The Rest Is Entertainment - Is This The Best TV Show Of The Year?

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

They said it might never be done. Rivals, the Jilly Cooper novel has finally been adapted for TV and it is all that could be hoped for. Marina & Richard break down the show and why Cooper is a powerhouse of literature. There is a beef brewing on YouTube as some of the platforms biggest stars, KSI, Logan Paul and DanTDM take aim at one another over... kids snacks? Paparazzi are still hounding celebrities with Sydney Sweeney giving an insight into the lengths some are going to in order to photograph her. After a brief period of moral correction, have we gone back to some of the darker days of celebrity reporting? Recommendations: Richard: The English Teacher (Disney+) Marina: Alma's Not Normal (iPlayer) Newsletter: www.therestisentertainment.com Twitter: @‌restisents Instagram: @‌restisentertainment YouTube: @‌therestisentertainment Email: [e-mail] Producer: Neil Fearn + Joey McCarthy Executive Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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RBC helps you maximize your return on life. Start investing with RBC helps you maximize your return on life start investing with RBC today. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me Marina Hyde and me Richard Osmond. Hello Marina. Hello Richard how are you? Yeah I'm not too bad how are you? Very well thank you very well indeed I'm looking forward to chatting this week got lots of exciting subjects we had the London premiere of our show, the franchise of our show, not our show, of the show in which I write on at the London Film Festival this weekend,

which was really fun. They screened the first three episodes and it was absolutely terrific. Now that is coming out Monday the 21st, so we'll do a little bit on next week's podcast about how a whole show like that gets made. I'm very much looking forward to seeing it. What if I hate it? Well, you just maybe lie. I mean, you know I would. I'll definitely lie, but will people pick up on it? That's what I'm saying. Will I?

That's what you've got to worry about. Yeah, classic, done it again, Marina. Were you on that stage? Yeah, wow. That is like nothing I've ever seen before. That was something. We're gonna talk this week about some YouTuber beef, which nothing gives me greater pleasure than a YouTuber

beef. Logan Paul and KSI, which many of you may know, they launched a drink called Prime and now they've got a new thing called Lunchly. Yes. We have what we actually have is YouTuber processed beef. We will get onto it. We are also going to talk Rivals, which starts this week. So we're going to go a little bit of the inside track on Rivals. You have seen and you love it. And we're going to talk Rivals, which starts this week. So we're going to get a little bit of the inside track on Rivals. You have seen and you love it. And we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about Jilly Cooper as well.

How that show got pulled off, which is sort of amazing. Got pulled off. I mean, Jilly Cooper would love that. She would love it. She'd love it. And then we're also going to talk about paparazzi and whether things are getting better for women in the public, particularly women, but it doesn't have to be women,

but particularly in the public eye, or whether in fact the hell has just changed slightly? Shall we start with Logan Paul, KSI and MrBeast? The three of the horsemen of the YouTube apocalypse are all involved in this story. Listen, we know that YouTubers have millions upon millions upon millions of followers. We know they have millions upon millions of millions of pounds in revenue. We know MrBeast has got his enormous show on Amazon about to come out, including lawsuits. But what we're going to concentrate on is lunchly. Just a new lunch product.

Listen, it's just three guys getting together, trying to make your lunch a little better. So in America, they have a thing called Lunchables, which you don't really have over here. We did briefly, I think, the Dairy Lee Lunchables they were called. It's a sort of pre-packed pack lunch with a kind of a cracker, some processed fruit and a soft drink and that's what Lunchables are made by Kraft and they're billion dollar industry. You grab it off the shelf, it's everything in one go.

KSI, Logan Paul and Mr Beast have thought this is an industry we might get involved in and they launched Lunchly. Now Lunchly consists of a cracker, one of them is a nacho cracker, you can get like a pizza cracker as well, a small bottle of Prime which we've discussed before is their soft drink and a small Feastables chocolate bar which is MrBeasts. So they have launched this in America and there's been unbelievable... How's it gone Richard? I would say mixed. And we all know what mixed means, if you ever hear the reviews are mixed. Yeah. The reviews have not been very mixed. And the YouTube community are not happy about it either. So yes, an immediate kickback that they are exploiting their younger fans and feeding them food, which is not particularly good for them in

order to get a slice of this pre-packed lunch market. Dan TDM, who is one of the old school YouTubers. He's a Minecraft blogger. He does other stuff, vlogs rather, he does a lot of other stuff. I don't think if I was to choose initials for myself, I wouldn't have initials that spell out TDM. TDM stands of course for the diamond minecart. So Dan TDM immediately went online and said, I think this is unacceptable, I think they're ripping off their fans. KSI immediately came back and talked about moments that where Dan TDM might have ripped off his fans, which seemed slightly less egregious.

Can we also say that KSI has a song out at the moment, which has somehow got caught up in all this called Thick of It. It's genuinely the worst song. It does not star Chris Addison. When you think, yeah, it doesn't star Chris Addison. Go and look at it because it's genuinely like AI would look down on its nose at this. This is like a version of AI that they never even rolled out. KSAI.

Yeah, KSAI. And he has had a mega backlash on them, which it looks as though they're promoting beyond all levels of cynicism, even that we'd expect from YouTubers who are kind of the most exploited demarcators in many ways anyway. So as these things go, there's been this backlash and people say, look guys, there comes a point where you are actually ripping people off. You know, everyone's allowed to make a living and these guys have built up huge listenerships, you know, they've built up huge brand loyalty. You know, they're allowed to monetize that, but people are saying,

perhaps this isn't the way you like to monetize it. There is now the backlash against the backlash. The other day I had to watch KSI do a reaction video about a Reddit thread. All about him. Obviously so many of these reaction videos of his now. By the way, I wasn't massively aware of the work of KSI before, I know the Sidemen, but KSI himself. It's literally him doing pretend laughing for about 20 minutes. It is a tough watch and it's people raising quite interesting points and him just laughing and calling them morons. That's what people do. I then had to watch Logan Paul do a reaction video watching KSI's reaction video.

We're really in the Hall of Infinite Regress now. I watch so many videos of KSI having to watch other videos of people criticising KSI or reacting to KSI's videos in which KSI had laughed at other people's videos criticising KSI. It really does suggest to you that everything has eaten its tail quite long ago. Guys, are you out of content? Can we help you out?

Well, this is content, but I mean, actually some of the ways in which they launched, Logan Paul's just had a new baby and he did this interview on his podcast, which by the way, this podcast that he has is hugely like sort of the Trump asked to be interviewed on his podcast in the summer because they think that they're like Jake Paul is like a massive, his brother is a massive Trump supporter and they think that this is a sort of hotline to bro votes and things like that. So Logan Paul has had a baby and he turned up on his podcast with this thing in a little bundle, you know, and said, I'm going to, you know, I were really excited

to tell you about my new baby. I'm so excited to tell you about my new baby. You know, you got to chew through some really hard content before you get there. And then he says, hang on, I've just got to have a sip of prime before I do this, drinks some of his prime and then starts taking out of the bag, not a baby, no, lunchease. So yeah, it's all of it coming out onto the table, putting it out like that. And I think there were certain people who just thought like, these guys have turned out to be cynical and now they're cynically using me. What these guys have been good at all and they've done some really bad things and they've been

backlash against them before. But what they've always been good at is bringing it in the tent and to some extent, it's not working quite so well any longer, where you just watch the haters videos and kind of laugh at them. I think people are still like, no, this what you have gone too far. Occasionally, there's the occasional one that laughing where you go, no, that's actually quite a good point they've made there, which you're not really just doing a pretend laugh is not really addressing the quite interesting economic point they've made there. What Logan Paul said, you know, we spent our life creating content and building our brands. Now we want to create businesses.

You know, the brand is the business for them. They are sort of Robber Barons really though, because they are the absolute kind of dominant personalities of YouTube, these people. But the Robert Barons sort of got away with it in the Gilded Age and you slightly feel that there is a slight version of the American Dream kind of caught up in all of this where you think even though they hate them, they sort of envy them and they do keep looking at the content, they do keep looking at it all and they believe that maybe one day they will be as big as them.

And there is something about that in the mentality of a whole generation of people who watch YouTube who think, yeah, but one day I'll be like that. So in some ways I'm excusing this terrible thing that's being done to me. I have sympathy with some of the stuff that KSI is saying when he's talking about the work he's put in. He is the more sympathetic of the two, if I can euphemize.

You know, he's put this work in to build his brand. You know, he's allowed businesses, you know, he's bringing businesses from areas where businesses wouldn't have started before. So I was looking into do you know who Carlos Abrams Rivera is? No, I don't. Okay, so Carlos Abrams Rivera is the CEO of Kraft. So Carlos Abrams Rivera makes Lunchables. Carlos Abrams Rivera is doing exactly what KSI and Mr. Beast and Logan Paul are doing. what KSI and MrBeast and Logan Paul are doing. I.e. he's putting out a product which probably doesn't have optimal nutritional value and sending it in its billions to American children.

But he's a soup man, he's not a creator. But that soup, isn't that the thing? You see interviews with this guy, he eats two meals a day, he fasts for 16 hours a day, he's at the gym six days a week. He also, he says, I also eat Lunchables twice a week. You think Carlos, really? You eat a eat Lunchables twice a week. Carlos, really, you eat a little cracker with a bit of processed cheese. By the way, Lunchly, their big claim, we have real cheese.

They can only call it cheese product or something. There's some sort of awful reconstituted name for it. So Carlos is making these things and is not getting any grief at all because he's a businessman in a suit and has come up via a certain route. KSI and Logan Paul and Mr Beast are doing exactly the same thing but getting a lot more grief. Yeah, because it contravenes their brand though, doesn't it? See, this is the thing. When you say you are starting a business, okay, what you are not doing, you're not going into big long research and development meetings, you're not going into big budget meetings, you're not going into the lawyers' meetings

constantly where you're talking about what you can and you can't do, you're not going into schools, you're not going into the lawyers meetings constantly where you're talking about what you can and you can't do. You're not going into schools. You're not going into focus groups. You're not doing the stuff that you do if you run a business, right? So you're not businessman in that way. What you are is front people for a business. So you're the people, put the product together. You are the people who promote it.

So I know- But equally they're different because the brand doesn't exist without them. I've seen like Prime has been valued between three and eight billion. If they sell it, then there's nothing. It's like worth nothing. It's something completely different. Yeah, it's fizzy water. So, you know, the value you're bringing to the business is not 30 years in business.

It is advertising. It is, you know, it's promoting. And if you are doing that, you do have to start thinking about what are my responsibilities? What is the age of my audience? What are the demographic of my audience? Is this something that's making their world a slightly better place and KSI all the way through his video says, look, I'm getting all this grief and all I'm doing is trying to make a slightly better product than the product that's already

on the market. I mean, kind of, yes, but what you're actually doing is you're hitching your brand to this specific product. And he says, Oh, but what about this YouTuber? What about this YouTuber? Doesn't forget other YouTubers. Okay. It's not what did they do? What did they do? What do you do? What do you do with this incredible opportunity? You have, what do you do with this incredible platform that by the way you've worked to get, and this is the thing that you have chosen to do and you have to own it.

Don't look at all these comments and start laughing your head off and saying they're morons own it. Say, no, this is the thing I'm choosing to do. This represents me. But they don't want to grow up and be that type of person because such an other big part of the brand has been being this kind of outside read disruptive agent of chaos presence. You know, that's that is the persona. So then it's quite hard for that person to go and like run craft.

But you know, and or version of it. And but what I always think with these people is that this generation for you know, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, the idea of the infomercial for us was death. It's like QVC is where you go in your careers, you know, on the slide and you're selling diamond rings, huge number of these kind of mega YouTubers essentially work in the infomercial business. And that's what they do. And it's not uncool.

It's expected amongst a young fan base. I mean, nobody sat in front of QVC, when I sat in front of QVC and things like that, because I found it interesting when I was a child. You were aware of a sort of faded stardom coming out to pedal this or that, but this is completely different. When you've got something where the asset value is completely divorced from price, which is what happened with Prime, where everyone will remember that there were sort of queues around the supermarket at six in the morning, you were only allowed to buy three bottles. I remember actually one of my sons seeing a kiosk on High Street Ken and remember that there were sort of queues around the supermarket at six in the morning. You were only allowed to buy three bottles. I remember actually one of my sons seeing a kiosk on High Street Ken and saw that there was prime. And he went up and said, how much is a bottle of prime? And the guy went, 78 quid.

I was like, 78? Okay. What they were in the business of then was the scarcity business. They were in the business of creating hype. And it's like those kind of things that, you know, that, you know, the tulip mania back in the 17th century Where Pete which is one of the first of all I hope we were gonna get onto that Oh, no, because it's fascinating about three years in the 17th century Everyone went nuts for tulips now the asset value of a tulip is you know, I hate to be rude Or a Bob bullshit. Okay, it doesn't really mean anything I'm being tulipist. It's problematic. It's a problematic behaviour, but it wasn't in the

17th century. So people went nuts for it. And then suddenly, you know, the bottom falls out of the market because everyone's like, what? We're all going nuts for tulips. What's happened with Prime is that their sales are sort of halved over a year because they were once in the scarcity businesses and that was great. And you're creating a bubble and it's really exciting. But then once you're just like a drink that is on the shelves, which now, by the way, you can get like two for the price, it's now part of two for the price of one offers, it's nothing like what it was, then you're in competition with Coca-Cola, right?

Cause they make Fanta, they make Sprite. So you're in competition with these guys. It's like, well, they didn't come to play. Okay. So they, they are, you know, that's not the CEO is the brand. That's none of that. They've got to keep putting out new things in order to slightly build that kind of hype. The question here is, have they finally found the thing that fans won't swallow in all

senses? Or suddenly in one sense, is it like this is just too much, you're insulting me now? Yeah, it's interesting that, isn't it? Because again, I absolutely respect the right of anyone to build a business. You have to be honest with yourself if you're one of these people say, what is it that I'm actually doing? Am I a hype man or am I someone who's going to business meetings three times a week? Am I going to the monthly board? Suddenly there's an outbreak of listeria at one of the processing plants like they have with Boer Farms in America.

Am I liable? I suspect probably not. I suspect the liability has been written off. I suspect that there's some venture capital behind them somewhere who's taking on every single bit of the back room part of this company. But they're saying very dangerous things that you really wouldn't be able to say in the UK. So they're not really versed in any of this stuff. I would love us to talk on a future episode about the kind of gen alpha obsession with skincare.

The girls, I find it mega depressing. Expensive skincare too. And expensive skincare. Things that I did not buy until I had had several years of a good job at price point, it's absolutely mad. Anyway, I would like to talk about that on a future issue please. Thanks, Anna, let's definitely do that. It's where our culture is going, and as you say,

it's direct sales from mouthpieces who are earning money every single time someone buys the thing that they're directly selling. You can't do that in a blithe way. You can't just laugh it off and you know, you see Logan Paul and KSI and Mr. Beast, you know, laughing it off, but you cannot laugh it off. You're the CEO of a big company. So take up some responsibility for what you're doing. I mean, they are probably billionaires.

Yeah. And also lots of people have tried to do exactly what they've done and they failed. These are the guys who really did it. These are the guys who landed the plane. Well, it helps to be in early. You know, if you want to see the KSI sort of talking about the Reddit thread about him and Logan Paul talking about KSI do honestly on this occasion, I wouldn't massively recommend it. It's not, you don't leave it feeling better than you joined it. Look at KSI's song, a name a worse one. Honestly, I'm stunned by it. It's really genuinely extraordinarily bad.

Wow. Yeah, I really try not to break the glass on the expression a new low too often, but let's do it for today. Shall we go to some others and then talk about the wonders of arrivals? Let's do that. and then talk about the wonders of Rivals. Let's do that.

Welcome back everybody. Now, this Friday, we talked a little bit about this show a few times before. The trailers are out, everyone seems to be getting excited. I think it's fair to say Marina is excited as well. Rivals is out. Right, I've got a tight four days on this, but I'm gonna

narrow it down. Rivals is Jilly Cooper's 1988 novel about a battle for a regional television franchise. Stay with me everybody. Okay, I like a lot of women and you know probably a lot of men. I would probably be more relaxed about having my medical records adapted for screen than I would be about this. It's for Disney Plus. It is eight one hours and I have to say it is totally joyous, a complete riot. There are glances in it that I've laughed at more than entire episodes of sitcoms. But anyway, we'll come back to that.

So Julie Cooper started as a journalist like so many brilliant writers. You can find collections of her journalism, their columns and stuff like that, which again, well worth reading. You just realize she absolutely understands the world and that she's a great social satirist, then decides to write the books that she wants to write, which again, I looked down on at certain times, but they have endured because she knows of what she writes. She writes the things that she wants to write and she does it in a super smart way. But yeah, so she's just one of those people who's been in and around that set.

Firstly, the London set, the London media set. Secondly, that Cotswold set understands it absolutely and completely, eviscerates it beautifully, sort of loves it as well. Completely loves it. That's the joy of the thing is you've got these awful baddies but you can tell she writes with a warmth and love of human beings, curious about the world,

curious about human beings, but is able to write these incredible Dickensian plots almost, just the tiny little differences between people that you know kind of tell a huge story and because we're British, you know, we get all of that as well and we love that but the reason that she gets away with everything she does is she writes with a great deal of love, a great deal of warmth and a great deal of wit. Oh she's just so utterly charming. Julie Cooper's works have been adapted twice, right?

We once did Riders, which is the first book on what we've now come to call the Rutscher Chronicles, which are all these kind of... She doesn't mind the tag bonkbusters, by the way. She doesn't like steamy novels because it sounds like someone's left one of her books on the arga, but she likes the... Julie likes the tag. And Rutscher, by the way, this is where they live. It's like a sort of fictionalised...

It's a fictionalised Cotswolds. The Cotswolds, Gilly Cooper is OG Cotswolds, not like one of those awful people from London who are in it now. OG Cotswolds? Yeah, she's OG Cotswolds. My name? Yeah. OG Cotswolds. And then they also did The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous, which is another of these books.

I'm sorry to everyone involved in these, but they were really badly done and the fans of the books hated them and they just didn't work. And I think we can't call anything unadaptable in this golden age of television, can we? Because it's like, oh, his dark materials, like multiple parallel universes, everyone's got an animal demon. Yeah, sure, go ahead. You know, 100 years of solitude, Netflix are doing that. Of course you are. Sorry, a man as good looking as Rupert Campbell Black.

This is an unadaptable book. You cannot do this. Well, they have found someone amazing, a guy called Alex Hassel, who's brilliant in this. Very, very good. By the way, if you are a woman and you've loved a sort of blonde image of Rupert Campbell Black, he's not blonde, so you can kind of retain that ineffable inner ideal and still watch the show.

Also in it, Aidan Turner, David Tennant, Catherine Parkinson, it's brilliant, and everyone gets the tone, which we'll come to. It's very interesting how it was done. Now, we're going to talk a lot about someone who, you know, in the old days, Barbara Walters, who's like a doyen of American TV interviews, would list her most fascinating people of the year. If I were making a list, I would put Felicity Blunt in my list. She's a literary agent, but she's a sort of super agent.

She's amazing. And what's really interesting what she did with this, she absolutely loved Jilly Cooper like all her life, was obsessed with her, loved these books. And Felicity is also a trained lawyer, but she's now a literary agent. So she then thinks, okay, where are all the rights of these books? They're all in different places. They're like these rolling options, everything's gathering dust. So she spends years getting back all the rights. And she becomes Jilly Cooper's literary agent only when Jilly's agent retires. And she says, you know, I'll fight you for anything. Please let me have Jilly. Okay. And she gradually Jilly Cooper's literary agent only when Jilly's agent retires and says, she says, you know, I'll fight you for anything.

Please let me have Jilly. Okay. And she gradually gets all these books back. And one of the things she notices when she's going through the archive is that the guy who has ended up being the showrunner, Dominic Treadwell-Collins, who used to be the executive producer of EastEnders and Alex Lamb, who is his partner at this company called Happy Prince, who is the story editor of EastEnders, no matter how many jobs he'd gone to, he'd always written about like, is there any chance of adapting Jilly Goopher?

So she was like, okay, here's a kindred spirit. Anyway, they somehow decide that they're going to do it and Jilly's on board. So what they all did was that they, and bear in mind, so they had a first writers room, they all went to stay in a hotel in the Cotswolds and I really liked it. It sounded amazing. Can I say, by the way, at this point, lots and lots of people buy rights to books. Lots of people go, oh my God, I love that book. Lots of people say, oh, I know there's a producer. Almost every single project at that point either collapses or goes ahead and is bad.

It's very, very, very hard to do a proper, decent adaptation when there's so many stakeholders, when the author is involved, when you're involved, when, you know, the teenage you remember something, when someone else, it's very, very hard to keep a train like that on the tracks. I 100% agree. And she, but she did also think it was interesting Felicity, that there was someone who'd sold that many millions of copies, because Julie Cooper's books have sold so many millions of copies. But she'd been sort of underexploited as a kind of screen property. Anyway, and they really want Laura Wade to be their lead writer. Now Laura Wade's brilliant. They think she's really good at writing about class,

but not actually writing about class in a capital letters way. She did Posh, a brilliant play at the Royal Court, Home I'm Darling, which was a really good theatrical comedy and it starred Katherine Parkinson, who is in this and is sensational. It basically ends up, once they've gone through that, with Dominic Trenvall-Collins, Felicity Blunt,

all down at Jilly Cooper's house, with sort of 10 pieces of A4, trying to work out how they divide up episodes. And Jilly obviously wants to have champagne every single day at 11 o'clock. And 10 minutes later we'll say, okay, but if we're waiting for 12, is it actually in the fridge? So it's cool. And apparently you get, she puts an alka-seltzer by your bed. Very classy. And yeah. And anyway, so they go through this wonderful thing. And what I'm very interested in is the tone of this, because it's such a hard tone To pull off a lot of people don't really know what Jimmy Cooper's books are

There's a whole load of stories of people who stayed in like a holiday left of some type and there's like three books there And they'll read them all and one of them and I say oh, it's a totally different thing to what I thought it was In Rankin reads rivals every single year every single year and lots of people who don't understand what they are They're sort of a genre of one. Obviously they have great romances and they're very funny, but it's a social comedy. There's Austin-like levels of observation and I wouldn't use that term lightly, but it's quite hard to communicate that to people and to get that tone. The one thing people genuinely don't, I think, think about and is the hardest thing to do is tone. It

really is because the story is often there if you're doing an adaptation the characters are often there Some of the dialogue is often there but that idea because a writer all they're thinking about is tone Which is how is somebody reading this? What's the line between? Comedy and reality how do I make people laugh? How do I make people cry everything? Why is this slightly different to other things, you know crime book crime book, a Scandi noir thing, its tone, its tone of voice, its pacing, it's the order in which things happen. If you get plot one percent off, that's absolutely fine. If you get characters one percent off, it's fine. If you get tone even one percent off, nobody's watching, nobody's reading, nobody's listening because you're just thinking, I don't really know what this is. And as a viewer,

you have to know what something is. And as you say, with something like Jilly Cooper, she has that incredible tone and people who might have read her will kind of go, yeah, but it's X. And you think, what do you mean it's X? It's a genre of one, go and look at it. 100% that, but to me, I'd be terrified of putting that on screen. So as you say, a book and a TV series

are very, very different things. And the smart thing of getting someone like Laura Wade, who is so brilliant and loves the source material, at least at that point you were in with a fighting chance. Absolutely, and you have to communicate it at every stage down. So the actors, they were so careful. This has been reported as a no-arsholes rule,

but you'll have obviously have to bleep this. It's in fact a no-c*** rule, which is what they said throughout, which is like, if anyone is difficult here. David Tennant was kind of like a father of the set, like he was actually, if it comes from the top and everyone is, then everyone was sort of on the same page and they had, I mean they had a complete right doing this, but what's interesting about it, they haven't shied. There are things that really capital P problematic.

Now there's a grope in it, I'm not gonna spoil anything, but if you've read the books you know what I'm talking about. Rather than cast it out, if anything, they've lent into it. It's really interesting. They have not censored or sanitized it in any way. When I went to a screening of the first two episodes, it's really interesting. It was like everyone was laughing so much. It's an infectious kind of energy, the whole thing, because as I say, tonally it coheres. It's a high war app, but they've done it. But I was sitting with a friend of mine who is brilliant, writes about television and said, God, you almost have to teach yourself to watch something like that again. Because there is no message. One of the things that you always

get asked in the commissioning process is some commissioner will say, yeah, but why now? The only possible answer to this can be because it's fun. I don't know. I will love to know what Americans think of this because it's really quite out there and one of the things that they did when they were sort of creating these mood boards so that people could understand this tone was say, here is American Vogue in the 80s, here is British Vogue in the 80s, okay, we're this one, right? We're not dynasty, we're not like, you know, everything taking itself super seriously. There is an element of fun and almost a sort of punky spirit that's different and it's not as put together.

It's Howard's way rather than Notts Landing. Yeah, absolutely. Everything about it is, the clothes are hilarious, just the whole sort of mood of it is very much of a piece, but it hasn't censored the books at all and it doesn't have what you realise almost everything you watch nowadays has, which is some kind of message about this or that. That's not to say that some of the sexual politics and things like that are not really interestingly explored because I suppose that's what Julie Cooper

was doing the first time around anyway. And there've always been kind of gay characters in her books and it's, you know, in lots of ways, it's kind of very forward thinking, but it's a different time for those characters. So those are- It's interesting that, because you know, I have read, I've yet to see it, but looking

forward to it very, very much indeed. When it's talked about the fact that some of it is fairly unreconstructed and they've lent into that. And I was wondering if it's because Depressing No, it may seem, it's from 1988 and that is 36 years ago. So actually, it's a sort of a period piece. It is. It is sort of what here were the politics of a particular era from many,

many years ago before you were born. And so actually it's got that sort of the documentary elements of a period piece that you can talk about. So actually it's being very truthful to the era by leaning into that and having things that might have been sanitised out of dramas in the 35 years since Rivals came out. The other thing is, from all the stories that still come out, we can see that loads of these things are still happening. We just sort of pretend because they've got certain types of this or that officer in a company that they don't happen, but they do happen. I also think that it is interesting to me that this is Disney. I mean, obviously Disney have got

different strands, they've got Hulu and things like that, which you've seen Pam and Tommy. I mean, you do see full frontal penises in this, I should say, sorry. They wanted equal opportunities. So for every pair of tits, there is a welly. And they- There should be two. Yeah. How does that work?

You could do some kind of genital audit, Richard. I want to stay away from it, but you could. You could do a genital audit. You could do a genital audit. Finally, permission. Yeah. But yeah. So they've tried to be sort of equal opportunities in that, which is what the books

are like. Are they stunt penises because often they are in television? No, this is not a stunt penis. No way. I believe. I mean, I didn't specifically ask him at the screening, but I assume it's not a stunt penis. Great. That's a bit of a compliment, isn't it? Yeah. Well, there we go. Thank you to the mouse. Thank you to the mouse. But I suppose actually another part of me does think that right at the top of Disney, you know, Bob Iger, who's probably thinking, yeah, I think we went too political with lots of our movies. And I'm not suggesting that he has got a personal hand in commissioning this, but it certainly fits with a move away perhaps from the kind of really kind of slightly over heavy handed political messaging that

he might think has got Disney into some, has perhaps led it down a financial cul-de-sac in recent years. It's fascinating that, you know, we're told that a younger audience won't put up with certain things and by the way, an awful lot of what has been got rid of from the 80s belongs in the bin and it's fantastic, but fascinating that the younger generation, friends is the thing they love most of all and friends couldn't be more problematic in lots of ways. You watch Frasier in the morning sometimes and there's jokes where you go, oh, oh really, oh I forgot, okay, yeah, that's what we used to do. But people, I think that generation could sort of understand what it is they're watching in the context within what they're watching and it'd be fascinating to see how they respond

to this. But I don't think any of these things have gone away. I think that lots of people are subject to similar kind of pressures and sort of sewer of lots of different types of male behaviour, women I'm just talking about in this particular case. But yes, I think that there's lots of that still and pretending it's not a ram, but this is above all a sort of social comedy and it's a brilliant story as well. It's very interesting. Another thing, I was talking to a sort of social comedy and it's a brilliant story as well. It's very interesting. Another thing I was talking to a couple of, I had this really absolutely lovely dinner with two of my most beloved writer friends. We were talking about adaptation and like who was doing, you know, what's it like and one of my friends said, was that, oh my God, you know, TV really eats plot. Where I know people who've adapted books and they've either had

to put two books together to get enough because something, you you know you can have five pages on a character's interior life and that's just like a split second on TV. I don't do that. No. But Julie Cooper's books are so packed full of plot. There's characters and bits of plot that it's so faithful to the book. She's got so much going on that it actually there is enough there they don't have to create whole other plot lines or B plots or C plots to just kind of make it all work and hang together. There's a little bit of that just as there always is when you're doing an adaptation, but far less than there would be with a lot of authors because she's really kind of packs it full. At the start

of every one of her books, there are these enormous cast lists with kind of Cooper-esque, well in fact Cooper-esque epithets. Oh, but even like the names of the horses. Oh yeah, all the dogs are named. I love in her books sometimes like the animals will will sort of like the horse will win the Grand National. You shouldn't win the Grand National. And that's like, that's like one of the big characters. And you're like, yeah, you're really rooting for them. Yes. And then, and also the great thing about them is that they kind of cross between lots of the characters

cross between lots of the books. And Felicity, I know, was thinking, I mean, I really love those early Marvel movies. Could I create, could I bring all these properties back from the various places they were like left out in dusty options and actually cross over all these characters leading through various phases? I just love the idea of the Jilly Keeper TV universe. And I've got a huge amount of time for it.

The JCC, no, sorry, I've got a huge amount of time for it. The JCC, no sorry, I've got to do that very slowly. The JCTVU, is that it? The JCTVU, yeah sure. Yeah, that's not catch, it's not the MCU is it? We are being told that the kids aren't going with the JCTVU Marina so we're going to call it the Ruttverse. The Ruttverse I love! Okay, the Ruttverse is far better, obviously you have swept in some sort of the better.

So, Phyllis de Blunt, as you said, loved these books and understood they hadn't been well made before. But the other thing she really had going for, the thing she genuinely understood is that these books are brilliantly written and that's a thing that's misunderstood. And it's often the fate of female writers and often the fate of female genre writers particularly. And the characters are brilliantly written. Exactly that. And she knew enough people who'd read these books and go, you know, these are actually brilliant. Whatever the sort of the kind of general voice of the culture is saying about, you know, these are fripperies and we're reading more important books.

These are beautifully written social satires and they're doing something that other people can't do. And they are funny, which is the hardest thing to do. And they're properly funny. And it is that thing of this thing to do and they're properly funny. And it is that thing of underestimating, particularly female writers that's happened for years and years and years, where you suddenly go, no, hold on, I mean, I was looking at 1988, the big books that came out, Silence of the Lambs, that's endured, Satanic Verses, Brief History of Time, but what's the one we want to watch? It is Rivals written by Gilly Cooper, who for years and years has sort of culturally, there's been a issue, a figure of fun. And of course she's not anyone who reads the books and understands the books and knows them,

understands that she is the one making fun. She is the one who understands more than you understand. And so, you know, I think it's, when you look at the people who write about her and have got their kind of names on the front of her books like Marion Keys and Jojo Moyes, again, also underestimated. And also in 20 years time you think, oh, let's do a whole Marion Keyes universe. Yeah. And you see people who, Julie Cooper, I've just reread Jane Imprudence, which is

a Barbara Pym novel. Oh, she's the best. And Julie Cooper has started, she's amazing. Barbara Pym, who, you know, we're going right back to the mid-century, is an amazing author. And was utterly, utterly overlooked. Completely. And it was only because Philip Larkin said, I don't care about all these big weighting things coming out. I'm looking forward to the next Barbara Pym. And then she having had 20 years, I might have got that wrong, but a big, big chunk out of the business. She comes back and she starts publishing these

again. But again, her social observations are completely Austin-esque and they are absolutely amazing. And yeah, she was looked down upon. But another thing that someone like Felicity Blunt and Dominic Trevot-Collins and Alex Lamb and all these people who are involved in this realize is that women love these books and they might shed lots of their books, but they'll keep their Jenny Cooper books and reread one a year.

They absolutely love it. There's a huge audience out there. Some men are put off by the covers because they've always got like someone's bottom and a hand and a red high heel or whatever it is. And some people think, oh, I know what this is, but they don't know what it is. And when they read it, they think, oh, this is really amazing. I really like this. And I love this story and I love the way she talks.

Yeah, they're deeply male-friendly reads, I have to say. I mean, well, they're everybody friendly. I mean, look at the characters. Yeah, exactly that. I cannot wait to see this out on Friday. It's out on Friday. It's out on Friday, everything comes out at once and it's eight episodes, eight one-hours on Disney+. On Disney+. I know everyone doesn't have Disney+, and that's hard when we're so enthusiastic about

something, but you know that's the business there isn't it, producing stuff that's so good. You have to get it. And it's such a uniquely British thing, so I will be, and I will also be fascinated to see what Americans think of it. And whose penis is it going to be? Yeah Okay, talking of things that were huge in the 80s and are still around now Paparazzi, that's a lovely link. Thanks

It's really charming. I've been in the business a long. Yeah, listen too long too long Talking a little about the paparazzi this week Sidney Sweeney, who you'll know from Euphoria, White Lotus, Anyone But You. Now, Sydney Sweeney has given an interview in which she said that the paparazzi kind of besieged her all the time. She mentioned a time on some sort of holiday in the US, they turned up at her house, they said at the door, if you just tell her to come outside in a bikini, then I'll take pictures and then I'll leave you alone. And she said that was reported by people saying, oh, she called the paparazzi herself. I assume that is the reaction of people to reports of, to order snatch pictures of her

from her. She's got us a waterfront house. Anyway, we talk about the paparazzi and what has happened. And you can think of all these phases. Obviously, photographers have always been a thing for as long as there have been movie stars and then TV stars. And we kind of go through these periodic fits of morality about them. And obviously the way they chased Diana, but she, you know, but by the end, I

suppose she felt quite trapped and she certainly worked with a number of paparazzi thinking if I somehow take ownership of this situation, that will get better. Well, obviously, you know, it really didn't. Um, and in the wake of her death, you know, tabloids said, you know, the male said, and I think the son followed them said, we will never carry it, carry any more paparazzi pictures. Well, I think that probably lasted about a year. If that, if that, I think the decade when it became really sort of extraordinary for me was the noughties where it's that huge explosion of celebrity culture. When you're kind of either talking about Islamic

fundamentalism, or you're talking about celebrity culture. And it's like, there's only two subjects in the whole decade. It gave birth to the sort of idea of the trainwreck star that decade. So you've got like Brittany, Lindsay Lohan, people who are, you know, who are fallen women really. And a lot of her, of Brittany Spears finally being able to talk about all of this stuff has come in her autobiography, The Woman in Me, in which she details in sort of remorseless detail what it was like to be total seed. And they blocked in the ambulance when she's being taken for treatment and yeah, they're absolutely lawless.

Everything was taken out of her bins, they would sell her pregnancy tests. One of the most horrible photos I ever saw was this guy used to follow around all the time and people were wondering if she's pregnant, blah blah and he upskirt photographed her and there was period blood on her knickers and the headlight, they published these, the headline was she's not pregnant. You can't sort of imagine that it happened. Think of all the even the sort of on a much more sort of sanitized level but it's still as far as I'm concerned like completely awful and I remember writing about it at the time.

The celebrity magazine, Heat magazine, things like that, it was all circled celebrity sweat patches, their cellulite. They were trying to sort of make women into a sort of selection of circleable body parts. They were obsessed with people falling, people becoming a train wreck. And so it was Lindsay Lohan, Misha Barton, all these people who'd had success and then were going off the rails. So you think, okay, well, things are better now, aren't they? Aren't they? I don't know, because people, you know, we know from the Britney documentary and we know from the free Britney movement that all of these sort of, you know, we now look back and think, oh, actually, Justin Timberlake was really shitty to her and she took all

this heat which she didn't deserve. And, oh, I see, I've, you know, readapted my social morays and I understand that what happened to her was bad and all these people who published these pictures were bad. But then I'm not quite so sure. Now I think, first of all, everyone is a paparazzi now. Everyone has a camera phone and you look at what we talked about the other week with sort of someone like Chappell Roane who's saying, she's talking about people taking pictures of her all the time and chasing her.

And I slightly wonder quite why that has happened. And part of me thinks is that people became very literate about paparazzi photographers. I mean, I always used to notice who had sold to paparazzi, but there were certain agencies. You could tell by certain things about the images. There's an agency in LA called Splash that often you could see had maybe done a deal. I always now look at, I've always just looked at the corner of photos. If you're looking at something on say MailOnline, if I see BackGrid in the corner, I think everybody knows this photo is happening. Okay, so BackGrid is an agency who certain celebrities would say, take this Candice Chotome at this time. I'm sure they're welcome to ring in and say they've never

collaborated with a celebrity, but I don't think they will. Now this obviously isn't the case, because some celebrities, a particular type of celebrity, makes their money from being, you know, this is before there was really influencing. Many of these people might have had different career paths now and maybe career ones. I don't know. They were proto-influencers. They were proto-influencers. To work this out. Yeah and to realize that some drama and some, you know, allowing people into what could be private moments was a way, in a covert way, of a slightly sort of oblique way. Well it's interesting if you are famous but not for anything in particular, so you don't actually have a way of making money other than your fame, then that is probably the

first port of call. And obviously these sort of attractive people with kind of interesting personalities but who maybe don't do anything in particular, nowadays they would obviously become influencers. There is a job. There is a job, but there wasn't necessarily before back then. Once again, the moral view has become completely clouded where you just think, oh, Sidney Sweeney wants this. She's really rich. She doesn't need to do any of this, by the way. She's like her career is going very, very well and there's no way that she does any of these deals. She's a different type of celebrity to, but people tell themselves that.

She has a way of making money. Yeah, trust me. Which is an incredibly good actor. That's going very well. And Chaperone doesn't need to do this, but the collective imagination can get clouded and think, it's fine, I have streamed her songs, therefore I have a right to do this. And the fact that everyone has a camera now makes things completely different for women. I honestly think that in lots of ways they might not be upskirting you anymore, which by the way Emma Watson said that you know on my 18th

birthday the paparazzi lay on the pavement to put the cameras up my skirt and they published those pictures. That was strangely outlawed in 2019. Yeah that's this entry guys, that's not quite five years ago in fact that it happened, but until then it was just sort of regarded as part of the job Yeah, I mean the truth is almost no celebrities are interested in being having their photos taken by paparazzi Yeah paparazzi as you say there are occasions where they'll set things up There are occasions where if you go to events if you go to like a premiere or something Where there will be a bank of photographers all of whom are incredibly professionals usually the same group who are great And then if you go to an event, you'll dress up.

Yeah, so red carpet, you know, they're not trying to make you look crap. They're not trying to get you at your lowest and worst. 100% that because that's the one thing you know as a celebrity now is if someone takes your photo, it exists forever. So sometimes you go to an event and they say, oh, there's just a photographer, could they take a photo? And you go, well, no, I literally know because look at what I'm wearing and it's it'd be lovely for you to have it on your leaflet, but it will exist forever and ever and ever.

But so there's, there are occasions where of course celebrities have their photos taken and there are certain celebrities who will have their photo taken by paparazzi as you say, but almost all of it, we, we, we, we had it once when, when Ingrid and I first got engaged, they're a pap photo. By the way, this is not me, when she can talk, so you'll be surprised to learn I get very few paps, okay? But you know, when-

And you walk everywhere. And I walk everywhere, so you know, come on guys. Work harder, guys. But someone was in a car on our road outside our house, and those are the photos, and I think it was the mail, and then other people published them. And you kind of go, that's not something that you know I go to loads of places have my photos taken and I work hard and I'm on

TV you can see me I didn't sign up to have someone literally sort of lying down in the back of a car taking photos and then publishing them and again listen who cares nobody other than if it was you and you woke up that morning those photos right you'd think oh someone was outside my house that's a bit creepy and by the way I say these things as an illustration of you know a very very minor version I'm absolutely fine listen I have not had any problems at all it's just it's illustrative if I get that on a tiny thing if you know women get it 30 times more famous women get it 60 times more I just some every time it happens a Bit of me goes. Oh, okay

I really I understand viscerally what it is to have that tiny bit of your soul taken away and mine is a tiny bit But people are having this all day every day It must so many bits of your soul must be taken away. But by and large it's not something that Someone who has other ways of making money is interested in. So I would say almost every single celebrity is not asking to be paparazzi photoed on this street. No, not stalk like that. But I do think the sort of bit that's most interesting in lots of ways is the way that everyone has become one now and everyone, and there's that kind

of slightly panopticon feel where you're constantly having to be in pictures, but everybody, and if you see celebrities say, I'm sorry, I don't do so, and I've seen people who do this, people think they're the worst people in the world, because someone goes up to a celebrity and says, can I do a selfie? And very, very famous people who would be asked 500 times a day, some of them say, I'm so sorry,

I don't do them because they don't want to be constantly doing this. And it's as though people, they've said, I hate all my, I spit on my fans. And people lack the imagination to imagine what it's like for them. And the other thing I think is sort of quite interesting is part of the reason that people made those slightly devil's bargain, I think, by staging paparazzi pictures is because the paparazzi would, another skein of that was that sometimes the paparazzi would say, hi there, I'm on this beach in Dubai and I'm going to take pictures of you whether you like it or not. If you work with me, we'll do them at Magica when the sun's just, you know, and it's lovely

lighting and you can look at all of them and approve which ones you want to use. I mean, sometimes you could almost see the shadow of the photographer in the front of frame because, but you can see why people did it now, of course, the technology does this for you. Everything is filtered. Everybody's putting filters on everyone's try and everyone is kind of posing for their own paparazzi pictures all the time.

And our relationship with images in those ways has become so sort of corrupted and clearly so commodified that we all, you know, lots of people were effectively work for the platform. You're all work for Mark Zuckerberg. You're staying on the platform and you're posting pictures of yourself and you're all part of this whole kind of photography industrial complex. And I'm not convinced it's got better.

I think it's warped and it's changed and I don't think it's better. It's clearly not better for many women in the public eye. Yes. Can I ask you one very specific question about this area? Because just looking back on some of the old paparazzi things and it's like Madonna and Sean Penn's wedding and they said, oh, they found out where it was by going through the bins. So do you remember like years ago when they kept saying, oh, the way they get all these stories on celebrities is they go through their bins? Were they actually going through their bins or was that they were just listening

to the voicemail and that was the excuse saying, oh no, we found it in their bin? Well, they did go through the voicemails, certainly. They went through huge amounts of voicemails, but there was a guy called Benji Pell, a guy called Benji the Bin Man, and he used to get stories by going through people's bins, but he got a lot of, he was an extraordinary sort of odd character.

And he used to also go through the bins of lawyers' offices who perhaps had not been as shreddy as they should have been with their documents and he got a lot of stuff from there and he got a lot of stuff from celebrities' bins. Yeah, so there were people who did that but no, on the industrial scale was, I'm not convinced there were a whole army of people going through the bins. Some, yes, there were, and there always have been people who've done that because it's a sort of very easy way to do things and trying to pay off hotel cleaners to give you the contents of the internal hotel bins, which is what happened to Britney Spears with

her pregnancy tests and things like that. But in general, I think that by that stage, a huge amount of it was coming from voicemail, which is definitely a form of really sick electronic trespass. Again, people didn't have the imagination for it. And I think a lot of people who did it didn't even fully get that because it wasn't illegal, because obviously the law hadn't caught up with the technology, it was wrong. Yeah. Any recommendations this week? I will recommend the second series, if you haven't watched the first series, watch the first series first of Alma's Not Normal, Sophie Willans Alma's Not Normal, which is brilliant.

She's so good. She's so good. I'm also, by the way, really enjoying her in Ludwig, which I can I recommend Ludwig as well, please. If you're not watching Ludwig on the BBC, I'm really enjoying that. She's in it as well. But it's mostly David Mitchell and Anna Maxwell Martin, who I have a huge car crush on. And it's fantastic. I'm really enjoying it.

Yeah, and it's not only when you can catch up with the first series on iPlayer as well. So watch the first series first and then dive into the second one. I also want to recommend a sitcom which is on Disney Plus. And it's The English Teacher. It's only seven parts, I think, but it's absolutely, just dive straight into it. It's one of those ones, we were talking about tone earlier, and the first two minutes, you're like, I get what you're doing, I absolutely get the tone. It's slightly different than what I've seen before.

I get where we are. Absolutely love that. We've been to the whole seven episodes of The English Teacher on Disney Plus. Is that us done? I think that is us done. Yeah, it seems a long time ago we were talking about Logan Paul and KSI because we've had such fun with rivals in between.

Yeah, it's been a ride, it's been a hoot, it's been a coxswalled hoot. See you on Thursday for the questions and answers. Absolutely. See you then. The End