The Rest Is Entertainment - Is this the era of entertainment washing? Saudi money in Hollywood.

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

There is a new revenue stream in tinsel town... Saudi money is on offer to finance films and many are beginning to ask; is this a form of PR via entertainment? Are we at the mercy of the 'dopamine cartels' aka big tech? Plus, GBNews - TV ratings or social media stats - where does their power lie? Twitter: @restisents Email: [e-mail] Producer: Neil Fearn Executive Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Recommendations; Marina - The Honest Broker - Dopamine Culture (Substack) Richard - The Rest Is History - 1974 (listen) 🌏 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

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When you can get a great deal on a whopper. Flame grilled and made your way, and you won't want to miss it. So make every Wednesday a Whopper Wednesday, only at Burger King, where you rule. Hello, and welcome to another edition of The Rest Is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And me, Richard Osman. Hi Marina, how are you? Hello, I'm very well Richard, how are you? I'm really well. You've been working incredibly hard all week on your huge American show, which we're not yet allowed to talk about. I'm filming it and we shall...

And that's all we can say. It's very secretive. I think lots of things are very secretive. I'm never quite sure why some things need to be so secretive, but'm very happy to make this one very secretive so what are we going to talk about this week we are going to talk as we promised last week we ran out of time last week so we're talking about AI by the way the response to that podcast has been phenomenal extraordinary so I think we could talk about it a bit more at some point and I've had lots of interesting chats with people about some upsides and a few other downsides as well. But last week we promised we'd talk about Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabian money going into the entertainment business in the same way it's gone into the sports business.

So we'll talk about that. I've also, just we talk about overnights a lot. So I've just gone through the top 100 overnights from last week. Also going to be looking at the ratings of GB News and picked out a few stories. This is TV ratings. TV ratings, yes, sorry. This is a basic explainer. Yeah, the overnights from last week also going to be looking at the ratings of gb news and picked out a few stories ratings tv ratings yes sorry basic explainer yeah the overnights we're also going to talk about distraction and dopamine on the back of a really fascinating brilliant sort of state of the culture substack post by a guy called ted giola which we're going to explain and talk more about and it's really interesting and yeah really interesting quite alarming in lots of ways but every every week we talk about alarming things now that's why i'm going to do the rating so i get

to talk about call the midwife at least anyway saudi arabia from call the midwife to saudi arabia right we're going to talk about saudi arabian money in entertainment obviously the crown prince of saudi arabia the effective ruler muhammad bin salman for a while famous for the murder of the washington post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who went into an Istanbul embassy to get a marriage license and was murdered and dismembered within that embassy. Now, a lot of people... I promise we'll be talking about Call the Midwife soon.

We're going to go to Call the Midwife soon. He was, you know, the international persona non grata. No one's going to work with him. And even on a sort of funny entertainment level, the movie star Gerald Butler, I will not do my visit to Saudi Arabia. I'll not film anything there. Needless to say, Kandahar,

which is the first film to be shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, stars Gerald Butler as a CIA operative. I think he wants to fight his way out of Afghanistan. The plot details are irrelevant. I'll believe anything with Gerald in it. World's leading meteorologist, yes, I'll believe it. I'll watch it. He is symptomatic of a wider trend, which is that there is Mohammed bin Salman wants to put a lot of money into cultural projects, Western cultural products. He started a big Red Sea Film Fund. He started a Red Sea Film Festival,

which has drawn lots and lots of big names. We'll come to those in a minute. And there was a very interesting, sort of funny, awful Vanity Fair article about his bromance with Johnny Depp. And Johnny Depp has spent a lot of time in Saudi Arabia. He's given sort of various, it almost sounds like sort of hostage video quotes, but they are about how exciting he is about the emergence of new storytelling in Saudi Arabia. You know, he's listened to all the excuses about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and seems to have believed some of them. But if you're asking how Johnny Depp got into this, it's quite interesting.

How did Johnny Depp get into this? It tells us a lot about film financing and whatever. You know, when you go to the cinema and you sit down and the titles start and it will say Canal Plus, you know, the Lower Saxony Lottery Fund, the Slovenian Cultural Heritage, and you get all these cards starting in the titles before you even get to the main titles of the film. And you're like, God, how long? Oh, here we go. UNESCO, all of these. Now, someone has had to stitch together all those little pieces of funding. And it is incredibly difficult. And it is very, very hard to find the money to make films at all.

So essentially when you look at those things at the start of a film, some of those are the people who are producing the film and some of those are just sums of money that you had to make $20 million and you had $15 million and you start... And it's really, really hard and it can fall away even while you're shooting. Now, while Johnny Depp was shooting some French movie, period French movie about a courtesan, Jean Dubarry, he is told by the film's producers, he needs to meet this guy, Prince Bada of Saudi Arabia, who's a sort of cultural bag carrier,

as far as I can work out for MBS, Mohammed bin Salman. And he says, I don't know, I don't want to do that. You know, I don't have to do that. And they are like, well, I think you do really have to do that because I think our financing is going to fall away if you don't do it. Anyway, he meets this guy. One thing leads to another. Soon he's having all expenses paid trips to Saudi Arabia. He really likes this guy. And as Vanity Fair article put it, which I found slightly hilarious, about his bromance with MBS, both knew how it suddenly felt to go from golden boy to outcast.

Wow. You just dismember one guy. It's really hard. As for the Johnny Depp, I know there are a lot of Johnny Depp fans out there. It's incredible. Online, if you write about anything to do with Johnny Depp, there are a huge number of single-issue human beings whose single issue is Johnny Depp's ex-wife was horrid to him. And they will go to

the mattresses on that. They will work online day and night to defend Johnny Depp in this. However, what a lot of people are saying now, there's an interesting Tortoise podcast about it now, that lots of stuff that came up in Johnny Depp's trial with his ex-wife, Amber Heard, were bot accounts paid for by Saudi Arabia to sort of act on behalf of Johnny Depp online. Really? Yeah. And so there is a huge sort of, I mean, this is what he can give you. Apart from chump change to make your ridiculous movies about French courtesans, he can give you all these sorts of things.

Well, they say he's, although he's not the richest man in the world, he has the most spare cash of anyone in the world, MBS Mohammed bin Salman. He can literally, if you're looking for someone to give you money don't go to musk don't go to bill gates mbs has the most money of anyone in the world that he could just give you out of his pocket tomorrow and it gives him great pleasure to sort of buy these things you know you could like as football fans often say you can't buy 200 years of history it's like well you can can't you because they just have yeah exactly by the way we are sponsored this week by Visit Jeddah. We're not for sale.

I suppose to some extent there have always been, I was talking to a very, these kind of bromances between dictators and actors. They're both in the entourage's game. They are both not used to hearing the word no very often and there's some something about the cachet of each someone very eminent in the media was telling me uh that he once had lunch in havana with castro and as the wine was being brought castro said all of this is from my friend gerald depardieu's my his vineyard he's my best friend and now i get i mean now he's been cancelled

in france dep France, which is incredibly hard. I mean, perhaps the hardest country in the world to get cancelled. Well, second hardest since we're talking about Saudi Arabia. And he's now doing it, I guess, with Putin. He's now probably Putin's best friend and sending his wines to Putin. It's like Steven Seagal and

Kim Jong-un. Steven Seagal and any dictator. It is fascinating. There's a sort of infantile playground attraction between incredibly rich billionaires and incredibly vain actors. There's something that each is missing the other because I guess the billionaires,

all they want to do is be liked. And I guess actors, because they're paid millions, the only thing left for them is to be paid billions. And so there's like a symbiotic relationship. There is something there. And having said that, this Red Sea Film Festival, of course, I'll tell you who went out there, Will Smith. So we're talking about the semi-counciled man.

But Will Smith went out there and he was paid, I think people say he was paid a million dollars to go this most recent time. It's in December, the Saudi Film Festival. But, you know guy richie went out there guinness paltrow went out there what people understand apparently what the big agents are saying i've talked to some agents about this they're saying yeah people know that if you go to saudi arabia you get paid so you are paid essentially to appear in the country it's like a pa but in the country yeah which is what they've done with golf yeah yeah you literally just have

to turn up with a with a bag of clubs and you get money. So, I mean, it is, listen, we're very, very familiar with sports washing and what Saudi Arabia are doing that and trying to sort of have that soft cultural power of, you know, extending the brand of Saudi Arabia. They seem to be enormously successful in that. Live golf is going from strength to strength. And I think Saudi Arabian money is staying in golf forever now. Briefly, it looked like it might be seen off, but I don't think that's going to be the case. They are putting money into other sports,

but they are now deliberately targeting the movies and television. And they've built extraordinary studios there. I mean, really amazing studios that people have to come and see, and then they're told they'll not have to pay any tax. And they will do anything to get you into the country. And Baz Luhrmann went to visit the studios recently and he was very impressed. I bet he was.

Baz Luhrmann. But, you know, it's hard even for Baz Luhrmann to get films made in Hollywood currently because that's what's happened. This kind of mid-level, as we've said, across lots of different disciplines, mid-budget things have fallen away. So you've got

these massive kind of tentpole things that the studio are doing but if you want to make a sort of 80 million dollar film which is mid-budget basically it's it's much much harder and this is where people like this come in and will pay for things well that's it so sport always had a money issue if you want to know what the greatest vice at any given time is in a culture look at who sponsors sports so in the 70s and 80s it was all cigarettes it was the embassy world championship um then it was booze you got the carlin cup and things like that now it is betting and crypto so essentially mcdonald's mcdonald's but football is always on the lookout for money sports always look out for money and saudi arabia have money and want to soft advertise themselves as you say film and tv now tv used to be the bbc would fund your program itv

would fund your program channel four would fund your program that's now impossible even for the most basic show so you always have to get financed from other places why would anyone be financing film and tv at the moment because the money has sort of gone from that industry. So, you know, it's much, much harder to find seed funding for anything. And that's a perfect opportunity for Saudi Arabia, because they have got an awful lot of money. And as you say, that's why Paltrow is out there. That's why Depp is out there. Yeah, but how much money is enough? I think it's dreadful. I mean, what's she doing out there? Her company is valued at 250 million, or maybe more. And she has absolutely no need to take the money there. You know, they've got a women in cinema event that they have there. I can't wait to hear

the Saudi Arabia view on the women in the cinema. I think women are even allowed to pick and mix in the cinema. So if someone else has to pick it and mix it for them. Of course, MBS is the only person who can actually afford pick and mix at the cinema. I sometimes think I'm not a fan of cinema, I'm a fan of pick and mix. I'm never looking forward to Harrison Ford, I'm always looking forward to some fizzy strawberries. Well, there's actually, economically, that is actually what's happened to them.

They've sort of become food courts with a kind of digital film screening thing attached. I'd watch a documentary about the pick and mix industry. But who's the big company behind pick and mix, could you name it? Who's big pick and mix? Yeah, but who... I don't know, but I'd love to. Who's big?

You know what? It's probably the Saudis. Probably. Follow the money, Richard. Follow the money. Yeah, follow the money. Anthony Joshua is fighting out in Saudi Arabia this year. Boxing, you can always tell.

It's like the porn industry. Yeah. Boxing will always find the newest source of money. And, you know, boxing has really sold its soul to Saudi Arabia and Joshua's fighting out there not for the first time this week so it's an avalanche and it's coming for the movie and television business as well

What's interesting is that the producers obviously it's always been a sort of immoral business movie making but the producers are saying things like, there was one guy I saw who was saying, oh, the greatest power I've seen from the kingdom is their long-term thinking. They have the ability to think in five or ten year or twenty year plans. This is not

really possible in the United States because the leadership of the studio has changed. It's like, oh, this, you know, this... Yeah, dictatorship. Pesky democracy meritocracies are just getting in the way of getting your ridiculous film about someone who has to fight his way out of somewhere made. Listen, the justification that all these actors would give and lots of sports stars would give is it's better to engage with Saudi Arabia than not engage with Saudi Arabia. Oh, bullshit.

It's better. Well, listen, I'm just giving the devil's advocate. It's better to think of Saudi Arabia in 20 years more liberal than it is now than less liberal than it is now it's better to have a big stable cultural powerhouse somewhere in the middle east this is what they are able to say you know all the way from lee westwood the golfer and i don't i don't know if i believe you lee uh i don't know if the liberalization of the middle east is your key concern i take all of my cues on this from Lee Westwood. You know, from famously the most sort of liberal town in America, Hollywood, where, you know, everyone's up in arms about everything at all times.

Fascinating to see the shapes of people. I'm sure that people in Hollywood hold their values and beliefs very dearly. But they also, I know that was literally just an absolutely unfiltered laugh. But I think they hold the desire to get their film funded even more dearly. But their number one belief is in money. So that's the thing that makes all the other decisions. They don't have to compromise their beliefs. This is literally, this has nothing to do with movies.

I'm going to go back from screen washing to sports washing. The snooker, which as you know is one of my greatest passions yeah it's one of the few things i really get hit up about now they're messing with snooker uh and nbs has gone too far they've got a tournament out there where there's a special golden ball on the table which if any player scores a 147 they get to try and pop that golden ball for an extra 20 points. They go, it'll be the largest break ever made in snooker history. It'll be a 1-6-7. No one's ever seen it before.

Yeah, because you've had an extra ball that's worth 20 points. Of course someone's done it before, but you get half a million pounds if you do it. Is it a solid gold ball? Surely it should be a solid gold ball that you get to keep. Oh, that's a really good idea.

I think you'd get a kick though, probably. Yeah. I think probably the gold would not run along the cushion quite as well so when they take it away from you at the end and say yeah we just say that for the cameras you're gonna say anything out loud no thanks just take me to the airport thanks very much i'll be off yeah but i listen i look forward to sean murphy getting a 167 it's uh but listen i mean it's this is not a story that's going away mbs is not going to get this influential there will be big big movies that are uh that are funded by saudi arabia keep an eye out for that title card which will say the red sea film initiative or things like that you're

going to start to see it and also any number of umbrella organizations beneath that well that's it and it's important to say that whatever title a company has, whatever title a fund has, they are all tied into the sovereign wealth fund. They're all tied into the ruling family. If anyone wants to justify what they're doing, they have to accept that that's where their money's from. And by the way, and sports stars have pointed this out, and I'm sure movie stars will, there's always been very dodgy money from very bad places in sports. Yes, of course and in hollywood it's just this one seems to be a lightning rod where you can you can jump one side or the other and the hypocrisy is sort of even greater because of course most of these films offend about a hundred

of their indecency laws yeah i think it's probably a good rule of thumb if your movie is funded by a country where your film would be unable to be shown then then maybe you should look for your money elsewhere shall we now ironically and awkwardly go to a commercial break let us do that best western made booking our family beach vacation a breeze and it felt a little like Come on kids, back to the hotel room. Good night kids. Good night mama. Life's a trip.

Make the most of it at Best Western. life's a trip make the most of it at best western hello and welcome back to the rest is entertainment yes welcome back everybody um i said let's do something gentle now yeah we talk about the overnights tv overnights quite a lot so i just thought we'd look through this week's top 100 shows and see if there's any interesting stories about what it is we are watching as a country anything unexpected uh and this by the way if you are interested in overnight's broadcast magazine which print them all then is a great sort of the bible of the television industry so thank you to broadcast for all this i had a little chat to chris curtis the editor there as well about some of the trends that are happening um biggest show in britain

last week call the midwife three of the top four shows in Britain Call the Midwife, Death in Paradise Antiques Roadshow Whatever we're talking about on Twitter it is not those three shows Sunday Night is massive and a sort of big mainstream drama By the way, they're getting about

five and a half, five million those shows and 15 years ago they'd be getting 16, 17 million. And there'll be more on catch up, we should say that, because people are often saying, oh, look, this show's viewership's fallen away or whatever. But it hasn't necessarily because people watch on catch up. Yes, this is pure overnight.

Funnily enough, catch up usually follows the path of what the biggest show is. Absolutely. Anyway, it's very rare that a show would get one million and suddenly seven million people watch it on catch-up. But if there's a show like Gladiators that's up against Anton Dick's Saturday Night Takeaway, both of those shows will do very well on catch-up. By the way, Gladiators beat Takeaway this week for the first time.

I saw that. Which is a terrifying prospect for ITV. Yeah. And a wonderful prospect for Nitro and Legend. By the way, House of Games booking news. We have a gladiator. I can't tell you who it's going to be. Oh, my God.

Yeah, we have a gladiator. There's been a lot of chat about which gladiator. A lot of them were up for it. But, yeah, we have... You have your first gladiator. We have our first... Your first gladiator. Gladiator ready.

I can't wait to be saying that. So it's interesting that right at the top of those ratings are shows that aren't really in the cultural conversation that's not super unexpected but interesting but what is really fascinating look at the looking at the top 100 is what's happened to the soaps now eastenders cory emmerdale used to absolutely dominate they used to get 20 million they were just complete behemoths plot lines would be on the front of the tabloids Now, EastEnders, Corrie, Emmerdale used to absolutely dominate. They used to get 20 million. They were just complete behemoths. Plot lines would be on the front of the tabloids.

Tony Blair, when Diage Barlow... Do you remember when Diage Barlow was falsely imprisoned? And Tony Blair talked about it in the House of Commons. Well, quite right. Obviously, he didn't watch the show. He just was told to say that. But it doesn't matter. It was big enough to have to make comments about it.

But you know what? He got stuff done. Is she still in prison? No, she's not. No, she's not. Listen, at some point, we've got to reassess his legacy. Sorry to go all Alastair Campbell there for a second. But the soaps, they put a lot into it, put huge amounts of money into the sets and what have you.

$89 million, that new set for EastEnders. For EastEnders. Oh, my God. In that top 100, the highest episode of EastEnders is in position 64. You're kidding. 2.3 million viewers. Again, it will get more on catch-up, but 2.3 million overnight. That's lower than the one show.

It's lower than all sorts of things. It's not a great rating. It's properly on its knees. Coronation Street, slightly better three and a half million but still only in 15th still gets the same as michael mcintyre's the wheel emmerdale again 3.4 so eastenders is in the biggest trouble but the other soaps they're not doing what they used to do for channels which is anchoring people for the evening which is bringing people in for the evening and then showing them other things turn up at 7 30 and you never leave exactly but you know there's other other shows are taking up the slack in the top 10 this week the one percent club the lemac quiz how many i think you

know this how many people are watching on linear because that is interesting you could still keep people in technically if how many what's the percentage of people who watch on linear well again you know if you look at twitter or talk to people, they go, well, no one watches live TV. 64% of all viewership is on linear, is watching on the day that something goes out. While it's going out. Yeah, which, by the way, is down from 100% 20 years ago, but it's still a significant amount of people.

It's still a business that has some juice in it. And so, you know, there's still healthy stuff going on in that top 100 but you know that thing of i always remember my nan's remote control the one and the three were completely worn out yeah yeah and people go no but people don't really mind what channel things are on 97 of that top 100 shows are on bbc one are itv yeah okay there's one Channel 4 show, Gogglebox, and there's two BBC Two shows, University Challenge, and hold on, let me look. Richard Osman's House of Games

is the other one there. That is, sorry, I was just checking my... Sorry, sorry, yeah. Richard Osman's House of Games, sponsored by Visit Riyadh. So that's where the mainstream of our culture is in those top 100 shows. But it's interesting because

we talk about different things and I think it's worth talking about reach yeah i remember last summer i interviewed um jesse armstrong on stage at the um edinburgh tv festival and we talked about his career and everything and he is very self he's the man behind succession peep show uh fresh meat thick of it all these things and yet he said just as a sort of throwaway comment while i was talking about him he said most of my shows i've made i'm not very high rating at all and we moved on we talked about other things but it's interesting that his shows which have had i mean you think of the sort of full spectrum cultural purchase of the final season of succession where everyone is talking about absolutely everything there are a million think pieces about it also things like

peep show well the thick of it or whatever. But these are not kind of mega, mega rating things. Whereas things that are often very high rating, sort of nobody talks about and they don't seem to have the hold. And I suppose I know you want to come on to GB News. That's quite an interesting one, where you have this kind of the tension between reach and viewership. And I think that's interesting. So yeah, between signal and noise. Yeah. And I think that's interesting. Yeah, between signal and noise. Yeah. And I think, you know, I genuinely think if you're interested in politics in this country,

and quite often you talk to politicians, if you don't understand that Britain is Call the Midwife and Death in Paradise and Antiques Roadshow, Countryfile, which is also in the top 10, that's who is voting in this country. Okay, that's who's voting. And every single bit of noise around politics in this country is about completely different groups of people.

Not in the top 100 because of the way it's measured, but often the biggest show on TV every single night, it takes an awful lot to beat it, is local news. The BBC local news at 6.30 in your area, you add them together, that's the biggest show in the area. That's Britain. That's what Britain are watching. And that's what millions of Britons are watching, which is the thing that's important for elections. So the local news is a huge success story. I often say to my publishers when they talk about putting you on TV shows to promote books,

I said, sit me on local news. I said, that's where everyone's watching. That's where people who buy books are watching. You know, that's the thing. And yeah, so I thought I'd look at GB News. And again, broadcasts were very helpful. And the biggest show on GB News, as you say, has huge cultural cachet.

We hear about almost nothing else. It's one of the, you know, if you looked at column inches for TV channels, it's right up there, you know, behind the big terrestrials. The biggest show, the first of the three biggest shows, in fact, are Farage's show, which is on at 7 p.m.

And the biggest rating of last week was 126,000. Okay, 126,000 people watching that. To give you an idea of that, a repeat of As Time Goes By, the old Jeffrey Palmer, Judi Dench sitcom on drama was getting 275,000. So double, double. Okay. Now, this is not to denigrate GB News, by the way we did a um we did a big industry news quiz this week where everyone gets together for charity and gb news did unbelievably well well they are they thrashed my they've thrashed my team but they're 400 increase year on year in viewership they want to be the biggest news channel by 2028, and I think they will be.

But here's the key. I'm sorry to say whether or not you love it, but this is the case. But here's the key. If you're setting up a TV channel, the hardest thing to do is to market it. You'd have to spend so much money. I mean, firstly, again, they don't have to worry about turning a profit because there's people with deep pockets behind them who have their own reasons for wanting to fund GB News. But that is a very, very very very very very small rating it is but their reach is far

bigger well that's it is because it's clipped online and people don't sit down to watch these shows i mean honestly people putting their supper on their knees and sitting down for you know an hour of nigel farage at seven o'clock do me a favor it doesn't really work like that what they really are in lots of ways is a kind of, and they've said this themselves at certain different times, is that they're a sort of digital business with a TV station attached. And when we talk about marketing, you know, I remember at the time I was asked to write a thing about the opening night show, you know, when they launched.

And I knew that, you know, essentially, you know, in a way, what you're being asked to do is say, this is rubbish. It's all really, nothing's going to happen. And I thought, I don't want to do that because I think there is a market for this. I think it could get quite big. And I'll just wait and see how it goes. Now, in some ways, and this is not a conspiracy theory saying that they deliberately didn't have any lighting and everything fell apart on the first night on purpose. But you can't pay for marketing.

Everybody wrote articles about it. People were like, oh, oh look you know the um everything goes wrong in their studio you can't see anybody people are sort of looking wrong against the green screen it's it's a complete fiasco the production values are so low they kept saying this for about you know months they kept saying this but that just meant there are lots of stories out there about gb news so it becomes something that's recognized and i'm afraid people see clips by the way offcom, Ofcom, which is the regulatory body for the media, which is investigating on about, I think, about 11, 12 issues of impartiality, breaching. There's plenty of things that are going wrong and that are being allowed to go wrong. And they obviously are employing many, many people from the governing party in British politics, which is another big issue. But they are a success story.

And one of the ways they've done it is by not paying people very much money. You see what they can get, compared to what you might get as an anchor on another channel. They don't pay people very much money, which is what Talk TV went wrong, where they're playing sort of Piers Morgan's like 50 million pounds over three years. I mean, the single worst deal in the history of television're playing sort of Piers Morgan was like 50 million pounds over three years I mean the single worst deal in the history of television apart from Piers Morgan

who was really it was the single best deal in the history of television and is now over and is going to YouTube yeah because he got 50 million so what does he care what's the difference

I mean literally I mean he's not gonna you see what they're getting on GB News because half the MPs have to declare it and it's not very much by the standards of the industry

it's about 200 quid an hour or something. Yeah, it's really not very much. Which is nice. But yeah, as you say, if Lee Anderson was a news anchor on a different channel. Yeah, he'd be getting a lot more. But that's the way to make it work within our market, the US market, where you get people who get paid a lot to be on Fox News. I mean, insane amounts.

It's a huge, it's a huge, it's a big country that there are obviously just a better sort of, you know, it's that's to do with scale. I mean, they're a much smaller country, and we are much less polarised in general. So within that they have but they have cut their cloth according to that and they don't pay people very much. They're good on digital, and they are becoming a massive, they are becoming a success story. They're good on digital and they are becoming a success story. But it's fascinating how culturally we do blow these things up. I mean, GB News doesn't have to spend money advertising because people who don't like GB News do all the advertising for it.

If you are someone who doesn't think people should watch GB News, I mean, they're hugely in the middle of our culture and the numbers just don't back it up in any way i mean i can't begin to tell you how lower rating some of those shows get it's a news channel so they often get low ratings but it just clip the clips on social media get seen by loads of people i know i don't even buy that stuff you know there's so many kind of auto plays and auto counts and all that kind of stuff. Whenever someone tells me they've had a million views for something, I think, well, I mean, I don't think you have.

No, I'm sure they haven't. But they are increasing. Where other people are falling away, they've increased 400% in their viewership. And they are on track. I don't think they have increased 400% in their viewership because their viewership must have been almost non-existent. Year on year, they have increased 394%. No. Yes.

Really? Yes, I'm afraid to tell you they have. I don't think, because they were getting 150,000 for shows last year. They're the fastest growing news website. Oh, the website. I think Unilad, which is the sort of younger

version of Ladbible, is doing very, very well as well. But I think if anyone's thinking about the next election and people being influenced and all this kind of stuff, I always think, you know, my mum gets the Daily Mail every day because she likes playing code word. If you said to her that's a right wing paper, she wouldn't have a clue because she's not reading the biggest rating of the week on GB News, which is, let's say, 126,000, that is fewer than 200 people per constituency in Britain. OK, it's not a huge amount of people. Whereas if you look at Call the Midwife, that's 14,000 people in every constituency in Britain. That's where Britain is. Listen, if you don't care about politics, absolutely fine.

If you do care about politics, I think you have to look at the media slightly differently. And I think you have to react to the media slightly differently as well. I just also want to give a shout out to, I think, one of the loveliest channels on British telly, which does about as well as GB News, but has slightly less reach in terms of its cultural grasp, which is Talking Pictures TV. Oh, it's terrific. Which is sort of run by this guy called Noel Cronin and his daughter, I think. So it's a grass which is talking pictures tv which is sort of run by this guy called noel cronin and his daughter i think so it's a very small band but in a shed can i just say in a shed in a shed and they show dixon of dot green run paula the bailey flash gordon they show public

information films they've got the rights to it's incredible it's called people call it shed flicks people really like it it's this guy has is an absolute labor love. He tried to go and get ordinary broadcasters interested in a kind of dedicated old movies channel, and they were like, no, this will never work. And as you say, he's got... And they track stuff down. They've got this thing, footage detectors, where they try and find old things.

But it's such a charming, lovely channel, which is run on an absolute shoestring, as you say, in a shed by a father and daughter talking pictures, TV. And I just imagine a Britain in which that got as many column inches as GB News. It would be wonderful. So the reason I wanted to talk about ratings, really, so if I can conclude in some way,

it is sort of this, which is an awful lot of people are using a very, very small base to leverage themselves into very, very big cultural figures and are monetising that as well and making a huge amount of money out of it. And so I would just say sometimes if you're doom scrolling or you're getting furious about someone or something, you don't need to talk about them because everybody is watching Call the Midwife. And to put 126,000 into even more perspective in terms of politically engaged people. The rest is politics is getting about 700,000 downloads per episode.

Five times more, something like that. Five and a half times more the size of that. And no Ofcom complaints, none at all. Exactly. And no one's accusing them of having any impact on the next election. I get all my politics from the rest is football. If Micah Richards comes out for the Lib Dems, that's where I'm voting. Let's finish today, shall we, with, we mentioned at the beginning,

a genuinely fascinating article by a man who writes under the name The Honest Broker, but Ted Giola is his name, and he's written about... On his sub-stack, but you can go and visit, as you say, the Honest Broker. You can see him on Twitter, all sorts of things. But he's written this piece about... He starts with this idea that entertainment ate art, right? Which means people were making Marvel movies

instead of The Godfather. He then says that distraction ate entertainment, which is that looking at something for 15 seconds is better than a marvel movie and that constant endless kind of cycle and now his final bit of his uh thesis is that addiction is eating distraction and he calls the big technology companies a dopamine cartel and essentially we've all been sort of we've all been brought into this system of constant rewards every 15 seconds and that's where all the money in entertainment is now well it's fascinating it's a sort of cultural state of the nation he calls it and i one of the things you know many people will say gosh i'm reading an article and i can't

concentrate to the end because i have to post on social media to say this is a really good article. And many people sort of understand that. And for, you know, also for a while it felt, I mean, while Donald Trump was president, it felt like the world was being run off one of these platforms, which is a dopamine churn. And there's this stimulus and you respond to it and then something else comes along every 15 seconds. So we're getting these culture or whatever it is, is coming in 15 second little bursts and you need another one and another one and another one. And what they want is for you to stay on their platform.

Now, this is a very sort of basic thing is that these people want you to stay on their platform. This is why when you go on Twitter X as it is now is it's really hard now. The algorithm is burying articles about, you know, linking to an article that you're suggesting that people read. You say, have a look at this. It's really interesting. It's really hard to click through now. And that's because if you click through to that article, you're not on Twitter anymore. You're not on X anymore.

They don't want you off the platform. They want you to stay on the platform. The best thing that you can do on the platform is to be angry. They want you angry because the angry people, it is proven, stay longer on their platforms. There's a fantastic book by a guy called Jaron Lanier called 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. And it's about 100 pages. It's absolutely terrific. Oh, I read that on Twitter.

Also, Shoshana Duboff, who wrote a book called surveillance capitalism this is what they want they want you to stay on the platform so they can use your data and they'll get to know you better and ultimately they will be able to sell your data to people who will sell some other things to you they know how toxic this is all sorts of scientific papers yeah talking about what it does to their brain yes that people have become completely addicted they can't leave their phones and it's making them unhappy. It's causing something that is called anhedonia, which Ted Gioda is very good about, which is when you can't take pleasure in things that you're continually doing,

there's a form of ennui where you're not enjoying any of this. It's incredibly flattening, yet they will not do anything to deal with it because they want to keep you on the platform. They'll lose out to other members of the dopamine cartel. And one of the things that I find really sort of depressing about it is all of these things that they're doing, so many of the innovations, people are wondering like, why is Google trying to do driverless vehicles? I'll tell you why. Because Americans disproportionately compared to Europe spend a huge amount of time

in their cars. When you're in your car, you're not on the platform. Now, in terms of what it means for what we're talking about in this podcast, you're not on the platform. Now, in terms of what it means for what we're talking about on this podcast, like entertainment, art, all those things, it's terrible because it's 15 seconds of gobbets. It's nothing.

And creative people that I know are just really creative people are just not on these platforms. I am, of course. But I get it. And some people... Marina, I get it. Do you think it helps you, though?

Listen. Does it help you? You have to tell me somehow. Do you though? Does it help you? You have to tell me somehow. Do you think, does it inspire you? I think that, so I buy this thing about the dopamine cartel. I genuinely do. And I think like the tobacco industry in the 50s, they know about it as well. They know what they're doing.

They know. Yeah, but they just don't care. Well, I always think it's funny in those sort of businesses. Yeah, but they just don't care. Well, I always think it's funny in those sort of businesses. Culturally, everything there is set up for them not to care. Everything there is set up for them to kind of go, oh, no, this just, yeah, we'll deal with it.

Just don't forget we've got the next six months results. You know, everything in capitalism is about, you know, your earnings call in six months' time or what your earnings call for the year. So it's very, very short-term uh thinking which at least is apt and so it's quite hard to turn those things around so i suspect there are people that the people that have left for sure because they think they're doing wrong there's people there who've left and said my children are never going on these platforms because they know they're doing wrong and there will be people there in the trenches who in 10 years time were going going, what was I doing?

I'm sure you know good people who worked at the tabloids many years ago who you now look back at what the tabloids were doing. They just go, I guess I did know. I guess I did. But honestly, my day-to-day life was not that. It was just speed and let's get this done. So I think there's some kind of deniability for people who work in those things. But they know what they're doing I think it suits my personality type because I have a very low attention span anyway so culture has come towards me do you feel you've been inspired by someone like Jonathan Coe

by the way it says oh I love Twitter and he's the novelist and he's brilliant I think personally I think Jonathan Coe is absolutely brilliant he was brilliant before Twitter came along and if it collapses he'll be brilliant afterwards I don't want to argue with him because he says it's a great inspiration to him but i i honestly i don't know it's unprofessional to say yes i do get inspired by it i like i'm very very selective i've everyone who's ever said anything that's even contained something that's annoyed me have been muted a long time ago lots of words have been muted i use it for sport and you know talking to people and so yeah i'm i'm i like the amount of stuff that comes in the amount of information that comes

into my brain i like that i like the more stuff that comes into my brain that the happier i am so for me i find it very useful instagram i like but it's it's so incredibly friendly there's sort of slightly less texture there for me but yeah i do i do enjoy um being on twitter i mean honestly in the last six months it sort of collapsed you can't see like the fulham team news without 15 blue ticks just saying yay good good team and this is all bots you think well i can't i can't there's nothing in this for me but yeah from from my own perspective it's fine but it's it's definitely addictive but you know like there's certain things that that you do find addicting and certain things you don't and i don't you know i'm quite comfortable with it can i talk a little bit about

this going back to this business of distraction and all of that i have spoken to quite a few i've and during the writer's stripe a lot of showrunners and people talked about these sort of things. And even Justine Bateman, who's an actress and now a writer, said she had said she'd heard from so many showrunners who were given notes by the streaming channels that they say this isn't second screen enough. And what they mean is the viewer is expected to be on their phone kind of half doing something else while your crime drama or whatever is playing and you just can't make it as complicated as you have because they're not going to understand it because they're only going to be half concentrating on your show I mean when you think how much it costs to make one of these things and what you're saying is yeah you're sort of competing with someone's social media account and you're going to be they're going to have half an ear and half an eye on you

they're going to watch you with subtitles and please you're going to have to repeat the story and the key plot details several times so that they definitely get them that is super depressing and in the response to Ted Jola's article I've noticed he's sort of gone back and said gosh I've got a really big response to this there were teachers writing in saying I've got children leaving the classroom saying they have to go to the bathroom they know they haven't it's just that they cannot get through the lesson without looking at their phone they just can't concentrate it's just that they cannot get through the lesson without looking at their phone they just can't concentrate it's destroyed concentration that's where the addiction

thing comes in i have nothing against shorter form entertainment i have nothing against funny clips i've you know there's some absolutely brilliant stuff out there uh also by the way culturally we do still have oppenheimer and barbie you know we do we are capable still of concentrating yeah but will we it but that is going really fast. You know, we were peak TV. Now the strikes are over. We're going to halve the amount of scripted. Yeah, but we're halving the biggest glut.

We're halving an enormous amount. Yes, I agree. And they had to race for scale and they all had to race to win and what have you. But, you know, clearly the movie studios are in trouble. Clearly entertainment in general i think that is we need to think about it being an addiction i really really do so and lots of kids by the way lots of people aren't addicted to it but lots of people are addicted to it and i think that's going to get bigger and bigger and bigger as the years go by and how can a government

legislate you can't because these tech companies are so much bigger than governments and they're so much more global than governments. But none of them are too big to fail. Many of them could be broken up and regulated better. Honestly, if they collapse tomorrow, tell me what the sort of destruction of, you know, you're not going to bring the world's economy to collapse. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if one of them goes. And, you know, if Twitter falls by the wayside, something else will come up, I'm sure. But no one is too big to fail in the tech companies. Well, that's what I think culturally. I think by culture tends it's a it's a pendulum and it goes back into the opposite direction when it goes far enough and I do think there's a whole generation

of artists who are going to of course there's a generation of artists who'll be coming through who make super fast hyper quick stuff because that's what excites them it's what they like but there will also be a generation who go oh hold on i can go and watch an actual film i can read a book you know i think it's fascinating that anyone listening to this now is listening to a podcast which is essentially two people talking for 40 minutes you know culturally books are getting bigger and bigger podcasts are getting bigger and bigger it's only things like film which are incredibly expensive that are having trouble but they'll find a way of making those things cheaper as well i think i think culturally things move in different directions but i do think scrolling is like smoking uh and at some point we're gonna have to do something to uh to deal

with that yes i think we should thank people for watching this clip on their device oh that'd be nice uh can i recommend i know it's in the same stable as us but listen that's uh that's the way it is the rest is history to the four-part series on 1974 in british politics it's in the same stable as us, but listen, that's the way it is. The Rest is History is a four-part series on 1974 and British politics. It's the maddest year in British politics. It's absolutely terrific. It's so good. It's great social history. If you lived through it, it's brilliant.

If you didn't live through it, it's brilliant. I sort of came of age slightly after that. I was born in that year. It is absolutely fascinating. You see, I only remember Harold Wilson from Mike Yarwood doing an impression of Harold Wilson. But it's really, really,

really great. I absolutely loved it. That's us done, isn't it? That is us done. We will be back on Thursday. And can I say,

by the way, sometimes I think there's a bit of doom saying, but, you know, we're listening to podcasts. We're having a good time.

You know, we still listen to the stuff we love. We still watch the stuff we love. There's still brilliant stuff being made by brilliant people out there. So I would say we are the fight back. Everyone listening, us, we're part of, you know, a thing to say we want to save our culture and we want to make great things and great content and all that kind of stuff. So the war is not lost, I will say. Oh, no, no.

Not for one second do I think that. But I do think it's significant to guard against people and to guard against kind of essentially malevolent actors, which I think some of these big companies are. OK, so I will recommend this week The Honest Broker, his sub stack, Ted Giolla. And it's called The State of the Culture, the particular post that I think we've just been talking about. It's really good. You can find that, as always, in the episode notes notes for this show i'm afraid you had to do that within 3.4 seconds you didn't in 4.1 so people switch off just before the end we'll see you on thursday for our question and answer one we've got some great questions this week © transcript Emily Beynon