Boris Johnson's Cash Dash

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1:14Hello and welcome to this episode of the rest is entertainment with me marina hyde and me richard osman What a busy week you've had marina you've been in LA and I don't mean Little Lampton I mean Los Angeles I went to LA for a period of around 60 hours which in some ways flatters the city I feel Saw all the sights I always think when I go there that the aesthetic is like a recapture you're always feeling that any vista you're looking at could easily divide it by a white grid and you just have to click on the traffic lights that I would say is the aesthetic anyway I went for the premiere of the show that I write on, the franchise which is coming out on HBO You can watch it on Sky or Now TV.

1:56And the premiere was at Paramount Pictures at the lot, the only lot that's still in Hollywood. It's so historic and so beautiful. It was one of those kind of perfect evenings, you know, great weather and all the kind of really old palm trees. And the lot itself, which I'd never been to before, is absolutely incredible. And it's sort of interesting because Paramount's being sold at the moment and you almost feel like, is this lot there, this piece of real estate, their biggest asset? Because it is absolutely huge. and standing and old but it's no the maidstone studios though no but at some point when the show is coming out i want to do an absolute nose to tail how a big show like that gets made what happens all that kind of stuff well i would love to do that and we'll we'll do that um fairly shortly because it's also got a premiere at the london film festival over this side of the atlantic this coming weekend so after that we'll get into it but today we are talking about a guy um i think fans of the rest of politics would have heard of this guy Boris Johnson and he has got a book out and we're going to be talking about that don't worry we're not going to be looking into the politics we are looking into the the economics and the entertainment and how much money he's going to make for which I have good news and bad news yeah so we're talking about Boris Johnson's book we're talking about we're talking about Naomi Campbell's charity she's been disqualified as a charity trustee for five years because of sort of financial mismanagement at her charity And we're also going to talk about Joker, Folie a Deux.

3:21Now, this was a huge movie, the first one when it came out in 2019. And the sequel to it, which stars Lady Gaga and is a musical, has just really tanked. And we're going to talk about why and maybe what it tells us about current trends and things happening in Hollywood. Talking of really tanking, though, let's start with Boris Johnson. So the book is out this week. It's called Unleashed, which sounds like a very poorly rating GB News show. but is actually the title. But it's also the sort of thing that Jamie Leng would call his autobiography. Jamie Leng from Made in Chelsea, finally. Obviously, he's got a big sort of promotional strategy to promote the book, and we'll talk about quite what that entails.

4:00But it's been sort of funny because two of the big things for that have been beset by problems, which is Laura Koonsberg, who was going to do a big interview for the BBC, had to pull out because she accidentally WhatsAppped him the sort of briefing notes for her interview. and then Beth Rigby was going to interview him at Cheltenham where I just interviewed you Richard yesterday which was great fun also nice to meet lots of fans of the podcast there were so many well Beth Rigby from Sky was going to interview him but apparently there was some dispute that she couldn't make a transcript of it or record it and therefore she has also pulled out calling your book Unleashed which is you know I'm wild me, I'm unchained but no, how wet are you?

4:45You can't make a transcript of me at Cheltenham. I mean, buck up. I mean, I quite enjoy the novelty because you don't hear the phrase Boris Johnson and pulling out in the same sentence very often, which I, so that bit's quite enjoyable. But tell me, how do you think this book is going to go, Richard? I mean, that's the big question. As I had good news or bad news, the bad news is it's going to go pretty well, I would say. It's not one, it's not going to be a list trust. It is going to sell a lot of copies. I think the good news is it's not going to sell as many copies as the publishers think it's going to or as Boris Johnson thinks it's going to.

5:14I don't imagine Boris Johnson really cares how many is going to sell because he's already got his advance. Just to go through the numbers. So his advance, it was reported his advance was half a million. But again, more bad news. That is just a quarter of his advance. So that's the first quarter you get paid on signature of a contract. So he would have got half a million when he delivered it, which presumably about three or four weeks ago. He will get another half a million this Thursday when it's released. Have a little think about that when you're walking past Waterstones. and you'll get another half a million when the paperback comes out, which is probably, I would think, March, April or something like that.

5:48So the advance would be about two million, I would think. And how would it sell? I mean, political biographies are interesting. So Blair's one is sort of held up as the exemplar of great-selling autobiographies of the British Prime Minister. He's sold 92 ,000 copies in its first week. Now, when Thatcher's came out, it was just before the Nielsen ratings. It was pre-Nielsen, yeah. Yes, but they reckon about 120 ,000. So Blair, 90, Thatcher, 120, those which are both, by the way, huge numbers in books. I mean, really, really big numbers. And I would have thought, I would be surprised if he wasn't nestled somewhere around there.

6:21It'll sell a lot of copies. But I've been talking to an awful lot of people in the publishing industry. And there are voices at HarperCollins, which is his publisher, which is part of News Corp, who think it's going to sell as well as the Prince Harry book. And I will... The fastest selling memoir of all time. The fastest selling memoir of all time. which sold over 400 ,000 copies in its first week. Listen, I've made a lot of predictions on this podcast. 94 % of them have been absolutely incorrect. But I'm very comfortable in saying I don't think it's going to sell as many as the Prince Harry autobiography would be my view.

6:54I think it'll sell well. I don't think it's going to sell crazily well. Now, that advance of$2 million, if you're worried about him making royalties, I don't think he's ever going to earn out that advance. I think it'll sell okay, But he would have to sell maybe 600 ,000 hardbacks and the same again in paperback to earn that back, which I don't think he will. He sold 600 ,000 books in total in his career, which is obviously not at all bad. The biggest selling, one of which was that Churchill book, which we'll come to in a minute. So, yeah, I don't think he's ever going to earn out. So I think that two million is all he's going to get.

7:29And of course, you take off 300 ,000 of that for his agent's fees. Imagine being Boris Johnson's agent. Oh, my God. Can you imagine? I mean, at least they're getting 300 grand, but I don't know if it's worth it putting up with that. One assumes he's going to pay his tax on it as well. So it'll come down. I know Blair's autobiography, all the profits went to charity. I'm not sure that that's what's happening, given the size of Boris Johnson's family. He's got people to pay for. There's a weird thing about it. One thing I noticed, which is they're doing something slightly sort of, it's almost like the IMAX version of it.

8:01There's a limited edition premium version, which is signed, deluxe, cloth-bound in a slip card. I haven't seen this before. Well, do you know where that comes from? Where? The place you get that is in fantasy novels, which is very apt if you look at some of the stuff that's in there. Yeah, so fantasy novels are very big on doing like a cloth-bound, incredibly limited edition, signed thing, you know, sort of one of 200. With an illuminated map of the land at the start. Exactly that. So let's see Boris Johnson's illuminated map of Britain. See where it stops. I'm guessing somewhere around North London.

8:36So the other thing about his advance, as far as I can tell, that's a worldwide advance because no one's really going to buy this in America and Australia. So that money will be for the whole of the world. So he's not getting extra money from Lithuania like normal authors might do. So listen, I'm trying as much as I can to make two million sound as little as possible. But that is what he's getting. And it's a huge amount of money. other people's autobiography so Thatcher 120 let's say Blair 92 Cameron first week sales 21 ,000 Gordon Brown first week sales 9 ,000 John Major first week sales five and a half thousand Theresa May three and a half thousand and who's this at the bottom of the list uh with 2 ,200 sales Liz Truss there you go see the bottom of that list but Boris I I suspect he'll sell over 100 ,000 but yeah the publishers I think want them to sell That's nothing like enough That is nothing like enough to make that money back and also usually you would, here's an interesting thing I'd love your take on this, normally with HarperCollins they'll give you a£2 million advance because they will do a deal with one of their newspapers the News Corp which will amortise that cost so they will say you know essentially we can do the exclusive extracts from this and that is worth an awful lot of money so that goes into the advance but in this case the extracts have been in the Daily Mail What on earth happened there?

9:54Why didn't they nail it down for two million? I'm amazed. They must have felt he was at the peak of his negotiating powers. I think that is, again, it's good work on behalf of the agent, but it's not on behalf of the people who negotiated that deal at all. My assumption is, I could be wrong about this, so his salary at the mail is a million, which he's definitely not earning. The columns are fairly irregular and they're not very good. And this is just absolute bog-standing stuff. They don't have any purchase on, you know, they're not what people are talking about. Literally no one's paying any attention.

10:25But I'm guessing that that million pound was pre-baked in that they got the rights. That they got the serialisation rights, I would have thought. That makes more sense of that money because it's, I mean, that's an insane amount to pay someone who some people like, but most people are not that interested in anymore. It's sort of yesterday's news. Now, lots of journalists have done diligent work on all of our behalves and read all 700 pages. You know what you had to do? You could see it, but you had to go into a room and read it, you know, in a sort of closed environment. And you came out pregnant.

10:53And you came out. What just happened? Yeah. When he announced it, he said, stand by for my thoughts on Britain's future to explode over the publishing world like a much shaken bottle of champagne. I'm so glad you never talk like that, even though you'll sell shit on his and always will. Sorry. Yes, I'll tell you what we did here, that perhaps there are still tickets available at time of recording for his appearance in Cheltenham, in that big tent that you sold out. And Manchester as well. And that I've sold out before. I know for someone who's about to sell as many as Prince Harry. Also, I'm hearing his event in Liverpool might be being rescheduled.

11:30You think? For the 12th of Navar. He's done what is quite a conventional sort of strategy for a type of book like this, which is that he's got lots of little news lines that he's trying to parcel out. He did an interview with Tom Bradby, one of the people who hasn't pulled out of an interview with him. That was where he said, I regret apologising for Partygate. And he was asked, do you regret apologising to the Queen? I don't discuss my conversations with the Queen. Sorry, what? What is this hanky-clutching? You have revealed that she had bone cancer. You'd discuss anything. I mean, you know, I'm a trustworthy man.

12:00Wow. Yeah, so the whole book, though, is that sort of, the people who have sat through it, It is one, this is not one for the personal growth section of the bookshop. If you like the tone, then maybe you can do 700 pages of it. But I mean, this is in one of the published excerpts, which I think is really interesting when he's talking about nearly dying from COVID. It wasn't just the physical distress, it was the guilt. It was the political embarrassment of it all. I needed to be be owing owing back on my feet like an India rubber ball. I needed to be out there leading the country from the front, sorting the PPE, fixing the care homes, driving the quest for a cure.

12:34I mean is that your reflection on a near-death experience? This is the trouble what we want in a political memoir is the behind the scenes you know what people the emotions I suppose in lots of ways that people because we know what the front of house was doing and I suppose you want the emotion but as we say you know emotions is phantom limb it doesn't seem to twitch at all in this book Well that's the fascinating thing isn't it in anyone else's autobiography that's a hugely meaningful thing He nearly died. He's got a young family. So you think, well, that's the moment where you say, here's the real me.

13:10Here's the real human being. But I don't think he's able to look himself in the mirror like that. I don't think he has a true image of himself where he can go there. I don't think he has the well to go to, to say, this is the real me or this is how I felt about this. This is the emotion of it. This is how I felt about other people dying because, you know, this is what I went through. and extraordinary to be able to write that. And he might go, yeah, listen, I'm being brave and there's more important people. But it's not. It's an autobiography. It's an incredibly important moment in somebody's life.

13:38And also, if I'm going to read 700 pages, I can do five pages on how mortality feels and what he felt about what he'd achieved in life and all of those things. And it seems a strange thing to... Well, it doesn't seem a strange thing for him to leave out because he's always left out that core of who actually are you. To do 700 pages without telling people who you actually are, well, that tells people who you are, I suppose. Yeah. I mean, the thing that was so great about that series that I banged on about, the corridors of power, should America please the world, was seeing those decision makers.

14:11You know, you knew the news stories and many of them were about things and genocides that had happened decades before. But the rawness with which they were in the present day talking about what they were feeling, what was going on behind those closed doors is so compelling. I mean, I think actually, even if you were to have that character arc, which he still wants, because it's the only place he makes sense to him. You know, if we think of him as a fictional person. Yeah. Essentially, he is a fiction of his own creation. He needs, this is the point where it goes wrong. And then you have your third act, Redemption.

14:43If we accept his premise that he's in only Act 2 and he's about to get our sort of hot Top Gun style redemption in Act 3, then you need to have a low point. And we need to see this. but it's not yeah you need to have an act that's just entirely Robert Jenrick yeah and then he returns on a motorbike with like a gunship helicopter above him yeah sunglasses on but you don't feel four more kids riding pillion yeah yes I felt that he was but in a funny kind of way all these people pulling out of doing those interviews and you know and I know it's not the formal reason but there is something so sort of washed up about all these women finding something slightly better to do with their time.

15:26This is the post-prime ministerial life and it is an exquisite form of agony for a person who only makes sense to himself in that job for which he sacrificed everything and everyone. Well, that's it. So Boris Johnson had a career in politics, right? And it's very easy for someone like Boris Johnson to get to the top in politics. But I think we'll get to the point where suddenly he becomes an entertainment figure as well. And he will find the competition there a great deal harder. And by the way, he can absolutely hold his own. We've said it before. He can write. He can turn a phrase. You know, he's got shtick, which is what you really need in entertainment.

15:57Like, he's got a thing. He's got, like, Johnny Vegas has got shtick. Boris has got it, right? We know the thing that he does. And, you know, he's making his money now in the book, and he'll start making money on other TV shows and things like that. But it's definitively he's not in the world of politics anymore. The Laura Kunzberg stuff, and I'm sure on Wester's Politics, they've talked forever about, you know, sending the briefing notes and what that means and why that might mean an interview is compromised. But the fact that that was scheduled at all is a disgrace. That is literally a half-hour advert for a book, a commercial book, funded by the BBC.

16:38That is worth... I was thrilled. I don't know why people were complaining about it, you know, the notes being sent. He's lost out on half an hour of primetime promotion. I couldn't be happier. No, that's what I thought. I thought genuinely his publicist will be so... I mean, gutted beyond words. That's the absolute dream. That's like, I mean, it's not quite him being on Graham Norton, but it's a pretty close second. His best-selling book, which I think has all 270 ,000 copies, which is The Churchill Factor. By the way, listeners, if you haven't read this review ever, please go to the New Statesman website and read Sir Richard Evans' who's a Cambridge historian review of his book about Churchill, which is one of the biggest drive-bys I've ever read.

17:17It's absolutely hilarious. I can't really pick favourite lines, but the end of this paragraph, which has just gone through various factors and actually says, just ends with this line saying, the Germans did not capture Stalingrad, though this book claims they did. You've written a book basically about the Second World War and you don't know the results of Stalingrad. I'm so sorry. It's just one of those. It's like being a football correspondent and thinking that like Bayern Munich won the Champions League final in 1999. You sort of have to know it. but there are limitless of these so probably there are things that he needs to be pulled up on by journalists Well look, he's a grifter and I genuinely, I don't say that with any edge, plenty of people who are very charming grifters and who do it in a harmless way and make a very good living, but you know he is a grifter who has an awful lot of impact on everyone's life but he was a grifter as a columnist he's a grifter as a Prime Minister grifter as an author, I mean that's his shtick and as I say listen, it's so fine to be a grifter we all do it from time to time we will look back and go wow and through a strange confluence of events that's who we had as our prime minister at a time of enormous crisis genuinely enormous crisis and a time of enormous opportunity as well yeah both of which he didn't really make the most of but uh it is uh nice i think maybe to start this next act where he is no longer a frontline politician but can instead just indulge his personality and then see how much the public can get behind that and enjoy that and he can monetize that in any way he wishes without having to bother the rest of us tickets still available for those events so we'll just keep an eye on those sales and we will obviously keep an eye on the book sales yeah when they come out we'll have another little chat about those as a follow-up it'll probably be two weeks time we might get some early ones for for next week's podcast it'd be i'd be very interested to see as i say it it will do really really well it's not if anyone's looking for it to being in remainders bins or if anyone's doing tweets saying oh look it's half price you think yeah that's because these things are heavily discounted so that Shops get market share of these things.

19:12It's going to be a successful book, but I suspect he's made every penny he's ever going to make out of it already. Yes. Shall we go to some adverts? Let's do that. What if one of them is for Boris's book? Oh, we're going to look fools. They wouldn't advertise with us, I don't think. Well, I'm quite happy to be paid by him by default. Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from Evglyss. After an initial dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking EBCLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.

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21:27Welcome back, everybody. Now, we're going to talk about The Joker. But you just were. No, I guessed. The follow-up to the Joker movie, Joker Folie Adir, came out last week. Yes. So we know the box office numbers now, and it's opening weekend. It grossed$40 million in the US. Now, you might think, that sounds quite a lot of money. I'd take$40 million. I would not sniff at it. But this is a$200 million budget. This is a terrible result for this movie. They will have spent almost the same on marketing all over again, as we've often talked about in this podcast. so we won't dwell too long about that.

22:02But I think it tells us a lot of really interesting things about Hollywood. First of all, this is a really sort of big swing. The first one was a big swing, by the way. It was, you know, it's directed by Todd Phillips, who despite having once directed The Hangover, he wanted to do it as this dark and gritty kind of New York style, Gorsese-ish movie, almost like Taxi Driver. The star is a villain. But that movie, it was an affordable swing. That movie cost$55 million, right? And was a huge hit. It was a huge hit, made more than a billion. Joaquin Phoenix won the best actor for basically playing a sort of DC character, which is sort of amazing.

22:41And in a way, like, why are they doing a sequel? Because it's the franchise movie era, so of course they're doing a sequel. And it comes five years later. Now, star salaries and Todd Phillips salaries alone cost the budget of the first film. Really? This is the problem. You know, star salaries are dining out on a different time still. But if you just made a billion dollars from the first movie and it was yours, is that not the time for you to cash in? OK, but think about it. Another thing that is so fascinating is that, you know, that old dictum about Hollywood that everyone says always, which is nobody knows anything.

23:13Oh, these movies that come out and in retrospect, it seems so obvious what was wrong with them. Okay, so here is a movie that was by far and away seen mostly by men. And I don't want to say that like a big portion of that was a kind of in-cell adjacent aspect of the fandom. But yeah, maybe. So you're going to do the sequel is going to be a musical, is it right? Starring Lady Gaga. I mean, I don't want to say how did this happen. But anyway, and then they pay huge amounts of money to the stars and the director. That's like a quarter of the budget. They've had to get venture capital money to even make that up.

23:48OK, in an era where the IP, as we keep saying, is a bigger star than most stars. But stars still want all these salaries and they're getting them. It is a musical. I've just got to say it. It is a musical. Joke of the musical. Joke of the musical. And once again, we see that they can't really market musicals as musicals because it's limiting. And we've seen this, you know, that's even the case with the Mean Girls, the musical, which was like not Mean Girls. So it must be something different. the difference is it's a musical but they still keep marketing these movies not as musicals because they think it's limiting in terms of how many people will go and see it right how they chose to sort of announce it to the world they put it on at the venice film festival again these are sort of things that increasingly start to feel from another time before the cold winds were blowing right so they stick it on at the venice film festival it gets really quite bad reviews which are then sort of sitting there online for a month and you know we talked about this in our Rotten Tomatoes betting thing when we were like, oh, that's not looking great on the, you know, the tracking for what people were going to give it a Rotten Tomatoes score.

24:53And by the way, it got a 10 minute standing ovation at Venice. Yeah, I think it got a 12 minute. I mean, by the way, the standing ovations at film festivals are complete bullshit. I don't know how anyone can bother being part of one. It's like party conferences, isn't it, when the leader speaks. But they're like one or two minutes. This is 12 minutes. I mean, you know, you're in the south of France. Don't you want to go and have some fun? But also, you just sat through a two and a half hour movie Go to the loo. The amount of people who must need a wee when they're doing those 12-minute standing ovations.

25:20It must be the energy, surely, in the room. And also the queue afterwards. I would, I can't because I'm tall, you would see me if I slipped out. But surely that's the time to go for a wee. You've got to crawl out. I would have to crawl out. Osmond's crawling out of Canfield Festival of Avation. I'm so sorry. I am so sorry. I loved it so much. I just need to go to the loo. I will be applauding in the toilet, I promise you. But let's then talk about the actual content of the film. Okay, apart from the fact that it's a musical and it's starring Lady Gaga and it's an audience starring men. Okay, I don't know.