Can Men Read?

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2:03Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment, questions and answers edition. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osmond. You're still in Kefalonia, Marina. I remain in Kefalonia, a place of incredible beauty, but substandard internet connection. I remain in London's Charing Cross, which I have to say, the internet connection is absolutely perfect but uh it lacks maybe vine leaves yeah and a couple of other bits and bobs now shall we kick off because this question can only be for you okay alison gainer says this week in france a game show contestant was finally beaten two years after starting his run on the show has something like this ever happened on british tv or are the rules too strict and therefore it's impossible for it to happen yeah it's a it was a crazy story it's actually not unique in uh in the world especially of european game shows but a guy called emilia was on the du coup de midi which is a a daily daytime quiz show he won at 647 episodes of the show 647 he won 2.5 million euros in prize money across that time as well as 23 cars holidays and he won a parachuting lesson as well oh my god so it was uh it was a huge deal i spoke to there's a wonderful man i've mentioned it before uh called brug bother if you want to follow him on on x and he is like the game show guru of uh everyone in he knows everything about every game show so i chatted to him about it and in europe these shows where you can stay on and you can start ramping up huge amounts of money are very very popular weirdly pointless is the same we have a thousand pound a day and if you if it's not one you kind of hang on but i think the most we ever got up to was was 24 000 that's the most we ever had but on these shows on the continent it's very hard to win the jetpots sometimes there's all sorts of different ways you can rack up enormous amounts of money so a million one as i say 2.5 million in Spain is where they really love those shows there's one show which is called Boom which has a combination of the two things so it has you can stay on for as long as you want if you keep winning but it also has a sort of prize end game which is almost impossible to win and that money keeps going up so it's a team game and the most famous team who ever played on Boom were called Los Lobos the werewolves they won 505 episodes in a row and during that time they picked up over 2.5 million euros in prize money but they'd also been trying to play this impossible end game every single episode as well and the impossible end game starts at 50 000 euros and goes up 5 000 a day eventually after two years they won the end game as well so to add to their 2.5 million euro winnings they won another 4.1 million euros as well so they won over 6 million euros so it's a cultural thing in these countries they love a show where it's almost impossible to win the jackpot because they've seen people win enormous amounts eventually and it has never really worked over here there's another spanish show um which we brought over here jeff stelling did it called alphabetical and in spain that rolls on and on and on has been over 2 million euros a few times over there but over here there was like a a limit of 10 shows it got up to 50 000 pounds before it it's uh it got reset because our audience just because we don't have an example of it working we don't like it we feel like you know we want to see somebody win eventually one you know eggheads works quite nicely in that way because eggheads the money goes up and up and up and eventually you can win sort of 80 grand or something but it's not it's not something we're never going to have a show where it goes up to millions and millions.

5:51In America, it used to be the same as us, which is they would always have a limit. They'd have like a five-show or a ten-show limit. And funnily enough, Jeopardy got rid of that in 2003. And that's where this guy Ken Jennings came good, who was the greatest winner in Jeopardy history, now hosts Jeopardy as well. And he won$2.5 million. He's also won various kind of spin-offs of Jeopardy. He's won another$4.5 million. So there's big money to be made if you're a professional quizzer in these countries, but not over here. So to speak to Alison's specific question, if it happened over here, would we change the rules?

6:25What exactly that happened? This is a very, very British story. Channel 5 used to have the quiz show 100%, which I used to rather love, where the contestants didn't say anything apart from their name and where they were from. And the whole thing was just then pressing A, B or C and getting answers right or wrong. And there was a guy on that called Ian Ligo, or as Channel 5 viewers knew him, Ian from Hamel Hempstead. he won 75 shows in a row of that he won 75 shows and there's a daily prize every single day on this show and he won 75 in a row and the producers at that point retired him oh no they said no do you know what we're changing the rules this is boring for our uh viewers we have to get rid of you we're changing you so he won 75 he said they could at least have let me go to 100 you know that's the name of the show it's called 100 but they didn't after 75 shows they got rid of him we talked about the money that people have made in various foreign shows uh because this was channel five uh and because it's britain after winning those 75 shows he walked away with 7 500 pounds ian lago 7 500 pounds after 100 shows he won 100 pounds an episode uh but that's that's the longest ever streak on british tv they wouldn't let it go on but uh you know you win you can win more on a daily show in the UK but yeah in in Europe I'd love to see those shows in the UK but it's just one of those things that they love a rolling jackpot and they love an impossible to crack end game where the money goes up and up and up so thank you for the question also thank you so much to uh to to Brig Bother for uh for helping me out with a lot of the research for that I love that Marina I have a question for you from Jason Cahill what are your thoughts on the royal rota it seems publishing anything controversial about the senior royals will result in a loss of access does this lead to an unstated form of less majest what's the royal rota okay the royal rota is a sort of press pool system where um selected journalists and snappers photographers uh have access to royal events um and then they can share them with those who weren't present amongst themselves and so you have what's called pool clips and shared write-ups and what it has allowed Royal Communications, who are the people who run sort of the various palaces, media operations, it's allowed them to control access and maximise distribution and to create a sort of orderly press access that isn't overwhelming for various members of the royal family.

9:01so on a sort of really basic practical level it's a bit like I've done this in elections as well if a politician or in this case if a member of the royal family is going somewhere quite sort of small and intimate you do not want 40 people sitting maybe they're going to a hospice or maybe they're going to something like that so you in that situation you would have you know one person there doing the moving images one person there doing the write-up and it would it would be very and then they share them with all the others now um different people are in different news organizations are in this at any one time but they basically they broadly stay the same so at the moment you the people who are in it are the bbc icv channel 4 channel 5 sky uh the sun the mirror the express the london evening standard the telegraph the mail the times press association and various picture agencies.

9:56We'll get on to what I think about this in a minute. You're given a rota pass and you have to sign up to all their conditions, which are all controlled by Royal Communications. And as I say, maybe they'll be 15 or 20 per event. And sometimes you'll get that what's called solo rota. uh megan and harry criticized it and withdrew completely so they said it pushed bias and invasiveness and unfair press practices and they said what we're going to do is we're going to create our own sort of rota we're going to go with selected selected favored people so grassroots or socially responsible or in or socially oriented um outlets and they were also going to use their own social media um i don't think it's interesting listen this this particular system doesn't stop other reporters getting um other stories about the royal family and the royal family has really never been able to stop people getting too many stories about them it's just for things like official visits is it and stuff where it would be overwhelming to have 30 people there yes it is i mean having said that rather like um when football clubs say oh we don't you wrote something really disparaging about you're not allowed to come to press conferences anymore.

11:13There are moments of carve out like that, which in my view are obviously wrong. It is much more exclusive and managed than the lobby system, which we must do a question about some other time, the parliamentary lobby system, which is the system via which politics is covered to some extent, but equally, just as with the lobby system, if you get some story that's outside of that, you will run with it and you always have been able to. It's very interesting because I would say that so much of the story of modern celebrity, sport, whatever it is, is about access. So much of everything that has happened over the past decades in public life have been about of different ways of restricting access.

12:01And to a certain extent, people, you know, when social media came along, and you can see that's what Meghan and Harry think has happened, like, oh, hang on, why don't we just control our own stuff, which a lot of celebrities also found, for good or for ill, probably a lot for real. If you try and control press access, or you don't cooperate with anything, then they do come after you. And that's the sort of unpleasant fact of that business um and people will always try to get to a truth as we've talked about before if they feel that oh you're selling me something with so again so much as you know that people have regarded as fair game and that they're all in the business of selling something and if people feel they're being missold something uh then they have a problem with it it's very interesting the royal reporters i mean if you think of the stories in the like the 80s and 90s which were obviously hugely invasive in lots and lots of ways.

12:53That book I was talking about the other day, there's a really good sort of little nugget in the Diana World book, which is the sort of story of the obsession with Princess Diana. James Whittaker, who was this sort of legendary Daily Mirror royal reporter. I remember him from sort of breakfast TV and things. Always looked very jolly. Hugely jolly. And a sort of, yeah, it's a slightly sort of foghorn voice. But he went out and sold all those stories on breakfast TV as well. So all the best stories really are partly to do with access and then you kind of maybe do something with that access or a piece of information that's come via access and then you can do something else.

13:30It's really interesting. He thinks his best story ever, it was about Princess Diana, was he found out partly via access, partly via contacts where Charles and Diana were. And they were on a yacht in the Mediterranean in 1985. and he had a network of insiders, so we found various. And he sat there and he watched them on the deck with a pair of binoculars for six hours and nothing happened. But that was the story. But you see, they didn't talk to each other for six hours. And he thought, oh my God, there's something so wrong in their marriage. This is something dreadful has happened. that, and of course he was right.

14:17And, you know, that wasn't access. And, but equally in a weird way, it's very weird. And the book that I was reading is very kind of good talking about, maybe he liked her best just to sort of observe as a creature. But that story is, you know, that's not from the press pool. That's not from the Royal Rotor. And it's not, it's not really anything. It's a story where absolutely nothing happens, but it became the biggest story of the 80s, I suppose, in lots of ways, which was the biggest royal story, certainly, which was that their marriage was completely falling apart. So the royal reta is really just sort of official functions.

14:51And outside of that, it's fair game. And people have always found ways through it. Yes, but they can use it to, you know, as always, as I was saying, as football clubs have done, to say, oh, no, you're being cut out of this because of the way you've behaved. and there are many many stories where it always exists where you have to give us access to things and you have to tell the press a certain amount of stuff and serve yourselves up to a certain extent and if you don't we will find ways of getting our own stuff because you failed to provide for us and that I mean there was a sort of famous incident when Prince William was at university in St Andrews and they felt that all the royal people felt they were just being completely cut out as they weren't having anything they had no access whatsoever so they just did a paparazzi shot of him getting his shopping in one night to say oh we could do this all the time so either you give us something or we'll do our own thing so it does work both ways it is a weird sort of carve up and um but I'm you know I don't think any of us could say that the royal family have been successful in suppressing stories about them over the last few decades.

16:01So it's a sort of arrangement that broadly works for good or for ill, as I say. Sounds like it works for no one. The British way. Well, we want everyone to be suffering, really. We certainly want the monarchy to be suffering, I always think. And the tabloid press. No one's unhappy when the tabloid press is suffering. Let's go for a little break, shall we?

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18:35Welcome back everybody Now, oh, this is a sad question, Richard But possibly not It's about fiction for men Martin H. has written in and says it is assumed that men have largely stopped reading fiction books. Is this true? God, I certainly believe it was true if you read every article about it. It's seeped into our culture that women hugely dominate the reading and writing these days of fiction. It's not as true as they say. There's a stat you see all the time that says 80 % of the fiction market is female and 20 % is male, which I find zero evidence for anywhere. There's evidence for, It's clearly female skewed, that's for sure.

19:18The best UK evidence is that I think 67 % of fiction books are bought by women, 33 % by men, which, I mean, that's a big skew, but no different to lots of other markets and marketplaces. And there's still a lot of men reading. But the funny thing about books is not many of anyone reads all that many books. It's not like television or sport or something like that. It is still quite niche. it's a very profitable industry because everyone who does read by and large is paying for those things and books have a very very very long life because you know you can still sell books many many years later so that's where the money in books come from it doesn't necessarily come from you know almost all the british people reading the stat about how many people uh books in general that people read a year is also misleading which is the average person reads 14 books a year 14 fiction books a year which sounds like a fair enough amount but there are many people my mum would be one of them you'd be another one who will read such huge amounts of books that that is skewed and actually the the better average is the median which is sort of halfway across our culture how many books do people read and that's about five a year so the average person really in a more interesting way of using an average reads five books a year five novels a year i still think that's quite a lot in a way in a way for that if the average person that's everybody taking the average of everybody then i think that's quite a lot i mean certainly there are male skewing authors and female skewing authors there happen to be an awful lot more female skewing authors at the moment probably the four best-selling authors in the world at the moment would be colleen hoover sarah j maas rebecca yaros and freedom mcfadden and they they have predominantly female readerships you know you'll have other writers like Stephen King who's would skew skew more male Lee Child would skew more male but again not crazily so my books almost exactly 50 50 which I always love and I often talk to men who say oh I absolutely got out of reading and I've got back into reading so you know I like that so I don't think it's as big a problem as people say but I think if we constantly keep repeating this thing of you know 80 20 then I think it gets worse I think Andrew Tate had something to say about men reading books.

21:38This is not his worst crime, but this was his quote. He said, reading books is for losers, losers who are afraid to learn from life. He thinks if you read a book, you're learning from other people's lives. And it leads him to this conclusion, which is books are education for cowards. I thought he spent his whole time holed up in that shitty compound out by the airport in Romania. I mean, what life? He doesn't have any. I mean, surely he wants to get through a Tom Clancy or two. I like that. But I mean, you can't read books about 17th century. You can't live in 17th century England, but you can learn about it.

22:16You can't live in someone else's heart, but you can learn about it. I think he's sort of, I don't know what books he's talking about. Do you think he's pre-enlightenment? I think he might be. I don't think he'd be thinking about the 17th century i think you're i think he's sort of yeah he's a sort of dark ages figure really isn't he listen it's it's an interesting take but to martin's question yes fiction does skew female uh in right in writing and in reading but not as much as they say and lots of people are trying to encourage more men to read but we're essentially we're trying to encourage more people to read we're trying to encourage more children to read more women more men more everything because you know books do make you smarter they do tend to make you more empathetic and it also takes your face away from a screen and that you know it's your brain does change and we all know when we can fall out of love with reading for a month or so and then you you have to sort of force yourself back into it and when you do you're always happy that you did but um yes it's female dominated but not as much as they say and the more the merrier oh thank you well that's that's a much more optimistic take than I had feared at the start of the question.

23:25Marina, Mark East has a question for you. He says, during an important parental lecture on patience, triggered by a 12 second YouTube buffer, I recounted how tough we had it in the olden days, the 1990s, when we would wait patiently for months for the UK release of a film compared to the US. I remember those days. Why did that used to happen? Those big release gaps between the US and the UK? And what changed to bring global release dates closer together? Has that shift had any real impact on the industry of box office behavior? Well, those are all very good questions. And yeah, exactly. Skip ad or, you know, something buffering.

23:57You never had it so good, kids. Yes, this was the thing. Now, there was a very, very rigid system of windows of what happened with films. And the US, basically because most of the films were made there, obviously it's different with Bollywood films and things like that. But they were obviously prioritized in terms of market rollout. And when films were shipped on physical reels, you showed in the US first and then you shipped the reels overseas and you needed all that extra time between release for things like, I don't know, dubbing and subtitling and local marketing, whatever that, all that sort of stuff.

24:35but you also hoped because you could because this is the system you'd created for the world was that the US run would get a buzz and that would sort of serve as a momentum type of marketing campaign for the international rollout as would the box office if you heard that something had been a huge hit in America and so yeah the 90s that you're talking about I think in 1995 the average movie Hollywood movie came out in the UK on average four and a half months after they had in the US that's insane in the 90s I know but you remember it you know and I'm going to talk to you about the various windows in a minute but then 10 years ago the average was three weeks after now as you can see it's simultaneous by the way obviously that's it's all digital now and so you're not shipping these huge literally physical reels of things anywhere but there are various reasons this uh this happened so um we'll go back over the decades pre-Jaws pre-Star Wars all that sort of stuff which we've talked about before you know movies were sort of opened in a kind of roadshow style way you'd open them somewhere you'd open them on sort of limited release and then if they were popular you'd roll them out and they'd go on to wide release more than 600 screens.

25:50And then anyway, Jaws comes along and they have these ideas. And then we all become used to the idea of blockbusters and everything wants to be a blockbuster. So the 1980s to the 2000s, it's a wide release. Now, the 2000s and 2010s are where it all changes because things go digital. And as soon as things go digital, you have the piracy risk. And that's what really changed. Yeah, everything changes with that piracy risk. And now in the 2020s, obviously, you've got the streaming issue. So things have much shorter theatrical runs. But so these were called windows. And this is how it went in the olden times.

26:33And you can tell your child that this is how it went. You would have the theatrical window, i.e. cinema. It was then available for hotels and airlines. Don't forget, you could sometimes, I mean, I didn't do this, but I knew people who'd say, oh, yeah, I saw it on a plane. You know, how have you seen Beverly Hills Cop? I've seen it on a plane. Well, excuse me. So then it went to rental and then retail. So you could buy the disc or whatever it was or the VHS or the DVD. Then it went to pay-per-view. These are all the windows. They're like eight windows. Then it went to video on demand. Then it went to pay television, then network television.

27:10And then finally, it could be syndicated, right? So even that rental window had eight weeks exclusivity. But that when I think in the mid-2000s, Warner Brothers had a big standoff with Blockbuster because Blockbuster said, we will not stop Warner Brothers films if you can buy them on the same day that you can rent them in Blockbuster because we won't accept that. But they came to accept it, Richard. Like so many of these businesses, they cave. and then all the other windows, once that had happened, all the other windows began to look vulnerable. So studios were thinking, well, hang on a second.

27:51If something's miles apart, I'm spending all this money and we know how much marketing costs. They don't want to spend all this money and then like six months later say, oh, now it's out on DVD or now you can watch it. They're like - Have to spend it again, yeah. Yeah, you basically want there to be a sort of momentum. And so now we're, so yes, it's changed everything hugely. as you can see, there are certain people who desperately want theatrical release for their stuff. Netflix say we don't give anyone theatrical release. Oh, hang on, except for you, Greta Gerwig, who's doing your Narnia movie.

28:25So she's managed to get a carve out for that. And Thursday Murder Club. And Thursday Murder Club, yes. Thursday Murder Club will have a theatrical release, and then it will be on the platform. How long between all those? I mean, it would have to be, you know, with certain things that like, you know, whatever the rocks Christmas, was it called Red One, that ridiculous thing with the rock? Yeah. Well, I mean, that would have been each one of those windows, those eight windows would have taken about 15 minutes with how quickly they got that out of theatres and onto the service. There are many things.

28:57So all of this is collapsed. And that collapsing windows thing was a big thing. and you still see creators still want their movies to be theatrical. Studios actually would like to have, lots of people would like to, the theatre owners would like to have longer release in cinemas because it allows them to make money. If you've got a two-week release and then it's going to somehow end up on the platform or on Apple or wherever it is, then really you just know that people are waiting at home to see it. So you can't really make money out of the property at all. And so they want to have longer releases.

29:29everything has basically been thrown up in the air and it hasn't properly settled it's still very very difficult and it definitely hasn't made anything better for the cinemas it's become a nightmare for the cinemas but yes it's good that everything can be released worldwide at the same time now so we immediately see the combined box office for a film so you can see the way the American trades break it down you'll see the domestic box office and the worldwide immediately which also makes your film look much more profitable in an era when films are much less profitable and the only time you really still see that delay now is with indie films or films that do get a bit of a buzz so you know they might do well and then in the states and then they'll come over and we sort of read about them and looking forward to them opening or something like the ballad of wallace island that was huge in the uk and therefore gets a much bigger rollout in the states sort of the next month so that still happens but it doesn't happen for any of the big movies Or they don't have a distributor.

30:27You know, there was a film that had a little bit, you know, just a kind of low budget comedy called One of Them Days. And I remember reading about it and thinking, well, when can I watch this? And it was a long time till I could watch that, clearly because it didn't even have a UK distributor. And there are lots of situations like that, as you say, with the indies. But with the big studio movies, they try and open them simultaneously. And piracy has become, was a big part of why they did that. Piracy is a thing whenever you get proofs now for new people's books it always has like I got a book this week the new Francis Buffett book it's one of my favorite authors but it has the word Faber written in very dark ink across every single page that is it it's unreadable because uh because it has Faber written across every page Chris Columbus who's who directed Thursday Murder Club he just got a copy of the uh the new Thursday Murder Club book The Impossible Fortune but he says it's got Chris Columbus written all the way across every single page he said so listen the top and bottom of each page i have to say a great he said the middle of each page i have no idea oh this is a good one about promotional work for movies ella worsley says will actors be contracted to attend red carpet events and do cover shoots if so who pays for their dresses and hair and makeup ah well i've been uh i literally had a big meeting last week with netflix about thursday murder club so i've i've been right in the heart of all this yes basically yeah for any tv show or for movies or anything like that in your contract it will ask you for a series of days to make yourself available for for promo duties red carpet slightly different it might if you're the big star of the movie then you'd have to be on the red carpet but otherwise it'd be can you turn up or not but every single time a big movie comes out they'll get hundreds of pictures in from all the big magazines you'll get and you know people who want to host the premiere places they want to host the premiere they will be apportioned out to the stars of that show those requests would go out to those stars and the stars usually should say yes to two or three of them you know that's the the idea or they'll go on a junket they'll have like a junket day where they do lots at the same time but yeah it's absolutely in their contract in terms of photo shoots in terms of premieres and stuff like that they yes they you you do get a glam fund which is uh if you are turning up for a red carpet the film company the tv company is very very aware you're being photographed everywhere and those photographs are going to be used by the tv or film company and so you are given a budget for hair makeup uh for dresses for whatever you want to wear so there's there's always that as well so yeah people are not expected to to to fund a red carpet look by themselves and most people you know you absolutely you can do and lots of people do do but if you do need hair and makeup that does get paid by your amazon or your netflix or your lionsgate or whoever is making the movie but yes it's it's all written into the contract that's why quite often when you get you know there's all sorts of headlines saying pierce brosnan speaks out on this or tom cruise reveals this is none of them are revealing anything they just they've had to do three interviews for the thing that they have to contractually do three interviews they will have to answer the questions that they're being asked And so people often go, oh, God, why don't celebrities shut up?

33:44And you go, well, I mean, celebrities are very, very, very happy to shut up. But every single time they see anything in any interview, it immediately gets reported. And of course, all those interviews are asking, you know, things that try to lead them into giving stuff away. And so it is contractually, you have to be talking and you have to do interviews and you have to go on the red carpet. and that it's not like oh my god uh these people are desperate for publicity oh my god these people love the sound of their own voice it is contractually for anything you do part of your fee is you have to promote this and you have to say yes to a certain amount of things you can always turn things down but you can't turn everything down so you have to pick and choose the things you want to do talking of uh red carpets by the way a perfect place to say we're not doing a bonus episode tomorrow but anyone who is a member we have 10 tickets 10 pairs of tickets to give away to the thursday murder cub premiere in august in leicester square uh everyone will be there uh mirren brosnan imri kingsley tenant the cast will be there uh will be there so if you are a member in your newsletter you'll get a chance to apply for those if you're not a member by the way and don't want to be a member there is a you you can follow my uh penguin newsletter as well which is absolutely free and there'll be tickets there as well but yeah we're trying to do a premiere where there's lots of members of the public there and not just um you know influencers i think is the idea the people's premiere the people's premiere exactly that so the stars will be there of the of the actual film but hopefully apart from that it'll be it'll be fans that's the idea and i'd love it if uh if some of them were listening right now and you can find details about our club at therestersentertainment.com.

35:28Now, I think that about wraps us up for today, Richard. Thank you for all your questions, everyone. Will you be back with us next week? I will be. You'll be delighted to hear that I will be back. Yes. Where we belong next week. In a dingy basement. Yeah, in a dingy basement, but together. See you in that dingy basement next Tuesday. Yes, please.

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