sign, then it's assumed that people can can handle themselves I think we'll be assuming that they can they will be having it now after this because this is continuing to unfold yeah and clearly they are going to have to do a psychological evaluation test I mean there are other people who are saying they should shutter it for a year such a lot has been made of the 20th anniversary that I don't think they can or should perhaps do that I don't think who are saying they should shutter it for a year. Such a lot has been made of the 20th anniversary that I don't think they can or should perhaps do that. I don't think they should shutter it for a year. Do you?

No, no, I absolutely don't. I mean, for practical terms, as you say, it's an enormous show and it's already well underway. And, you know, the contestants have already been booked for the next year. And also, it's very hard this there's certain shows that you see over the years where I think there's a toxic atmosphere behind them. There are certain big, big reality shows that you think, yeah, I'm not entirely sure I trust the motives of the people making this television show. And Strictly's never been one of those for me. Strictly, genuinely, from the point of view of the people who are making it, has been about joy and it's been about journeys and it's about transformations and it's about showing Britain to its absolute best. So it's always had somewhere in the

brains of the people behind it there's been glitter coming out and actually what that can do is blind you sometimes to some of the things that are happening on your show and so it doesn't blind you from a bad way it blinds you from that that thing of over positivity and I'm absolutely certain that every now and again there have been rumblings about disagreements in... in fact you hear it all the time you think oh so and so contestant is quite difficult and looking back you go well were they difficult or were they just saying that maybe that I'm not being

treated the way I should be but it's a brutal world that whole world is absolutely populated by dancers who as I say have been through that in the same way that the the gang on SES are you tough, have been through that in the same way that the gang on SAS are you tough enough? Have been through boot camps and are so happy to dish it out. And I think it's one of those car crashes that was inevitable and was going to happen. And if the BBC can show that it's taking it incredibly seriously, can understand what's happening, cannot sort of say, yes, but you know, it's tough because it's tough because if they understand actually culturally the world is changing people will not put up with the things they used to put up with that

perhaps some of the people they have got as dancers also need a bit of help every now and again because of the way they've been brought up in the world they were brought up in. If they can find a way... Well one of them has complained that we're not given sort of adequate enough assistance to face their own behaviour which seems to me. One of the dancers who was no longer with the show is saying that they weren't given enough support, they're sort of suit and counter suit now. I mean I can get it, two cultures colliding I would say. I agree

and I wonder whether, it is difficult then though to recalibrate when it has gone so far down the road of the performance have become much more technically adept and it's become much more professional to go back and say a little bit of amateurism is fine, it's fine to laugh at people, it's fine when people honestly can't do it and we're just having a laugh when they're out there. We used to be like this. It's quite hard to go back to that when you've gone quite far down the road but it's a little, you know as I say it's we see this across absolutely everything the sort of hardcore performance gains culture of lots of

these things where the fun does get slightly wrung out of it and that's not this is not just about strictly as I say this is about everything from triathlons to marathons to all sorts of things other do you know what for me the fun has really gone out of trions to marathons to all sorts of things. You know what, for me the fun has really gone out of triathlons. Yeah, marathons likewise. Honestly, they used to just be a breeze. Yeah. And now everyone takes them so seriously. There's something about the sort of professionalization and high performance-ization, not a word,

of things that used to be fun. And clearly it's driven in lots of ways by social media and by the idea of perfection. But it's interesting that it's bled even onto this, which is a sort of fun Saturday show. Yeah, we've all worked in organizations where there are targets and you hit those targets and then those targets are raised and you hit those targets and they're raised again. And there is that sort of performance inflation that's happened with Strictly. And the BBC now have to find a way of stopping that happening, of reassuring people it's not gonna happen again. Bringing it into the show. Do you know what that's exactly what I was gonna say

this is what I'm saying about Hell's Kitchen and about SES are you tough enough you have to accept that it is very very very very hard to train to be a ballroom dancer you have to accept that those couples are gonna have arguments. When was the last time you ever saw an argument on Strictly? You don't do it. And by the way, I understand why, because that's not what they want to have on their show. People don't want to see this and actually, you know... That's not the Strictly way. So they've never ever shown it. And I think you're right. I

think you have to slightly go, do you know what? This is not always... You have to own all of it. ... you know, roses. And you have to own it on camera. And it's quite interesting. You remember when we did that research that came from More In Common that was said that this actually, this show skewed sort of most right wing as it were compared to lots of the other shows on television.

It's quite interesting. If you read a lot of the comments about it, people are saying, this is rubbish. It's just dancing. It's not, it's not, it's not being in the S.A.S. It's not any of these things, they're not training to be special forces. Now, if any of those people had a daughter and that daughter was kicked at work, they would have very, very different views. No one wants to watch that on Saturday night at all, I should be very clear about that,

but folding it into the show, but making it still kind of heartwarming and part of it, that is the challenge, but we will definitely see that when we next see this show. I think the big difference is there are things that you choose not to show viewers because you want them to believe a reality, but as a production team, if you start to believe that reality yourself, you're in trouble.

And people can take a bit of reality. Yeah, it's part of authenticity, which is one of the big sort of buzzwords of the time. So being able to see both sides of it. And there's absolutely no doubt that Strictly has done some extraordinary things over the last few years and over the last 20 series. And genuinely, some extraordinary stories, some extraordinary performances, has made careers, has brought a huge amount of joy and will continue to do all of those things.

But I think can only do it if they have to own the situation that they've created and the situation they've created is people who've trained in a certain way being asked to train other people in that same way and you have to deal with it, you have to look at it, you have to cut it off at the root and you have to show that it is really really really hard. Obviously I wish none of this had happened to anyone I think it's absolutely terrible without any question. It's a terrifying thing for a producer to have to face because they've got their castle and it's completely built and they know exactly what it looks like. But occasionally you just got to go, no, maybe, maybe we did a little bit of the truth shine in. By the way, they let a lot of truth shine in on that show.

Almost everything you see there is true. They're not lying to people, but they are obviously at the bottom end of what's happening. They're not being entirely honest with viewers. And I think probably they haven't been entirely honest with themselves. Yeah. We always get lots of headlines when we talk about the BBC as well. Someone sent me two the other day. I was like, what is this? Someone sent me a headline that said, Richard Osmond breaks rule that will cost BBC billions. I was like, Oh no, what's this? And it was the thing I said on the podcast about singing along to the words on the wheel. Yeah, exactly. Which of course they just don't show. But that was the headline.

Who wrote that story? Do you know what? I'm going to Google it. Get Switch newspaper, Daily Express, who also did Richard Olsen talks of fears after last House of Games recording. What were your fears? And no, that was me saying, oh we've just finished recording for the year and you saying, God I hope no one misbehaves in between now and

Christmas and we're like yeah. And again that's the headline on the Daily Express. Do you write in if you're listening to this on the Daily Express and I'll suggest the best news lines from this. Those previous ones weren't it? No. And with that Richard, I think we should go straight to a break. Shall we? Welcome back everybody. Now what should we do now Richard? Shall we talk about the New York Times best books of the 21st century? Yes. Firstly it's a really, really great list I would say. It's one of those things where if you're looking for something to read,

there will be like four that you would be interested in here and they're very good at saying if you like this you will also like that They got about 500 people to do this by the way. Yeah, they asked lots and lots of writers and critics and celebrities and Yeah, it's very American based I would say definitely say that that's I would definitely say but that's kind of interesting in a way because there's books there that you don't Know which is quite interesting if it it had been over here, I think we might have known more of them. So I wanted to do a couple of things. I wanted to go through the list and suggest books that people might actually like to read because I reckon that's a fun thing.

Quite a lot of that I don't think people would like to read. There was quite a lot of what I would call, you know, books that people think you should read. There's a lot of that. And to some extent, their society is not exactly the same as ours. Quite a lot of sort of politically correct things you watch, read, and you think, oh my god, this is a hard yard. I'm not going to read that. Great, I've now read the paragraph about it on a list, and that counts as me having read that one. A lot of the non-fiction is very American based, so we can...

There's hardly any non-fiction. We can skirt over it. There's a few. But I was stunned by that, that there was so little non-fiction. And there was really hardly. But I was stunned by that that there was so little non-fiction and there was a there's really hardly any I thought and that was it was like a few you know some great stuff like Tony Judd post-war, Nicoll and Dymed, Barbara Ehrenreich. By the way if you haven't ever read any Barbara Ehrenreich she died not that long ago and she's absolutely wonderful. You see and this is the interesting thing because a lot of people are certainly inside the industry go oh why do we have lists why have we got to have a list of the best books of the 21st

century of course they're not the best we shouldn't compare books and if we didn't have this list you wouldn't have just told people about Barbara Ehrenreich and there will be people at home who buy Barbara Ehrenreich's book and love it and it's added to their life and that is the reason we have lists I was at a thing last night with lots of booksellers from all the different Waterstone Smiths all the Indies and what I mean but for my new. I was at a thing last night with lots of booksellers from all the different Waterstone Smiths, all the Indies and what have you. For your new book? For my new book, I was. But listen, we don't need to worry about that just yet. We're talking

about other people's books for now. All right. Much as I would love to talk about We Sold Murders. Get the title in. I was talking to them about lists and prizes and they said they were absolute godsend. It's not like there's a big TV show every week about books on British television. They tried it a million times. These things don't particularly rate. There's a brilliant Between the Covers, which is on BBC2, but that's about as far as it goes. People who like books absolutely love them. Most people don't come into contact with them,

is the truth, culturally. Soon to have, say, the Booker Prize. The Booker Prize, when it was run about, what had been ten years ago now, and they shared it between Margaret Atwood and Bernadine Evaristo. And there was controversy that they shared, because they never shared it before. And they go, what's the point? Firstly, we shouldn't even have prizes.

And if we are having prizes, why give it to two books? And so actually, suddenly it was on the front page of newspapers. And Girl, Woman, Other then sold in absolute bucket loads. And the whole of Britain got to find out who Bernadine Evaristo is and Bernadine Evaristo's backlist then sales and sales and sales and she makes an incredible contribution to our culture and we've got this new star in the firmament just because we had a prize and these booklists

They didn't like ranking things, nothing wrong with that. Well listen you know to me there is no culture without ranking culture. Do you know I was reading an obituary last week about a journalist called Pat Hartridge, who was the first person to compile the Sunday Times bestsellers list, because we didn't have it until the 1970s. In the US, they've always had bestsellers lists right back to the sort of 19th century. And in Britain, it was seen as very un-English, and it was seen that actually books should not compete with each other. And it was Harold Evans at un-English, and it was seen that actually books should not compete with each other. And it was Harold Evans at the time,

so you've got Pat Hartridge to compile this, which he did by ringing 200 bookstores and getting them to literally physically tell her the numbers of books they'd sold that week, and she would then compile it and compiled it for many, many years. And the argument that we shouldn't compare books, there's something in it but the

moment that there are real book charts publishers has always known what's sold because they can see their sales numbers but publishers don't always want to tell people what that is because publishers actually just want to oh my god they're so secretive publish their friends and publish their mates and give their mates more money and actually when you actually see what people do buy the meritocracy comes into order a little bit more and suddenly books that people actually like and books that people actually read suddenly command bigger fees and bigger advances and things like that so putting those books in the charts and comparing them actually really really improved the health. Speaking of which, where were the

genre books on this list? There were none. Where were the romance? Where were the mysteries? There's no romance, there's no crime fiction, there is absolutely zero genre fiction on this list, which is fascinating. Which tells you various stories, including about the people who answered the New York Times call to rank them. Well, I did a cross-reference of the 100 best books on this list, 100 best books of the 21st century and the 100 best-selling books of the 21st century in the States. I knew you'd have done that. Yeah, exactly. And I think there's four in there.

There's Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver, which sold a load. There's Wolf Hall, which sold an absolute ton as well. Elena Ferranti, my beautiful friend, she's got three on that chart. And the Underground Railroads, those are the ones that crossed across both of those, which tells you, by the way, how great all of those books are. No Sally Rooney. No Sally Rooney.

No NASCAR. Yeah, no sort of anyone. No poetry. You've read no poetry. People say that poetry died like a hundred years ago. Yeah. No. Did it not?

No. That was the publication of The Waste Land. They think that that's the sort of poetry sidle event. Oh really? Have they not heard of Pam Ayres? Well, there you go, she wasn't on it. So it's a fascinating list and there's a hundred books on it and honestly I would recommend having a look at it.

Honestly most of it need not detain you, is the truth. There is a type of literature which appeals to people who really, really get literature and that's literature that uses words in an incredibly interesting and unusual way and I get it and people who really know their business can recognize it, understand it, appreciate it and admire it. That is not what most people want to read. I'm incredibly happy it's respected and shown and people who love that sort of thing can buy it. If I was going through that list and things that people haven't read, Elena Ferrante, of course, George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo is in there,

which is a brilliant book that people love. And if you're not sure about it, there's also two of his short story collections in that top 100, 10th of December is one of them. So you can dip in and if you like his writing, go for Lincoln in the Bardo. Donna Tartt, who wrote Secret History, her book, The Goldfinch is in there,

which is one of those books. It's really long, but one of those books I was happy it was long, which is very, very rare for me. So that's in there. And Patchett is in there with Bel Canto and the Underground Railroad as well. Kate Atkinson was in there, which I was delighted about. Yeah, if you want to winnow out all that. I mean, there's a huge amount in there on sort of racial politics that Britain is is not America so you may find some preponderance of that on that list yeah maybe you wouldn't perhaps create exactly the same list over here but when you go through and you see things like you know

line of beauty or never let me go or Zadie Smith or Wolf Hall as I say if you just want to win or out the British it's a really good list of say the best 10 British novels of the 21st century. They've got that pretty much bang on I would say. You know we always have to end with a number one. Of course you understand that. So in the top ten, actually the corrections is in the top ten which I love, Jonathan Franson, but he's number five.

Wolf Hall is number three. And number one, it is Elena Ferrante, my brilliant friend. If people haven't read, and there's four of them, and that's a proper, it's a page-turner, and it's literary, but you will absolutely love it. And I genuinely, I love it when we have lists, and I love it when we have awards. People talk about, you know, Oscars and book awards, and they say, oh, it's so self-congratulatory. And you think, no, it's a money-making exercise. Yes, and also most people are not congratulating, they're just shouting at the television that you got it wrong.

And that's the massive part of lists is, oh my god, they've completely messed this one up. Or, you know, yes, you're correct, that is the best book. So people just like to either define themselves against it or to say, yes, well, you've been right, or to predict it, to predict what will be there. But if anyone is saying, oh, we shouldn't, we shouldn't compare art to each other, then I'd say a number of industries that would disagree with you, the movie industry, the TV industry, and the book industry, the music industry as well. They're all like, no, please,

please compare because it absolutely proves a boost to our sales. And every now and again, like with Bernardine Evaristo, a new name comes from nowhere that just would not have come if it hadn't been for those awards. Can I compliment, by the way, the New York Times editors, because as you can imagine, the real fun of the list actually is the comments, which are as awful as you can imagine. Nothing drives reader engagement like a list. I mean, the whole of Buzzfeed, to some extent, was born of people just loving a list and either raging against it or cheering for it. But I have a series of people who are cleverer than the list here who've responded.

I seem to be unable to find the Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Murakami on your list. Did I miss it or did you? To which the long-suffering New York Times book editor says, yes that was published in the 1990s. So great. Someone says, the fact that the warmth of other sons is not on this list is a tragedy. Very disappointed. To which the New York Times editor replies, it is number two on the list. Another, I can't believe Demon Copperhead was left off this list. I never ever read the same book twice, but I've read this one twice and I'm sure to pick it up for a third time sometime soon. It is on the list. It's number 61. Well, it should be in the top 10.

Why don't you read the list twice? There you go. But it's honestly, it's a great list and I defy anyone not to find something on there that they want to buy. But this is me in defense of lists and in defense of making comparisons between different types of art because it's incredibly good for the industry. We'll on a whole separate occasion talk about power lists which are the scum of the earth. But we'll talk about that. Yeah, but in lots of other ways brilliant. That's the dream to be on a power list isn't it? Oh yeah. I once saw, the GQ once did one where David Beckham was more powerful than

Rupert Murdoch. There was one details magazine in America, Kevin Federline, who was at the time Britney Spears' unemployed back-hit dancer husband, I think he was more powerful than Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian leader. Is Bashar going to do the photo shoot? And in the end, it's like who will do the photo shoot? Yes, who's going to be there? GQ men of the year who are available. Here's something I would like to see, like a British power list, either media or politics or whatever it is that has both Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart in it. Now the thing to do of course is to put them together because the podcast is such a force, but the thing I would love them to do is separate them and put them separately on that list, rank one of their powers above

the others. Can you imagine the fun of that? I think we'd feel a great disturbance in the force. We'll link to that list and also all the recommendations we've made on our newsletter, which you can sign up to at therestisentertainment.com. Before we go, we'll just talk a little bit about a row that has developed over the BBC's plans to spin off a sort of golden oldies version of Radio 2. And various stations have sprung up, most particularly Boom Radio, to cater to people who feel that they were disenfranchised by Radio 2.

Yes, which has aged down a little bit. Which has aged down a little, they say. But anyway, these people are very angry with the BBC for trying to spin off another station and they say that, oh, this will be kind of commercially devastating to us. And they've gone to Ofcom and Ofcom have said that the BBC need to do a full public interest test, which is everyone from the industry can feed in, the public can feed in. I think this is a tricky one.

I have to say, because Boom Radio started and actually describes itself as created by a group of individuals who felt the BBC had stopped caring about the interests of older listeners. I suppose if you just keep saying and keep using the press to push the line that the BBC has disenfranchised listeners, then arguably the BBC, in my view, has a duty to try and refranchise those listeners. I know from talking to people that the BBC feel that in this area maybe they're not offering people as much value as they would like, and it's not for the BBC to be a sort of, in my view, market failure organisation.

This is what's happened to public service broadcasters all around the world where they thought, oh, well, you know, the market will take care of that. And you sort of eventually retreat into kind of religion and news. And that's sort of what you do. You become irrelevant. The media ecosystem suffers hugely as a result. So it's not for the BBC to be that. I sort of feel like it's the BBC's job to offer as much value as they possibly can in a

world where people including their commercial rivals are trying to assail the license fee and say it doesn't offer as much value. But I do have sympathy with people who think they might see their listenership draw forth. Yeah I take a slightly different view which is you know boom radio if I'm setting up boom radio of course I going to say the BBC is not serving older listeners because that's publicity and I'm starting a new station. And by the way, that's the gap in the market that I have spotted. Older people who feel that radio 2 has left them behind.

They want pop music, but they want it older and they are no longer catered for. So the market then takes up that slack and if I was Boom Radio I'd be like yeah I saw that gap in the market I invested quite a lot of money in it. That gap in the market is now going to close almost entirely because the BBC are going to do a free version of it without adverts where they can use their talent much more cheaply and suddenly the money I've invested is not worth anything. The argument could be BBC there is a way of serving those older listeners by rolling them back into Radio 2 you've chosen to take radio 2 in a certain direction

By doing that you have left a portion of the population Available to a commercial channel the commercial channel has said great We'll take them is hard then to sort of walk back in mosey back in and say oh no We're gonna we're gonna take them as well But the BBC I think can't be constantly under attack for things it's not doing and then when it tries to do them be under another form of attack for doing them. I sort of feel and also what they can do is different to Boom Radio because they have just the unbelievable archive of the BBC and what they have they have all archive interviews for that from those

years these are things that are not available to other broadcasters I mean I would say feel free to make them available because they were paid for by people's license fee money over many many years They weren't paid for by the BBC director-general out of his pocket They they belong to us and you know, you can get access to them via on the BBC on BBC sound You absolutely can all I'm saying is there is a point at which you can overreach as a channel. When I was growing up, if you liked indie music, you had John Peel. Yeah. And that's all you had. You had like two hours a night and then it was two hours a week. And now there's an entire channel dedicated to it, which is paid for

by the way. They show those big signs of in the seventies, this is what the BBC was and it's BBC one, BBC two and the four. And but now look at us and you've got these hundreds of channels and isn't that incredible and a bit of meetings I'm not sure that is incredible I think that might be a slight overreach into the market there has got to come a point where there is overreach there has got to you've got to put up a gate at some point and go the BBC is doing a number of things and this doesn't necessarily regulated more than anybody. Absolutely. If they have money, if they do have money, and I recognize the other thing is it's not super expensive for BBC to put this channel on BBC Sounds.

And that must stick in the core of boom radio and people who have actually sort of invested some money and some money. If there is money to spare, the place can most usefully be spent is on local radio. That would be what I would say. That is also serving that generation and it's serving that part of their listenership in a way that has always been so brilliant. And I know the BBC care a great deal about local radio, but it's become under invested enormously because the money is not there. And there's local newspapers and local everything has fallen by the wayside. Again, that's a sort of slight sort of people talk about market failure.

They can't just do that. They can't just be market failure. Exactly that. But I think they do plenty. I just think there comes a point where the optics of it, if you are opening up a series of new radio stations to market to quite an initial audience, which has already been marketed to by commercial rivals, while underfunding local news and local radio. I think that's an issue.

The other issue is world service, of course, which was always funded by the government and the Tories took that away. One hopes that maybe that comes back into, you know, government spending. Cause it was one of the great soft power things ever. I've been in the most like obscure and remote places in the world where people have said, oh, we all listen to BBC World Service because we don't trust our news or whatever it is. It is one of the most extraordinary things and just the short sightedness of hobbling it.

So what you'd really want is for the government to take over funding the World Service again, take that away from the BBC in terms of having to fund it. But all of that money that the BBC are getting back straight into local radio is what I would do. I just wonder if it's a great look to be launching all of these BBC Sounds channels, cheap though they are, I do think you have to take a responsibility for the market as well. Yeah and they will do and they will be regulated and there will be court cases if necessary, but I slightly feel that If you're constantly being told oh, you've let this audience go

You've let this you've you've failed them then trying to make up some of that failure Yeah, but I can't win the trouble. That's not real criticism though. That's commercial That's people, you know trying to make a buck and trying to have a bit of publicity and people are always gonna do that And the BBC will always Companies you know place it people like the Daily Mail or the Times or we have commercial interest in seeing the BBC have its wings clipped or in fact not exist at all Will make a huge amount of payout to this all the time and that becomes part of the discourse about the BBC So you can see why almost all of these things at

some small level feel and suddenly have over the last 10 or so years have felt slightly existential like as you say, maybe people won't be in such a crouched position now if they feel that the government is more sympathetic to their general existence. Why throw meat to those people by saying we're going to have a station for the over 60s playing pop music when it already exists somewhere else. It makes no sense to me. I think the archive stuff is interesting and the use of the archive, I think, is really interesting.

I agree a million percent. I just wonder if there's ways of doing that without it stepping on other people's toes, because that's not what the BBC is supposed to do. It's supposed to have a unique offering and to appeal to unique audiences and that is an enormous grey area. I get that. But if you ask me where my line would be as to the outreach of the BBC, my line would stop just before they hive off this new radio station. So if I was on... Why not on the other side? Yeah, I see that. I absolutely see that. But we are both agreed there is a line.

Yes, there is. Of course there is a line and the law is agreed there is a line. So we'll keep an eye on how that one plays out. All right then, is that our stance? Yeah, I think it is. I think it is. But we'll be doing a questions and answer episode on Thursday. We will be, Richard. I'm sure I'll be giving a masterclass, a mistress class in top three. But you'll still be in the country then? Yes. Okay, that's good. I will be.

Just after that you're on. We won't like being parted, I must say, but we'll make it work. Listen, it'll happen. If there are oceans between us, still the rest is entertainment. We'll sail. Always on. Always on, all the time. Is that okay, Gary?

Did we get that right? Is that why he's snarling? Yeah, it doesn't happen at all. On that note, goodbye. See you on Thursday. See you on Thursday, everybody.