TRASHFUTURE - Two Scoops and a Bread Basket feat. Hesse Deni

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Hesse from Seeking Derangements and Movie Mindset joins the gang to watch Scoop - the story behind the news night interview that blew up the Prince Andrew story and made him lose his job as the nation’s special little boy for upwards of eight months. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *LIVE SHOW ALERT* See us live in London on May 29th with special guest Nish Kumar! Get tickets here: https://bigbellycomedy.club/event/trashfuture-presents-liz-truss-presents-ten-years-to-save-the-west-ft-nish-kumar/ *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello Trash Shooter listeners. This episode was recorded with the intention of coming out as a bonus in a couple of weeks. However, due to basically the entire cast getting COVID or some other kind of incapacitation, we have decided to put it out now. We're aware, second movie episode in a week. We don't normally do this. We also had some technical difficulties. Our apologies again. Promise it'll get better, hopefully. In the meantime, please enjoy our episode about the Netflix, BBC media themed film, Scoop. Hello everybody, and welcome to the second in an emerging series where we talk about movies with monosyllabic imperative names.

First we had Lift, and now we have Scoop. I'm excited to see where we can go from here, you know? Like, so far we're going through the checklist of stuff you do after your dog shits in a park. Yeah. Scoop and lift, two key areas of the Turkish Ice Cream Man's toolkit. It's in very different places, though. My thing is we have to see Bag next, and then like, dispose. I was gonna say like, the third in the trilogy would surely be called like, Heave or something. Ooh, Heave. Yeah, I'd love to see Heave.

Hoist. Hey, Lift, Scoop, Heave, Hoist, Hesa. Hello. Hello and welcome back to Seeking Derangements and Movie Mindsets. Hesa Denny. Hesa, how's it going? You ready to talk about another legitimately great movie with us? Yes, of course.

I love Scoop, I love the BBC now. This is a fantastic movie about how they just accidentally put an idiot in front of the camera who basically said, I am a pedophile. And how courageous they are for doing that. Genuinely. You may remember this as a news story. And then they decided to make that news story into a movie. For no reason I can determine.

I think it's really refreshing that we're making movies that the sort of premises of it is like, what if you just sent an email? In fairness, that does make it a psychological horror movie. You know, so I'm a journalist by background, as most listeners know. There was, I remember when I first started started out there were like a few journalism movies because like that was about the time that like it was the Snowden stuff happened. There were a few like Snowden movies and the way in which they sort of you know were framing journalists as kind of being these real speak truth to power.

The fifth estate with Cumberbatch with the fucked up hair. Yeah. There were like a few Snowden movies that came out. A little bit of one crept into one of the Bourne Identity movies where there's a Guardian journalist who gets domed off by the CIA. That was one I was thinking about. Domed off? Yeah, he gets domed off in like Liverpool Street Station. Yeah, as a CIA team comes into Liverpool Street Station and like perfectly domes him off. This goes like cross-eyed like Dan Aykroyd in Ghostbusters. To discredit him, I assume.

No one will ever believe any of my other work now that I've gotten. It's like in Swordfish when they make Hugh Jackman, is it? Try to hack something while getting head, but he has to write both sides piece about trans people's rights while getting head. There was like one film that I remember. No, it was about WikiLeaks. It was about WikiLeaks. And the sort of guardians involvement in it. And the reason why is because our friend in yours, James Ball, or a character that represents him is featured in it. And there's this point, it's like very minor, but it's just like, he basically gets handed like a USB key of

all the secrets. And like, this is supposed to be this really exciting moment where this Wonder Kid, who he was presented at a time, suddenly has access to all these documents, but he has to really make sure he doesn't lose them between going on the tube and for some reason radio heads playing in the background. This is a horror movie for like ADHD people. Yeah. It's like you have to keep a USB key, keep it labeled and not lose it. This was my commute in here with my phone and my charger, genuinely. I have lost USB keys on my way to places that have not been.

I lost like a car, like you know one of those things you put in the car like to hold your phone when you're driving? Between like my driveway and my house I still have no idea where it is. LARSON This is how you structure a movie, right? It's that immediate conflict and tension is you have the USB key, you don't want to lose it. Rising actions, you lose it, and then the denouement is they bring out the tube thing that lets them grab stuff off the tracks. JANUS Yeah, yeah, yeah.

LARSON What I was gonna say was, it's very difficult, I think, to frame journalism as exciting in films. That's why you just shouldn't be on there. All the president's men did it. I think that's the best you can do. And you've really got to sign up to the idea that this is a film about letters. Emails are just boring as shit.

This is a film that really tried to do that. But the element of it is very much like, she sent an email and they were like, yeah, sure. Let's do it. That was it. That's it. Yeah. It makes a real climactic use of the fax machine though. The best part is at the beginning of the movie, she's like, I'm the one who gets the people. You can't just email. And then it shows that they do get them because she sends an email that says we would love to talk to like seven people Yeah Well, the trick is when it's people you can't just email you have to email another guy who then goes and talks to them in person

She doesn't even do that. She just you know, yes So I want to take us back because we've been getting so we've been going scoop mad. We all have scoop madness We've been getting so... We've been going scoop mad. We all have scoop madness. Scoop-leosis? We have Scoop-leositis. We're all gonna go get cosplay as our favourite characters from Scoop next time there's a Scoop release.

I might do, to be fair. Scoop is a... It's a new generation, I think, of made for TV movie, which is a made for Netflix movie. A direct to Netflix Gillian Anderson vehicle. There's something that's really strange about it it is that it's Netflix sucking off the BBC for two hours, which is a strange thing to do to your ostensible competitor, you know? I guess the same school of thought as the CIA and that Guardian general. Well they're also just doing like, I dunno, if you're Netflix, you look at the BBC, which

basically is like an arm of the British government that is sort of funded by people that fucking hate it, then you're just like Oh, we're just doing an end zone dance. It's like oh, you're great. You're right. It's patronizing It's like oh check out this quaint little like funny little country's institution. It's like alright grandpa. Let's get you to bed but scoop is all about how the dramatization of the Emily Maitlis interview with Prince Andrew, a news event that happened like a couple years ago. You remember it. Pizza Express and Woking. Yeah, can't sweat. Don't know how to sweat. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would love

to point out that on the poster for this movie it says the interview that changed everything and it really seems it seems like they established that it didn't really change anything at all absolutely the only like One of the only regular people they show in this movie is this cab driver That's driving Billy Piper to Buckingham Palace at one point and he goes who are you going to talk to a Buckingham Palace? Hope it's not that fucking pedophile Prince Andrew Although to be honest, he's one of only several pedophiles in this, so statistically it's gotta be one of them.

Is it that pedophile or one of the other ones? The poster has quite a sort of Brazzers vibe to it, I have to say. When you're looking at it, it's the way he's got his back to you, and he's facing it, there's the three slightly imposing like looming over him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Well, that's because this is a feminist movie about girl power That's right. It's so crazy because it's framed like that, but it's really not It thinks that's what it's about but really it's about the power of the cold email, basically. So, look, this is a movie, if you love the news, if you're crazy about the news, and

you want to see how the news gets made. L- If you're Hugh and Lewis. M- Yeah, if you're into that. L- If you liked this, you'll watch the other. If you liked this, you'll like this. Is the West Wing, or the newsroom? Like, this is 100% a movie for like, Sorkin people who wished that there was a British Sorkin.

But this isn't it. I do want to say, as someone who was a Sorkin person, in a very limited sense, because again, the WikiLeaks being The Newsroom all came at the same time, it did influence me as a person for a very brief period of time. This is not it. This is not. And structurally it's not. It's written very blandly. It's a very Netflix film, in that sense. I'm gonna do a quick summary of the overall situation and then we're gonna go through the plot. Just in case you don't know. So first of all, Prince Andrew is a pedophile.

First of all, he's the son of the Queen. May she rest in peace. Alright, 1066, Norman Conquest. The Battle of Tours, 732. 1805, oceans are now battlefields. Okay, so, if you remember, right, when the Roman Empire leaves Britannia, they also leave the money, they bring the money economy with them, and then the country reverts back to like market towns and trade and barter? Also a lot of pederasty.

Yes, that's right. Which the Windsors bring back. Yeah, for sure. The druids. All right, so Pangea basically was a super continent. They never really address Andrew's like, powerful druidism at any point. Basically, this is a movie about Sam McAllister, played by Billy Piper. She's the sort of point of view character. She was news night's booker, she's the one who arranged this interview as a producer, and then she wrote a book about it, of which this movie is an adaptation, and she got a lot of PR about this, and because she's very visually compelling, because she dresses like shit,

as opposed to everyone else in her job. This is a compelling narrative to adopt. They try and force a class thing into it too, so because she's Billy Piper, and because she's wearing leopard skin Chanel everywhere, she's also working class. Which is not a correlation I've observed before, but... RILEY A working class BBC segment producer. ALICE Classic BBC news night producer. RILEY Who's often being talked down to by her black colleagues. We'll talk about that.

She shows up six hours late. They're like, can you please stop coming in late for work? And then later in the movie, she's like, why does everyone hate me at my job? Yeah. And Billy Piper's like over enunciating all of her lines. And she's like, I get interviews with people. Yeah. You can't just email. Sam McAllister was subject to a lot of microaggressions at the BBC because she's from Guernsey. She would come into the office and people would be like, oh, have any Channel Islands

milk this morning, Sam? Evaded any tax this morning, Sam? Just that kind of stuff that people don't think anything of, but it really grinds you down over time. When she brings a latte and they're like, uh, you pay VAT on that, Sam? Bring your own milk? It is like, an all time entrant in this kind of recurring British class analysis thing, of being like, well this woman dresses tackily as shit, she must be poor.

But she drinks coffee, so... Mmm. Ambiguous. She doesn't take any shit. Actually it is a follow on on a West Wing thing, which is the endless quest for the good Republican, right? Where it's like, she's the outsider, and she's like, you know, she gets things done, but not by the book, and she like, rattles all these cages.

It's sort of implied she's also quite right wing by BBC standards. She gets called a bit Daily Mail by her director for the BBC. But then the first story she tries to pitch is leading NewsHour with an interview with Lupita Nyong'o about colourism, which doesn't really track with being a Daily Mail kind of right wing. I would also say based on that, I don't think the Daily Mail comment is necessarily wholly a political... based on political leaning. It's very much more... It's a sort of comment on like Newsnight being the way that BBC Newsnight is framed in this as being very intellectual and bourgeois, which like, I would describe as many, I wouldn't describe it as that.

You know what Newsnight is? Newsnight is the show that showed the nation Corbyn edited into like a Stalin cap. Yes. And the way that Sam McAllister is framed is like, oh you know, she's very tab... Like her instincts are very tabloid, right? It's very, you know, it's not the sort of intellectual rigor that one would expect from Newsnight. To which I would say, mmm, citation's needed on that. Like, perhaps... There is a right wing dimension to it. Like she has a little like Trump thing on her desk and a black thing. Oh, I didn't notice that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like just an behalf. There is a right wing dimension to it, like she has a little Trump thing on her desk and a blood thing.

Oh, I didn't notice that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just an in and out reaction shot. That's very clever. Yeah, but when she's trying to be like, oh, you know, the BBC could stand to be a bit more tabloid because the tabloids are hungry, it's like, yeah, the tabloids are also hungry in a right wing way. In which the woke BBC blob disapproves of.

The tabloids are hungry in the same way that, like, a leopard is hungry. The sarlacc is hungry. I want to start from the very beginning though, right? Because we're jumping ahead to the- Yeah, we have to start with someone really sympathetic. A News of the World paparazzo. Yep. Yeah.

So a News of the World paparazzo. New York, 2010. He's in the apartment from Black Rain that looks out on the bridge. Yeah. You can hear less savvy Fav doing cocaine with Cobra snake in the background. It's New York. It's 2010. It's vice dos and don'ts. It's that's what we're doing. It was a mistake to let Jeffrey Epstein write that article for vice. If the traffic child does not feel loved, she will leave. We did mushrooms with Jeffrey Epstein for 24 hours. Here's what we learned.

So there's this news of the world tabloid journalist, a tabloid photographer, a paparazzo, basically the same guy that like fucking iced Diana essentially, and type, is just basically camped out across the street from Epstein's house, just taking pictures of the people coming and going. And then he has to go get a picture of Prince Andrew talking with Jeffrey Epstein, because it wasn't enough just to know that they hung out all the time and there's documentary evidence of it. We need a picture of them walking in the park together. And what I found, noticed about this, the only observation of it is, again, it's framed

like an action movie, but for an action movie there need to be stakes. And the stakes of this were, paedophile immune from public scrutiny, faces scrutiny, sees no consequences. Yeah, like they do a bit with the paparazzo where it's like, lightly implied that if like, royalty protection catch up with him they might like, take his SD card. It would be so funny if he went up to them and took a picture of them together, and Jeffrey Epstein just pulled out a gun and shot him in the head or something. If you become a billionaire they let you do one a year. I feel like it'd be more funny, I mean, yeah, obviously it would be a lot more funny if

they got like one of the caricature guys in Central Park to like do like a little draw. That's how they catch him, oh my god. Like a court reporter. I mean this is the thing, like, the movie's against itself here because that very same character later on says to Sam McAllister, oh yeah, I was taking photos of the guy for years, no one gave a shit because no one thought anything could happen. Which is kind of vindicated, because nothing does. Like...

Or in fact, the things that happened to Jeffrey Epstein didn't come from accountability, they didn't come from like, public opprobrium, they came from depression and sadness and feeling alone. Men's mental health. It might as well be like a Jeffrey Epstein falls down elevator shaft for how random and completely unconnected to anything going on in the movie it seems. I think this movie could have been improved if for example the only way for Prince Andrew to escape the accusations was for him to steal a large amount of gold bullion off of a plane. I think that could have made the movie a lot better. More entertaining.

Prince Andrew played by Kevin Hart. It's an audacious choice. What if Emily Maitlis had to make a gun out of a vape? Like I'm just spook-balling here. So then we cut forward to 2019. Sam McAllister, as we've discussed, walks into work six hours late, a little drunk. She like, you know, dumps her coat on the desk, and the giant Chanel brooch on it like fucking dents the desk kind of thing.

She didn't take any shit. And she says, hey, let's lead with Lupita Nyong'o talking about colourism, and they're like, no, we want to get Nigel Farage back on to talk about Brexit. And it's like, so wait, the stakes like that the show that's unable to look beyond The borders of its own building and Westminster basically it's even the dramatization of it It seems fucking boring. Yeah, actually the first story they pitch is should we talk about England selling arms to Saudi Arabia that it's using against? Yemen and they're like no next Boring shit about a thing we can just...

You know you couldn't just call, you couldn't just call the guy from BAE Systems or whatever that makes the arms that go to Yemen. You would have to do some actual journalism to find the guy. Yeah you'd have to talk to his son who works at the BBC. Emailing Mohammed bin Salman would love to talk. Also another really funny thing is, I paused it because whenever a movie shows a character looking at a computer screen of emails or tweets or whatever, I think it's always funny to look at, to pause there and look at what the producer imagined, the director imagined to fill the space. And one of the emails that Billy Piper gets and deletes is that Manoush Shafik, the current

president of Columbia University, wanted to talk about her book, What We Owe to Each Other. Like, that would have been an interesting interview five years later, perhaps. Yeah. But yeah, you don't want easy interview subjects as her position, right? Because then you're perpetuating the thing of like, oh, Newsnight is just like, North London talking to itself. Kind of thing. Which it is!

Sure. Yeah, and everyone is like, vaguely aware that their shit sucks, the BBC's cutting jobs and stuff. But she does have one co-worker, well she has a couple of co-workers who disapprove of her, but she has one co-worker who is like mad at her all the time, who is black, who is, as far as I remember, the only black character, the only non-white character in the movie, who is like, your shit specifically sucks even more because it's like, right wing and not woke. And it's tabloid and it's trashy.

Yeah. I am personally demanding you be woke, Billy Piper. Yeah. Yeah. I imagine that was like Lawrence Fox got to write one line. Yeah. He like sort of won a contest where you get to put in like one character. So in this universe, like Lawrence Fox doesn't believe Billy Piper to be woke. He believes that circumstances have forced her to be woke in relation to him by taking his kids away. I think he might actually believe that. The divorce courts made her woke.

She was ordered to be woke by a county court judge. Aw, the judge gave me new pronouns. Yeah, 120 day woke order. 200 hours of community service. Yeah, that's right. I have an ankle bracelet that goes off when I get a certain distance away from my copy of why I'm no longer talking to white people about race. I have to do a land acknowledgement every time I pick up a piece of garbage from the

side of the highway. Yeah, that's right. So Sam receives a pitch in her pitch folder after minutia feeks Yeah from Buckingham Palace to talk about pitch at Palace where Prince Andrew's thing which is a real thing Yes, his real desperate like comeback attempt after all of this stuff had already been exposed. Yeah Yeah, everyone knew it already. Yeah newsnight didn't break any stories at all. Was to go, okay, well what if, like, small businesses, right? Because like, Prince Andrew had this thing of like, travelling a lot and doing business

with some really sinister people. A lot of stuff in Central Asia, same as Tony Blair actually. But also, like, he used to be used to launder British arms deals. Could have been interesting to do that with the Saudi Arabia story maybe. Anyway. But his new thing was this small time thing where he would get a bunch of young entrepreneurs to the palace and introduce them. Because of the economy, or whatever, and 5G and shit.

Oh yeah. What's that show on the BBC? Predators Den? Yeah, Nonsense Den. Yeah, that's right. Good afternoon, Nonsense, I've got a proposal for you. What if we get the sexiest teenagers we could find and put them on one convenient island?

ALICE Alan Sugar being like, now the task was to like conduct a scavenger hunt and find these twelve items, but instead what you did was operate an international network of child sex trafficking for a number of years. NIGEL You've become engaged in something that you and sisters called a Feebophilia, but like, looking at it from where I'm standing, y'know, I was raising it, that's good old fashioned paedophilia is all that is. So, Sam gets this pitch from Amanda Thirsk, who's played by... Again, very well played by Keely Haas.

Can I just say, the cast in this movie, magnificent. I'm a huge fan of all of these women. That's the thing, one thing I'll have to say about this movie, well acted by competent actors who were doing the best they could with some pretty shoddy material. That's absolutely true, and listen, I will always praise anything Keely Hawes is in on the basis that she's in. Rufus Sewell, great Prince Andrew. Same with Romula Garay, who is Esme Wren.

Yeah. Like, Billy Piper's boss, News Nights producer. She's also really good. Billy Piper, also good. Just giving it. Billy Piper's great. She does over enunciate all of her lines, but like, she's good. Everyone in this movie did a great job except the writer and director. Yeah. And the person that came up with it. And Billy Piper got to reuse the costumes from Diary of a Call Girl, so it was quite a cheap production. I'm amazed you remember that.

So Sam gets a pitch from Buckingham Palace to talk about Pitch at Palace. On the same day where photos of Prince Andrew with Jeff Epp get released. Again. Jeff Epp. As his friends call him. Jeffy E. Again, why did it take this long to release those images? I don't know. They were waiting for a story to put them with, is what I read into it.

Mm. So, Keely Hawes plays Andrew's publicist Amanda, who is like, the only person probably in the world other than his own mother, who is genuinely devoted to Prince Andrew. She's fully played as a surrogate mom, right? And this is meant to be an interesting dynamic dynamic, is that like, Andrew has been like infantilized by being royalty, and so his PR has to be very very mumsy with him, and so she's like, darling, don't you think it would be a good idea if maybe you did a bit less pedophilia?

And he's like, I couldn't possibly. The best part is, every time she's talking to him, she's like, we just need you to get to, we just need to get you in the room with people so they can talk to you and see that you're actually like the coolest guy on the planet. So sweet and kind. And we see him like charm people in small settings using the kind of like fixed royalty, putting people at their ease affect. And every time he does it she's like oh my god this guy's the fucking master statesman. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When the royal family come to your house and they go,

GOSH, he's had an air fryer, I think I've got one of those. Yeah, exactly. When he walks into the room to do the Pitchett Palace thing he's like, oh, ha ha, lovely weather we're having. And then everyone like bursts into laughter, it's like, what the fuck? It's just kind of like, being like, well it seems I'm a stupid piece of shit. And like, she's like, this is a master communicator and no one who could say that about themselves could possibly be a pedophile. Yeah.

People love Prince Andrew so much when they're like in a room with him in this movie, that you'd expect he was one of like, the Central Asian cons who would just like, cut Cordier's hands off for fun if they just pleased him. There's, like, another subplot where, like, Prince Andrew's hired another PR called, like, Jason Stein. Yeah, why is that in there? That guy doesn't do anything. Yeah, for no reason.

All he does is say to Amanda, you really shouldn't let him go on Newsnight with Emily Maitlis, it's a terrible idea, he's gonna come off looking so stupid. Yeah, you have hired like one obvious man, right, who is able to see that this guy is not actually that charming, and it doesn't matter. So I guess that the relationship between Amanda and Prince Andrew is a little bit like the relationship between Billy Piper and her son, and that's like the C-plot, is Billy Piper's son is trying to talk to a girl? Yeah, and in case you were worried that this was gonna be a subtle movie, he says, Oh, she's not in my class.

Because we're London urchins and we live in like, probably like a two million pound house. If only I knew just what to say to teenage girls like Prince Andrew. If only there was some way of getting advice. This interview needs to happen. For my son. But you can't just email Prince Andrew, he's not Gnome Chomsky. So the other PR, the one who's like, again, the competent PR, who's like, PLEASE don't do this.

Yeah, but basically his plan, right, is to sort of mouzayir assault on the extremely servile British newspaper journalist, to get Prince Andrew in one-on-one interviews with journalists they know will be subservient, and be like, get flattering puff pieces and scale it up really slowly. And that fucking works! We've seen royals do it, like, many times. That's also 95% of UK journalists. Yeah, absolutely.

So anyway, Amanda's like, hey, come on, let's get Prince- Elsa, what are you, Prince Andrew on Newsnight to talk about Pitch at Palace? Like, what the fuck kind of a news segment would that be? It's really great to come to the palace and get pitched. It's really fantastic. It's so obviously a trap. Like, talk about my Penny Ante bullshit scheme thing. It's like the cardboard box propped up with a stick, you know?

My favorite moment that I guess we were pretty much there is when Gillian Anderson is in the palace waiting in this meeting room, and she's with Billy Piper and they're about to meet Prince Andrew for the first time, and she leans over to Billy Piper and she's with Billy Piper and they're about to meet Prince Andrew for the first time and she leans over to Billy Piper and she's like, don't worry, how hard could it possibly be to talk to a royal about quite, you know, accusations that they're a pedophile. And it's meant to be like, oh, that's really hard. But then Prince Andrew walks in and he might as well be wearing a hat with a propeller on it going, hello. They told me not to tell you about the little girls. Ho ho ho. He's played by a peon from Warcraft?

Yeah. He literally says like, I was really good friends with Jimmy Savile too. I kind of like that as like a kind of off-putting joke that he thinks is funny. And to be fair it is the funniest line in the movie. But like, we should talk about Maitless here, right? Because I think Seldom has a British TV journalist have been so mythologized, But like, we should talk about Maitless here, right? Because I think seldom has a British TV journalist been so mythologised, because like, they do a bit of the like, oh, North London talking to itself thing earlier, but they never implicate Maitless in this. She's just kind of, she or her shitty dog are like, traipsing the halls looking like

extremely dignified, and everyone's like, woah, that's fucking Emily Maitless, she's superwoman! No one ever sees her eat? Question mark. And everyone's like, whoa, that's fucking Emily Maitlis, she's superwoman. No one ever sees her eat? Question mark. And it's like... What? Huh? I didn't know that Scoop was also Thinspo, like what the fuck? A little bit, yeah, but like, it's just...

No, cause Emily Maitlis photosynthesizes. No one ever sees her eat, they can hear it through the door. It's disgusting. Like a horse. Emily Maitlis went on to a second job as one of like, the ladies in black from Fade Routhers camp. I understand Emily Maitlis to be a, like, you know, I'm sure hardworking but basically unremarkable journalist in the, a stern woman delivers you your news mould, which so many

British people seem to like. It's fine. Now, Baron Harkonnen, there are allegations that you've murdered the little slave girls because you were mad in your oil bath. It was a technique perfected by Moira Stewart, but you know, Maitlis is a good practitioner on that. Can I prevail on you to open up Twitter and search Emily Maitlis' tweets for Corbin? This is a fun time. I know she's had some shit takes in her time.

LARISSA They all do that though, that's very like pest encoded as well. To just tweet out a thought, like it's not really like a view. It's very like BBC, to be just like, well I'm not allowed to express a view so why don't I ask a weird question? ALICE Coonsburg by far the worst defender on this, but like, Maitless is, I think of her very much as in the same kind of mold, but like, any time she's on screen or mentioned they're like, this is a fearsome fucking interviewer. And then you see the actual interview, like the real one, and it's like, she goes like, are you a nonce?

And he goes, yeah. I mean, no, fuck! LORENZO I didn't think consequences were real and they're basically not so sure. JAN Yeah. I mean, no, fuck. I didn't think consequences were real and they're basically not so sure. Yeah. Presented as like the maternal figure of the nation. And if your mom asked you that question, you wouldn't lie to her, would you? No.

No. The best part of the interview is that she's like, hello, Prince Andrew. And then it cuts to one of the other producers of the show who's off to the side and he's like, this is going fucking horribly. Sorry, my funniest line of the movie, we are jumping forward a bit. So I'm going to pull this back. to the side and he's like this is going fucking horribly. My funniest line of the movie we are jumping forward a bit so I'm gonna pull us back and I share this which is that after they argue about what Emily Maitlis will wear to the interview she's standing there in like a suit jacket and pants and then Prince Andrews walks

in and exclaims the top of his lungs trousers. Which apparently is real like all the weirdest Andrew shit is just stuff that everyone involved has written about in their various books about this. And of course, like, all of that's believable because he is genuinely like the Oath King. Yeah, for sure. He's an idiot. He's a fucking moron. He is an idiot.

That's why tonally the movie doesn't work, because it's like all this... They build it up like, oh, it's going to be like two gunslingers having a battle. And then it's just that they missed the tone of like, no, this was like choking a defenceless child, but the defenceless child just resuscitates and is immune to consequences. ALICE It's sort of like, they do this whole thing that's like, oh we're like, we're tracking big game, and if they get spooked, like the Queen could stop it, the Director General could stop it, like his PRs could stop it, and then we like, see him in the room with all those people, and they're like, are you sure that you wanna do this, stop it, like, his PRs could stop it, and then we could see

him in the room with all those people, and they're like, are you sure that you wanna do this? And he's like, yeah. Yeah, it's fine. That was really crazy to me, after the interview they're like, oh, thank god, we did it, we got the scoop. Now all we have to do is pray that the Queen doesn't call us on the phone and tell us not to air it. And again, the more interesting implication is that, like, she would and they would just do that.

Yeah, fully. Yeah. Very nice, Emily Maitlis, you've got there. Would be a shame if anything were to happen. Would be a shame if she were to eat. I heard she's going on a trip to Paris soon. Very dangerous tunnel. The Queen sneaking, like, protein powder into Maitlis's, like...

Yeah, we're bulking Emily Maitlis. No one will respect her anymore, she's got huge lats. She's doing mean jokeshit to Emily Maitless to stop this thing going out. I'm gonna bring us back into the order, right? Because the photographer is still, at this point in the movie, saying to Sam, hey, Google Glaine Maxwell, and so... I'm fucking Mr Exposition, right? And Google... Nonsense. Yeah, Google Gl... Nonsense. Yeah, Google, Glade Maxwell Nonsense. All of this stuff was massive international news as it happened. And then the movie, again I pause, she clicks a Daily Mail link from 2015! Everyone knew!

There's not news! You just got an idiot to embarrass himself on TV! Yes, yeah. So, Sam then goes to the palace to meet Amanda. They really hype up the kind of hypnotic effect of the palace and like, proximity to power. Because like, she's fucking working class. So she's like, her mum tells her to steal one of the teaspoons, because they're like, you know, knees up, mother brown cock knees or whatever. And she's about to and she gets caught by Amanda, who's like, we kind of expect people

to do that, because that's how we like to run things, patricially. So like, that's a good sign when people are stealing spoons from us. It means they want a part of us. It's like, yeah, that's a good sign when people are taking parts of the Berlin Wall home. ALICE I really cannot get over how much, kind of like, working class shit they try and cram onto Sam McAllister. It's really remarkable. And it's like... JAN She only is ever pictured eating a kebab. plus shit they try and cram onto Sam McAllister. It's really remarkable.

She only is ever pictured eating a kebab. Oh, we'll talk about the fucking kebab. I have a specific kebab thought for the end. At one point she accidentally calls Prince Andrew Bossman. That's how committed she is to the kebab lifestyle. Just sitting down in front of Amanda Thirsk and she's like, hello, and Sam's like, oh bruv. Yeah, it's Kingsman 3. But instead of parkour, it's interviewing. It's emailing. It's news. So, what's Amanda like, asks Sam, and Amanda says, he's a very loyal friend, and too loyal

for sound good sometimes. And then the two of them, Sam's like, why don't we get a proper drink? It is really, like, well played by Keely Hawes. Again, I'm being normal about Keely Hawes, but it's really remarkable how well she plays up the light. It's quite creepy, the way all of these people act, that she's like, well he's actually really lovely, we don't talk about the paedophilia here. Kind of thing. It was well done, I thought. Yeah, so, down to the skill of the actors, really. Yeah, for sure.

My favourite little bit of that in that scene is when Billy Piper refers to Prince Andrew as the Queen's favourite son, and she says, "'Well, she is a very good judge of character.'" And he's like, what the fuck kind of thing to say is that? She's like, ranking her sons, and she's so fucking good at it. The Queen is not in this, by the way, because that taboo still hadn't been broken yet, so she's still like... It's partly because I cultivated a thing about how she's really remote and distant and Andrew

really needed someone to love him, aside from like, you know, Jeffrey Epstein. But instead the result is just kind of like this void, you know? Actually, that's not true. The Queen does have a cameo as a woman on the bus. In one scene. As she does in every British movie. We see her come out of the kebab shop. She's like the British Quentin Tarantino. She's always in there. She usually says the N word.

$50 lamb and rice. There's a scene at the end of the movie where she does like, you know, come out of the bus withholding a kebab and then it goes, I mean it cuts. I don't know if you guys saw it, but it was, it said something. It said the queen will be back in Heave. I hate when I watch a movie for work and then I forget that there's a post credits scene. Oh, a nightmare. Yeah, well in the case of this movie it was when the Queen and Daniel Craig skydive into the Newsnight studio. Freebird playing. So Amanda and Jason now have the first of their many arguments where Jason's like, don't

do this. Absolutely don't do this, absolutely don't do this, you have to understand that he's a sweaty paedophile and comes off like one. Well I think that people will understand if you put him in a room with a camera that he's not a sweaty paedophile because he doesn't sweat, actually. He's a very dry paedophile. Basically everyone involved is like, hey, this is stupid, don't do it. Including Sam's co-workers, to be fair, like, No, we want to have more Brexit arguments on Newsnight. We need Newsnight to be Brexit

arguments. It's not entirely untrue in the sense of, because one of the things I thought touched on quite well in this film, or much better than the actual story itself, is the state of British media post-Brexit and the hysteria that these shows got themselves into, particularly around all those early discourses about news media being completely detached from society. And this sense that, and I don't know if you remembered this, or remember that period of time. But one where you had like BBC, like heads of the BBC departments and stuff, kind of committing to sort of reconnecting with

broader British society, but being completely unaware of how to do that. And like, there's a sort of broader conversation as to like, whether that was sort of misplaced or whether that's even possible in media generally. I think that's a different type of conversation. But it did sort of result in these types of programs that were designed to reconnect British institutions with broader society, being kind of concentrated entirely on pretty mundane, well not even mundane, but just very bizarre ways of trying to reassert that, and lots of it was kind of Brexit arguments, or it was about, I think, like early culture war stuff, but, you know, lots of this sort of laying the groundwork.

Just like, grabbing the public by the lapels and being like, what the fuck do you bastards care about? Well I think, yeah. And like, as a result, it's kind of, you know, you look at sort of media stuff now, I think Question Time's a really good example of it, where it all feels really messy and disjointed, and you're sort of watching it being like, well, who is this for? And why are we watching it? And why is like the CEO of Pure Gym talking about why we need to sort of, like, why we need to give all of Gaza to Israel? And it's like, and I think there is a way that you can connect that to the reckoning that the BBC had to confront on the basis that, you know, they believe that

they had to reconnect with the public, but didn didn't really know how to do that. And in any case, yeah, I do think that the broader existential crisis of Newsnight that's touched on very briefly in this is actually quite a good insight into. Whether it relates to the Andrew stuff, I'm not convinced about that. You're saying what you're talking about is, again, a better and more interesting movie. It goes back to why doing movies about media stuff is really bad and you shouldn't do it. If you want a TV series about this that did do it quite well, also with Roman Ligaray, by the way, is The Hour, which was like a BBC series about a 1960s news night, essentially.

It was really good and then they didn't realise and they cancelled it after like two seasons. Oh, they needed to do Question Time 2. Yeah. It's the 1960s, every politician is a nonce, we're interviewing them about something else. We call it Table Sticks. Yeah, I mean, we say one of the things that's well observed in this film as well, is the weird petulance of the royals. Like Andrew freaking out at some maid for arranging his teddy bears wrong.

Yeah, that's one of the ways in which they infantilize him, is that he has a bunch of stuffed animals on his bed that he's already particular about and he knows all the names. That's normal, actually. If I was making this movie, I would have had him the second that she's like, puts the stuffed animal in the wrong place, he would have put her in a sleeper hole that knocked her out, dragged her into a closet, and closed it. I don't want to be too dune too on here, but again it could have been like Baderath testing out his knife.

This the Epstein then kills himself because he was sad. He gets a sudden attack of men's mental health. Yes indeed. Which we experienced as new. As everybody watching screens being like, holy shit, Jeffrey Epstein fucking jeffed himself. To a permanent Epstein. And Andrew then sort of mutters to Amanda, I'm supposed to be talking to mummy about my 60th birthday. She had big plans for me. It was going to be apple popping, it was going

to be pin the tail on the donkey. With a real donkey! So yeah, and also, this is mostly just an observation for Hesse, but did you feel that after Epstein died, it was like they got a DVS-1 ambient set just cut over this movie for like 45 seconds? Yeah, absolutely. A lot of the music is very Born Identity coated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Complete with the kind of like, news tension theme, like, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da Like, get some rest Emily, you look tired. This moment is like, and the sort of scenes leading to this, it is another example of like why you shouldn't do a movie like this in terms of like why you shouldn't do a media movie.

Because like the only one that I reckon sort of does it well, All the President's Men, kind of really understands the genre of the paperwork movie in terms of like the whole film is supposed to be like, incredibly mundane. The stakes of it are high, but it's kind of, you know, you have characters who are having to spend, you know, a good portion of their time just going through document after document after document. The whole process is supposed to be mundane. And the idea of it like, you know, like in this 45 second scene, where, or the 45 seconds I think that you're referencing, but perhaps it was before where these sort of documents are uncovered, and the documents

that are supposed to detail Prince Andrew. And it's sort of just shown to you immediately. And like... It's video game logic, kind of. It's like, it just gives you what you need when you need it. Yeah. Well the information is kind of just given to you already, which, I mean again, this whole film is like, we all know exactly what happened.

Prince Andrew walking into the interview room is full of chest high walls and health packs. RILEY But it's like, there's no sort of big discovery that doesn't sort of like, unsurp everything. Every answer is sort of given to you. You can see the original footage on YouTube, and it's like, a lot more compelling. ALICE This is the thing, right? The paparazzi guy gets the kind of most interesting line in the movie, and the thing that is a

more interesting question. Which is when he's like, yeah, I've been taking photos of this for years and no one cared. None of this required that much legwork. Right, and all the president's men is interesting because it requires a lot of phone calls, and a lot of meeting sources and stuff to try and confirm and trip people up and stuff. Whereas they have the thing that they need from minute one, and as they're planning this interview the Newsnight producers whole lead is just going early and aggressive by being like, these are the photos of you being a fucking nonce.

Yes or no. Like... , because they have to constantly like, invent stakes for it, right? So as they go to meet at the meet at the palace, I believe... I can't remember if one of you alluded to this line before, where Emily Maitlis says, "'I've got this.' How difficult could it be, talking to the Queen's son about his relationship with the convicted sex offender in Buckingham Palace?" There's a terrible Gillian Anderson, she says it way sexier than that.

It turns out it was super easy to do. It turned out it's one of the easiest things you could possibly do. Sam McAllister has to have a big speech where she like talks Andrew into it, to his face, where she's like, everybody thinks you're a fucking nonce. And that's basically it. Like... Do you know what they do to nonces on the wing, Andrew? You're gonna have to go in the fucking seg, unless you go on Newsnight and sort this out.

Dangling VP status in front of Prince Andrew, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the speech basically is, social media means everybody has a voice now. And then like Princess Eugenie is like, I'm on Twitter daddy and they're saying the most awful things about you. And he's like, well, yes, I guess I'll go do the Peter Fowler interview, I suppose. They're saying worse things than they said about my hat at the wedding. And Amanda keeps saying like, whoa, this is great.

As soon as he does the paedophile interview, everyone's gonna love him. Jason, the one smart character in this movie, is just like, this is such a terrible idea I have to resign now. Yeah, he quits. This is, like, I can't march our boss into this minefield with you. It's going to be fantastic, Andrew. You're going to go on the BBC and you're going to say, I'm not a pedophile. Oh, you want me to say I'm not a pedophile?

Can we practice a few times? Another thing like as to the stakes and like the fact that they have these like crazy, they keep inventing these crazy stakes. Like even in the first scene when the photographer running and putting these like little acts, this little action scene in. It's movies like this, they don't, you don't really need stakes other than the story and which is why they picked the wrong story because nothing really happens because of this. Like Spotlight is another movie that does this type of movie really well, I think.

And it's because like the stakes are, you you wanna see the people who are molesting kids in the Catholic church, you wanna see them be held to account in a way that is very different from this movie, cause I mean, again, it's the same, like everyone knew, but it's not like they're the prince, and they could literally just, like, you know, hide in a big tower from everyone. ALICE As far as practicing for the interview guys, like you mentioned that, Riley. They do do this, like the BBC set up a kind of, like, Hereford style kill house?

To like, prep for this? Like, as soon as they know the interview conditions, where it's like, oh there's two chairs, six feet apart, they like, tape this shit out like they're about to go and kill Osama Bin Laden. Yeah, yeah. The dog that interviewed Osama Bin Laden. The first scene of the killer is just like, they're in the same exact room. Yeah, why did you need to diagram this out to rehearse it? Like, I do not know what two chairs facing each other looks like.

There's like tape on the ground marking like... I thought it was weird when Emily, Sam, and Esme came into the interview room like cutting the pie, breaching and clearing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just a Kevin Hart there with a stopwatch. Not quick enough, mateless. Run it again. You're dead. Run it again. You're a dad. Run it again.

Emily Maitlis asking Billy Piper in the first scene to test her. What color is the boathouse in here for? It's the fucking FNG, sir. Draw it again. It's just a Brexit argument. Draw it again. What kind of name is Maitlis anyway? You know what's just happened? Princess Michael Kent shot you in the back of the head. It's cuz you didn't check your corners I think has been pointed out by basically everyone on this call right now. None of the stakes really stick

Yeah, because they keep hammering the oh god What if he's really good thing they actually say but what if he's good? And like cuz they want you to be the viewer to be like, oh god, what if he's good? What if he really bosses the what if he does the interview really well then comes off super super well himself? As though we didn't see the interview The first sentence of the interview again, it's the funniest one of the funniest moments of the movie She's like hello Prince Andrew You finally decided to speak out and like it cuts to one of the other producers and he's like, he's fucking killing it.

For farts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The stakes here, the BBC are worried he's just gonna like, apologize, right, and be charming but mostly just be like, yeah, boundless regret, I feel bad. Boundless regret, but I don't admit to anything but I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Serious errors of judgement, I feel terrible for everyone involved, all of this, right? Which I don't know if there was a way for the real Prince Andrew to have threaded that

needle, but the key distinction is that he never would have because he's not that person and the royals don't let you be that kind of person. And the movie does its best to get to that, but not very subtly, you know? He's mostly like throwing a tantrum about a stuffed animal. Exactly. And it's like the destiny of the interview was set at the very beginning because as we've said many times, the man's a fucking idiot. Yes. And so constantly playing up to playing this up as though it could go either way, hold on to your seats, this is so important, sort of misses the fact

that the man's a fucking idiot. The interview itself sort of then happens. They have to create the stakes, like he's not a colossal moron. But as soon as, like, the I don't sweat line comes out, you can kind of see Keely Hawes finally realize, I've made a terrible mistake. Yeah, well what's really interesting is, they try and create more stakes by being like, is like, Maitless fucking this up by not immediately going on the attack and like, coming over the table at him and like, threatening to like, chef him up, right? And... No. No, she's fine. Also, we talked a lot about the interview portion, but I looked into this and Andrew,

Prince Andrew, did a lunch with the FT interview in 2009 in New York. Wow, okay. Yeah. Which I have some of in front in New York. Wow, okay. Yeah. Uh huh. Which I have some of in front of me here. Guy loves dinner. He's crazy about lunch. Shout out to the FT, when are they getting there?

Sort of like, you know... Well, I suggest that, so basically, Prince Andrew's job in 2009 was to go be a kind of ambassador for British business generally. Again, that would have been really interesting to be like, hey, also, what's the connection of the royal family to like supporting British arms sales in Yemen? What have you been up to in Uzbekistan, my guy? I had a massive plov. I was actually able to eat in its entirety. It took me four hours. A plov for an entire wedding. They were very pissed. They said, wow, that white boy has shocked us by eating massive plov.

Member of the British royal family shocks Uzbek wedding by eating plov in perfect Uzbek. They told me I was going to be the talk of Dushanbe when I went to Tajikistan. I suggest that New York is an unusual stop for someone with years of exposure to parts of the world where British businesses usually request more help opening doors. Yeah, New York was a weird place for you to be in 2009 if your job is to like sell arms to his back of steel. Yeah, grease and bombs. Yeah. The need for me to intervene here is minute, he admits. As someone whose friends include the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, he can be seen more at

home in the Middle East and Asia. Until the dispute in August over Scotland's release of the Lockerbie bomber, Prince Andrew has been considered to represent the UK at Libya's celebrations for the 40th anniversary of the coup that brought Muammar Gaddafi to power. Oh, rancid vibes in that tent. Yeah. The smell alone. God, him and Gaddafi could have gotten up to some fun pedophile antics though.

Like a buddy cop movie. The opposite of a buddy villain movie? The ability to work with countries with which British diplomats may have had rockier relationships is something he highlights, pointing to a 2008 visit to Sakhalin, where he attended the opening ceremony for a Russian liquified natural gas plant. What is that ceremony like? Are we talking like, Beijing Olympic style, like, 800 drummers, you know, pyrotechnics? You get a Russian 21 gun salute, which is one guy shooting a Markov in a concrete room

with a drain in the floor. Well no, it's 21 rifles, but only one of them is loaded, but each one of them is pointed at one of the guests. The 21 gun salute is, it's 21 rifles but all of them have had different crucial parts sold to pay for someone's villa in Nicosia. So five minutes of conversation with Dmitry Medvedev were invaluable in preparing the Russian president for the G20 Summit in London, he argues. Quote, he's a young man with no experience of that sort of environment.

The ability to walk through the door and see a smiling face he knew made all the difference. So he was like, I'm going to make Dmitri Medvedev feel like he's among friends at the G20. Basically. Cool. He's like a fucking service dog. Prince Andrew fucked Dmitri Medvedev, this is what we're taking. Greek warrior style to impart his knowledge of the G20 summit. And again, like, this is the thing.

He is the most suspicious man in the world. And like, to invent this tension with Maitlis, where the producers are like, no, you have to go in there like Kendrick Lamar, is like, when instead you can just very lightly tap on the door and he immediately volunteers, oh yeah, we were like, fuckin' spit roasting miners with Gaddafi. Yeah. He says he's in New York to highlight the role of British businesses in employing one million Americans, and to argue for a coordinated transatlantic approach to financial regulation. That's cool, where you staying, Airbnb or...?

I dunno. He's got a friend who lives around there. Prime Minister. Arguing for transatlantic approach to financial regu- like, what does that fucking mean? Well there isn't one of those, so. Yeah. So, on a previous meeting when he'd been in Davos, he'd been brave enough to declare that the Bernie Madoff standal, quote, couldn't happen in London, and then returns to his

defense of the principles-based regulation preferred in the city. Polishing off the last of his bread rolls, I like, this is the most vicious the FT generally gets. He's just been eating bread the whole time? That's the twist here? Non-stop housing bread rolls. You finished off the bread. Oh yeah, we're fucking miners with Gaddafi. Mommy doesn't always let me have this much bread. Can I get like a fifth order of bread rolls, please? I have some more crimes to confess.

You normally only get this out of mob guys. That combination of like, carb loading and like voluntarily confessing to serious crimes is normally only a feature of like, the mob. Yeah. They were at Cipriani and he was like, no, they don't have my favorite lunch, which is enough plov to feed 140. So polishing off the last of the bread rolls, he ate all of them too, he didn't give the FT Journal one. He was just like, get the bread rolls, put them in front of him, and just starts munching through them.

Does it say what restaurant they're at? Yeah, Cipriani. Oh my god. The FT really is Capito talking to itself, but sometimes Capito says to itself, does that motherfuckers just eat all the bread rolls? He launches into a discussion about free-floating exchange rates, the perils of protectionism, and a back to basics explanation of what banks do with their savers' money that bordered on teaching this financial journalist how to suck eggs.

Wow, okay. That's the most vicious I've ever seen the FT get directly. Which I had to suck eggs because he'd eaten all the bread rolls. When they brought out the eggs, he sucked them for me. Prince Andrew snowballing an egg into an FT journalist's mouth. I'm looking at the bread basket that Cipriani gives you. I'm looking at a picture of it online, and it is a full loaf of bread. Full loaf of bread, and like, 30 breadsticks.

Oh, nice. The funny thing was, Prince Andrew, the other part of the article, was like, no starters, I'm too busy. And then, so the FT journalist is like, I kinda wanted to get starters, and he's like, no, too busy for starters, I'm gonna eat all the bread, and that's gonna be it. L. Learning from this that Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, aside from a pedophile, is also a terrible hang. M. So, as our food arrives, asking about his routine, travelling for 100-120 days a year,

sometimes squeezing 16 weatings into a two day visit. Sorry, this is the best. Sawing at his food with a fork, the Duke answered. Wow, they really hate this guy. He's like barely house trained. He doesn't know what a knife is. It's because people keep stealing all the silverware from Buckingham Palace. He's never seen it before.

Yeah, it's like this is is a guy who, like, the FT has politely portrayed as a man who still wears pull-ups. Basically. Who did this interview? I need to know who the kind of British financial Isaac Chartner is. RILEY It was Andrew Edgecliff Johnson. ALICE I am now terrified of this motherfucker. If I hear word one that Andrew Edgecliff Johnson wants to interview me, I am fleeing the fucking country. Also Edgecliff, what a name, huh?

Yeah, he sends you an invite asking whether you want to go out for dinner, just like, avoid that at all costs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unless, like, the restaurant's really good, in which case I'm sure you'll be fine. Taking Andrew Edgecliff Johnson to the Shalimarca bathhouse. Sawing at her food with a wooden fork. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Prince Andrew listlessly gazed over to the chicken marinating in a paint bucket.

So, I gotta go back to this. As our- sawing at his food with a fork, the duke says the key is the painstaking preparation that goes into each trip. He adds that, quote, this business of engagement is something his family has a genetic predisposition to. L, Oh my god, dude. J, Uh huh. L, Yeah, he has epigenetic memory of like, sort of shaking hands and being like, oh, yes, it's perfectly charming, we have one of those as well.

L, There's hints of the same kind of obliviousness that's in the movie, where like, Maitlis's thing is to essentially like, give him enough rope, right, where she's like, do you want to apologize to the child you nons? And he's like, nah, I don't think I should do that. LUCAS She just gives him... and this is what happened in the actual interview, of course, because again, the climax of the movie is something everyone has already seen. The interview! D&J Yes. LUCAS Yeah.

D&J Yeah, it's like, we know that what happens is she gives him enough rope to hang himself and he's like, I'm bloody good at tying nooses, let me show you. And what you don't think this will work, I'll hang myself with it just to show you, you idiot. Learned this shit from Emma Gaddafi. This is kind of like if the movie JFK had been about Lee Harvey Oswald preparing to shoot JFK in the head. And he's like, I just don't know if I can do it. I don't know if it's possible.

Lee Harvey Oswald shooting JFK in the head was impressive. This is just... It's sad. I can't do this myself. I'll need at least one, maybe two other guys helping out. Oh, also, Riley, in terms of like funny freeze frames on computers and stuff, there's a scene after the interview where Billy Piper is looking at the reflections of like a wall of tweets of people tweeting about

it. ALICE The tweets are my favourite thing! DARREN Yeah, on her phone it says, you can see it for one second, one of the tweets is, we need better prison guards. ALICE The tweet thing is great because that's her big moment of victory after the interview goes out, right, is the BBC's socials room, where they run the Twitter from, seeing the feeds light up, and my favourite detail about that is that still, in like,

however many years of Twitter being a thing, movies have not figured out a way to demonstrate that a tweet is popping off, other than the little like, whistle noise. And so it leaves you with the idea that the BBC Twitter room, where they run the Twitter, just leaves the notifications with sound on all the time. Because it's like three guys sitting at laptops and you just hear it constantly, it's like Jesus, okay, at some point this is an occupational health and safety thing. They have those headphones on that people on the airport tarmacs have.

I'm like the BBC Twitter mentat, you know? Well that's why none of the guys who run the Have I Got News for Twitter account can ever get a good one off, because they're so distracted by all the noises going on constantly. They're like a dog in a firework show. Sounds like a hydroelectric dam in there, it's like crazy. One more thing from the FT interview, let me go back to the movie. The Duke's office has asked PricewaterhouseCoopers about 18 months ago to identify exactly what value his role creates.

Quote, we're trying to come up with a model, but I'm not sure that it's going to work. I'd love to be able to say that I've been responsible for 10 billion pounds of business or another 250 jobs coming to the UK or whatever, but the companies themselves don't know. Fantastic. What does this guy do? No one knows what I do. As you're trying to cut a pizza with a fork No one knows what I do My job is to be friends with some of the worst guys in the world

Hey, he said we'll try to cut a beef Wellington with a teaspoon Shuffling gnocchi loose into his own mouth phone ringing Jeffrey Epstein's a contact picture on it No one knows what I do. Ominously. No one knows what I do. He said drinking a candle. The second breadbasket arrived. Point.

Walking off tablecloth trailing after him. Putting his hand into a pot of spaghetti and being like, oh, I thought that was a witch's hair. Okay. So, much drama is also made of like, oh, the interview's over. He's like, well that went well. And much drama, which he actually would have... Yeah. Amanda Thirsk is the one who's like, no it didn't. Much drama is made also of like, are they gonna get the sand disc back to BBC HQ so the public... Do like a sort of over the shoulder tracking shot in a moped of the guy driving back to broadcasting house and it's like... Why?

Like, at this point it would have been better to like... A white Viet Uno looms into shot. It would have actually been better to have a movie of like, we have to get like a kind of heightened reality sort of like shooter, right? Movie where it's like, I have to get the Prince Andrew, or like Warriors, right? I have to get back to Broadcasting House and the Royals are gonna be trying to kill me the entire time. Yeah.

Like the Queen going up to the mic to play Nowhere to Run. This is a thing, if you're Americans, you're Netflix, you have an infinite budget and just fucking straight out say, oh the Royal Family might kill us. It wouldn't be a more entertaining movie, The Stakes would make sense. It would be funnier and would generate a hilarious lawsuit. Also true. Yeah. Prince Harry in an Apache helicopter looming above the road as you accelerate towards it

on your moped. Get Olivia Colman to play the queen and she just like pulls out dual like dual wielding desert eagles. Prepare for the teagling of a lifetime you bitch. I'm gonna tell you what I told Diana. Buckle up motherfucker. She's our best driver. She's our best driver. Now that's Prince Philip. Anyway, so we get to the real victory. Here's the real victory, the real stakes of the movie.

People like Sam McAllister at work now. Yeah, Esme Renn says, does like a nice tweet about her, and she's like, damn, my insanely hot boss finally respects me. But also, do we remember right, that the consequences of this interview were like, yeah, a couple days later Andrew was stripped of his Royal titles, until he was given all of his privileges back because they remembered that they hate Harry more because he married a black woman. Yeah. The way that they do this, right, is that he's in the bath thinking, that went well, and then the interview goes live and his phone blows up.

He comes out of the bath and he's standing there wet and naked, there's a really unexpected shot of Prince Andrew arse. And he's like, God, I shouldn't have bought a Samsung Galaxy S7. Rufusil, normal shaped arse, I'll say that. Not like fucking Rory Kinnear. No, no, no. Amongst very talented British actors of that sort of gender and age, yeah, very normal arse.

And that's his moment of emasculation and humiliation, he's like, I underestimated these fierce women and they put me in my place. And then he goes in for an unseen interview with his mum, who is like, you're fired on account of the nonchit. Yeah, and then, but yeah, you're not so much fired, the stakes are, Prince Andrew- You're off the team. You're benched. Prince Andrew was benched for like seven months until they were, the stakes are, Prince Andrew... You're off the team. You're benched. Prince Andrew was benched for like seven months until they were like, oh yeah, Prince Harry

married a black lady, we hate him more, and we're sometimes short of royals so you can come be with us in public again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is displayed through a climactic fax from Royal Communications. However, the thing I want to talk about, right, is Sam's big victory, is she like, gets the approving tweet from her posh BBC bosses, and they're like, you're one of us now, kind of. And she goes back to, y'know, working class London, where she goes to the kebab house, and boss man in the kebab house is like, yo, did you see this news thing?

Because I loved the Royals, apparently. I would have loved to have been there when they filmed that. Which is an insane thing to say or think. Whoever booked that interview is a great booker. I bet she sent an incredible email, huh? Whoa! Why is he Italian? That is a lot more interesting than more about Brexit, innit? Donner or Shish. Yeah, really reestablishes Newsnight as serious. Well this is the thing, because at the end credit I was just like, I didn't realize this, but she's now like, she isn't at Newsnight anymore.

She's not at Newsnight anymore, partly because of like the woke blob or whatever, but partly because she teaches, the film says negotiation, which is partly true, but she teaches at... LSE. LSE's law program, because she was already a barrister before she got that job. Something which never shows up in the movie, and which would maybe have undercut a little bit the like, oh if I don't get this fucking interview I'll die of being poor. That thing. They're gonna put me in the walkhouse pickin' elkum they is.

She should have been wearing the wig the whole time. University of Edinburgh. Like, I don't know what to tell you. The reason... Well, it's not Oxbridge, right? Um... Okay. Yeah.

Fucking owned. It was a better law school than I went to, I'll tell you that. I've always been excluded by the Doxbridge Mafia. Not even Durham. But no, the reason why I brought this up was because if the beginning of the film, what it's seemingly trying to do is reinforce the idea. I'm not saying this does it intentionally, but this is the way that it's structured as one of the BBC being this kind of invaluable institution, the only place where despite all the disparaging comments and despite all the demands and pressures put on it. Because again, at the beginning of the film, the way that like, the stakes are sort of set up, I think for anyone who's an outsider, who's

not aware of how British media works and be very thankful for that, the idea is that, oh no, they're going to shut a news night. Like, you know. Oh fuck, no! And this is where the Sorkin stuff becomes a real thing, because in the newsroom season one, that's the whole concept. They bring in the new producer, who also is a news night type of person, to be like this Republican who's lost the good Republican politics and is just disillusioned, needs this perky British woman to save him from himself. And in doing so they reinvent news night into this invaluable force. And the way that this is framed is really similar in terms of, oh, they're going to shut down Newsnight unless

it can prove that it's useful to the Greek kebab man at, for who his work is, the Italian kebab man who's working. And unless we can come up with £50,000 in the next week, which is the exact same price as the dodgeball competition. The other thing, right, is that it's not even like Newsnight then stopped just booking the same Brexit argument. They went back to doing that! Well, this is what I was going to say, which is that like, it doesn't...

After this happened, they just went back to doing what they... And they still just continue to do that. And also, they've now just got the shit cut out of them, right? They're now like, basically going to be a synopsis of like the 6pm like normal BBC news from like what I remember. But delivered by a sterner woman. But also that sterner woman isn't even on news anymore, she's doing like a podcast! You're watching the kinky BBC news.

Growth industry, baby! Everyone like, the stakes of it are even more minimal, knowing what we know now, because it was kinda like, okay, well, you sort of embarrassed this guy who was already very embarrassing for a little bit. You got, like, benched for a bit. They do the, like, sort of after, you know, after text thing. And then you all got, like, jobs afterwards, okay, cool. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to, you know, have another ending than that with British media.

The thing I think about a lot is, um, Sam McAllister in this reminds me of Rebecca Brooks, right, you know the former editor of The Sun? Where it's like, no one in this country knows what being working class is or means, and so anyone who is able to convincingly perform that affect, which mostly seems to involve in having absolutely fried hair, and like, wearing leopard print. If you can do that, it doesn't matter if you work for Newsnight, if you're a barrister, if you edit one of the most powerful newspapers in the country, you are automatically a permanent outsider. And it's like, that's never been

true in that way. No, but I think you're right in the sense of like, the way in which you kind of navigate and the way in which you survive in media if you are not someone who like already comes from a very particular kind of, you know, a very specific kind of wealthy background. Is to be able to sort of like perform a caricature of working classness that isn't real, but also know when to rein it in. You know how not to scare off the hoes, right? That's sort of what you've got to do in order to sort of have a sustainable career. And like, the character, the Sam McAllister in this film, I don't know who she is in real life so I can't like say anything, but in this film, the Sam McAllister character knows

how not to scare off her boss. I'd be interested in a movie that kind of approached that as like, how to inhabit that kind of persona. That work-sona, if you like. Yeah, what if it was the talented Mr. Ripley? What if the talented Mr. Ripley was... It kind of could be, you know? Like, yeah. A scene, it's a little off point from this, but a scene that really, that we've kind of skipped

glossed over that I would like to talk about a little bit, is when Emily Maitlis asks Billy Piper to talk to her on the studio and she's like, as she's adjust, like help telling them to adjust the studio light, she's like, a little bit more red. And then she turns to Billy Piper and she's like, girls like us have to stick together. And then like winks and then it zooms out and you see that Emily Mateless has just directed them to put the trans color, the trans flag colors in the studio. I was like, okay, hang on.

Yeah. Hidden messages. Anyway, I think that's, we've scooped today. I feel we've scooped. I think we've scooped all we can get out of the film scoop. Yeah. I would like a movie called Scoop where it's about a Turkish ice cream man. Oh yeah. That's my take. Turkish ice cream man really emotionally

engaged in that interview. Just two hours of that. But Turkish ice cream man like trying to give Sam McAllister an ice cream cone because he's really impressed by the news. He cannot but take it away. Hey boss man, two scoops of pistachio. He lives by a code. All right, all right, all right. Heather, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us today. Thank you for having me. Always a pleasure. I hope you enjoyed watching Scoop, the best movie that you have seen this year legitimately. Absolutely.

It's the best movie I've ever seen in my life. Besides another movie, which we may or may not have watched or heard about, us talk about, but we didn't actually do it. We didn't talk about it. No, no, never. We never talked about Lyft. If you think we did, you were just, you know, you're wrong. Delusional. Yeah. Yeah. We were actually in a pizza express. When that episode came out, we were in a pizza express and wokeing. No, Hestia, thank you

very much again for coming on. Thank you everyone out there for listening. By the way, this episode was recorded on Monday, the 13th of May and will be coming out in a couple of weeks, which is why there was two movie episodes this month. We're just having fun. No, we're having fun with it. Having fun. And the thing is, right, in the war I suffered an overdose of Kevin Hart movies, and so I don't actually... I can't actually watch Kevin Hart.

You can't actually laugh because you've laughed too much. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Anyway. I can't lift. We will see... We'll lift all of you, and we'll scoop all of you as well. Lifts, laugh, love.

In a couple of days. If this comes out before the 29th of May, who knows if there will be tickets left. They've gone very, very fast to the live show. It's almost sold out. People really want to see us. At the time of recording, it's almost sold out. Maybe at the time of listening, who knows if it's almost sold out. Give it a check.

And so we'll be doing that on the 29th reading Liz Truss's book with Nish Kumar. I have to read that book soon. Quick question, how heavy of a like metal collar can I expense as like a business cost? I think a couple of kilos. Cool. Heavy is the neck that wears the collar. Yeah, that's gonna be really hefty. Yeah.

Alright, alright. We are going to see you in a couple of short days on the free episode. Bye, everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye.