Richard Osman on cats, crime and c**ts

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0:35Hello and welcome to How to Fail with me, Elizabeth Day. On my podcast, I discussed my guests' failures each week, seeking to understand what obstacles people have overcome and what, if anything, they've learned along the way. because ultimately our failures are lessons that help us understand success better. Just before we get to my chat with Richard Osman, please do join me after this episode on Failing With Friends, where my guest and I take a look at your failures or questions. This week, Richard and I go through the mailbag and tackle fear of rejection in the workplace, how to receive negative feedback, how we wind down and relax, and how to deal with being overly competitive, particularly at Scrabble.

1:22I'd love to hear from you. If you'd like to get in touch, follow the link in the podcast notes. Get Failing With Friends episodes every week and all episodes of How To Fail completely ad-free. Just visit the How To Fail show page on Apple Podcasts and click Start Free at the top of the page to begin your free trial. Or you can visit howtofailpod.com if you're not an Apple user. If you were to put the name Richard Osman into Google, the fifth search suggestion would be a simple question. Is Richard Osman a genius? The evidence on first assessment seems quite compelling. Osman appears to possess an uncanny knack for working out what people want and then giving it to them in the form of entertainment.

2:10As a TV producer, Osman devised formats for hit shows such as Deal or No Deal and Pointless, which he ended up presenting with his university contemporary, Alexander Armstrong. Then when he pivoted into writing fiction, his debut, The Thursday Murder Club, became the fastest selling crime novel of all time and was optioned by Steven Spielberg for film adaptation. The following three books in the series also broke sales records. The quartet has sold 10 million copies globally and all four of them have simultaneously been in the Sunday Times bestseller lists. When last year Osman launched a podcast called The Rest is Entertainment with The Guardian columnist Marina Hyde, it casually soared to number one in the UK charts.

2:55Osman was born in 1970, the youngest of two brothers, and grew up in West Sussex before reading social and political sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was raised by a single mother after his dad left when he was nine, and it's his mum, Brenda, who is probably his most ferocious critic, claiming that her son's prose style is a bit staccato. Undeterred, Osman is publishing a new novel this autumn called We Solve Murders. It introduces a father and daughter-in-law private detective duo. It will undoubtedly sell by the bucket load. But, says Osman, I'm with Kipling on success and failure.

3:38You have to treat them in just the same way. Richard Osman, welcome to How to Fail. Thank you. Kipling put it better than me, I think. You were paraphrasing. I was paraphrasing Kipling. See, he's a genius. I had to set aside all feelings of professional jealousy and my innate competitiveness when writing that introduction. Okay. Because you are an astonishing success. Is that important to you? Yes, it is, but it doesn't come from genius. It's funny, working in a world such as television and and the media in general, it's sort of filled with people who don't really know their audience. And so anyone who comes into that industry, and there's plenty of us who know the audience and who grew up amongst the people who watch kind of mass entertainment media, it's quite easy, because you just make the sort of stuff that you grew up watching and you grew up loving, and that your family watched and your family loved.

4:32And then everyone around you goes, how have you got this magic touch? And it's just what's the inside of my brain. It's what I grew up watching and my brain is very very mainstream i've been able to monetize that do you think that public taste changes over time not really i mean of course you know the um the color of the car changes but you know an engine is an engine you know people always want the same thing they they want to be entertained they want to be amused um they want to be educated they want to feel slightly better about themselves uh by the end of something than they did at the beginning um and that's basically what they want.

5:08And then you just build something extraordinary around that. And I grew up loving television. I grew up writing. And I've been very lucky that I get to do that every day. And I get to do something that I love. And I get to... My real job is I desperately, desperately want to entertain people. I want people to not turn off my television program. And I want people to turn the next page of the book. And yeah, so yeah, it's really, really important to me. And how connected is that desire to entertain people to your desire to be liked by people? Gosh, that's a good question. I certainly like being liked.

5:43That's definitely true. You know, I'm not interested. I'm quite conflict averse. And the best way to be conflict averse is for people to like you, I suppose. But in a cynical way, I'm not interested into shifting into various shapes just to be popular. But I certainly love it if I hit a seam in my brain that people like and people like me for so I can be real but at the same time popular to be real and popular at the same time that's the dream so talking about the Thursday murder club and the books that came subsequently they are wonderful in many respects but one of the ways in which I appreciate them is because the protagonists are older people what was it about people in their 70s that appealed to you as a writer?

6:32I think it was. My mum lives in a retirement village, and I would go down there, and you'd talk to everybody. And they just did these amazing things. People who'd had extraordinary life stories, you know, women who'd sort of ridden on motorbikes around Iran in the 1950s and stuff like that. And then when we see older people in our culture, they're shuffling down the street, getting in our way, voting for the wrong people, you know, hogging all the houses. That's how older people are seen. Either they're completely invisible or they're the problem. And I thought, my God, you know what? They're a generation like any other generation.

7:03They've done these extraordinary things. And so I wanted to just tap into that. I wanted to tap into the fact that I had natural heroes there who also would be underdogs. And from a crime writer point of view, also were invisible and therefore could kind of open any door they wanted, could ask any question that they wanted. So they were sort of perfect. But really, it was just meeting these people and thinking they were sort of lost to our country's narrative. And there were so many stories that were just disappearing. As a writer, it's wonderful to be able to have all of these backstories amongst people who are, you know, not seen as huge heroes and who are sort of locked away somewhere and underestimated.

7:44How old do you feel? My mum always says she feels about 32, which I think is quite a common age for people. I have always felt 46 That's so intriguing that your mum's always felt 32 and that's quite, I feel 32 but I didn't think that was common I think, because I always ask people that question because quite often in book things people ask about writing older people and I always say, how old do you feel? Some people still think they're in their early 20s that must be quite difficult I think I think around about 32 is probably a pretty healthy thing to be isn't it, for the rest of your life? I think so, and similar to you I felt very aligned with myself at 32 Yeah.

8:21All downhill since then, obviously. But I did. Yeah, exactly. I kept thinking, I don't quite fit this world. I wonder if there'll come a point where I do. And at 46, I went, oh, there we go. There we go. Okay, this makes sense now. Brenda sounds like a legend. Yeah, up to a point. I know I did quote her saying that your prose was a bit stochastic. To be fair, she said that she enjoyed reading you. She also said, I tell you what, your books would be very good for any foreigners learning English. Yeah. I said, okay. Thanks, Mum. Okay, that's good. No, she loved the new one. She loved the last devil to die.

8:57But yeah, she's not like any mum. She assumes that the love is built in. She assumes over the years she's put enough work in that I know I'm loved and that I know that she's proud of me. And so she doesn't ever feel the need to tell me anymore. And like any child, of course, I need it constantly. I don't need it from anyone else, but from you I do. So whenever she says something that's not a compliment, you do kind of go, come on, Mum. talking of your success obviously that comes with a fair amount of money now is money something that you fear the lack of yeah and yes a hundred percent i'm gonna grow up with zero money uh and you know certainly as i started my career and if if i ever got back to zero there was nothing to bail me out there was you know i couldn't i couldn't get into debt because there was no one to get me out of debt so yeah i grew up with no money at all from a family that didn't really have money and yeah I really really value it and I'm very very lucky that I'm in a field that overpays people I think sport entertainment these worlds you know they are overcompensated but yeah it's always been a big worry of mine and I've always been very very keen on maximizing what I could earn from what I do I'm a grafter so I would always put in a day's work But if someone else is getting paid off the back of my labour, I want to make sure I get paid too.

10:22And I've always been very, very unionised about that. Yeah, it's really important to me. And not anymore. Those days are slightly gone. But yeah, the fear of losing it all and the fear of having nothing again really was a big driver for me in my 20s and 30s. I read somewhere, or maybe I heard somewhere, that you said that once you hit a certain level of success, or once you hit a certain age, the rocket fuel of competitiveness and ambition sort of falls by the wayside, and it becomes about being happy. Yeah, I think so. You see it all the time in people, in lots of areas. We're all driven by something in our 20s and 30s, whether it is you came from no money, or whether it is you want to vindicate yourself against the bullies who were at your school, or you didn't feel beautiful, you didn't feel loved.

11:11Whatever it is that drives you, you need that because building a career is hard. It's proper graft. You have to put the work in and you have to have a drive. But that rocket fuel which propels you up there, it doesn't last forever and it can't last forever. For me in my 40s, for other people, it might be a different age. you have to kind of see oh i need to find a different way to live now because the rocket's in orbit so all it's doing now is circuiting the globe you're not going to get any higher you have to find a way of enjoying the view right and then you have to work out that what happens after the rocket orbits the globe well eventually you know it runs out of orbit and it crashes back down to earth and then we'll get to the next bit which is you know the thursday murder club bit of how do you manage the decline of your life that's how I've experienced it and you see it in lots of other people you see it in politicians you see people who are still burning their fuel like really late in their career and you think at some point you just you have to just let it go and you have to look out the window has happiness been good for your creativity yeah I think so I mean I've always found contentment very easy I've found it very easy to shut the door and watch the snooker and be happy in that in that regard be content i think a range of experience is good for creativity and i think historically we think being a sort of a misanthrope and you know and drinking too much and you know being embittered against the world makes you a great writer and it can it can do if you can express those things in interesting ways that kind of you know add to the human condition but you can write about happiness as well and you can write about the things that we hold dear and You can write about the little things that make getting up in the morning worth living.

12:52And so long, again, as you write about it in an interesting way, then people are drawn to it. Every single thing that ever happens in my life, I'm like a magpie, goes straight into the writing. I would never go anywhere or buy anything and then mention it in the book the next day. It's impossible. The new book I'm doing, We Solve Murders, it's all around the world. And I thought, I have to do some research. I thought, I'll just set it places I've already been. There are certain scenes and certain books that are about love and about happiness that come because I was, you know, that's how I felt at that time.

13:25As long as you're not sort of just singing it from the rooftops and saying how wonderful life is, because people know that that's a lie. The other thing that you've taken from life with your new book is the cat on the cover. Yes. You are a cat lover. Yes. You're amongst friends here. Yes. How important are cats to you? I think they're very important. Is that a question you've ever been asked for? Do you know what? It's not. Although people, it's fascinating as soon as that book cover came out, people are like, okay, I'll buy that because it's got a cat on the cover. That's the problem. That's how easy it can be sometimes.

13:53I know, I was one of the people who commented that. Then you have to back it up. Yeah, the front cover of the new book is a cat on a gun. And honestly, if you chopped my brain open, that's what you'd see inside. Half cat, half cat. It's a cat and a gun. Yeah, I love cats because I love their attitude. I love how little of a toss they give. but I love how when they do finally sit on your lap you just oh yeah I did it I love dogs but dogs are dogs are a pushover it's the truth and that's nice as well it's nice to have absolute kind of untrammeled loyalty but with a cat when a cat finally goes do you know what I'm actually not going to sit on this really uncomfortable table anymore I'm going to come and sit on your lap you're like yes I did it you know I'm a I'm a hit and that's that's looking out the window you think oh there's me and a cat that's the only success you really care about rich lossman isn't it it's the cat on your lap yeah if lisa ingrid and i will sit on the sofa and and you'll see lisa approaching the sofa and you think okay she's going to sit on someone's lap and then we'll look at each other and just go who's it going to be who's it going to be today and we both sort of pretend it's not we don't want it to be us while we're raising our laps into into the sort of perfect uh place and if she ever walks over ingrid and lies on my lap i just oh my god it's the dream Is she called Liesl after Liesl in The Sound of Music?

15:10She is, yeah. Liesl Von Kat is her full name. So good. Yeah, yeah. The hero of the new book has a cat at home called Trouble. And the whole point of the new book is, which is similar to me, I'm sure we'll talk about, I don't really like going anywhere. And I wanted a symbol for this guy not really wanting to go anywhere, and that was he wants to stay at home with his cat. So he just got this representation of that desire to be at home. He wants to stay with trouble rather than getting into it. Exactly. I do. Honestly, I get an awful lot out of it. I called him trouble just because I thought it was funny.

15:49And then through the book, you just think, oh, I can use this in a lot of ways. Like, you know, returning to trouble, you know, trouble crossing your path, all sorts of stuff. Before we get onto your failures, I would love to touch briefly on Richard Osman as a child. Yes. I understand that your grandfather was very important to you So my dad left when I was very young And my grandfather is one of ten brothers from Brighton From the back streets of Brighton And was a soldier and then a police officer And yeah, he certainly represents to me An idea of masculinity Which is lacking these days Which is an incredibly strong man But incredibly kind And, you know, he was in the police force He never really got promoted Because, for example, he wouldn't police the mine strike he said I'm not that you say that's not my business that's another man's living I'm not going to go and police it and so understandably perhaps he did not become the chief constable of Sussex so he was always for justice and equality and fighting for people but he was tough as well so strong and tough and gentle and kind at the same time I think is a is an exemplar we don't see much these days and I'm not as tough as my grandfather would that I were but that's what I think about when I think about how you can use masculinity in this world because there are ways of using it where it doesn't have to be toxic and you know so I try and write characters like that certainly you know when I think about when I see the world and someone like that crops up I'm like yeah this is uh this is what we need and he had dementia yeah the last almost sort of 10 years of his life so he's a very healthy strong guy so his his body was never gonna give out I feel very um humble to write about and talk about his experience of it.

17:30And you'd hear the same stories time after time, but he was such a great storyteller. You'd be like, oh, this is amazing. You know, he'd tell a story about coming back from, you know, India on the boat and it taking four weeks and him losing all his money and a card game and all this stuff. And you've heard it before, but he told it in a beautiful way. He wouldn't always recognize everybody. He wouldn't always understand things and things would slip and slip and slip. But I remember always, the last things to go really were laughter. There's always a lot of laughter. So that I find interesting.

18:02And love as well. When he knew who you were, he knew he loved you and knew he was loved by you. And that I found, so many people listening to this have experiences of dementia and everyone is slightly different, is the truth. But writing about it, that's what I wanted to write about. Trying to really get inside his mind really, or the mind of one of my characters, Stephen, give it a humanity and a dignity and to pay tribute, really, to my grandfather and to, you know, the grandfathers and grandmothers of all of us. What was his name? Like all people from his generation, he was really Thomas, but everyone called him Fred.

18:35So he was always like middle names. I've got an educational foundation now, which is set up in his name, the Frederick Wright Foundation, because he left school at 14 because he couldn't afford to go to school. But he was a very, very bright man. That sort of fire powers a lot of what I do. You have spoken in the past before about your dad leaving when you were nine and the fact that you had a glass of orange squash and you were sort of summoned to the front room and told that this seismic change was happening in your life. And I suppose I wanted to ask you how much the world of television was a refuge for you through that point in the same way that I imagine music was for your brother who ended up in Suede.

19:16Yes, he did. The little known band Suede. He did end up in them, yeah. and also i know this is like eight questions in one that's okay but the fact that you were born with this eye condition yeah and therefore feeling the need to belong to the world in a different way from how other people accessed it if you could just speed all of that in three words or less i'm gonna take the fourth part of your question first um we sum it up in television is very important to me you know growing up we had three channels and then briefly you know then there was four and we're like four this is insane that's so many channels but yeah i learned about the world through television i could sit very very close my eyesight is very very bad so in in the real life i can't see birds in the trees or you know that the cricket ball flying through the air or what have you but on television i can i can see all of those things and you know you can see slow motions and you can sit right up next to the screen so i saw most of what i saw from life on television and it only occurs to me very recently i always read in books and people go describe people's faces or a tiny tick and i didn't know what that meant i thought oh yes because i can't see it everyone I ever meet looks just beautifully lit, like just in a soft blur.

20:20And so television, yeah, I can see things that I can't see elsewhere. And yeah, I think growing up, it was certainly a world that I was able to escape into. It's not like I didn't watch television, then my dad left, then I watched television because they were my friends. It's like I watched loads and loads and loads of television, then my dad left, then I watched loads more television. it's absolutely in my dna again when i started in tv and i'd someone come up with an idea and i said it's a bit like that was a bit like that and no one had ever watched them and i'd watched everything like in the kind of 17th century when it's still possible to have read all the books ever written in the 1970s it was still it was possible to have watched all the tv shows ever made i think i had so yeah it was a constant companion to me but again because i was you know i like staying in as well can you read your own books with your eyesight most books i listen to an audiobook funnily enough my eyesight is changing a little bit and reading books is becoming slightly easier than it used to be which is a really real welcome change did you ever write to jim or fix it yes so i did did you okay what was yours i had two one was quite weird and i thought that was too weird so i need to write a more mainstream one the first one i wrote was asking to be put in a box and put on an airport carousel.

21:37Wow. Because you know that's fascinating to kids. And you know what? He would have done that. He definitely would have put me in a box. No problem. And then the second one was, I'd like to teach Parrot Talk because I thought that's a more chance. That's a really good one. Thank you. That's good TV as well. I didn't get any responses. I asked if I could train with the Harlem Globetrotters. Okay. The basketball. Do you remember the basketball team from the AAM? Like 70s, 80s. That was mine. Everybody, everyone wrote to Jim Will Fix It, right? Everyone did. Isn't that incredible? If you think about what media is like now, but every single child in the country wrote in and asked for something.

22:10I can still remember the address, probably. I mean, I wrote into Blue Peter as well, and it was the same address because it was BBC TV Centre. I genuinely think that you could probably make both of those dreams come true still. That would be nice for a future podcast. Why don't you invite someone on who could... Like the box on a carousel, that's definitely doable. I mean, that's got Richard Osman TV format all over it. Box on a carousel. just celebrities in boxes yeah exactly that who's who's here well it's got how to fail written on the side of the box who might be in there um and yeah i reckon you could you could uh if anyone from london zoo is listening yeah you could teach a parrot to talk that's good it's important to keep those dreams alive yeah you've got to have some goals that you still aspire to exactly i'm not sure the harlem glow trotters are still going though so my my dream might have died was that And because of your height that you wrote in.

23:00Yeah, I think so. It was, I love sport so much, but I've always been terrible at it. But basketball, I was quite good at because I was the tallest at my school and that's something that I could do. And so, yeah, I was in the basketball team. That's the only team I've ever been in. So yeah, I was obsessed with Harlem Globetrotters because even now, the average height for an NBA player, basketball player in America is six foot nine. So I'd be under the average height for an NBA player, which is my dream. when I did we did a celebrity darts tournament for comic relief and um my walk on music was I wish I wish I was a little bit taller by ski low and I had my favorite karaoke track yes I like doing it on karaoke do you I used honestly I used to do ignition by R.

23:42Kelly and now I've of course I can't do that I'm not going to do that but ski though as far as I understand has not been cancelled no so I can continue to continue to do obviously was a little bit taller but I had a seven foot two man and a six foot nine woman as my bodyguards on that show on my walk on yet to have did you choose that music yeah okay yeah yeah they didn't force it from me because you have spoken in the past very movingly about essentially being body shamed because you're tall it's interesting that i've never thought it you know my whole life of course certainly since i was 15 16 17 and the height i am now there's no getting past it you know you are amazingly tall and everybody notices.

24:20And so, yeah, I've always felt that shame because you do feel you're on display the whole time. If you have something that's out of the ordinary, human beings can't help but notice. You can't create a world where people go, oh no, you look exactly the same as everyone else. You can't do it. And over the years, it's an incredibly great radar for people's personalities because you instantly see if someone's a bully. You instantly see if someone's unpleasant or someone needs to sort of get something out of their system. you instantly see who's kind and nurturing you instantly see who's curious and so it's a it's it's an amazing radar if you if you can bleep something out i've always called it a radar because because you can immediately tell if someone's a they respond to you instantly they have there's a visceral response and so yeah i've always understood that thing of people going through life feeling looking different and mine is fine because I'm not discriminated against in any way.

25:15You know, there's no violence towards me because of it. But I think, I hope that it gives me some empathy as to what it is like to go through life being different. If these micro encounters that I have every day, if they became microaggressions, life would be very, very hard.

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26:57Let's get on to your first failure, which is the sitcom Boys Unlimited, which you say failed in 1998. It did, yeah. It's still available on Channel4.com, by the way. Is it? I did have a little watch. Well, a lot is available. Yes. I've been in telly for a few years, and I was writing, and I was doing a panel show at a company called Hat Trick, and we had this sitcom, Boys Unlimited, about a boy band. And James Corden was in it, a very young James Corden. And it was one of those ones where people were like, oh, this is going to be big. It was a nice budget. It was Channel 4, and, you know, sent the script off, and they liked the script, and so we did six scripts, and they liked those.

27:36and suddenly you're making it and it's incredible and I was 27 or something like that and everyone was oh this is this one's really going to fly and you think okay finally this is the thing that I wanted the big hit and I'd worked on tv shows before but I wanted the thing that was mine and that was you know right out there in the in the middle of culture and winning awards and all those lovely things and it absolutely bombed and I was I was in an edit for another show when I got the overnights through which are the ratings and it was got like 1.6 million which these days would be huge but back then it was a absolute disaster but I'd already started writing the second series and I had to stop writing the second series because you know Channel 4 are not going to put any more money behind it and you know I've had so many failures since then but that was the first big one to really really hit me and if you write anything sitcom a novel anything it's like a couple of years out of your life each time and to then go oh I can't I don't know if I can start again.

28:34I don't know if I could do that again. And so I went back into the world of formats and creating TV shows and being a producer and sitting in a gallery because I'd done this thing of writing, which is a very vulnerable place to be. And formats are not a vulnerable place to be. That came out in the year that my eldest daughter was born. That failure is the same age as her, which she's very much not a failure. So it was 25 years ago. But it took me another 18 years before I could write again. Jimmy Mulvill, who ran Hat Trick, he said, look, the most important thing about failing is what you do next.

29:08But what I did is I ran away and hid from it and did something I loved and something I enjoyed and a career that I'm proud of. It was only at 47, 48 that I thought I should probably go back to it. I think in that instance, I failed badly. I learned later in my career how to fail well in creative endeavors and how, you know when something doesn't work that it's okay but that was so early in my career and such a big deal and people were so excited about it and everyone was telling me this this one's going to be a hit uh and and and it wasn't and so whenever anyone ever tells me that something's going to be a hit in the future I don't I pay no attention because you never know one of the things that you did do in the aftermath which I'm very impressed by given that you were 27 is you wrote a letter didn't you to the people who had chosen not to recommission it yes and that and you know that that is something i would recommend to anybody especially you know in telly so there was kevin liger who's head of channel four at the time and and a wonderful lady called cheryl taylor and they're both still in the business now and they brought me in for a meeting and said look it's not we're not going to do it again and i know that's hard to hear and blah blah blah and i you know obviously i didn't take it brilliantly but the next day i just thought man that's a that's a hard meeting for them to do as well they didn't want to do that and so yeah i wrote them both a letter saying look that must have been really difficult i completely get it thank you for the opportunity really loved it and hopefully i'll get to work with you again and of course you do work with people again is the truth and they remember that i've had situations where a friend of mine was writing a show with someone and the first series did all right it got that sort of four million or something so it was one of those shall we do another series or not and they went in and the guys writing with were saying you put it in the wrong slot it was the wrong casting you didn't publicize it enough and so the channel just you know afterwards just went well let's not do it because we don't that we don't want to do that whereas if you've gone and gone how what do we do on the next series how do we make this better what do you need from us immediately they go okay let's do it again you know and people in telly take it very personally when things go badly my view has always been listen the viewers tell you if a show is right or not you know and you have unexpected hits, you have unexpected failures, but you know, you can't tell viewers what to watch.

31:26And you know, it's, you have to take it on the chin and it's not, it's not a personal slight on you. It's not a personal slight on the work that you've done. And if you're good, then the next one will be a hit on the next one will be a hit or the next one will be a hit. But it's hard when it's one of your first ones, it's hard. I say to anyone who's doing creative stuff, who's got an idea. If someone says, I've got an idea, I've got an idea, you've got to have 10 ideas, there's no point having an idea because there's too much weight on it, and also when it disappears, what do you do then? You've got to have the next one in the rank all the time, it's got to be, you've got to have them lined up, and you know, my career since then doing formats is you can have a failure, but the good news is you've got another show starting next Friday, and another show starting the Wednesday after that, and so long as one in four of them hits then you'll have a long and successful career looking back do you think the viewers were right yeah boys right why because i thought the scripts are okay uh i think we didn't i didn't produce it very well i was put in charge of producing it as well and i was too young i didn't really know what that meant so i didn't really cast it properly It just didn't have the kind of depth that it should have had.

32:40You can have funny jokes, but if people are sort of watching them from the wrong angle, they're not funny. You've got to have all of your ducks in a row. And I think I just didn't. I just didn't make it well enough. I didn't have enough attention to detail on it. And I hoped that the brilliant hilarity of my script would carry the whole thing through. And it never does. TV is incredibly collaborative. And, you know, everyone's got to be on the top of their game. And, yeah, the producer should have been better and the producer was me. So, yeah, I think I take full responsibility for it. But, yeah, it's very, very rarely I've had shows that have done badly and I've been like, I'm shocked.