The Rest Is Entertainment - Robert Downey Jr & the Death of TV Comedy

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

Marvel superfans were shocked at the reveal that the next villain to star in the Avengers series would be played by none other than Robert Downey Jr. Will this gamble resurrect the MCU, or is this just another confusing addition to their multiverse of madness? Richard and Marina also chat about the impact of TikTok on stand up at Edinburgh Fringe Festival and how it has helped cause the death of comedy on television. Sign-up to The Rest Is Entertainment newsletter for recommendations - http://www.therestisentertainment.com Richard: Rebus (BBC iPlayer) Twitter: @‌restisents Instagram: @‌restisentertainment YouTube: @‌therestisentertainment Email: [e-mail] Producers: Neil Fearn + Joey McCarthy 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! ✅ Redeem data in 1GB increments. Save by mixing to lower cost plan and supplementing with rolled data. Downgrades effective following month. Full terms at Sky.com/mobile. Fastest growing 2021 to 2023. Verify at sky.com/mobileclaims. For more information about how you can use Snapchat Family Centre to help your teenagers stay safe online visit https://parents.snapchat.com/en-GB/parental-controls Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and BetterHelp makes it easy to get started with affordable online sessions you can do from anywhere. Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's betterH-E-L-P.com. ["The Best is the Best"] Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde.

And me, Richard Osmond. Welcome back to the country, Marina. Thank you so much. Thank you for missing me. Well, I didn't say that. I just said welcome back to the country. Didn't go that far. Yeah, come on. I missed you. You were holidaying it. You probably noticed there was an incredible lighting if you watched it on YouTube because

Joey set me up in some form of natural lighting as opposed to in this sepulchral studio where I look very ill even though I have a sun tan. Quickly before we get onto entertainment, certainly my news. Yes, please. We have a kitten. We just got it from the Brighton RSPCA on Saturday. She's called Lottie. We haven't introduced it yet to Liesl. I was going to say. We got that fun ahead of us. But yeah, she's a beaut. She's a real showboater. Sinks for herself.

Yeah, she really does. So where's Lisa Lisa is in the rest of the house. Lots of using in the West Wing She is essentially in the entertainment complex. Yeah, she is in a in a small room where she can feel safe But honestly doesn't need to she's like she's like, yeah, what else you got? Yeah outside I don't care, but that's that's been my entire weekend really was pretty exciting. And Monday was all lotty all the time. A moment of bathos. What are we actually going to talk about after that? Yeah, I think we're going to talk about Robert Downey Jr. coming in to save the Marvel Cinematic

Universe. Yes, we are. Are we not? We certainly are. We're also going to talk about Edinburgh and comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe and comedy, aren't we? Yeah, and about stand-up comedy and how the economics of comedy has changed entirely within two to three years. Every single thing has changed and the way you make money in comedy now, it's very different. So we're going to talk about that. Shall we start with the MCU and our friend Robert Downey Jr.? I just think he's sort of post friend really I don't think I think he's one of those in one of those categories of celebrities that

very sort of so removed from normal life so the MCU which you start off with Iron Man in 2008 and then we get Hulk and Captain America and Thor and then they all meet it with the Avengers with Black Widow and then we move on and they get various standalone films they all branch out they're all in interconnected product and the whole cycle sort of ends several phases with Avengers Endgame. Marvel has been in the doldrums of late in that they had sort of two pretty much well one underperforming film Ant-Man and then the Marvel's Witch flopped and everyone was saying is this the end has something gone terribly wrong and bearing in mind how much of cinema has been given over

to this particular genre is that the end does dispel sort of disaster for Hollywood as well. Well Deadpool and Wolverine came out it's already the highest rating R or 18 film of all time. It's the eighth highest movie opening of all time both the combined totals of Deadpool 1 & 2. Now it came at the same time as Comic-Con which is the big sort of comic book fan convention. It's at San Diego every year and Kevin Feige who is the boss of Marvel always stands up and they've got this whole age that they do all their big events in and it's a sort of cult thing. For a long time you know Kevin Feige would just stand up and announce about 15 projects

some of which would happen and some of which are still in development. It would almost always be like the name of an animal followed by the word man or woman. And then sometimes they wouldn't even have a sort of like a logo having done them up already, like things like Blade, he would just, which still by the way we haven't seen, he would just randomly announce at the end. This year he announces a load of stuff. The Fantastic Four's Fantastic Car sort of flies over and you think, oh my gosh, and then they're actually on stage and you think... A car flew over. The Fantastic Car. The Fantastic Car sort of flies over and you think oh my gosh, and then they're actually on stage and you think a car flew over The Fantastic Car the Fantastic Car their vehicle from the comic

Yeah, just a small little hatchback But souped up slightly. Yeah, also listen you can get a lot of luggage in the boot You can if there's four of you honestly, it's useful surprisingly roomy. Yeah exactly. They used to have a Citroen They swapped to the Fantastic car and they have not looked back. Now, so that seemed to be the big announcement that they were actually there and then they're coming over to film in Pinewood. Lots of these films are now filming in Pinewood, which is quite significant in the UK.

Another reason they were in trouble is that the next phase of Marvel movies, which are all in these phases, never-ending respawning product, the big bad in it was a guy called Kang who was played by Jonathan Majors. Now, and they introduced him in Ant-Man 3 and he was convicted of assault and harassment recently and they had to part company with him. So all those plans have gone awry. And hearing you talk about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is like hearing my mum talk about her friends. I know.

You know what I mean? You go home and they get like a good 20 minutes and eventually you work out who's connected to who. My mother says, of course you know them. It's like I've met them once for 30 seconds in 1983, but we talk about them, you know. So what Deidre says, you can't tell me which Deidre that is because I know there's been a number of them. Yeah, perhaps I'm too close to this thing. Anyhow, on come all these masked people and they say that the new villain is going to be Doctor Doom. Now who unmasks himself and is going to be playing Doctor Doom but Robert Downey Jr. Now I am going to do a spoiler here. If you don't know

that Robert Downey Jr. is Iron Man and he dies in Avengers Endgame, you're like one of the last three people on earth not to know this. So I'm sorry about that. What? You said what? That's the only one I've ever worked. So I'm sorry if I've ruined it for you but he does and everybody knows this right and also there was sort of no feeling that even though how can you bring him back you can never bring him back but they were thinking that in order to make Marvel work again they somehow have to get the old gang back together whether or not they do and not only that he's going to be Dr Doom, Victor Von Doom.

I mean, come on. Victor Van Doom, excuse me. Who's going to a doctor called Dr Doom? Dr Doom, yeah. I think he's a doctor of letters. You know, like if you ring your GP, you've got three choices. There's Dr Patel, there is Dr Robertson, or Dr Doom also has. I am going to go with Patel or Robertson, I think.

Dr. Doom sitting there going, why does no one ever like to come to my surgery? I tell you what, you're gonna say any GP appointment you can, so you take it, no problem. I can get a GP appointment, my god, yes please. But not only that, it will be these two movies, He's Gonna Be the Villain, are going to be directed by the Russo Brothers. They did two of the Captain Americas, but they crucially also did Avengers Infinity War and Avengers Endgame, which are obviously the biggest movies. When you say crucially. Crucially, they are. So to say Robert Downey Jr. is coming back in movies directed by the

Russo brothers. If you're a Marvel fan, it is the biggest thing that they could possibly have announced. It's like for Fulham fans when we heard that Ryan Cessignan is coming back from Spurs. It's the big guns, the ones that have made them an absolute fortune before and made them a fortune by making great movies. Stanley Junior has probably taken 600 million out of Marvel, maybe more, 600 million dollars. And they're paying them another huge amount to do this. Why? Well, it's clear that they needed something so enormous to rescue this.

Don't forget that this is, however, the most successful run of form ever in Hollywood, ever in the whole history of Hollywood. The most successful entertainment franchise that has ever been created. It's pulled in over 30 billion at the box office. And in 2001, Marvel was sharing a tiny, tiny little office with a company that made kites. No, really? Okay, so it is a meteoric rise and it dominated the whole of entertainment. Do you reckon the people in charge of the kite companies still ring occasionally? Oh no, they're massive. They're absolutely enormous. They're a defence contractor now.

They make defence kites, okay, and they laugh at 30 billion. One of the things we've always said about Marvel is that the IP is the star. Robert Downey Jr is a rare one because he has got a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Oppenheimer last year. But the Russo Brothers, they go off, they make films, they do things for Apple, for Netflix, for Amazon Prime. They're not that successful. It's interesting, the Rotten Tomatoes score for the Russo Brothers for their MCU movies

is 89 to 90 percent. For their non-MCU movies movies is 39 to 40 percent. Wow. What have they done that's not Marvel? A very very expensive TV series called Citadel that wasn't a particular success. They've done a movie called The Grey Man. They keep working with like Marvel stars. They did something with Tom Holland which was called Cherry that was not, which was basically a flop. And again, we're talking, we keep talking about this. The actors are not really the stars.

Once people come out of the MCU, their movies are often flops. They may not be able to make it, so it's really the brand that's the star. It's like the Big Brother house, when people come out, you're like, well, no, I'm not interested. As soon as they're doing the interview with Davina, you go, oh no, when you were in the house, that was fun.

I was gripped. Now I recognize you're just some guy from Letchworth. And now no longer. It's interesting that Robert Downey Jr. would try and do this. I have to say, he's never going to be as famous as he is as when he's playing Tony Stark or in this, and we'll come to how on earth, sorry, he's just been playing Tony Stark, the most famous guy in the canon. How can he now be a villain? Yes, that's why I want to ask you. Marvel is now in its multiverse phase, which, you know, put kindly, it's like shows that there's all different, you know, different realities and different timelines where all

different things are possible. But unkindly, I would just say anything can be anything. It's just a massive hand wave to kind of wave away plot problems or to bring people back from the dead when they're already. That's so clever. That's like that bit in Terminator when Linda Hamilton's trying to work out the timeline and Arnie goes, listen, your brain hurts if you think about that too much. But that was clever and ironic then, but now I just feel like it's a way to try and

sort of spew out more money for this franchise. In one of the recent comic book versions of this, Dr. Doom bound a piece of of Doctor Stranger's soul to himself. How did he do that? Hand wave, hand wave. Maybe he combined a piece of, Tony Stark couldn't bind a piece of himself to Doctor Doom. Who knows, who knows. They'll find a way to make it work because they have said, oh, Iron Man can't come back. Kevin Feige has repeatedly said, oh, I think, you know, to the fans, we've said that he's died. But you know, it's not a surprise if you don't lay the ground for him never coming back and then, oh my god, he comes back. So really, in a slightly depressing way, anything can be anything. They can do anything they want, they can put it in a different timeline

and Kevin Feige will think, I know exactly what the fans can swallow and if they want it and the fans will swallow it then why can't we do it? Yes, tricky isn't it because where's the jeopardy then? Nothing really there's there are no stakes because no one can really die in lots of these things. The narrative stakes are not enormous I would say even though the fate of the entire world is always the stakes supposedly in every film but I don't think the narrative stakes are enormous. One of the things Robert Downey Jr said on stage stage at Comic-Con was you know what can I say I

like playing complicated characters and I have to say that we like our complicated characters simple in the MCU. It's like a warped Tony Stark he's really selfish but he also makes a really noble sacrifice. A libertarian is a bit of a dickhead but he also wants to save the world. I mean it's that kind of complicated so I'm sure his Doctor Doom will be a same version of that kind of complicated. So Robert Downey Jr. is the greatest comeback story in the history of Hollywood, from where he was to where he ended up. You know, he went to prison for a year, you know, he's found with guns and crack in his car, persona non grata, came out, so he had a slight comeback and it was an anim-mobile and things like that.

But then he found with drugs again, now the best-paid actor in Hollywood. And that's all because of Marvel and because they took a shot, they really wanted him to be Iron Man. Bear in mind that Marvel was nothing before Iron Man came out at all in terms of a film franchise. I heard that they used to share an office with a kite company. Yeah, I mean, can you believe it? I don't know where I heard that.

Can you believe it? But they were nothing then and to say, oh yeah, we want to bet the office with a kite company. Yeah, I mean, can you believe it? I don't know where I heard that. Can you believe it? But there were nothing then. And to say, oh yeah, we want to bet the farm on a guy who has, we're gonna have to drug test every day and all these sort of things. It seemed a really odd decision, but it became, obviously as we've said, it quickly became enormous. Let me tell you what Robert Downey Jr.'s day

would have been like on Oppenheimer, okay? He's a supporting actor. I thought you were gonna say what his day was like just previous, just before his arrest. Yeah, I mean, it's a little actor. I thought you were going to say what his day was like just previous just before his arrest. Yeah, it's a little bit of a blur. Christopher Nolan really is always the biggest person on any of those sets. One of the things in his new Marvel deal, which is actually something I already knew he had, but now this has become clear in this latest Marvel deal, part of his contract is

he gets a trailer encampment. His trailer is not on the set okay there's a whole separate area where he has a whole bunch of trailers, some multi-story trailers and and he's completely separate from everyone else. He can't have that anywhere else, he can have that in the MCU. He's got a trailer on a different timeline to anyone else's on the set. What do you think he has in his trailer encampment? I think he has, you know, various on-call chefs. He'll have his own private gym. He will have a post where he can survey the rest of the set,

probably with a set of binoculars. Oh, that's good idea. And thank God, look at them having a terrible time having to eat. Podcast studio. Yeah, I mean, the lot. Escape room. Yeah.

Yeah, just, I mean, the fun stuff, really. Table tennis. And on Oppenheimer, he's just got a regular Winnebago like anyone else. Yes, he would have performed in a... you can't have ridiculous demands. You can have some ridiculous demands because you're Robert Downey Jr. but you're in a supporting role and everyone's sort of saying, I'm thrilled to be working with Christopher Nolan. But there's nobody bigger on any single Marvel set than Robert Downey Jr. and that easily counts the directors. Robert Downey Sr.?

Very, very senior. The most senior. He's also guaranteed an unbelievable amount of things like back end and points and all this. The Russo brothers themselves who are coming back are getting, they get incentives, pay reward incentives that kick in when the movie passes $700 million and a billion, which by the way, these will definitely pass. You can see why they're all doing it and it makes sense. Creatively, is it fascinating? I don't think that they're creatively fascinating anyway as movies. Hollywood hasn't really got any other ideas. These are so unbelievably successful. They were like an over-performing hedge fund. They were like made of really, except without a kind of creepy 17th floor where actually all the Ponzi scheme is being run out of. They were like made of really, except without a kind of creepy 17th floor where actually

all the Ponzi scheme is being run out of. They were like this unbelievably guaranteed way of making money and everyone tried to switch to them. Universal tried to and failed to create their own sort of dark universe which didn't work. All the studios tried to pivot to this type of movie making and if it doesn't work anymore, what do you do now? So it's a huge relief that Deadpool and Wolverine has done so completely well and that obviously now they've got, when they bought Fox they bought got certain other properties.

Okay let me tell you who they bought back in the fall, they bought the X-Men, that's why they can do Wolverine and they bought the Fantastic Four. So these are some new people. The guys with the Fiat. The guys with the Fiat. Yeah. The guys with the Fantastic Four. The Fiat Fantastica. And they bought them in and so now they can do more and they can do the crossover things of which they become very famous and there maybe is a way out. Reports of the death are very exaggerated which is good news for lots of things. So that's one of the very interesting things about it is as you said right at the beginning, literally one of the most successful if not the most successful endeavors in the history Hollywood, building of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I mean, you might

argue Star Wars universe, but this is, I mean, and even this gets to the point where everyone goes out, they've lost it. Oh my God, they're so useless. They can't even run this properly. Yeah. And what a flop. And you think, my God, it's impossible to win a career in success, isn't it? It's absolutely, it's important. They all end in failure, but I think that failure will be staved off for a while yet. And also there are no really other ideas how to film multiplexes. So bottom line, so these films will be coming out when do we think? So Fantastic Four will come out in 2025. By the way, that is that as of last week that

started filming a week ago at Pinewood. Both of these two new massive Avengers films will also be filmed in the UK, I would have thought at Pinewood. Both of these two new massive Avengers films will also be filmed in the UK, I would have thought at Pinewood. That's so great. It's in a difficult time for the industry because what people don't understand when if you film at Pinewood or something, you bring a few execs and stuff over from America, but the entire crew is British. Will be British, yeah. And that's a huge group. The support crew for a film is absolutely massive.

So many thousands of names. There are thousands of names, obviously some of those are VFX and they'll be in different countries in the world, but a huge number of those will be British jobs. Exactly, I go down to the Thursday Murder Club set at Shepperton, you go round all the different stages and everybody is British and everybody is a craftsperson, everyone has a skill and everyone's doing this incredible job at a very, very high level. And it's so great. You can just feel the economy throbbing and growing

when you're on a movie set. So thank you to the MCU for that. For bringing it all to the UK. So are these films gonna be called Doctor Doom? They are. Doctor Doom will see you now, I would call it. I would call it Carry On, Doctor Doom. They're gonna have to do a sort of earlier one than they thought they'd do, which is

a sort of interstitial thing to make sense of, a slight conceptual leap they've done, which is going to be called Avengers Doomsday. And that will come out in 2026 and then Avengers Secret Wars in 2027. My view of that Marvel Cinematic Universe is this, a lot of them are terrible. A great MCU movie is a great movie. And you think with the people behind it, we might have a couple of great new movies on our hands though. There will be huge new movies. Also, I mean... Huge and great are different though.

Yeah, I think I agree with you. And I'm afraid I don't think they're necessarily great movies. Oh listen, in two years' time, let's review them. Yeah. And we'll play that back. I imagine they'll be very, very successful movies, but if you ask me if I think they're great movies, Oh listen, in two years time let's review them. Yeah. And we'll play that back. I imagine they'll be very very successful movies but if you ask me if I think they're great movies, no I don't.

And I think it's bizarre that this is the premier cultural product of our time and it doesn't reflect well on us as a society. That sounds like a cue to go to an advert. Yeah, I think it does. Anytime I hear Marina say, I don't think it reflects well on us as a society, I think, hello, let's talk to some of our advertisers. Welcome back everybody. I think we're going to talk now about the Edinburgh Fringe. We are. We're going to talk about stand-up comedy because the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

is on right now. It's in Edinburgh. A whole month of stand-up shows, theatre, works in progress, lots of amazing things up there. If you've not been it's well worth going. But it made me start thinking about the comedy industry as it stands at the moment because it's very emblematic of that. Edinburgh always used to be this is the place you go to be discovered. So this is the place where you go unknown and you leave a superstar. I remember going in the early 90s, I've been going to the Edinburgh Festival

for 30 odd years now, more than that. And the early 90s, I remember going up there and David Williams and Matt Lucas had a show, Armstrong and Miller, Mighty Boosh, League of Gentlemen, they were all in smallish venues and they all sort of really, really cracked it that year. People would come up and see these shows shows have meetings with these people in London put them on television and then they become superstars. From university I went twice

and did the Oxford review and performed for two years. Did you perform? Yes. Wow like sketches and things. Yeah. Did you have to do any voices? I had to do a lot of voices and you know you get reviewed by people and we had reviews of our shows and it was really sort of there were big comedy producers people like Avalon up there and everyone was trying to get spotted and noticed and it has always been that springboard and then obviously in later years you've had things like Baby Reindeer or Fleabag or Nanette that start off as Edinburgh shows that they can't. Taskmaster started off as an Edinburgh show so you know it's always been the place that

you would go to be found and therefore actually it's become quite expensive as a comic to go up there because the rewards are so big. You are willing to spend a lot of money to play in a very small venue and not take a huge amount of the cut of the gate and, you know, put yourself through that and get yourself into debt because the upside was absolutely massive. Now, the interesting thing more recently, that industry of going to Edinburgh, being found by television and then making your money has collapsed. And when I mean collapsed, it is non-existent. Just about pre-pandemic we saw the very end of it. I'm gonna say the last comic to now be big on television,

the last Indiana Jones to sort of roll under the door as it was closing was Maisie Adam. So Maisie is on loads of shows and she's brilliant. Since then the television industry, the television comedy entertainment industry has completely disappeared. There is now no conveyor belt. If you used to be in Edinburgh, you would have meetings with 10, 20, 30 development producers straight afterwards because there were lots of independent production companies. They were all developing shows. They were all doing pilots. Some of those pilots would be made into series. They all needed comedians to be in that. The smaller the pilot, the more the newer the comedian you needed. So you're always looking for somebody who you knew you could book, but who was brilliant and no one

else had found yet. And it was just the age old story. So many of our comics, so many of our big standups, you know, in that place I've seen Romesh in a tiny little room, Josh Whitcomb in a tiny room. Just all the big names of now. If I go way back to my first ever festival, I've seen Alan Davis in a tiny room, who by the way I think did probably the best hour of stand-up I've ever seen in my entire life, back in the mid-80s that was. And you met people who helped you in your career, I always thought. I remember doing weird things. Simon Monnery, who had this character called the League Against Teadium, which is an incredible... and he used to run this thing called Club Zarathustra.

I remember me and Sally Phillips going on for a couple of nights in that show and doing weird. But then you met all these other comedians and they pulled you up and they helped you. It was really good for that, for the sort of cross pollination of all those sort of things. Yeah, it's been an extraordinary breeding ground, an extraordinary breeding ground of gossip and all sorts of things going on and an amazing place for comedians. As I say, that's why it became rather expensive because the venues in Edinburgh by and large will take 60-40 of the ticket price, rents have gone up and up and up and up as the fringes got bigger and bigger and

bigger. You know, the costs of brochures and advertising, all that stuff. So everything got very, very expensive. Now you come back from the pandemic, the television entertainment, comedy entertainment industry has disappeared. You know, it's genuinely disappeared. All of those panel shows, like millions of them, they are all gone. And the people at those production companies who were in development, they have all gone. But the Edinburgh Festival has not caught up with that at all. So the Edinburgh Festival is still incredibly expensive, but it is not a springboard to anything.

And when we say incredibly expensive, like just for the month, it's costing people sometimes 12 grand, it can go up to over 20 depending on how big your little company of what you're doing is because you've got to accommodation is killing people. In the old days, you could swallow that, you know, just about for a year and certainly the big agents would pay for you to be there. One of the big agencies would not pay for you to be there. They would pay for you to be there. You would then have to pay them back.

One of the very big agencies. I wonder who that was. Put you up there and you'd suddenly you're in debt to pay them back. One of the very big agencies would put you up there and you'd suddenly you'd have eight grand in debt to them forever. But other agents would go, honestly, I'm going to cover this because I'm going to launch you. What's happened, which is absolutely fascinating, I think, I'll precede this by saying there is not a crisis in the comedy industry. There's definitely a crisis in the comedy television industry. That has gone. The comedy industry is absolutely booming. I mean, it's insanely lucrative. If you're a comic and you can tour, you're going to make an awful lot of money, like a huge amount of money, because your costs are not particularly high. People love

going to see comedy. If you put on a decent show, you know, you're getting 80, 20 probably of the ticket price, maybe 70, 30. So if you can do 100 date tour, 200 date tour to decent numbers, you are making an absolute fortune. There is one thing that helps you with that. And this is the biggest thing that's changed in the last, maybe it's only sort of three years or so really in comedy is comics. Every single time they do a club gig, they film themselves with four GoPros and they do crowd work for the first 10, 15 minute crowd work is when you're talking to the person on the front row, he's saying, where are you from, mate?

What do you do for a living? And then you sort of roast them and have a laugh with them. So you film that every single night and then you cut that up into one minute clips and you put it on TikTok and you put it on Instagram. And that industry is enormous. The reason they do it with the crowd work is by and large, if you're a comic, you write a set and it's quite hard to write a set and you don't really want to give that away too much. You don't want to give away your set.

Whereas if you're just talking to people at the front of the audience, that's free because it's different every single night. Now it didn't start with this guy, but the reason that everybody does this now is this guy Paul Smith. Yeah, are you aware of Paul Smith's work? So Paul Smith, I don't recall him being on television. He's not someone who's been on Would I Lie to You or Taskmaster or anything like that. He's a liver puddley in comic Paul Smith. He started doing this sort of thing in 2010. He was connected with a company called Hot Water in Liverpool, a hot water comedy club who were clearly very, very forward thinking. He now got what they say is the biggest comedy club in the world. Then they worked out there was one in San Francisco that was bigger.

So it's the biggest comedy club in Europe up in Liverpool. But they said to Paul Smith in 2010, they said, just put some of your crowd work on just put clips of it mate. And Paul Smith, say, Oh, come on. I mean, he's going to watch that. They said, just do it. And he did. He is now pretty much the biggest touring comedian in Britain. You know, he is doing like 200 date tour, he's doing the Wembley Arena, he did a 12,000 person gig up in Liverpool. His latest video on Instagram is,

one of his most recent videos on Instagram is him buying a Bentley Continental, right? So this guy, there is money in comedy and Paul Smith is making an awful lot of it. And he did it by building up his own fan base and by putting stuff online and on socials and that is what every single big new comic is doing that it's doing now you're not getting big through Edinburgh you're getting big through YouTube you're getting big

you're getting big through podcasts as well and you're getting big through TikTok. I mean it's interesting this year's festival was launched at the Refringe festivals launched in the TikTok headquarters The money you can make in touring and comedy is huge. I mean TV even in the good old days of TV money It's nothing like touring money touring money is there, you know, it's sure the Netflix special which is you do quite well Yes, you can do quite well of that But if you take Paul Smith, for example, I'm not saying this is him But if you do a 200-date tour, say, and lots of these big comics do 200-date tours, and that includes all the legacy comics, you

know, the people who did start on TV, the Diary, Breen's and people like that. If you're doing 200-date tour, you're doing maybe a thousand people a night and you've got an 80-20 split on the box office, 35 quid a ticket, then your tour just grossed 5.5 million pounds, right? And what are your overheads there, by the way, apart from a rail rover? You know, it's like, you're not a band, you're not someone having to do this incredible stage show,

you're not someone having to have lights and lasers. A really funny person standing up there connecting with an audience night after night. It doesn't cost very much. I do think there's something very democratic about it. I'm gonna take one example, it's a guy called Vittorio Angeloni, who I went to see at Edinburgh two years ago, I think. So Vittorio had a really good Edinburgh,

is a proper Irish stand-up, very funny, mainstream, you can stick him on telly tomorrow. Of course, you can't stick him on telly tomorrow anymore because there is no more telly, right? It's gone and every single place is filled by legacy comedy acts. So, Vittorio, you think, well, what can you do with Vittorio? But he and Mike Rice have a huge podcast now, and he has loads of YouTube clips, and Vittorio can now tour. And he didn't need television, he didn't need any of that stuff. He didn't need all of these people who,

any time someone is young and talented talented who absolutely just swoop on that person. And if you have YouTube and if you have podcasts, the really interesting thing that happens is you cut out so many middlemen. And the reason so many comics do podcasts and the reason so many of them do their own stuff on YouTube is you remove every single barrier between you and the advertiser where people are getting paid when they do anything sort of on television. Every single channel has gone. You don't have a channel, you don't have a production company, you don't have any of that stuff. The money runs straight to you and you can do the act that you want to do. You can do the work that you want to do. You find out very quickly who your audience

is, what your audience likes, what it is they like about you, stuff that you can push them in this direction and that direction. So I think creatively it's a very, very interesting thing. People always say that the smaller the screen that you work on, the better your prospects currently are in entertainment. So if you do something that can be seen on a phone, you're doing well. If you're working largely in the theatrical exhibition window, you're having a few problems. Yeah, it's exactly it. And there are so many examples of people. Adam Rowe does the Have a Word podcast with Dan Nightingale, George Lewis doing a big tour now, all these people who have had absolutely no TV exposure really. But of course they have had TV exposure because what does TV mean now? It means a screen. It means you're looking at some clips of somebody.

Edinburgh, what happens to Edinburgh? Well, I was talking to David O'Dohidy about it, who still does Edinburgh every year. He says, but look, it's soon just gonna become what we would call legacy acts, which is comments from years ago. And he says, and of course I'm gonna come to Edinburgh every year, so I love it.

He says the most, it's just great. And David O'Dohidy, he's sold out every single show he's done at Edinburgh for 10 years in a big venue. So he's not somebody who would worry about the economics of it, but of course he worries about it, about other people because he's an incredibly big supporter of younger comics. And he said, look, Edinburgh have to work out a way to make it worth the while of a 23 year old, 24 year old, 25 year old to come to Edinburgh and do their first show. Because at the moment there is nothing. If you're not going to get found, be launched

onto a big screen and then launched into a tour, why are you coming to do Edinburgh? You wouldn't sit at home and do some stuff, play your local club and film it. That's the thing you would do. DoD says, and various other people I've spoken to, Matt Crosby from Pappy's said, the prices of taking a show to Edinburgh have remained the same as when the rewards were massive. Well, I think actually they've got higher, and I think they've got a lot higher than they used to be when, even obviously when I was going, which is a long time ago, not attending, but when I was performing, it was easy to, you could easily rent a place that wasn't a million miles away from the centre. And certainly those agents who used to take clients up and pay for them are no longer doing that,

because why would you, if you've got 12 grand to spend on a client, stick it all into their social media strategy I mean why wouldn't you be I was speaking to someone this week and they said that all of them now on their flyers which you have to everyone's still bizarrely hands out flyers to try and get people into their shows and they all have their TikTok follow accounts on them. Can I just say one thing it just encountered something you said earlier I do agree that it's a meritocracy and you know, obviously TikTok and Edinburgh of old used to say the same thing, which was that if you can scrape it together, then anyone can come and we surface anyone, anyone there's no real barrier here, although there was obviously a barrier in terms of cost, performing Edinburgh, but they all saying we're putting amateurs out there.

But I do think that it leads to a certain flattening of the market, the creative market to some extent, because there are people who do odd shows and there are odd comics that don't clip well and they don't, you know, or they do improv and that doesn't necessarily respond well to short form video and not everything, not everything is well served by short form video and creatively.

And if you're saying the things that work, you know, whatever crowd work, whatever, actually, although I actually think that it's limiting creative, it narrows the creative spectrum because the things that work on TikTok are less diverse than the things that work on Edinburgh Stages. Yes, I agree entirely. All I mean about TikTok is that's now the way to go from a small comic to an arena comic. And it used to be television. And television also, by the way, is quite reductive.

And there's certain things that work and certain things that don't work. And so what Edinburgh needs to become again is the home for those quirky, unusual things. We actually wear extraordinary stuff. I mean, the League of Gentlemen, I remember seeing, they were so weird and we all saw really odd stuff there.

Yeah, you know, Harry Hill, stuff that where you would never think for a second, oh, this is going to be one of the biggest acts in the country. And that's what Edinburgh needs to be. That has to have a home. But for that to work, Edinburgh's got to work out that it no longer has this premium. It can no longer charge this premium because it is no longer delivering what it used to deliver. You know, TikTok are paying now this year. They're paying for lots of acts to go there. And that reminds me of lots of these tech companies that do a little bit of bricks and mortar as it were, like in the way that sort of Netflix want to have some cinemas or whatever open because then they can show their films in and then they might be eligible for awards.

TikTok want to say, oh, we, you know, we, we, we're going to pay for some people to go, but really they've subsumed it all. Great green shoots at the Fringe. Monkey Barrel, which is one of the festivals, is much better for comics. The Free Fringe, which basically just rock up and see a show in lots of different venues and you put money in a bucket afterwards. So there's ways and means of making that experience cheaper. That needs to become what the fringe is essentially, because as you say, we need somewhere for those people who don't want to stick a GoPro at a club gig and film them talking to the front row of the audience. I love that people do that and have managed to leverage that into a big career.

I genuinely think that's great. But for comedy to really grow, we need something like that because it is not going to grow on television anymore. If I can finish by talking about this idea of, you know, if you're a comic, then, you know, oh, God, there used to be all these producers used to come up and see us and it used to be great. And, you know, you'd have been taken for lunches in London, you'd do a pilot and stuff like that. Behind that is an enormous industry which has collapsed completely. It's an industry which where I know an awful lot of people which is this world of comedy entertainment. There's still some of it but there is a fifth maybe of what there used to be. And if you want to go on tour, that's you and a couple of people. If you want to do a TikTok thing that's you, you know your editor and director might be the same person. There's you two or three people, maybe three or four people.

If you want to do a television show, if you want to make Mock the Week, you've got five runners, you've got five researchers probably. You've got two APs, which is assistant producer, which is somewhere in between, when people have been a researcher and aren't quite ready to be a producer. You've got a producer, you've got a couple of exec producers.

In the studio, you've got six camera operators. You've got a gallery full of lighting, gallery full of sound, makeup, you've got wardrobe. You've got a studio camera operators, you've got a gallery full of lighting, a gallery full of sound, make-up, you've got wardrobe. You've got a studio. Yeah, you've got a studio. You've got 80 people probably that you are giving a job to for three months. So to make this thing Mock the Week, which is a simple half hour bit of entertainment with new, you know, youngish comics on it, it's employing 80 people for three months

and it is no longer doing that. And that is 80 people who don't have work for three months. And I can count on the fingers of one hand now the amount of production companies that still have big development departments and who are making comedy pilots because the world and the economics of it have changed. And because comics can find the exact same exposure, far less hassle and far less money by doing podcasts, they can find exactly the same amount of exposure for far less money, far less trouble, clips on TikTok and YouTube. So the world of television, that's one of the first bits that's been completely hollowed out.

And the immediacy of it, which is what people expect nowadays, is that, you know, on things like SATA, I mean, it's kind of amazing that they managed to get more than week out in a week. But you can have a funny idea in the morning and have it going viral by lunchtime. If you're one of the related to a piece of the news that people are obsessed about at that particular moment. And so it's that kind of instant consumption that certainly in terms of Sassai, you're thinking, wait, I'm doing a show, you know I mean you're doing a show that what is 18 months in development and then and it's satirizing what now and an awful lot of An awful lot of comics. They're big skil is speed of thought

That's the thing that they love and if you have speed of thought you want the minimum distance between you and an audience Yeah, but you want the idea and then you want the audience to hear that idea and that's the absolute idea on a podcast It's perfect for that If you're suddenly having to go to a studio and you have hair and makeup and you this eight other people who all trying to get stuff in as well why would you do it? I will say that that industry is really gone. Just the funniest people you will ever meet in your entire life. A lot of the producers are as well, a lot of the APs, I mean this it just this funny funny talented

people. So if you're in any other industry, if you're high up in any other industry whether that's marketing or if you're a big. So if you're in any other industry, if you're high up in any other industry, whether that's marketing or if you're a big company or if you're anyone that wants content, anyone that wants ideas. Which is everybody now. Which is everybody. If you're looking for that,

then there is a huge amount of people out there. You have to pay them very, very well because they're brilliant. You've got really, really good people who can come into your business and bring you an experience and bring you skills and bring you ideas, which you're not gonna get from some of the people who are working for you at the moment.

I would say if you are anybody looking to really kind of hypercharge a brand or hypercharge an actor, whatever it is, anything that needs marketing, anything that needs to build an audience, there is a group of people at the moment who are struggling for work and find them and give them work because you will absolutely not regret it because they are so brilliant and the industry they've worked in for ages has disappeared. The skills that they have have not disappeared and the talent they have has not disappeared so there is a huge opportunity if you want brilliant people, brilliant writers, brilliant producers, brilliant ideas people, there was a lot of them out there at the moment. But I do hope that was all

interesting and not too unfocused but there's because there was a lot to unpack there. Any recommendations? I've been in a place with absolutely no Wi-Fi, which only had DVDs. What do you want me to recommend? The Jason Bourne trilogy? Just re-watch them all? Bad Boys 1 and 2? 2 is better than 1?

So sorry about that, but not this week. I will recommend the Reba series on iPlayer then, which I think is great. It's taken from Ian Rankin's books. They take quite a lot of liberties with his characters and I don't entirely know what he feels about that but I know he's an exec producer on it. But it's really good. It's really well written. It's really well put together. It's very, very Scottish in a great way and I absolutely loved it. Six-parter on iPlayer, the new Rebus. Does that about wrap it up, Richard? I think it does. Shall we reconvene on Thursday for a question and answers?

Do join us. The address for questions is therestisentertainmentatgmail.com. And we will see you then. See you then. Bye bye. I'm a man of faith, I'm a man of faith