The Rest Is Entertainment - Romantasy - the biggest genre you're not aware of?

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

Richard reveals some juicy details about his forthcoming new book but before then he and Marina delve into the world of 'romantasy', the genre which is taking up space on bookshelves at great pace. Plus a dissection of Dakota Johnson's Madame Web press tour, the return of Formula 1's Drive To Survive and which Gladiator Richard would have on House of Games. Twitter: @restisents Email: [e-mail] Producer: Neil Fearn Executive Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Recommendations; Watch Richard: American Fiction (Cinema) Live Maria: The Hills of California (Harold Pinter Theatre) and A Mirror (Trafalgar Theatre) 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/trie It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ Pre-order Richard's new book here - www.wesolvemurders.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Apply now at careers.timhortons.ca Hello and welcome to another episode of The Rest Is Entertainment with me Marina Hyde and me Richard Osman. Good morning slash afternoon slash evening to you Marina. How are you Richard? Yeah I'm not bad, I can't complain. Listen we've got lots of fun things to talk about. It's fun to be sitting in this studio, we're back in the old studio now. But I got used to the other studio, that's the problem. Oh we will be back in the other studio.. But I got used to the other studio. That's the problem. Oh, we will be back in the other studio.

But I can't do constant chopping and changing. But you can if we get to sit exactly opposite each other. So we will be back in there. Better camera angles. Now... You can watch this on YouTube by the way. Yes, you can watch this on YouTube. Now, this week we are going to talk about... That's a stunning endorsement.

I mean, you can watch it on YouTube. Just watch the Richard Tarr of the screen, please. Now, this week we are going to talk about I'm one of the few people to have helped Madam Web, the movie, limp across a very, very low UK box office tally. And we're going to talk about mad press tours. Dakota Johnson, the star of that, has been on quite an eye-catching, eyebrow-raising press tour. It's quite hard to do a press tour for a film that everyone seems to hate.

Already, from the second the trailer dropped. I'm going to talk a little bit about Romantasy, which is a romance-fantasy hybrid, which is the biggest-selling genre in books around the world. I mean, crazily huge numbers. It's sort of like a porny version of Lord of the Rings, but it's massive, so we will... I'm dying to talk about this, because I don't really understand it at all.

I've had a look and I've been quite disturbed by what I've found. It's a porny Lord of the Rings. Also, we're going to begin by talking about Drive to Survive. Now, Drive to Survive is the show that runs on Netflix and it's behind the scenes on Formula One. It has been an absolute monster success. It comes back on this Friday, about eight days before the first Grand Prix of the season. But what it does, it takes you behind the scenes of a season. So the season that's about to drop on Friday will take you behind last season. And so you see all the drivers and the plot lines and all the team principals. And

one of those team principals is Christian Horner, who is the team principal of Red Bull. Now, he has been alleged to have indulged in controlling behaviour over a Red Bull employee and sending sexually suggestive text messages. He denies all these allegations, we should say. But it's kind of interesting that this is all breaking around the time of the new season, around the time of the new Formula One season and the show. So we can talk all about that.

Richard, you are a drive- survive watcher as am i yeah i love it it's always formula one is that fascinating thing that if five years ago you'd said um oh yeah i'll tell you what people are going to love behind the scenes on formula one that's one of those pictures where everyone would go well of course not it's like the goggle box thing we say yeah let's watch some people watching tv and everyone would go well of course not but the thing with formula one is people have always loved it if they like machines and the one of the unique things about um formula one hard to think of any other sports at the same But the thing with Formula One is people have always loved it if they like machines. And one of the unique things about Formula One, hard to think of any other sports that are the same, maybe skiing, is you cannot see the competitors at any point.

You can't look them in the eyes. You can't see what they're doing. And Drive to Survive has absolutely turned that on its head and made all of the drivers characters, made them personalities, put them in a soap opera. So you suddenly, I think if you don't like Formula One, you see the point of it, which is there are rivalries, there are goodies and there are baddies. You can so see the point of it for the sport. And a lot of people always say, oh, we've been trying to make like this for years, kind of unfettered or supposedly unfettered. We'll come back to that later.

Behind the scenes access to these kind of sports. But something like between 20 and 30% at any point of Formula 1 fans now say they got into the sport because of Drive to Survive, which is sort of incredible. They needed to do something like this in a way because, as you said, you can't see the drivers. There are only relatively few races a year. There are now 24.

There were even fewer when this started. And they go all the way around the world, so they may very well be happening in the middle of the night or very early in morning and late at night and you may not see this thing and they're very very rarely in democracies yeah anymore in the in the 70s i think all the grand prixs were in democratic countries and these days you can you can go months before you before you go to a germany yeah we'll be starting in bahrain this season as i indicated anyway i mean i how can we what should we talk about the sort of aesthetic of it? I really can't, it's a dark masterclass in that Netflix aesthetic when you're doing a documentary

and it could be about Stalinism or it could be about the Second World War or it could be about Formula One. But you're not allowed to, they don't want anyone to be seen asking a question off camera. So one must answer one's own question. So you'll see someone like Christian Horner is saying what do we feel about coming second we fucking hate her he has a sort of intercontinental ballistic blandness to him yes which you're made to feel like you're getting all this behind the scenes thing and you might see someone swearing but it was a problem for the show that the number one driver max verstappen for three seasons refused to be involved well he said and and you know, he's right.

It's made for people who don't know the results of what happened, is the truth. And, you know, that's why I love watching American sports documentaries. I can watch the whole of The Last Dance and be like, oh, I wonder if the Chicago Bulls win, because I don't know. I don't know, but I didn't watch it. And so if you don't know the results, it's exciting. But they will occasionally edit in such a way,

and they will overlay commentary on something that wasn't contemporary just to make it more exciting to explain what's going on. What he rightly said and he's really hit the nail on the head was to say it's like the Kardashians and yes, I do think that the show that this is most analogous to quite weirdly

is either keeping up with the Kardashians as it used to be or the Kardashians as it is called now. I tell you it's harder to keep up with Formula one drivers than the kardashians yeah but and there were sort of non-participant characters in the kardashians really like you'd kind of see when he she was with kanye kim you would kind of see him just off to the side of scenes because he didn't really want to you know ruin his fantastic reputation he had other plans he had a whole other plans for that so um but there's something weird about the time in it

because the Kardashians are so completely reported on. You know every little detail of their lives and they're part of entertainment news stories all the time. So you constantly see all these things. And then what you're asking fans to do is to go back and re-watch. Nine months later, you're like, oh, you know, this is it. And you'd think that would be quite boring because they followed every cough and spit, little bit like formula one in drive to

survive they know but funnily enough there is something about it the thing that it most represents for me stay with this one okay it's classical drama like ancient gree drama when they tell you the whole story in the prologue so you or in romeo and juliet you know you already know they're gonna die everything reminds you of classical drama not everything reminds me of classical drama but you know what this does because they're going to die. Everything reminds you of classical drama. Not everything reminds me of classical drama. But you know what this does? Because in the prologue of one of those plays, they tell you what's going to happen. And it makes it matter more. So knowing the story, far from people saying, yeah, but how can we do this?

It's not quite a turnaround. Everyone already knows that Kim's got divorced now. Oh, my God. No. Yeah, I know. Breaking. But you want to see it happen. So, yes, you know,

Aeschylus, Drive to Survive, and the Kardashians. You heard this hot take first. Aeschylus in the Red Bull. Yeah. By the way, this is the reason so many people

come out of reality shows or things like that and go, I was watching it back and friends have told me I was so badly edited. I came across as so boring. I came across as slightly robotic and hard to work with

and not over competitive you can think did you max that's so I can't believe they edited you like that I think sometimes when people see their real personalities on screen they go I cannot believe you've edited me he should have remained a Kate Moss figure never speaking and the more you hear it now and she's talking about wellness it's like oh please don't silence is the most intriguing statement of all in many of these shows but anyway now we know what he sounds like and you're right he is quite boring but can we talk a bit about the idea so much of the way that people talk about modern sport now and the types of people who become characters you know we talk now about and certainly when we're doing one of the questions episodes of this show a few

weeks ago we were talking about the manager as main character in football, and there are now cameras trained on the manager the whole time because they've become so much more of a significant performer. Isn't it interesting? I mean, honestly, 20 years ago, the only people who used phrases like narrative and plotline about things other than books

were genuinely media studies students or some elite-level publicist who would talk about that stuff now everybody talks about football in terms of plot lines narratives the characters and these people like christian horner or toto wolf the macedes principal become these much much more significant figures in sport and the way we talk about sport and the way we kind of perceive it all as a story and they they become stars as well. And they've had their whole career. If you're Toto Wolff, you're used to dealing with the egos of racing drivers. And suddenly you're famous and everything you're doing is being looked at.

And he gets mobbed, Toto Wolff. You know, he's really monetized it as well. And loves it. Like Mourinho used to love it. Like Jose Mourinho used to absolutely, he's thinking, oh my God, I am the biggest star on this team. used to love it like jose marino used to absolutely thinking oh my god i am the biggest star on this team and you know when everyone realizes they're in a soap opera it's like they change their behavior it's just this thing with christian horner and who knows what will happen with the investigation but certainly it wouldn't be as big a story if he hadn't just spent five seasons

on the biggest reality show on the planet yeah fascinating to see if they that makes it he's married to jerry halliwell, Jerry from the Spice Girls. So there's a sort of certain need and he features a lot of his home life in the season. You often see them trotting around on their horses in their big country mansion. But the interesting thing is sport, by and large, and this is a massive generalisation,

but if you want to really look at sports audience, it has always traditionally been older men. Okay, so it's skewed older and it's skewed male. It always has done. And very smart sports worked out not so long ago. Well, listen, if we want to expand, there are two enormous areas we can expand into, which is have more women watch our sport and have younger people watching our sport. And it's fascinating with the Super Bowl.

And it's almost impossible to overestimate how huge NFL is becoming in the States. It was already massive. And now it's, you know, the biggest thing in the world. But it's still skewed older. And they now, essentially, around the Super Bowl and other games, they recruit YouTubers to come along and do, you know, they literally have the run, the absolute run of the place. They can do whatever they want. They can interview whoever they want. And it's really, really working for them.

Nickelodeon had SpongeBob commentating on the Super Bowl. But again, because it goes viral, it's interesting, and it's about personalities, and it's turning sport into soap. It's turning sport into a reality show, like the Kardashians. But the beauty of having a sport reality show is if you're the Kardashians or if you're the Only Wears Essex, you've constantly got to manufacture drama.

You've constantly got to go. Sorry. Can you pretend that you're annoyed that he's going out with her? And can you look at her across the bar? And that's half an episode. If you've got a documentary that's about Formula One, then every week or occasionally two weeks, you literally every single main character gets in a really fast car and races against each other for two hours yeah i mean you can't get better than that sport you don't know what's going to happen and it's exciting and it's controversial and things can go wrong and it's

dangerous and you didn't have to manufacture any of it at all the stuff behind the scenes you but of course they're manufacturing bits and bobs, but you've always got that thing. If you watch any sports documentary, you watch any Last Chance U or something on Netflix, each episode is ending with the game they've been building up to and you know it hasn't been fixed. You know that they could lose it or they could win it

and it really matters what happens. One of the things I think is the sort of dark obverse to that in some ways is the sense that everything's a plot line and that it's all just hashtag content. And I was really quite surprised in one report about this, the Christian Horner allegations last week, they were saying, and you can see all the Netflix cameras were there picking up some drive to survive gold. And I i thought goodness as i said he denies the allegations but

if you're the person who's made those accusations then the idea that you are just becoming drive to survive gold is a little bit like we there's a point where you just have to stop seeing everything as content and it is actually the real lives are involved in it and i there's something and that's by the way across the board for any of this stuff um it reminds me a lot of classical drama i would say um i tell you what i did in terms of in uh in the interest of research i watch because you know try to survive is a big show for them they've done the same on the tennis tour which grand slam i think it's called they've done the same on the golf tour um which is full swing uh and again it's sort of fascinating because i mean really i really recognize that lots of people don't like

golf right but i'm watching full swing it's great because you get to see their houses you get to see their lives it's interesting and there's a guy called um joel damon who's sort of a journeyman pro but he comes across so brilliantly and now every single week if ever there's golf on i always think oh i wonder how jo how Joel Damon is doing. But isn't that amazing? It's given you a storyline to follow. It's given you someone to root for. And, you know, I'll watch any sport anywhere in the world if I want one team to win and another team to lose.

You know, that's what all sport is. Do I want one team to win? And so, you know, Full Swing has done well. So they had this Netflix's first ever live sports event which was the Netflix Cup which was just before

the Las Vegas Grand Prix which was insanely huge and every star in America was there which is a new race and there was a lot of controversy

about whether it should even happen and it was kind of just beyond showbiz and let's say it did not lose a lot of money for a lot of people

no I think everyone came out Richard Stamper was very sniffy about that as well and then suddenly he felt his pocket And let's say it did not lose a lot of money for a lot of people. No. Yeah, I think everyone came out richer from that. Max Verstappen was very sniffy about that as well. Yeah, and then suddenly he felt his pockets full. What a purist he is. But they had four Formula One drivers and four golfers

playing on the Steve Wynn Golf Resort just off the Strip in LA. Two hours live. It involved golf cart. A cursed pro-am. It involved, exactly. Truly cursed pro-am. Golf cart races. They had like kind of speed holes. The presenting staff were not, I'm going to say, not traditional golf presenters.

Were they traditional presenters, Richard? I would say they did not have as much live experience as sometimes I would look for. Oh, that is an absolute disremew. If I was producing a two-hour live show, there is certainly, you know, I'd be happy if I could look down and see Gabby Logan there. Whatever happens, Balding's going to get us out of trouble here. And I think there were certain presenters I thought, I'm not entirely sure if you're a safe pair of hands. And it was sort of a mess in a way, but it was very watchable.

Past the time, you're watching people do unusual things and i would have thought that if they carry on doing those things and make them better because by the way it's very hard to do a two-hour live show where it's formula one players and golf and no one's ever done it before and everyone at netflix wants you to hit 15 different demographics and everyone's got an opinion so it's very hard to make that show look at bbc one with gladiators it's all it's all the same stuff. It's competition. It's competition and it's personalities. I think your daughter is a huge fan of Gladiators. My daughter is an absolutely huge fan of Gladiators.

She wants to be on Gladiators more than anything. She wants one of them to retire and then she'll take on the name afterwards. I'm going to suggest Legend. We're booking the new series of House of Games at the moment. I made a plea to the gladiators and so now we have to go work out which gladiator would be

best at House of Games. He's not even the best at being Legend, but yeah, no, I would love to see Legend on House of Games. But also, and I hope that we're able to call them by their gladiator name. Oh yeah, of course. Do you think they will wear the leotard? Yes, please.

Never break character. Never break character. Well, they might do, right? But it's funny. Every single person I know who's coming on the new series of House of Games and who knows me, I think every single one of them has sent me a message saying, how am I going to be on with a gladiator? They're all like, can I do the gladiator week?

I would really, really like that. Yeah. It's the future. We did a show years ago on Channel 5 called International King of Sports. And that's the one show, if people say, what show would you like to bring back? I'd bring back that. And it was the idea that some people are brilliant sports people, but haven't found their sport. And so we invented lots of new sports.

There's like kind of running backwards. There's under hurdles. There's like hitting a ball as far as you can with a tennis racket. There's all these different things that we'd invented invented uphill long jump we did uh and we got properly great really really great sports people to do it but who were not professional sports people because they never quite good enough the guy who won the first series adam horder was like almost made it in rugby league but not quite australian guy and people from different countries that's the show i'd love to make for netflix just absolutely supersize that thing and invent a load of new

sports and have people who've never quite found the thing i was so nearly good at badminton uh but and give them something that they are amazing that is definitely ted sarandos's sports adjacent content that is a that's a come and get me plea to ted Sarandos. Yeah. I'm always, you can come and get me, please, Ted Sarandos. You are. He has yet to come and get me. Quickly. I'm moments away. I'm like a kid at Christmas looking out the window.

It's Ted coming. Every time a car goes fast. It's his big sack of money. Is that Ted Sarandos? Ingrid's like, come sit down. He'll be here soon. He'll be here soon. So that's Drive to Survive, which drops on Friday on Netflix.

And on that note, shall we go to a break? Hold on. Gladiators and cars. Yeah, let's go to a break. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Fidelity Investments Canada. Make investing simple. Fidelity's all-in-one ETFs are designed to do just that.

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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 welcome back we are going to talk about Romantasy, which is a fictional genre that I admit I was not altogether on top of until I started reading a lot of articles about it, because it is monster. Is that right, Richard? It is.

Romantasy, romance and fantasy, as you would imagine. And it's the biggest genre in books in the world at the moment. There's two absolute giants of it. Sarah J Maas, who writes Court of Thorns and Roses, and there's Rebecca Yarras, who writes the Iron Flame books, and they're the sort of leading lights of this movement. What is it? Well, what it is, it's sort of fantasy.

It's elves, it's, you know, all that kind of stuff. A lot of fairies. A lot of fairies, fairies and elves, and an awful lot of sex. So it is romance, romance and fantasy. The romance, it could almost be called fuckstasy rather than a romanticy because it's quite pornographic. Yes.

It's a lot going on. So I think the reason it's become massive now, because it's been around a long time, the reason it's become massive now is there are a generation of girls who grew up with Hunger Games and Twilight and those things. And Harry Potter. Harry Potter, yeah. And who want the same thing but want it a bit more spicy is what they say.

They've reclaimed spice and smart. Can't even say it. Spice and smart. Yes. And that's how they kind of hashtag it on things like BookTok so that people can talk about it. They've reclaimed Spice and Smut, the two new gladiators. My favourite, who will be on House of Games soon. One of the reasons it's gone crazy is it's very well done.

So Sarah J Maas, Rebecca Yarris, they're both great writers. You know, it's not literature, but it's, you know, you turn the pages. Is it literature adjacent? I'm not quite so sure, Richard. Oh, well, I look forward to hearing about that but it's like publishing has gone absolutely insane for it. Every four or five years publishing goes completely insane and it's just gone insane again because it's been around since I think that the term was coined in like 2008 you know it's been around for a long time there's been great writers. Jen Williams is an amazing writer who wrote The Ninth Reign but wrote it maybe sort of five or six years too early but you hope that maybe time there's been great writers jen williams is an amazing writer who wrote um uh the ninth reign

but wrote it maybe sort of five or six years too early but you hope that maybe people would go back and kind of refine that kind of stuff but publishing now every single big publisher has set up its own fantasy imprint because this is where all the money is waterstones have finally got a sci-fi fantasy book of the month because it used to be sil siloed. You didn't really find this stuff in bookshops. And people had to sort of order, you know, there wasn't a kind of dedicated area. But it's quite interesting because it has obviously fantasy has often skewed, strangely in some ways, has skewed male as a genre for definite. Like Lord of the Rings, what I always think of as books with a map at the front of them. Some guy standing there thinking, so that's how you get from the minds of Asteroth to the you know planes of gris and dark i love it a long time

to traverse those you know i love a book with a map do you love a book with a map yes i've got a certain amount of use about that yeah there's it's quite a male sort of skewing that particular demographic but this is a bit like that i'm quite male skewing at times yes you can be and i'm and there's nothing wrong with it but it's interesting that this thing that, you know, The Lord of the Rings,

all those sort of series that have been, have far outsold amongst male audiences than female audiences. Women are the sort of heroines of these books. Am I right in saying that?

Yes. They have agency whereas, you know, I often sometimes think in some of those books and particularly some historical drama series or fake historical

fantasy drama series they sort of exist to get raped and as a plot point yes or they're strong women but they're wearing a bikini yeah yeah and i've i you know i i another theory i have i sometimes feel that the reason that those kind of historical drama series are so big with male audiences is because is that they just see women getting treated like shit but you know that's what it was like back then and you think what in well, in Resteros, that was never. I mean, it didn't exist. Why do you create a fantasy land where women don't have to get raped to move the plot along every five seconds? But anyway, that's what these writers have done. That's what these writers have done. That's exactly right. So the incredibly strong heroines and female written

heroines. So it's not like a male idea of a strong woman. It's like an actual strong woman who has vulnerabilities, has a lot of sex with dragons, you know, so there's all that going on. There's a lot of enemies to friends, though, isn't there? That kind of slightly Stockholm Syndrome-y, like Beauty and the Beast, just, they start off,

but mind you, that's been a romance trope forever, like Mills and Boone has been like that. We were talking about Hallmark Christmas movies over Christmas, and that, again, enemies to friends is a big thing. Yeah, exactly.

But it's not going anywhere. I'll tell you a couple of interesting things about it. So any time a genre gets really, really big, celebrities come and try and take it over. No, they don't come and try and take it over. Publishers go, can we get a ghostwritten version of this? But because these books are all 600 pages long and involve incredibly complex world building, and Sarah J Maas has been writing for 12 years.

She's put the work into making these worlds. That's why people love them so much. They're so rich. She started online, didn't she? Started online. She started on WordPress or something like that. Exactly that. She read Lord of the Rings,

loves the idea of Lord of the Rings, loves that feel, loves the kind of feel of that narrative and just sort of tried to apply it to her own life and so has come up with a very, very different version which is reaching a very different audience. She sold 37 million books. I know, right?

There's something like 14 billion TikTok posts that have her hashtagged in it. That's not bad, is it? There's nothing to be sniffed at. But it means it's quite hard for someone to cynically just go, oh, I'm going to write one of these. One of the really lovely things about it is fantasy writers who've... These books, you have to write a big, long book,

and your world-building has to be incredibly good because that audience are incredibly smart. Suddenly they're all getting paid, and they've had like 10 12 15 years of not getting paid or getting paid very very little because it's been seen as a niche now you've got this world where they are the most in demand writers now here's the here's the interesting economic thing that sarah j maas has and rebecca yaros has they sell hardbacks and nobody really sells hardbacks right now hardbacks are the holy grail for the publishing industry, because the publisher, the writer, the bookshops, you make about four

times as much money off a hardback than you do off a paperback. So it's all very well selling 100,000 paperbacks. But if you can sell 500,000 hardbacks, that's crazy money. And that's what fantasy fiction can do, because people are fans. And if you're in a fandom you want every new version of it there's this whole world of things it came from gaming originally of crates yeah okay there's a luma crate and there's fairy crate which are the big ones so once a month they will send you out a new fantasy book and they um curate it they know what their audience will like they do beautiful additions with kind of sprayed edges illustrated maps uh all sorts of things and you could you can pay up to 45 quid for one of these and if you love the world and if you love the writer you'll do that which means that fantasy

people are making a huge amount of money which is great both of those companies by the way fairy crate and illumicrate both set up by women of colour in their 20s, both of whom are now making millions of millions. And it's a subscription service. It's a subscription service. Like the Book of the Month Club of olden days. It's like the Book of the Month Club. They will send you one. You can duck in and out month to month.

Sometimes they'll go, we're releasing like a, they'll say, oh, we've got a special limited edition of this new book, just 30,000 copies, and it gets subscribed immediately. And by the way, there's only about 10 books in the whole of britain that will sell 30 000 hardbacks in a year let alone in a week which is what these um crates can do and so they're both set up by women of color the books are incredibly diverse non-binary inclusive all that kind of stuff and not you know the old go woke go broke you think well this is an industry that's that's just how it's always been you know everything is fluid everything is binary people

there's elves there's all sorts of things going on um and it's the most profitable industry in the whole world of publishing at the moment and it's an extraordinary diverse world the authors are extraordinarily diverse um there's loads of great british writers now who are doing uh sarah ella reefy who had a number one book with fey bound this year which is about black fairies uh it's it's it's an extraordinary world and it's bringing lots of people into bookshops it's bringing a whole generation into reading because i think when you get to sort to 20 or just when you stop reading right but all of these hunger games twilight readers are now moving on to older literature they're reading more books and it's a habit you never get out of it's sort of

the perfect storm it's the right people getting paid for doing the right thing i wonder what we'll see because i think they're starting to do the deals to adapt them for television yes i really wonder what the fandom will be like when they see that because for television yes i really wonder what the fandom will be like when they see that because it could be i mean not like the absolute kind of extreme end of the marvel fandom which could be you know just the dedicated incel demographic that four in four four quadrant incels the did yeah the uh um but i i wonder whether the fandom will it almost strikes me as a bit of a poison chalice being the person who's got to adapt one of those because you feel like I'm

never, never going to get it quite right and there will always be, you know. You're going to get it insanely wrong, I would have thought. However you do it. Because it's so much to do with people's inner life. And they're all going to be made because of course they are and I don't really like watching fantasy on TV. It's not my vibe at all but

yeah. I've got to say, I read some of these, and I would not want to read a book like this at all. I would have no interest in it. Oh, really? No. What is it about a dragon shooting fire when she orgasms that you're having a problem with? I don't know.

I just didn't feel it was enough intellectually stimulating. And I'm sorry, it should have been sort of just erotically stimulating, but it wasn't that either. And so I'll stick with my current reading. What's your current reading? Well, I'm currently reading a biography of Bismarck, Richard. What's not erotic about that? What is not erotic about that?

Who would famously set fire to the curtains every time he orgasmed. I haven't got to that bit yet. It's very good. Jonathan Steinberg. It's been around a while, but it's a very good book. do you know what i was i was actually going to read that but i thought i'm going to wait for the netflix adaptation of that just it's a little blow your curtains off yeah wow by the way because we're talking about books uh am i allowed to to announce my new book well i've been very much hoping you will this is a world exclusive for this podcast it is what

depending if you're listening to this before this morning today, then it's a world exclusive. If you're listening after this morning, then I've literally got to head there. You've eaten your own lunch. I've got to head there straight after this to announce it as well. Yeah, so it's very exciting. It's called, so it's not a Thursday Murder Club book. I've done four of those. They're coming back next year.

So I'll be on to them again. It's called We Solve Murders. You can have a look at the front cover on Twitter and Instagram and stuff like that. We tried to make it look a bit like an 80s kind of airport-y. I love that. Sort of novel. I really like the vibe of the cover design.

Because so many books look like Thursday Murder Club now. Everyone will now look like your new 80s airport design. That will be the next one. We'll see. But it's got a cat and a gun on the front cover so that's like the inside of my brain uh we solve murders it's a it's i wanted to write a book about actual detectives because with thursday murder club you got to wait for happenstance whereas with a detective you could someone can knock on the

door and say here's your plot so it's a father-in-law who lives in a sleepy village in the new forest and a daughter-in-law who's a close protection officer to billionaires uh she's always going around the world big adrenaline junkie he just wants to do the pub quiz and you know hang out with his cat she comes under threat and can only call on one person who she trusts and that's him so he now has to sit on a private jet and miss the pub quiz and so it's the two of them essentially solving murders with her client who's a woman called rosie d'antonio who's the world's best-selling crime author. She's like Jackie Collins for crime. And it's essentially the three of them travelling around the world

trying to outrun a murderer and catch who's trying to kill them. Terrific. When is it out? It is out in September. Listen, you can pre-order now if you want to. I was about to say you can surely pre-order now. I know. I'm duty-bound to say that. And it's always good to pre-order. But anyway, so it's nice to be able to give that

as an exclusive on this podcast. Oh, this is terrific. Yes, more world exclusives, please, as of when they drop. Unless it's post-11 a.m., in which case I've just told Holly Willoughby. Oh, it won't be Holly, of course, will it? It won't be.

The interregnum. Maybe Craig Doyle. Maybe. And I told you that. I said I would never tell Craig Doyle anything before I tell you. The same principle applies. Thank you. But Romanticy is the main thingle anything before I tell you. The same principle applies. Thank you.

But, yeah, romanticism is the main thing. It's extraordinary. It's selling an awful lot. And if you like it, you'll absolutely love it. And, honestly, I feel like a lot of good people are making a lot of money out of it, which is such a nice thing. Proper people who've written online for years and years, who've struggled for years and years,

who've absolutely followed their dreams, written the thing that they love, now suddenly they're making money. I always think that's quite nice. That is a brilliant feel-good story from which we shall move on. A brilliant feel-good story about having sex with elves. About having sex with elves.

We'll move on to something from which people are not making any money. Madam Web, which is the latest addition to the Spider-Verse. Spider-Man is a thing that is held by Sony, and so Sony have made this, even though it's kind of. Spider-Man is a thing that is held by Sony, and so Sony have made this, even though it's gone on Marvel property. It is a movie starring Dakota Johnson as the titular Madam Web clairvoyant.

I think the tagline is, her web connects them all. Well, as one of the people who went to the UK cinema and helped it to its very dismal box office showing, I can tell you I have no idea how her web connects them all. You still can get to the end of the movie. It's a genuinely bad and fascinatingly bad movie because it is, first of all,

what happened is that they had a trailer to it which went viral for all the wrong reasons, they say in the business. There was a line in the trailer which is, he was in the Amazon with my mum when she was researching spiders right before she died. And that line of kind of clunky exposition went viral and dakota johnson actually left her agents the sort of week after that trailer dropped which is it's a fair decision um the the movie itself is genuinely 70 of the dialogue i thought was exposition i've never seen

anything like i've also never seen anything like it. I've also never seen, and bear in mind, I've watched all the Marvel films, product placement quite like it. I now find it quite funny that Pepsi paid that much money to be associated with this movie. The entire final action sequence is essentially around a Pepsi sign.

So now, you know, every time I see a can of Pepsi, I will definitely think of that movie and reach for the Coke instead. What's been sort of quite eye-catching about it is that probably knowing that the movie was awful, as often happens, Dakota Johnson has had to go on a press tour. And she's a little bit of a liability on a press tour anyway, I would say, in general. I love a liability. I love a liability. We all want a liability on a press tour anyway I would say in general which we all love I love a lot but we all want a liability I mean actually Cillian Murphy who was in Oppenheimer obviously and he said oh this is a broken model the press tour because everyone is so bored and to just talk about what a press tour is obviously when you make a movie you have to try and tell everyone

all about it so actors who are actors really and would love to talk about their craft or whatever or not even do any of the promotion, all actors hate doing this. You then have to promote the movie and it takes really months and it can go on. And if you're, by the way, if you're up for an award, you've got to do it all over again, backwards and in heels.

And the thought of having to do it when you obviously know the movie's a turkey is pretty awful. And you can often see actors having to do that. you obviously know the movies are turkey is pretty awful. And you can often see actors having to do that. Sometimes they spin out on press tours anyway. I mean, there was a famous one, Tom Cruise, when he was promoting War of the Worlds, which was a Steven Spielberg movie. He fired his very, very, very long time publicist, who was a woman called Pat Kingsley, who was totally fearsome and totally feared in across hollywood she was sort of extraordinary person who managed to keep a lid on the fact that you know tom cruise is actually quite crazy for many many many i mean for decades really and now

and now we've heard it and now and now and now you can tell craig doyle well that yeah not that that press tour he this was where the one where he jumped up on oprah's couch then he started saying brooke shields was um she should never take Oprah's couch. Then he started saying Brooke Shields was, she should never take an antidepressant. He started arguing about Scientology, something he'd never been allowed to mention and interviewers were never allowed to mention. Hey, it was extremely watchable. And Dakota Johnson has to promote this movie

that has already gone viral. So someone said to her, you know, that quote, that went viral, you know. And she said, yeah, but why did it go viral go viral i mean it's been taken out of context and he said well maybe it was yeah it was taken out of context she said but isn't everything if it's taken out of context taken out of context and so there are these incredibly awkward yeah there's incredibly awkward interviews i'm gonna have to watch the whole thing because i feel like i don't have the full context unique i can assure you that you that it's a real...

People are saying maybe it's collapsed the superhero genre. No, it hasn't collapsed the superhero genre, which is in trouble, but it hasn't collapsed it. It's not great for the Spider-Verse, I will say. It's pretty, pretty awful. You know I worry about the Spider-Verse. We all worry about the Spider-Verse. Exactly. We have to check in every now and again.

We want stars on press tours to say what they think, which they all try very hard not to do, because really what they want to do is maybe talk about what it was like doing the acting, whatever. And what the interviewer wants to say is, I'm doing you a favour, I'm promoting your film. Your personal life's looked like a bit of a train wreck recently. Can we talk about that?

And it's this horrific transactional thing that you don't want to do. And so sometimes they come out with these prepared lines. And, you know, every time you see a celebrity on a chat show, that anecdote has been pre-approved. It's really interesting, you know, how you have a long time to have this sort of easy familiarity, a quick little anecdote that you're going to tell on Kimmel or whatever it is.

It's all been pre-approved. You've rehearsed it so many times. And then you go and sit on the sofa and make it just think as though this thing you've just come up with. Now, Lady Gaga- You went to Geneva recently. Yeah.

You were on a train, right? Oh my God, I can't believe- How do you know this? How do you know this? Well, you know, because this anecdote alone has been the subject of a two-week legal negotiation with my publicist. Now, Lady Gaga, when she did the first...

What was it? Star is Born, she did. Now, that was a classic press tour because she didn't realise... Like, one of her first outings as a movie star, because she was obviously a singer before, and she hit her one line a bit like Boris Johnson during the 2019 general election. And if he didn't, say, get Brexit done 15 times, then he'd go back to number 10 and Donald Cummings would beat him.

So he had to do it every time he went out now she said about Bradley Cooper you know there could be a hundred people in the room and 99% don't believe 99 don't believe in you and you just need one to believe in you and that was him but she said it so many times that people started creating cuts of all the time she said it right so it was it was a genuinely sort of it's really excruciating and she i think she sort of got the joke now house of gucci her next outing oh she got the memo okay so she said she'd every time she went out she said something slightly more batshit i she'd hired a psychiatric nurse to be with her at all times during the filming she claimed never to have broken character for

18 months i thought you're gonna say she's never broken wind i don't know that would be i mean that's that goes viral i am actually even more impressed by that than perhaps not breaking character for 18 months. But anyway, she claimed she'd written a biography of the character. Oh, no. She became so unable to distinguish fact and reality that she thought the whole of Rome was a movie set, even if she went out to the shops.

She also believed that the Gucci heiress, the Gucci wife had cursed her and she was followed with huge swarms of flies wherever she went. So yes, thank you Gaga, you got the message for the next press tour, this is what we want. We don't want to know anything about Bradley Cooper being the one person in the room who believed in you.

Also, by the way, if Lady Gaga is in a room with 100 people, more than one of them is going to believe in her. So it's Lady Gaga. You know what, almost all of them. Bradley Cooper, like, join the queue, Bradley. Because we're all going to go, yeah, I'll do whatever film you want to be in, Lady Gaga. I want to be involved. You're Lady Gaga.

But do the flies come as standard? Just attended by a huge cloud of flies. Do they come as standard? No. Because it's going to be quite hard to take each one out in post. But it's not like Lady Gaga walks into a room and everyone's like, oh, God, Lady Gaga. Apart from, there's just one guy in the corner going do you know what I'm gonna take a chance on this chick yeah and that's

Bradley Cooper I'm gonna false modesty again I'm gonna take a chance on this multi-millionaire the huge massive megastar you know what that's the kind of guy I am yeah come on guys now there was one I come to think of the other good press doors Robert Pattinson just makes things up oh really yeah he says that you that he witnessed a terrible circus accident. He once worked as a hand model. He's never washed his hair. I mean, there's, you know. There's an awful lot of Wikipedia kind of pick.

And when you do sort of remote interviews with people, all they do is look at Wikipedia. And briefly it said that Oprah Winfrey was my aunt. And no one, there's about two people ever fell for it and just goes, so tell us about Oprah. That's a very unusual fact. And you'd be like, oh, I think that's not, yeah. The first one I said, and the second one I went, yeah, it's weird, isn't it?

It's just on my dad's side. And, you know, then they sort of go into Fleetwood Mac. One interesting thing, I think, is when you watch people on press junkets, some people, the Hughman's of people like that love it because they like new people being in the room and they like you know entertaining themselves but by and large the more effusive they are it means the bigger back end they have on the movie yeah so if you've got points on a movie which means if it's successful you do well or if you direct it if you're an actor who's directed a film, oh my God, they'll literally go on anything, anywhere.

So go, this is actually the real me, the director. I think actually this is my real skill. But if someone's already got paid for the film, and in your contract, in your contract for pretty much anything, it'll say you have to do 12 days publicity. So that's to get your kind of $8 million or whatever it is. You have to, you know, you've got to do the shooting shooting but you owe us 8 12 whatever days of publicity so they have to do it they have to do it but they're not going to get paid any extra money and so that's why that

really hurts them if they're getting 10 of box office receipts oh my god they will literally that's why tom cruise loves a press junket and And, you know, Will Smith, they love it because, you know, they always own what they're doing. It is absolutely vital that you do do it because otherwise your movie will just drop away. You know, part of the reasons we were talking about some of those films that were cancelled or mothballed and will never be aired is because it is so expensive

to market a film these days. Often the same cost as the film all over again, even on a very big Marvel production. And by the way, if you made a low-budget film, it could be two or three times the amount that the film costs to make just to market it. Do you remember sometimes those kind of relatively smaller-budget movies?

Olivia Wilde, that one, what was it called? Don't Worry Darling. Oh, my God. Now, you see, that again is something that I was talking about earlier, that the idea of fans studying every single tiny thing. Now, that started off as a chaotic press tour anyway, because when she was on stage

at some sort of theatrical movie theatre's convention, Jason Sudeikis, nice turtle assu, served her, had the divorce papers served to her while she was presenting about that movie live on stage. Good guy. What a nice guy.

One of the, so that was a way to kick it off. And then she was having a relationship with Harry Styles, who was in the movie. People, there was this whole sort of thing that people thought that Florence Pugh was really angry about it

also in the movie. I didn't even realise Chris Pine, by the way, was in this movie by the time it finally got to the Venice Film Festival, at which point people convinced themselves that Harry Styles had spat on chris pine in the

front row of the venice film festival just after they'd sort of either joined the audience or the film had just been shown as again i say people are always looking for drama in these things i think because that's really great drama though isn't it it was sensational it was then dating harry styles i've yet to see this movie but but the press tour for it was just a Category 5 mess. Well, that's the thing that's really, really changed over the years, is you always have to spend an awful lot of money promoting a film. But this non-paid-for publicity, that's the absolute dream. Because you're not having to pay a penny for Jason Sudeikis to go and, you know,

performatively divorce someone on stage. Or you don't have to pay anything to date Harry Styles, as far as I know. Imagine the money he could make if he did. A back end on that would be fantastic, yes. Do you know what? He does have a fantastic back end. But all that is free and people

are sharing that and so that's your movie. That's what, you know, Barbenheimer was. They couldn't have scripted it, this unbelievable sort of native movement that sprang up digitally where people thought oh my god these two movies how weird are out on the same weekend well on a more prosaic level that's how gb news publicizes itself it doesn't have to spend a penny advertising because people constantly complaining about it just keeps it in the public eye because i mean to the money you would have to spend to have the profile yeah gb news has on on social media is enormous but they they don't have to spend to have the profile that GB News has on social media is enormous.

But they don't have to because people do it for them. And it's unpaid publicity is the real, the soft power of marketing. And there are people who are these kind of deep social listening, social media management firms that are really now trying to get into the dark arts of trying to sort of surface that type of supposedly authentic non-paid for type of either advertising of a publicity of a specific celebrity themselves or of a creative endeavor they're involved in certainly when the thursday murder club movie comes out if i'm either if i either get divorced from jason sudeikis start dating Harry Styles or don't spit on Chris Pine you'll know it's not real you know that's inorganic some

influencer agency has uh has done that so we started by talking about Madam Web so you've seen it it's terrible is it the sort of film that's so terrible it's worth going to see well in a sort of yeah I mean I was there are only four people in the movie theatre that I saw it in. It was on the Enormo screen. And it was like, oh, my God, take this off and get the Bob Marley picture on right now. Which is done amazingly, by the way. Which is done amazingly, which is done far better than expected. Yeah, I mean, if you want to see a movie that is genuinely, you're so shocked that it can be made,

that the dialogue is 70% exposition, that you honestly feel they completely re-decided halfway through they were shooting it, they were going to make it a different type of movie altogether, and then they decided all over again to make it a different type of movie in the edit. As I say, I still have no idea how Madam Web's web, or why, it connects them all. I see how it does connect

them all, but I have no idea why. Maybe it's playing a longer game. Yeah. Well, I can tell you I don't think we're going to be seeing any more instalments of that particular franchise. Oh, do you know what I fancy? Pepsi. Yeah. We never heard back from Yorkshire Tea, did we?

We never heard back. After I said how much I was enjoying it. Thanks for dialing in, guys. Go on. Yeah, I mean, come on, guys. I mean, listen, we're cheaper than Madame Web. On that note, do you have anything that you saw that was good this week?

Yes, I really do. I have a film, in fact, that I absolutely loved, which is American Fiction. It's terrific. Have you seen it as well? Yes, I have. Isn't it great? And it's just one of those films you think, oh, why don't they make films like that anymore? And it's Geoffrey Wright, and he plays a black writer who writes books, and in the end, the

publishers won't buy them because they're not black enough and he goes but i am black this is my experience and so he deliberately sets out to write a sort of copycat of kind of a ghetto book and unsurprisingly it gets bought by publishers but they play with that uh conceit very very well it's funny it's charming it's first time director and writer of core jepson it's absolutely he did some he's done various things he did um stuff on watchman game he worked on succession for a little bit uh anyway but it's it's a it's really terrific i absolutely loved it too it's a proper old fashioned ah they've made a great movie with a great story that's brilliantly written and

brilliantly acted i saw a couple of plays i saw the The Hills of California, which is by Jez Butterworth, directed by Sam Mendes, which I absolutely loved. And I also saw A Mirror, which is all about sort of art and censorship, which is a new play, which has got Johnny Lee Miller in it. And I really recommend that one as well. I really enjoyed both of those. They're called A Mirror? A Mirror. A Mirror. A Mirror. And it's sort of about art and censorship. What do they call it in America?

A Mirror. A Mirror. Yeah, well, it hasn't transferred to Broadway yet. Yeah, I sort of about art and censorship. What do they call it in America? A Mirror. A Mirror. Yeah, well, it hasn't transferred to Broadway yet. Yeah, I'm not surprised with that title. In due course. On that bombshell. We've got a questions and answers one on Thursday. Yes, we have.

Do please send even more of your brilliant questions in. The address is therestisentertainment at gmail.com. And they are all very, very good, the questions. And we will endeavour to get round to as many as possible of them on Thursday. And wesolvemurders.com if you want to look at my new book as well. And there's all sorts of, yeah, and you can download it wherever you want. And look at the front cover. And we'll, yeah, see you on Thursday.

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