The Rest Is Entertainment - Phone hacking. What happened, who was there, and what is the fallout?

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

Marina gives a first hand account of phone hacking and the culture on Fleet Street in the noughties. We delve into Netflix's data dump and explain the rationale of why they're releasing figures now, and with the festive season in full swing Richard and Marina examine the Hallmark Christmas movie production line. Twitter: @restisents Email: [e-mail] Producer: Neil Fearn Executive Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/trie It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Commissions, fees, and expenses may apply. Read the funds or ETFs prospectus before investing. Funds and ETFs are not guaranteed. Their values change, and past performance may not be repeated. Hello and welcome to another edition of The Rest Is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And me, Richard Osman. It's nearly Christmas. It is very nearly Christmas. I don't know if that's going to be news to our listeners. I mean, it depends when they're listening. They might listen a week later, in which case, oh, it was just Christmas.

It was just Christmas, yeah. Either way, I hope we're breaking something here. Exactly, breaking news. You went to Winter Wonderland at the weekend. I did. How was that? I was in the Tenth Circle of Hell. It was, you know,

go in early and leave early. It's like invading a country, I would have said. But yeah, we got out there with, I think, our dignity intact. So great advice for Winter Wonderland and great foreign policy advice as well. I spent my weekend watching, firstly, loads of Christmas movies on Hallmark, which we'll talk about later. And secondly, watching Michelle Moan, thinking that being interviewed by Laura Kunzberg was a good idea.

Which maybe we'll cover at some point. She is some kind of monster and I'm fascinated by her. Well, someone showed a clip saying, what was she like when she was on Pointless Celebrities? And I had no idea she'd been on Pointless Celebrities. I could not remember it. It was from a long time ago. It was pre-beard, mine, not hers. But I watched it and she was getting something badly wrong,

so lots of people were tweeting it. Really need to call that episode up. Okay, very good. We're also going to be talking about phone hacking, Prince Harry's partial but really quite significant victory against Mirror Group newspapers for phone hacking. And we're also going to be talking about the Netflix data, which has been released after people begging for about a decade by Netflix, which shows data on 18,000 of the titles available on their platform and it's called what we're watching report and it's a really fascinating look and we're going to talk about why it has happened and what it means and try and make that interesting as well yeah so it all came out a data dump i think uh you'd called it a lot of information it's like one of those things when you know a government department

releases like a 15 000 page report because they know that no journalists are ever going to read it and this felt a bit like that there's 18,000 shows but what do you think the main takeaways from it were? I think the main takeaway that this has been done by Ted Sarandos he's the Netflix CEO okay is the streaming wars are over kids and Netflix have won once you see all of this stuff the fact that they are releasing it, they're doing it to say to any of their competitors, try having an advantage over this because you won't. You just simply won't. Good luck Paramount Plus. Yeah, good luck. Many of these other ones. It's quite interesting what's happened to Netflix over the last few years, because obviously, first of all, let's go do a quick reminder of ourselves that they were originally a DVD service by post. And actually, a lot of people via Netflix got into that idea of box sets.

And so they've pioneered once they came to actually be a streaming service, they pioneered that kind of binge watching model where they drop all the episodes of something at once because they understood that the audience was there for that. And so they have gone through quite a big, sort of weird journey in the last few years. During the pandemic,

there was a point at which they were more valuable than ExxonMobil. I'd agree with that. Yes. I use them more. Yeah. Well, do you? We don't really know how much we use. ExxonMobil. Petroleum products. But then there was a sort of market correction. And people loved calling it a market correction because they thought being really euphemistic and they were kind of saying, yeah, Netflix is really that they're not done for, but they're not nearly as big as they thought. But actually, now when you see this, I'm afraid that it's quite clear that Netflix have won and they are stronger than anybody and nobody else can really compete with it. They are really the world's first

global TV channel. 30 out of the top 100 shows are Korean and Spanish. And part of that is a function. They have a very weird metric. I don't know what you think about this, Richard. They measure an individual hours watched. Yes. So it's a huge advantage. They have a very weird metric. I don't know what you think about this, Richard. They measure in individual hours watched. Yes, so it's a huge advantage if you're a long-running show. If you've got 10 episodes and you're up against a one-episode thing, then you're going to get 10 times as many viewers, which slightly skews. There's various people who have written the list. So I think top of the list is The Night Agent.

There's a lot of very, very mainstream shows at the top. It's the stuff that broadcast network TV used to put out. Exactly that. You can probably watch it while you're looking at something else on your phone. It's not the big kind of think pieces and the big sort of billboard shows that they always promised they're going to do. So Ginny and Georgia. That's like a Gilmore Girls reboot.

Not reboot. It's sort of effectively like a Gilmore Girls sort of rip-off. People haven't even heard of this show, and yet it is enormous. But I think it taps into something which I notice a lot, which I find quite sad in a way. When I talk to a lot of teenagers and I say, what are you watching? They say, I'm watching Gilmore Girls, I'm watching Grey's Anatomy, I'm watching Friends. These shows came out how long ago? Before you were born. That turn of the millennium mood. Obviously, there's been a lot of Y2K stuff in fashion,

but there's a turn of the millennium mood about a lot of these big Netflix shows, which are what people are watching, and about the movies that are really big on Netflix. You've got Adam Sandler, Jennifer Aniston, kind of romantic comedies. Insanely middle-brow, which I quite like. And interestingly, these ratings are for the first six months of the year this six months of the year which will come out soon

number one will be a five years old series of suits suits has been this phenomenal story because suits is was originally i think it was there was there's some sort of channel in america i can't even remember it's called like the usa channel or something like that. And Suits was made for that. And it starred, not actually in a leading role, contrary to what you might have assumed if you've never watched it, Meghan Markle before she embarked on her new life. I've heard of her.

I've heard of her. Yeah. We'll come to her later. I've done my research. Yes. But Netflix licensed it and it was the runaway hit of the summer. I mean, repeatability is a absolutely huge thing and of

course it doesn't cost a huge amount for netflix to license that show much cheaper than you know making stranger things or something and you get bigger ratings for it i think in the new year show when we talk about 2024 i want to talk about why certain shows get cancelled on the bbc and why certain ones don't i think like doctors and Question of Sport are both in council, but it comes back to the same thing. But it's fascinating the long tail that Netflix shows what you can do with a long running, very middle brow, very watchable television show,

which that's what television used to be. And they need that though. They need that between their originals. They can't make it work unless they have lots and lots and lots of this stuff. One of the interesting things I think that they have done is I've seen someone once describe them as a sort of universal adapter. And also now lots of young people watch TV with subtitles on the entire time anyway. So they don't mind so much watching foreign language things.

So this is what, you know, Squid Game could never have been this successful when I was growing up in the 90s. It just wouldn't have been a thing because people just didn't really watch subtitle content in that same way. It would have been a successful when I was growing up in the 90s. It just wouldn't have been a thing because people just didn't really watch subtitled content in that same way. It would have been a cartoon squid game, wouldn't it? But as for why Netflix have done this, I think they've been quite disingenuous. Ted Sarandos has said, oh, you know, it was quite clear that talent weren't happy.

Now, there's lots of reasons why talent haven't been happy because I'm a member of the Writers Guild of America. The WGA had a strike earlier this year as did SAG after the screen actors rather and what people part of that was about residuals now residuals are basically success-based royalties for your TV show and a lot of people said tell us if our shows are hit we don't even know on streaming if it's really a hit and if it is a hit pay us more and actually what the WGA finally got them to agree to, the streamers, is that like six people are going to be shown a little bit of data in a room, six people from the WGA with these incredible

kind of cast iron contracts. And on that basis, they will be able to work out a slight success based residual for streaming. The reason Ted Sarandos has not done this is not because of that. I think that this will actually enable Netflix to pay less for shows. Because creators were told, where else can put your show around the world? Where else can platform it in this extraordinary way? And I actually think they'll end up paying less for shows. The interesting thing is, I think actors and directors and producers have loved not knowing what their ratings are. My entire career in TV, you get the overnights the next day and it makes or breaks the television show.

So loads of times you've done a show and you know the next morning that no one's watching it, you're not going to do another series of it. And with Netflix, you don't know that. And when they're saying, we want to be told viewing figures, well, listen, if you've got a successful show,

you will be told the viewing figures. And no one can prove otherwise until now. As a behind-the-camera camera person i think it's a real shame it's been lovely for five years not to know that people they had one week in um itv where where the overnights broke down and no one could see the overnights and footballers wives had just come out and they didn't know that it rated incredibly badly but had amazing reviews and so suddenly everyone loved footballers' Wives. And the next week they understood

that no one had watched it. But by that point, there was enough momentum behind it that it went on for many series. So sometimes not knowing the ratings is rather nice, isn't it? It's interesting, there's very few British shows on the list.

Probably Black Mirror and Top Boy, pretty much the only one, and the Luther movie, which does incredibly well. But when you think about the shows that people talk about there's not a lot of them on this list no you know i saw someone tweeting the other day about how you is a huge show and he'd never heard of it this is a tv writer and you think i mean you is a that's a massive show and has been fears and that's number sort of three on the list if you count all the series together. And the biggest launch they've ever had, Wednesday.

Yeah. Which I didn't see, which Tim Burton did. It's based on Wednesday Addams. Yes. I mean, I have seen it. I thought it was really overrated, but they almost didn't give it a second season until it became, suddenly they thought, okay, they weren't going to give it a second season. That's the thing that Netflix does as well well which is that they will just happily well we're going to talk about this later and walk away um but they weren't at all sure on wednesday but

it became such a massive hit but it's again it's that i think almost as a teen content they do a lot of that sort of teen content that kind of hangs around the like like the original, the CW was a network and it had lots of sort of teen content. They had things like One Tree Hill, Smallville, which was a really big show for them. They didn't have Dawson's Creek, but it was kind of like that. They ended up having Gossip Girl a bit later.

There's a lot of content on Netflix that's like that, that's meant for teens and meant for people who have those family subscriptions, which is probably the last thing I will say on this is, this is very clearly done by Ted Sarandos because he wants to build their ad tier. At the moment, they've got sort of 207, I think they've got 250 million odd subscribers,

and only 15 million of them are on the advertiser-funded tier, and they'll want to grow that because they think they can get many, many more subscribers if they bring them into that. So being able to give advertisers this data and saying look at us is great for their business and another headline is there's a huge disconnect between the shows that people talk about and the shows that people are actually watching i don't remember ever having a conversation about night agent i don't remember ever having a conversation or even hearing about ginny and georgia which if you put the series

together is the biggest show in the world you You know, Bridgerton's in there, but it's shows that people are not speaking about. No-one's talking about Suits over here. No. You know, everyone's talking about Succession. I interviewed Jesse Armstrong, creator of Succession, this summer, and he is the first to say, you know, I've never really made high-rating shows,

which there seems such a disconnect in that because obviously Succession was such an enormous show this year and obviously the last four seasons. But these are shows that make, that win huge numbers of awards. They completely dominate the cultural conversation. You know, when the big event happened, if you haven't managed to catch season four of Succession, I'm not doing any spoilers, but when the big event happened, it was covered on the front page of the Daily Mail as an obituary. And there was sort of 15 think pieces on the bag that cousin Greg's girlfriend had taken inappropriately to Logan Roy's birthday party. And yet it gets lower ratings than Celebrity Antics Road Trip.

It's extraordinary. And this is this is the sort of disconnect. And this is the disconnect with kind of popular shows and with i suppose shows that dominate the awards and dominate the kind of cultural conversation it's lovely to have both though in fact can i can i talk very briefly about terrestrial tv now we talked about netflix please do we were watching the the strictly final on saturday uh crying throughout best series ever for me best final ever yeah and i just thought it's two hours of absolutely extraordinary television and again we talk a lot about succession and slow horses and stuff like that but this is saturday night light entertainment shiny floor and it is done so brilliantly by so

many amazing people everything there from choreography lighting hair makeup everyone is at the top of their game. Everyone's going the extra mile. And for one reason only, that's to put on a show. And that's to put on a spectacle. And to put on a spectacle for families, for generations of people. They don't have to do it, but they do do it. And I think that's why I got into television, because television to me, it is family and home and safety and all of those things.

And if you don't have those things, it's dreams and it's ambition and it's all that stuff as well. So I just wanted to mark it by saying to everyone who made Strictly, well done, because it was absolutely terrific. It brought a lot of people together and an award of a lot of cynicism. Nice to see a bit of magic. I found myself quite emotional in that speech. That was very lovely, Richard, and I agree.

And no, I wouldn't do it. Would you? No, I couldn't. No, no, no. Should we go for a little break? Yes. This episode is brought to you by Fidelity Investments Canada. Make investing simple.

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connecting with your guests in the community, and participating in programs like Smile Cookie and Hockey Card Trade Nights. So join your Local Tim's team today. Apply now at careers.timhortons.ca. Welcome back to The Rest Is Entertainment. Now, there was a little story this week in the press involving the husband of Meghan Markle from Suits, Prince Harry. Prince Harry, you might know him as Prince Harry. He brought a case against the Mirror Group of newspapers

alleging that he and those around him were hacked and stories were published which were based on unlawfully obtained information. Now, the judge, Mr Justice Fancourt, has found in favour of Harry's claim that he or someone around him was hacked. In about half of the incidents he suggested, I think it was 15 out of 33. When we're talking about this case, we have to be very careful for a number of reasons. Many people involved in it have issued denials or forms of denials.

And it is currently still active in lots of ways because Prince Harry still has cases against newsgroup newspapers, which is the publishers of The Sun, formerly the News of the World, obviously now defunct as a result of phone hacking. The Times, The Sunday Times. He's also got a case against Associated Newspapers, who are the publishers of The Mail and The Mail on Sunday. And both of those will come next year, as will a drama by the prolific and brilliant dramatist Jack Thorne for ITV on phone hacking. Oh, really? Yeah. I don't think that many people know that, but it's coming out and it's based on Nick Davis's book, Hack Attack. Now...

Hack Attack? If we go back, I shall give you a little bit of background into phone hacking. Nick Davis's book, Hack Attack. Now... Hack Attack? If we go back, I shall give you a little bit of background into phone hacking. Nick Davis was the Guardian reporter whose stories about phone hacking really broke the scandal open. But what happened was that in 2007, there was a royal reporter, and that's very significant, at the News of the World, a guy called Clive Goodman,

and he was jailed for basically this illegal interception of voicemails and a couple of other things in 2007. And the editor of the Time of the News of the World, Andy Coulson, resigned. It sort of felt like it was one bad apple. They made it sound like it was one bad apple. By the way, I worked in tabloid newsrooms, darted as a secretary on The Sun, and I ended up also working at the Sunday People very briefly, relatively briefly, like more than 20 years ago now.

I can see that. I used to work at The Guardian and The People, so I would work Monday to Thursday in The Guardian and then on Fridays I went to The People, which was contrasting. Wow. Is there anything you could pitch them both? Not a lot, I have to say. Bono's got a podcast. Nowadays that would probably straddle the boundary. But so Clive Goodman was jailed in 2007.

But in 2009, The Guardian, which is the paper I worked for and worked for at the time, started running stories on phone hacking, which was a practice that was sort of known about but hadn't really been covered. but hadn't really been covered. And because newspapers operate in a sort of a murder and they don't like to offend the rest of the club, it really wasn't picked up by that many people, Nick's story, and he carried on with it, but anyway. And funny enough, I was talking to him about it some time later and he said, the editor asked me what I was going to do next and I said I'd quite fancy going to the EU.

I think there's quite a lot of corruption in the EU. I'd like to go out to Brussels, I'd like to report on the EU. And he was all set to do that. When News International basically said, this is completely exaggerated, all Nick Davis's stories, blah, blah. It wasn't anything like an industrial scale. Like he said, this didn't happen.

And he just thought, huh, what? Well, hang on. Hang on. He thought, I'll leave the EU for a while. That's going to be there for a long time. That's not going anywhere. I'll go back to phone it. And he went back to it and he started digging again.

And it was in that second tranche of stories about it that it was reported by Nick Davis and Amelia Hill that Millie Dowler, a schoolgirl who disappeared and was later found to be murdered, while she was disappeared, News The World had hacked her phone. And that was the story that just took it completely mainstream. That was the lightning rod. Just an unbelievable sort of wave of public revulsion.

It became clear that it had been done to almost everybody, phone hacking. I have to say that it's really hard thinking back to that time because it was done to absolutely everybody. It was the editor's phones were hacked. Other journalists' phones were hacked. My phone was hacked. What did they find out? I don't know, but all my messages had always been listened to. Really?

If they'd had the mobile number of Rupert Murdoch, they would have done it to him. And it's really weird to sort of think back to that time, because I suppose the big irony of phone hacking is that the little bits of tittle tattle that they gleaned from it were of nothing importance. The really big story is that there was a criminal enterprise as part of one of the pillars of establishment, I suppose, the press against other people in public life. And it was massive and it was widespread. That was the era. Phone hacking was the era defining story all along. Not some stupid argument Prince Harry had with his girlfriend or Kylie Minogue had with her boyfriend. Piers Morgan, who was at the Mirror when this was all happening, has issued a very, very vehement

denial, very carefully worded denial. He's admitted in print and in interviews that he knew what phone hacking was. He knew how it was done. He had heard messages that had been attained in that way. But he is saying that it was nothing to do with me. I never commissioned any. I suspect he's not going to back down. I suspect Harry is not going to back down

because he's fired up by the fact that his mother was killed and he thinks that the press was somehow complicit in that. So he's never going away. It's made me think a lot about that sort of groupthink where it's hard to explain, but a lot of those people will have thought that they were sort of doing God's work and that someone, this is how odd it is,

not telling them that they've had a miscarriage or not wanting to discuss their cancer treatment means that they are lying to the journalists and that lie, consequent, I hope you can hear the sarcastic air quotes here, but I'm putting them in, and that that lie needs to be exposed. And it's made me think a lot about how a kind of heard, awful groupthink can result in people just doing really criminal things by any means necessary to get, I mean, really completely ridiculous stories.

And I think in the 90s and noughties, the newspapers were sort of the masters of the universe in a lot of ways. They were awash with money, circulations were high, very different to now where essentially they're sort of click farms and they know they are as well. So I think then, you know, they were riding high and anyone coming into that newsroom, you sort of fit into the culture that's there.

And I genuinely think that a lot of the people who were involved think they are innocent. They're able to say, I did nothing because in their heads, they think they did nothing. Or they think that what they did was fair game because it's what everybody else did. And it was the culture at the time. And I think they think it would be very unfair for me to go to prison. It's really fascinating. He's got this sort of kind of kamikaze mission and whatever you think of Harry,

and I often think he's a kind of complete pain, but you can kind of understand how he got that way. There's something quite heroic about this. They found the one person, because so many people, for quite rightly, by the way, this is no shade on anyone who's settled out of court for phone hacking. Absolutely. not going to court is one of the best things you can ever do in your life but this he will not back down and so it's sort of fascinating to you he's

stuck in a lot of cases because the evidence is not what we might wish it richard the evidential picture i think uh news international had a unexplained sort of email deletion the day before they handed all their stuff to the police what are the chances Boris and Rishi's whatsapps and and mirror groups have had a huge deletion and um obviously the police at the time a little bit like the old death of a spinal tap dramas sort of felt it best left unsolved because of course there's a big revolving door between former police chiefs being given kind of columns, particularly in the case of Murdoch newspapers. But also there was a significant amount of payment between the police and journalists. There were police officers arrested.

There were NHS workers arrested. There were people from all sorts of places that might have access to private records arrested at the time as well. But again, best left unsolved, it always seems. So one thing I do think is interesting in terms of what this story means and where it's taken us in terms of something quite simple, which is entertainment journalism.

And you mentioned Andy Coulson, Piers Morgan. Actually, when they were celebrity showbiz reporters, this sort of practice of phone hacking didn't exist. They were of a different generation of people who had to get stories and scoops and scandals. And if you like stories and scoops and scandals, which I do quite like, the marmalade droppers, you had to go out to parties, you had to meet people,

you had to make friends with people, and you had to hope. There'll always be people who want to sell stories for revenge or for money. But otherwise, there are people who want stories in the press for one reason or another. Or you can just try and track it down in the old fashioned way. And there was a generation of reporters who could do that. And you got some you had sort of fascinating and fun stories often. But after that, the phone hacking thing, you had an entire generation. I'm not saying every entertainment journalist at that time was involved in phone hacking,

but there was a whole generation of entertainment reporting that was essentially based on phone hacking. And instead of making contacts and going out and speaking to people, they wandered in this kind of predatory and obviously violatory way through people's electronic private lives. And then everyone had sort of forgotten how to be showbiz journalists. And what came straight after that was the advent of social media, when you could see celebrities put things about their own lives on social media, and journalists essentially just wrote them down, and never left the office and didn't meet people and wrote things that happened on Twitter or happened on other platforms.

And now it's been completely hollowed out. We don't have, you don't have those marmalade dropper exposures. You have the big stories of the year are often things that are in the public domain or that celebrities have put in the public domain themselves or that are based on some sort of argument that might have happened in the public domain or a form of cancellation that people will have seen something someone said and not tolerate it, but it will all have been done in public. You don't really have those sort of stories anymore.

And I think it's been forgotten how they were done and it feels of another time that they even existed. The only echo through the ages, two words, Colleen Rooney. How do you think? What do you think? I think she's super, but tell me why you think. Oh, no, she's great. I think it's fantastic. But she would have stopped that.

Well, celebrities knew phone hacking was happening to them, but they couldn't do anything about it because it was very difficult to prove. And I mean, some of these people, the stuff that people said, I mean, I know somebody who once went into their editor's office at Abloid newspaper and saw that person with two phones in their hand at their own editor's desk, which was the means via which most of the phone hacking was done. I mean, stay classy, boss, doing it in the editor's chair. Another friend of mine said, I mean, a lot of these people are people who gave me a written warning for having a cigarette break.

And how did they find out about that, is my question. But, you know, you have to say that journalists exposed this. The Guardian, Nick Davis exposed that, and so whilst it was obviously a terrible and black moment, and it's still ongoing, because it just won't go away, I wonder

how it will ever play out in the end but i think it's getting tougher and tougher for some people yeah i think some chickens are going to come home to roost in 2024 anyway merry christmas everybody uh and talking of merry christmas it's the last podcast before christmas there is one coming out on the unboxing day but i wanted to talk about christmas movies uh and more specifically i don't Elf and It's a Wonderful Life and all these great things, but this extraordinary industry that's built up Did you know that this year Hallmark are now doing something, Hallmark, which obviously started as a greetings card company and then eventually moved into kind of, I guess, schmaltzy movies. They've got something called Christmas Con. Christmas Con? Yeah, Christmas Con. It's modelled

on Comic Con. They've got it in New Jersey this year. And the stars of the Hallmark Christmas movies are there and you can go and it's like a fan convention and you go and meet the people who are in essentially only Hallmark movies because it's such a treadmill. And that in itself is really big business. And by the way, most of them have been in the shows we were talking about earlier, One Tree Hill and Gossip Girl and all that. So the basic plot is almost always a high-flying woman who's an executive.

And so you think, OK, this is nice. This is progressive. But this high-flying executive will go to a small town, often where she grew up. Yeah, she has to come back from the big city. Has to come back from the big city. Her high school sweetheart is now either a baker or a candle maker yeah or somebody makes snow globes uh she essentially has to get some work done by christmas or she's going to be fired the ex-partner there's a high school sweetheart's shop is undergoing financial problems and it's probably gonna have to shut down he's a

nice man we should say he's always a nice man yeah and she oh my gosh she's so busy yeah like there's stuff happening there's like christmas trees everywhere santa is going and she's always on her phone with her big city values with her big city values you know talking to her boss on the phone while you know kids are eating candy canes uh but bit by bit bit by bit he manages to break her down and say do you know what i don't know if being a big city lawyer is what a woman should be doing. I wonder if you should be at home with your high school sweetheart and stay in this small town and forget your

boss. And that, by and large, is what happens in an awful lot of these films. I also have to say that I love them. I love them too. I have to say, sorry, if you're hoping for agreeable disagreement on that point, I'm a huge fan. They are fan they are incredible structurally they're mesmerizing yes they are because they're done for ad breaks they're they are a nine act structure i don't know if anyone

is very interested in this something but this is the thing that i love most movies are sort of three-act structure they do a nine-act structure and actually the writers guild of america who often will send out materials like if you're trying to write something here's some advice we'll advise you on the nine act structure there will be an almost kiss at 18 minutes there must be christmas in every frame this is really crucial so you will not see a single frame that there isn't some sort of bauble or you know or some form of christmas and if you watch enough of them by the way way, they reuse all the same trees, all the same baubles. I mean, every house looks amazing. They look amazing.

Oh, it's beautiful. Like you can't help, every time they walk down the street, you just go, oh, it's Christmas. They are unthreatening. But they are, actually one of the things that's always part of the formula is that they have a sort of fundamental, they have to have a fundamental disagreement about Christmas. They have differing views about Christmas. Maybe like it's a hassle that needs to be got through. Whereas, yes, Mr. Candlemaker, Candlestick Maker, will love Christmas.

And he's got all the time in the world for it. Exactly. And he makes candles. Like on Christmas Eve, he does a special thing where the children of the village come to see him. And the village will be called Candlewick. And all the children of the village will come and he gives them candles for free. That's why he's losing money.

That's why he needs this woman to come and sort his business out. But yeah, he loves Christmas. She can't be dealing with it because she's got lawsuits to... That aren't making her happy, Richard, that are not making her happy. Can I say that there is a strand, a royal strand within this that I think call things like A Prince for Christmas, Christmas with the Prince.

They're often set in a fictional kingdom called something like Aldovia something. I saw one which was set in the fictional kingdom of Belgravia, which I'm not going to spoil it for anyone watching those movies who doesn't think it exists, but it is there and it's probably, it was less heartwarming than Belgravia of the whole world.

There's an awful lot of, again, high-flying American female executives who go to Scotland for a bit of peace and quiet. Did you see that Kerry Elwes one with Brooke Shields? We literally watched it yesterday. That's A Castle for Christmas. Brooke Shields, she's a writer. She comes over to Scotland and she meets Kerry El Shields, she's a writer. She comes over to Scotland and she meets

Kerry Elwes, who's the Duke. She doesn't realise at first. She doesn't realise he's a Duke. She thinks he just works on the estate. There is a little misunderstanding there. Kerry Elwes' Scottish accent, by the way, not bad. I think if I was Scottish, I would object to it. But for a non-Scott, it's not as bad

as you think it's going to be. I was looking forward to it being really bad. I thought actually he made a pretty good fist of it. He makes an excellent fist. I've seen a hilarious one that I've only seen the trailer of, sadly, because I can't seem to get it at the moment. It's called Christmas in Notting Hill. Now, they want it to be Notting Hill meets Ted Lasso. The footballer is called Graham Savoy.

He honestly sounds like he's been playing Prince William in The Crown. I think he's a Premier League player. And she doesn't understand why everyone in Notting Hill, again, it's quite odd that he lives in Notting Hill, everyone in Notting Hill seems to know him. And this case of sort of mistaken identity happens, I imagine, up to almost 18 minutes in the movie where they're going to almost kiss. The almost kiss, by the way, is always two people turning around at the same time and ending

up an inch apart in a way you never ever would do in your actual life and sometimes we've all wished it would happen so that's Christmas with Carrie Elwes now one of the things who writes them that is an interesting one for me because quite a lot of people I was reading this woman who said yeah I was a war correspondent for a long time in Bosnia, Afghanistan. I always used to sort of escape to Christmas movies. And in the end, I ended up writing one. And this is a slight relate, not the Bosnia and Afghanistan bit, but my friend Will Smith and I, who Will is the showrunner of Slow Horses and Writer, we had just finished working on a show that took a very, very long time and was pretty exhausting. And instead of just going to bed after the show, for some reason, we hold up for about two or three weeks.

And we did an outline for a Christmas movie, which because he's been really busy with slow horses and I've been doing something else as well. We actually looked at the other day. I'm like, this is actually quite good. What's it called? It's called Escape from Christmas. Wow. OK. I'm absolutely up for that i've um can i can i guess in the end she wants to escape from christmas in the end she realizes actually what she wants to escape from is the pressures of her life and

actually christmas and the love of christmas is the answer well you know what that would have been absolutely it if she it was a hallmark but it's not a hallmark so yeah i know i'm sorry is it a prisoner of war film it's a prestige christmas drama it's a comedy it'smark, but it's not a hallmark. So, yeah, I know, I'm sorry, disappointing. Is it a prisoner of war film? It's a prestige Christmas drama. It's a comedy. It's a comedy. It's more in the ones you were mentioning earlier, Vane. But yes, it's reminded me, thinking about hallmark movies this week, that I need to

get that one back out there. Talking of people closing down shops, there was one we were watching, which is called Christmas Cookies. They're all called Christmas something, by and large, or Marry Me atmas catering christmas uh was one we scrolled past the other day i thought i don't know about that catering christmas but cookie christmas it's set in the town of cookie jar uh and again that's a businesswoman who for some reason she's very high powered but she's been sent to cookie jar to shut down a cookie shop which feels to me like something that you could get one of your local reps to do but no she's flown in from denver or new york or something to shut down a cookie shop, which feels to me like something that you would get one of your local reps to do.

But no, she's flown in from Denver or New York or something to shut down this cookie shop. You'll never guess what happens. She falls in love with the cookie maker. And she realises actually, instead of shutting down the cookie shop, maybe she could use her skills to make money for the cookie shop.

And she takes the spirit of Christmas into her heart. That is absolutely, I love that. They often start the Hallmark executives, they think back from the title. So they'll say something like Christmas on the rocks or the rest is Christmas. And then someone will just have to come

and retrofit a plot to something that some guys have just been spitballing all afternoon in an office and come up with 30 of these things. They do actually put out 20 to 30 movies a year and they have this thing called Countdown to Christmas

where a new Christmas movie gets released every day. And I should say that in the 2020 US election, more people watched the Hallmark Channel that night than election coverage on CNN. Oh, really? Yes. It's massive business. The amount of people who watch these Christmas movies

is far more than even a big Netflix show in that month. What about a Joe Biden Christmas? Maybe next year. A Biden with me. There was one called Single All The Way. Was there? That's a good title, isn't it? I want to talk about a couple of the people who are in them.

As he says, it's often the same actors because it gives me the opportunity to read out a lot of the titles. So there's Lacey Chabert, who's in lots of them. She's in Matchmaker Santa, Christmas Mingleingle a royal christmas a merry scottish christmas she's in a wish for christmas she's in the tree that saved christmas a christmas melody christmas in rome christmas at castle heart and pride prejudice and mistletoe oh my god she also by the way is in the sweetest christmas which has the exact same plot as A Gingerbread Christmas, which is an architect who teams up

with a local baker to make a full-sized gingerbread house to win a competition. It's the same plot. Okay, the architect is quite stuffy and doesn't believe in the spirit of Christmas. Blah, blah, blah. Candice Cameron Burr is in Moonlight and Mistletoe, The Heart of Christmas, Let It Snow, Christmas Under Wraps, which is the biggest rating ever

Hallmark Christmas movie. A Christmas Detour, Journey Back to Christmas. I don't know if that's a sequel to A Christmas Detour. A Shoe Addict's Christmas. She's in Christmas Town. A Shoe Addict's Christmas. A Shoe Addict's Christmas. My God, what have they wrought? Come on, I know.

The Christmas Contest, My Christmas Hero, and Tinker Tailor Soldier Christmas. That last one's a lie. Texting it in, not even phoning it in. That last one was a lie. We watched a good one yesterday Called Xmas But the X was like An X

Like a kiss? No, EX Oh, Xmas It was her X Oh, I see, yeah Yeah, she came to her house Both work Her X was there

And it was with Leighton Meester Oh, yes, from Gossip Girl From Gossip Girl Which is why Ingrid Wanted to watch it Yeah And it was good

It was really good But honestly If you haven't seen them Listen, you might hate them Where to start with these? Loads on Netflix why Ingrid wanted to watch it. Yeah. And it was good. It was really good. But honestly, if you haven't seen them, listen, you might hate them. Where to start with these? Loads on Netflix,

loads on Channel 5 as well. They've got a lot of the Hallmark movies. Netflix has got them as well. I'd maybe look at Falling for Christmas, which was the Lindsay Lohan Christmas movie from last year. There's a piece of CGI in that. Is it CGI? It almost looks like it's done with sellotape

and felt pens. I strongly urge you to have a look at that one. That's brilliant. Exactly. Yeah. Lindsay gets amnesia. She gets, like a lot of Christmas movies,

it starts with a head trauma. Like a lot of Christmases. Yeah. That concludes another episode. Thank you so much for listening to us. That catchphrase, well, that concludes another episode is really working.

That satisfactorily concludes another episode that's that then that's good thank you for joining us and Merry Christmas everybody Merry Christmas and thank you so much for listening yeah I hope

you have a lovely one if Christmas is hard for you hope you have a peaceful one but we'll see you on Boxing Day for a question and answer special and we've got

some amazing questions thank you so much for all your amazing questions they are phenomenal Merry Christmas. Bye-bye. ... ...

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