The Rest Is Entertainment - When Product Placement Goes Wrong

Episode Date: April 2, 2025

How did a Sex And The City product placement almost bankrupt Peloton? Do spy writers use actual murder methods in their books? And is Amol Rajan actually clever? Richard Osman and Marina Hyde answer questions on Killing Eve, The White Lotus and why the final season of Game Of Thrones flopped. Join The Rest Is Entertainment Club for ad free listening and access to bonus episodes: www.therestisentertainment.com Sign up to our newsletter: www.therestisentertainment.com Twitter: @‌restisents Instagram: @‌restisentertainment YouTube: @‌therestisentertainment Email: [e-mail] Producers: Neil Fearn + Joey McCarthy Assistant Producer: Aaliyah Akude Video Producer: Jake Liascos Executive Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport The Rest Is Entertainment is proudly presented by Sky. Sky is home to award-winning shows such as The White Lotus, Gangs of London and The Last of Us. Visit Sky.com to find out more Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Sky, which is great TV lovers we are delighted about. It's fantastic news. I'll be honest though, I'm also a fan of Netflix, of Disney+, of iPlayer, and this is supposed to be an advert for Sky. Well, the good thing about Sky is that it's not just good for Sky shows, it's basically an all-you-can-eat buffet for TV lovers. Mmm, buffet. If you've got something specific in mind.

What about that thing you were talking about the other day? Memento Mori. It's a one-off drama. It's on BBC iPlay if you like that sort of thing, based on the novel by Muriel Spark. Which I love. So it's got everything. The niche stuff, the mainstream stuff.

It's got all the apps you like. If you want to go straight to watching the best that TV has to offer without the fuss of searching, Sky is a game changer. Just go to sky.com to find out more. Okay, flights on air Canada. How about Prague? Ooh, Paris. Those gardens. Gardens. Amsterdam. Tulip Festival.

I see your festival and raise you a carnival in Venice. Or Bermuda has carnaval. Ooh, colourful. You want colourful. Thailand. Lantern Festival. Boom. Book it. Um, how did we get to Thailand from Prague? Oh right, Prague. Oh boy. Choose from a world of destinations, if you can. Air Canada. Nice travels. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Restless Entertainment questions and answers edition. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. Last week we were just

asking questions of the the Adolescence Director and DOP. This week we've got to answer the questions. I'm so sorry, this week normal service has resumed. Although all the questions are about adolescence again. No they're not. They're not, don't worry. Marina, shall we start with you? Peter White, which is an absolute direct anagram of Peter with the old Aston Villa striker. Peter, well done. Peter says, just wonder if Peter's question is about his name being an anagram of Peter with. No, it isn't. He says, just wondering why is that niche for anybody at home? Anyone? Anyone?

I think that's incredibly mainstream. Anyone like the really gone M.O.R. there? The Peter with material. You're long and strong in it. Yeah. Peter asked this, just wondering why so many films and stories centered on kids feature single parent households. Either that or the protagonist is an orphan being looked after by an uncle, aunt or kindly grandparent. Is it just because it's easier to write something with fewer characters to worry about or could it be a simple way of gaining sympathy for the protagonist?

Good question, good question. We'll deal with single parents first and then we'll get onto orphans, which is the even bigger category. Single parent's good because it sort of telescopes all of the, much more of the action onto the relationship with that one, with one child or the one parent. In a good couple, a problem shared is a problem halved and we don't really want any of our problems halved in drama or fiction because that's less good for the plot. So this is why we have a lot of saintly but struggling fathers or mothers. It's also ridiculous. My mom's a stripper, but she loves me.

Really? Yeah. Come on, we're doing a podcast. Mommy, I'm so sorry. But also it's one for your actor to pay. As a writer as well, you're like, if you've got a single parent and a child, that's one relationship you're dealing with. If you've got two parents and a child, suddenly you've got three relationships. You've got parent-child, other parent-child, parent with other parents.

It's only going to really limit the plot. And of course you have sympathy for the adult, you have sympathy for the child. Orphans is a very interesting category. Now orphans, they seem and they are vulnerable, okay? Sometimes it gives you a backstory, Batman's parents, which I'm not gonna, remind me how they died, okay. Batman's parents is a good name for film, by the way.

Yeah. There's often, with orphans, there's often no reason for them to have to stay somewhere and therefore not throw themselves into whatever quest or adventure or whatever has been sort of thrown up, cast that person as a sort of psychological itinerant rather than someone who's stuck somewhere. We all know that home and family is a pull and keeps you anchored. So as you say, as a writer, you know, everyone's lived experience is completely different,

but as a writer it gives you an immediate shortcut to that feeling. To get that person into the flood. There's no reason they have to stay where they are. There's no reason an adult is going to say to them, no, you can't do that because we're supposed to believe that those parents have either gone or they may not actually be an orphan. We may discover that their missing parent is in fact the villain. They might have sort of surrogate or adopted parents, as you say, like uncles and aunts. That it also gives you a quest to have to find out who you are, which is a big part of lots of fiction. They, what we also want, especially with children is reasons for them to have to step up in the event and the adventure and do things that otherwise an adult would

be saying, don't do it. Or Disney is obsessed with orphans. It's really interesting. Something very bad happened to Walt Disney actually when it, sorry, this is a sidebar. This is a sidebar. Absolutely. It's a marina hides, absolutely sidebar. When he got some money, when he became successful, he bought his parents a house at Walt Disney. Someone hadn't dealt with a boiler properly and they got carbon monoxide poisoning and they both ended up in hospital. The mother died.

Anyway, that's not why lots of Disney movies we know are based on fairy stories that have orphans in them and orphans, fairy stories have orphans in for the reasons we've just said. Disney has had a particular kind of bent for orphans in all of its works. And there was a year, I think it was 2018, and they released something like 10 movies, and nine of them had orphan characters. Even this year, you're looking at things like, I'm just having to do this off the top of my head, but like Lilo and Stitch, Lilo's Or an orphan, Snow White, it is a very, very big thing. But it is incredible

how significant like for those family relationships are. And if you look at even things like in reality television where it's anchoring when someone becomes the mother of a house, like I don't know, or even like Amanda in series one of the traitors or whatever. Dianne, series two of the traitors. You know, people say, oh, you're like a mother to me. Those are the ties that bind. And just as they do amongst, I don't know, animals in the African savanna,

many of whom are actually related, when you have those relationships, when you have those relationships in things like reality TV, you're stronger. This is why people create those kind of false families in a weird way or pseudo families when they're in houses or marooned on islands or wherever they are in reality television because you are stronger as a family

unit and so orphans to come back to that point it just means that you don't have those ties and you're much more easy to throw into an adventure if you're the creator. I think so there is also the thing of if you are writing a book and it's got lots of characters and someone and you're in a family environment it's got lots of characters and you're in a family environment, the smaller amount of people in that family, the better. There's nothing to stop you having a child with six siblings in your book. But then, sorry, every time you see them, you've got to go, there's John and there's, it's limiting. I was talking to Ian Rankin, he was writing a Rebus book and Rebus was sort of semi-retired,

so he gave him a dog. So he thought, oh, this is a nice thing to have and then he was halfway through his next book and he thought oh god I gave Rebus a dog. I forgot. I forgot I gave him a dog and he had to find a way of writing the dog out you know if you can keep relationships quite tight if they don't if your book is not about a Family, but there is a family in it The smaller that family is, the better, the simpler it is, it's not getting in the way of everything else. One for you Richard from Keir and a Hoja. On University Challenge, when a contestant

answers incorrectly, Amal Rajan often pinpoints exactly where they've gone wrong. It creates the impression that he has an encyclopedic knowledge of every question's background. Do the show's writers anticipate common mistakes and provide him with scripted responses, or is he really just that knowledgeable? Listen, Amal, I love you. He's been on House of Games. I'm going to go on there, let me say he's not that knowledgeable. Any more than I am on shows. What you would have, if it's a particularly complicated question, for example, Amal will say look, I'm pretty good on arts and literature, I'm not great on science. And so on a science question, a number of things will happen.

Things will be spelled out phonetically in the question. There will be, if there's the holy grail of a question is- Sorry, are you saying on University Challenge, everything is spelled out phonetically? No, but if they're- For the most. No, only if it's like a word that you would never have come across. So, you know, if it's like an Incan tribe or it's a chemical compound, you know, there might be situations you will look through beforehand and go, how do I pronounce this?

It doesn't look like that's how I pronounce it. Could you for this word, could this word be phonetic? The holy grail of any question is there is no gray area at all. There isn't anything that they could answer that isn't an acceptable answer. Quite often in university challenge, because they're dealing with people absolutely at the top of their game and people who are studying things, there will be the odd grey area. And on those, the question writers would have a little thing saying, this is the answer, and they'd have a thing saying, accept another answer.

So if they say that, you can accept it. Do not accept this answer, which is a bit, which is a common mistake that someone might make with this question, but it's not right because, you know, of this reason. It's like one of those conversation trees you get in a call centre. Yeah, exactly. Your script. Now you don't have that on an awful lot of questions, but what you definitely do, and it happens all the time on the university challenge, is if there is an answer which

feels like it's very close to the right answer or feels like actually it's a different branch of the right answer, they just stop recording that second. You stop recording, absolutely, and you just go, okay, in the gallery the question editors will all sit together, just go, I mean, could we accept that? Or is that pronunciation acceptable because it sort of sounds like that? They will spend a minute, a minute and a half and then say to Amolzi, no, that's a not accept and they will give him then the reasons why he's not accepting it.

Or they'll say it's an accept, but would you say that give this piece of information as well just so people at home don't go, why did you accept that? Because actually the answer is this, you're not watching a half hour live show when you're watching University Challenge. You pretty much are, but there will be the odd moment where they will stop it and they will talk, talk, talk and Amal will be sitting there checking to the contestants and they go, okay, it's not accept. And that's when you often say, um, yes, I can accept that. Although the actual normally we would accept this.

That's he's saying that very quickly, but that's been after three minutes of people upstairs working out what to do. So there'll be areas where he is able to extemporize for sure on areas that he knows about, but if it's something, if it is science or maths or something like that, there is a group of people, if there is an answer that could be construed as right or wrong, who will give him extra information. Robert Buckingham has a question for you, Marina. That's a good name, Robert Buckingham. Has a creative work of fiction ever been so bad that brands have actively requested their product

be removed from being featured so as not to sully their reputation or as a company ever reported a significant drop in sales because of being associated with a poorly received movie or TV franchise? That is interesting. I mean, in general, these things are incredibly worked out to the letter. Sometimes that doesn't always happen though. You know what you're getting into and if it's not a hit or everyone hates it, that's too bad. You agreed to it. You've done a deal.

There have been occasions of removal. Danny Ball had to spend a lot of money digitally removing Coca-Cola and Mercedes logos in Slumdog Millionaire, but that was just something that had been accidentally featured. They didn't sort of Here's one a young company Maybe making a bit of a mistake They won't do again Peloton in 2021 were very excited because they thought so our bikes gonna appear on on Sex and the City On and just like that the reboot. It's a very expensive product. They didn't realize how it was going to be used Which is really really they give them permission?

Yes. Mr. Big has a heart attack while riding his Peloton. And actually their stock value decreased the next day after it had aired. And they thought, okay, fine, fine. They had to try and think of a way around it. Because by the way, you've really messed up if you've done that. And they got Chris and Arthur played Mr. Big. They thought, right, we're going to get him in our Christmas advert and he can- he can lean into it. Yeah, I mean into it Unfortunately when in just a few days several women accused Chris North of sexual assault and he was basically dropped by his agency Suddenly dropped by the peloton advert. They didn't think it through almost the apex of product placement in lots of ways Is James Bond and talking to people who've worked on Bond films, oh my god, I mean, it's a huge deal. When product placement is happening,

it happens quite a lot in those movies. It's like the watch is on set, the watch is on set. There'll be five guys from Omega and they'll have a briefcase basically kind of lashed to their hand and they're on set and they're watching all of those takes. It's almost like an actor's meticulously worked out nudity clause, like how many seconds that watch is going to be shown. No, we haven't quite seen it reflected the light. They're really, really fussy about it. And there are many, many days where you've got those people on set. I mean, we had when we were to research in the franchise, we heard of them just leaving things like coolers blank, so that you could just CGI the products in later because they hadn't sold it at that

point. Oh, that's clever. Yeah. So I think that was in Doctor Strange. They had this and then it's really quite badly what was filled with some form of drink afterwards. But in general people, it's very, very carefully worked out and there are teams on the set insisting you do it exactly right. But yeah, a pellet on that was a bit of a ball drop, I have to say.

There's an interesting one at the moment, isn't there, with White Lotus, if people are watching that and enjoying it, which I'm absolutely loving. Some people said this series is quite slow. I love it. I think it's my favourite White Lotus yet. But Jason Isaac's family, who are that's one of the great families ever in any television program. They're so bleak all in their different ways. He's constantly wearing his Duke University t-shirt. He's like a Duke man. That's his thing. He is going through such terrible trauma in that program. If anyone's watching that, you keep seeing the images of him wanting to kill himself, always wearing this Duke t-shirt. And Duke

University, they went public and just said we think this is absolutely unacceptable. It's taken it too far. Yeah, it's taken it too far. I mean they've had quite a few scandals. Yeah. Really unpleasant scandals Duke. It'll be interesting to see if they do try and get themselves a reference.

But also they've given, you know, it's the Barbara Streisand effect of the fact that they've complained because everyone's now talking about Duke. God, that family. I can't. Yeah, I can't even. I'm loving this series. I haven't seen the final one yet. I'm taking a tactical ad break there just to cleanse my thoughts of that family.

God, I hope this is not Duke and Peloton. That'd be so awkward. This episode is brought to you by Sky where you can watch unmissable shows which includes the new season of the multiple Emmy award-winning Hacks starring Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder. We love Hacks so much. I'm so looking forward to this new series. For people who don't know Hacks, Marina, talk us through it a little bit. It's focused on the relationship between the older comedian who's played by Jean Smart, Deborah Vance, who's one of those real old showbiz troopers. She plays Vegas, she does residency, she's sort of, yeah, almost like a Joan Rivers-y

type character. Exactly. Old school. She's the boomer and Hannah Einbinder is kind of Gen Z-er. It's really interesting on the stuff between the ages. Yeah, so she plays Ava Daniels, essentially becomes Debra Vance's writer. So she writes for very cool, very hip things. Having sort of been cancelled for a joke at the start.

Yes. So we start in the culture war and we continue in it. But what I love about the show particularly is the absolute reverence for comedy and the the graft and the craft of it. And what a tough kind of man's world it remains. Definitely, definitely. And so how hard it is to be a woman in that male dominated industry. Yeah. Amazing on showbiz, amazing on comedy, amazing on the industry, but also just the

relationship between the two of them is a really lovely generational sort of, it's like a sitcom thing. It's very dramatic, but a lot of comedy in there as well. They've got some terrific gas stars in the season. They've got Helen Hunt, Tony Goldwyn, Eric Balfour, and obviously the returning cast who are pillars. Yep. The mix of comedy and drama is spot on. You can watch season four of the Emmy award winning hacks right now on Sky. I'm Sarah Churchwell, author, journalist and academic.

And I'm David Aldershooger, historian and broadcaster. And together, we're the hosts of Goalhanger's latest podcast, Journey Through Time. We're going to be looking at hidden social histories behind famous chapters from the past. Like, what was it like to actually live during Prohibition? Or to have been there on the ground for the Great Fire of London? We'll be uncovering it all. And we'll have characters and stories that have been forgotten, but shouldn't have been.

This week, we've got one of my favorites, Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for US president all the way back in 1872, 50 years before American women could even vote. She was also the first woman to address Congress and to open a brokerage on Wall Street where she made a fortune. It's an incredible story, but it is also full of contradictions. She was a trailblazing woman in politics, but later in life, she also turned to the pseudoscience of eugenics. So join us on Journey Through Time and hear a clip from the Victoria Woodhull story at the end of this episode. Welcome back everybody. Now, welcome back everyone. We've got a question. Sorry, I put you off, but you also welcome me people back. No, I liked it. I think you should. I stumbled over Callum H because Callum H has got a question saying, how do shows like Killing Eve come up with ways of killing people?

Some are very complex. So our writers having to learn about poisons and guns to think them up. Thank you Callum. Well I thought I have views on this because I'm always killing people, as you know, but someone who has much better views on this exact example is Gordon Carrera, our friend from The Rest is Classified, which is all about spies and spying. And he was a consultant on Killing Eve. And Gordon has this to say to your question, Callum. Hi, Richard. Hi, Marina.

It's Gordon Carrera here from The Rest is Classified. So a few years back when Killing Eve was being developed, I was asked to help as a consultant because it's all about assassins, as you know, and strangely, perhaps the writers like Phoebe Waller-Bridge weren't actually experts in killing people. Now, neither am I, but I know a little bit about it. So, I was asked to come up with a document which we called The Kill List, which was all kinds of different slightly crazy ways in which assassinations might take place. Some of those were based on real events like the killing of a North Korean official in an airport when two women approached him and sprayed something in his face which turned

out to be VX gas. That was then the model for one of the killings with a perfume bottle in the first series of Killing Eve. It's a reminder really that in the spy world, fact and fiction often collide and it can be sometimes quite hard to disentangle the two, although that is something we try and do on The Rest is Classified. Thank you, Gordon. If you liked that, if you like talk to spies, then you'll love The Rest is Classified. But yeah, I like thinking of ways of killing people if you know what I

mean. Yeah. Yeah, it's quite fun and writers tend to be quite imaginative people. So yeah, you can think of a million ways, like getting away with things and killing people. Well, you've told me that it is possible to get away with murder, which I absolutely love, that all the crime writers like, no, no, it was totally possible. Yeah, because the whole point is the only murders we know about are the ones that got solved. There's people out there who did it, but the spy world is full of, you know, lots of the spy authors were spies themselves. You know, Ian Fleming was in the Secret Service, John the Carrier at the very beginning of his career was as well. And they certainly move in those circles. And anytime someone is killed, that

information gets spread around to everybody in that community. And then it's just like a race to see who gets to use it first in their book. I mean, that works both ways. You know, the spies will read something in a book and think, oh, that would work for us. Or, you know, writers, if you're Mick Heron and, you know, the spy sort of sends you an email just saying, thought you might be interested in this one. That material does the rounds. They like to see that stuff percolate into the world of fiction. But everybody does, because everybody loves show business.

Yeah. And you can be like the highest ranking spy in the, you know, CIA. You could be like privy to every secret there's ever been in the US, every single thing. But if you send a little note to John Grisham and say, oh, by the way, this happened, and then it's in a book, you're like, oh my God, I'm in a book. Oh my God, this is so cool. There are very porous barriers between the world of spy writers and spies and the world of crime writers and the police. You know, there's lots and lots of back channels. So quite often murders will be real ones.

I will see my murder got a mention. Oh yeah. Oh, yeah. Book one for me. But almost always in that case, you will see at the end that someone will credit they'll say, Oh, thank you to so and so from the Metropolitan police or thank you to so and so. It'll either say they're from the Metropolitan police or which police force they're from or it won't say where they're from, in which case they're a spy. Who did the murder that this was based on. Yes. Murder and spy.

Exactly. Thank you to, yeah, murderer John Edwards for all the information. Thank you, Gordon. Harriet has a question for you, Marina. Hello, Marina and Richard she says. Hello Harriet. A question for you on whether TV shows have got darker. She says I don't mean genre, I mean visually less light. It is often at the most dramatically interesting bits of a show, e.g. set at night time. Do I need a new telly? Has it always been like

this? If not, doubt it's accidental. So why? Okay, this has been a complaint Harriet Harriet, for some years, and there are various different reasons for it. It's a bit like I was whining about drone shots. It's a cheap way of making something look expensive, the drone shot. Dark is a sort of, in my view, can be. Not always, but it can be a very lazy way to create atmosphere when you just feel like... But a lot of people feel that they're completely peering at their television and like can't quite actually make out what's happening here. Now things are compressed for streaming and the bitrate can make it even worse so you might actually, just to answer a technical question which I'm terribly bad at, but there are things you have control over. If there's motion smoothing turned on your TV, turn that off, you could adjust the brightness. But there is autistic stuff that you have absolutely no control over, I'm afraid,

Harriet. And I mean, I think it's quite pretentious. It's a bit like the one shot, isn't it? But the Game of Thrones Battle of Winterfell that was in the final season. Oh my God. You've never seen it. Never seen Game of Thrones. Okay. I've never seen Game of Thrones. Okay. But I have seen Game of Thrones. The Battle of Winterfell is this epic thing. It's in the final season. I remember talking to the script supervisor on that. She said it was 55 night shoots They were all completely meant completely mental. Okay now Fabian Wagner Who was the DOP on that said because so many people complained that they couldn't even see it

So you've got 55 night shoots. No one can actually say because it was very very dark He said everything we wanted people to see was there. I mean that's It's not great is it when you know, like it's a bit like politicians thinking we need new voters no maybe maybe the problem was with you but he said people were watching it wrong and they weren't watching it in cinematic conditions and other people said oh no but they've graded the grading is something you do in a post-production and it's a way of affecting the colors and they said that they graded the blacks even blacker okay so people think this whole thing started this whole trend.

Normally, by the way, is when you're watching, you know, Love Island, and you think how is the pool that color? Yeah, how's it? Because it's been through an incredible grade. It's really interesting. I was talking to a director the other day and he said, Oh God, I went to see an edit of my and the editor had just done something that I'd asked him to do. And I came and had a look and said, Oh my God, you've the whole life's gone out of it and it's just to do with a, you can

put it back with a flick of a switch or some slightly more complicated than that, but it was to do with the grading. And he said, suddenly like this kind of down mood and it all. Some of the great unsung heroes of TV, the graders, cause it feels like it was a filter you'd have on your phone and it's sort of that, but immensely more complicated. It can so affect the tone of something. And as I say, you know, nothing has changed in the dialogue, the cuts or anything. People think that the really dark trend started with David Fincher with Seven, you remember that it was very dark, it was raining all the time. Is it, by the way, this is a technical question, is it easier to light a dark room than it is to light a light room, if you know what I mean. In the darkness, we need lights

because we've got to see certain things. But is it cheaper to light for darkness than it is to? In some ways, yes, and it also covers a multitude of sins. There's lots of things. If you've got lots of animatronics, lots of props, painting it black will make it just, you won't see it anymore.

So in the spaceship in Alien, there's lots of stuff that in the end, they just painted loads of, because there was so much animatronics and things like that and puppets or whatever, they're painting it all black and then it just fades away and then it's a very dark, but obviously it suits the material. But lighting, I mean for really, for decades, black actors were not lit properly because in that same way that, I don't know, seat belts are tested on men and not women

and so there's this whole thing where, you know, lots of things are not designed for the people they're being used for. Black actors were not lit properly and they were just lit in the same way you would light a white actor and their skin was different and it didn't work. That isn't the case now. But the whole thing about dark lighting, people just feel like they can't watch it at home on their TV and everyone sort of says, oh, you know, it should be like a cinema, but really it's not it's at home. Yeah, I get it. And you know, I'm visually impaired and there gets a certain level of darkness where there's no point me even looking at the screen, which a lot of people get when they're hearing impaired

and I recognize it and the way they cut lots of modern shows or mix them. They literally there's no point in them listening because they can't hear it. And if I'm watching the screen, I mean, I cannot see it like that Winterfell thing. Yeah. What's the point? I cannot see anything that I need something, I need some definition. So yeah, the second something's dark or if it's described as dark in a review, there's no point. I can't see it. So it may feel classy to whoever's made it, but there's a proportion of people who are just there. They're not seeing anything that you've just done.

Yeah. And people are just not watching their TV at home on a cinema. Yeah, exactly. In cinema conditions, what? Yeah, otherwise they'd be in the cinema. Do me a favor, anyway. Now we talked about Last One Laughing on the main show this week. We've had a lot of questions about it.

People are learning it. And we might do some more on them next week, but here's one that some people have asked. David Hart says, Amazon's Last One Laughing, why are there 12 writer credits at the end of the show? What are they writing when it's about comedians in a house trying to make each other laugh? If you watch that show, there are an awful lot of set pieces.

Each of the 10 comics has their own joker to play so they go out and they do a set piece. And lots of comics have writers and lots of certainly TV companies have writers. So if you're making that show, the comedians are going in and you want to make it as absolutely natural as possible for them and them just to be able to be themselves. We know they've had to prepare something, a joke, I think five minutes, some of the people will do that completely by themselves. Some of them will say, Oh, I've got this thought, I've got an idea, you know, and they'll sit in a room with a couple of writers and put it up, you know, because it's five minutes and they want to make it good. But also when you're thinking about that format,

and you're thinking about six hours, and you're thinking about ideas and how we do make people laugh and if we've got a head to head thing, what is the stuff that we can do? So, you know, there's a head to head between Bob and Richard where it said you have to make the face that you would have if for example, you're on a plane and the pilot is break dancing in the aisle and a big bull man's just come out of the toilet, something like that. That's all written. A writer has come up with that idea. So when you're watching telly, Jimmy's not kind of thinking, oh, what could you do, I wonder.

Every single thing there, every single suggestion that's made, every single prompt that is given to the people has been done by producers or writers. And workshopped by writers. Yeah, exactly. Because although, as we say, the show sort of lasts six hours, as it were, the development of it and working out what works, what doesn't, what would be funniest has all been done in workshop

I guess with writers. And obviously there's a lot of furniture for Jimmy and Rashi, particularly Jimmy not to doubt, but furniture lines that he needs to come up with and those will be written by somebody. Yeah exactly and you know 12 people sounds like a lot of people that is not 12 people sitting in a room for the entire production process. That will be, oh, we got 10 different people doing these bits of work of services coming in on day one, someone's services coming

on on day seven, then oh, can we do a day where we're just coming up with suggestions for the game where they have to do the faces? Why don't we get two people to come in and do that? Who's available? They're not available. so we bring in other people. So you know in a three month production process 12 writers will come in for me you know a day or two each but yeah it's not 12 people sitting down and writing the stuff but when you watch that show every single prompt that's coming out of someone's mouth for those contestants somebody has written that. Yeah one of the things I actually really liked about it is that they do give those people credit. And I do think we've, I would love to do something, in fact on the main show,

I do want to do something at some point about who gets credit and who doesn't and why. Because development and things like that are really interesting and there have been a few sort of viral posts about people who did or didn't get credit for Bear Hunt on Netflix. And there have been a lot of various things like that, so I think it would be interesting to talk about, and particularly writing credit. Writers so many people will say, I don't understand, I wrote so much in the show and I didn't get a credit. Yeah.

And there's lots of interesting reasons for that. So let's talk about that on the main show. That's a really good idea. But for this, I mean, one of my very first ever jobs was Whose Lines Anyway, which is entirely improvised. And I was a writer on that show. You think, well, how is there a writer on an improvised show? You think, well, because Clive reads out prompts and suggestions and all, you know,

and you're coming to a party and you need to be person X and those writers, not just writing a one-liner for someone is coming up with comic ideas and comic thoughts that you then throw in front of the comedians and then they go and do their stuff. So apart from the things when they're on stage and you know that that's been written, everything they're doing is made up, made up, made up. But any time a prompt comes out from the production, somebody's had to sit in a room and write that.

And when there's 10 different people and when there's lots of different stunts going on, then over the course of a production, probably 12 writers might, you know, it could be three because they're on for the whole time. But if they're not, then it's 12 different writers, you know, one or two a day for different days. Jolly good. Right. I think that wraps us up for today. But we are going to be doing a bonus episode. On Friday. Yes.

About celebrity obituaries, some very funny stories about those when they get written, who writes them, have people ever read their own obituary and been alive. When they go wrong. Yeah. Let's face it, there's quite a lot of when they go wrong. When obituaries go wrong. Yeah. When obituaries attack. And that's for our members. And remember, if you want to sign up, you go to therestisentertainment.com, you get ad-free listening, we've got a Discord server,

and you get these bonus episodes. But otherwise, we will see you for the main show on Tuesday. See you next Tuesday. Well, that wraps up another episode of The Rest Is Entertainment brought to you by our friends at Sky. Now, what have you got on your must watch list at the moment? At the moment, the White Lotus enjoying the latest season of that. Oh my god, it's incredible. It's so good. A dark treat. A dark treat. The visuals are really great and with your Skyglass TV you'll be able to enjoy it all in its 4k glory. And also the built-in sound bar means you can also listen to it in its full whatever the sound version of 4k glory is, but it sounds immense, I'll say that.

It is indeed. It brings everything to life and it really gives that cinema experience at home. It feels like Jason Isaacs is in your house. Like sometimes I go downstairs and I'm like, Jason Isaacs, come on, man. God bless you, please. But he's not there. No. But for our listeners who want to experience this with Skyglass 2, visit sky.com to find

out more. I'm David Oleshoge. Here's that clip we mentioned earlier on. You see spiritualism kind of working its way up the social hierarchy, up the ladder of respectability because people are desperate and they will cling to anything. And remember that we're still in an age of great religiosity. And so, if kind of traditional Christian messages are not enough consolation, then you might seek something more direct like trying to speak to a lost loved one. It's also worth saying that historians have pointed out, I think this is really interesting,

that in an age where telegraphy had just been invented, you suddenly have telegraphs which can send invisible messages across the ether, apparently. Almost magically. Almost magically. And suddenly people can receive them. It's not really that much of a stretch to then start to imagine people receiving messages clairvoyantly. You start to think about telekinesis. You start to think about the idea of invisible movement of messages, invisible transmission. I'd never thought about that.

It's a really interesting idea, isn't it? That's so fascinating. I mean, I think it's a really, really smart idea and it suggests the ways in which other cultural factors can help influence those kinds of trends. Why would you suddenly believe in spiritualism while have telegraphs? Well, why not? Who says it's not possible, right? If you want to hear the full episode, listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your

podcasts.