Corpses, Quizzes & Newsrooms

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1:09Hello and welcome to another edition of the Rest is Entertainment questions edition. Hello and you are? And I'm Marina High. I like that you always forget to introduce yourself. I almost forgot to introduce myself though. Hello everyone, I'm Richard Osman, question and answers edition of the Rest is Entertainment. This is so professional, the top of this show. Do you know what? That was pretty slick. This is actually liquid. I mean, no notes for myself. Hold on, I'm getting a call from Gary Lineker saying. Now, loads and loads of questions this week about The Apprentice. I think perhaps we'll leave The Apprentice until that series is finished because there's a few things I want to know about The Apprentice as well.

1:44The main one being, why do they keep getting up at four in the morning and then saying you've got to be in the car in 20 minutes and then they get in the car and it's absolute daylight. So I'm going to find that out for you. But let's start with something else. Pan Greaterex has written in. Brilliant name. I still work with a Barry Greaterex. But Pan Greaterex. Good luck everyone else beating that as the name of the week. She says,

2:12Pam, this is a very good question. And I spoke to a producer of a show about forensic pathology about this this week. The casting of a corpse is a thing. They don't just say, like, okay, get that person, they'll be able to lie still. because people can't. And some people do freak out. And so you have to sort of audition by lying still. It's like pretend you're doing an MRI or something. Now, they used to not linger on the chest for those reasons that you say, Pam, which is that it's really hard to stay still. But now this is like one of the big routine instances of VFX. They capture it at rest, the chest at one moment, and then they layer that still in the rest of the footage.

2:53Now, something else he told me, which I found really, they toured the LA City Morgue. They toured quite a few morgues. One thing I will say, actually, just as a sidebar on this, is that people are generally, when you're making shows like that, are incredibly helpful and will give you access. And it's really quite extraordinary, obviously, to have access to a morgue. He said, I mean, it will never leave him. He said one of the most interesting things he discovered was those drawers where the corpses are in a morgue, I'm afraid, unless you're in a hospital, are completely a TV conceit, I suppose.

3:24No. In the big city morgues, there were open racks. It's just a giant fridge. Like a Benetton of death. Yes, I'm sorry to say. Oh, no. And he said it was just extraordinary. And the smell, of course, which people will always talk to you about, the formaldehyde and things like that, is that he says he thinks about it probably every day, that one. Pam is sitting at home now going, do you know what? I wish I hadn't asked. I wish I hadn't asked, yes. In hospitals, they do have the drawers with the corpses, but in the big city morgues across America, it's all large rooms and everybody is just on open racks.

3:56Wow. But essentially there are some actors who are very, very good at being still and now they cheat the not breathing. Yeah, well, they can do, yeah, it's a VFX job. But also it's quite a big gig that, isn't it? You have to lie very still and also usually heavily made up, either looking dead or with injuries or... Well, for those ones where, you know, it's an open eye corpse, the VFX is particularly helpful because, as you know, I mean, obviously, how long was we in a blink? And especially if someone's telling you not to do it. So that is all, you know, this is where you can have open eye ones.

4:25But it's also part of the reason why you can spend longer now around these tables and looking at the courts because they are able to use VFX. Thanks, Pam. Definitely one for you, Richard. It's quiz show scoring. Oh, that sounds a bit lighter. Yes. Jordan Cracknell says, I love quiz shows like Have I Got News For You and Would I Lie To You? But one thing that's always baffled me is that only a subset of questions make the edit, hence the extended versions of the shows. And yet the final scores get read out at the end. Do they, one, know which questions will make the final cut when filming? Two, film the host reading the final scores for every possible combination of edits.

4:58Wow. Three, assume no normal person will actually care about the scores for these shows and therefore not care about the discontinuity. It's a good question, Jordan. And also, by the way, your one, two and three are very insightful because it's sort of a mixture of all of those. So with shows like Have I Got News and What I Lie To, et cetera, et cetera, people think, oh, their scores don't matter. But actually they sort of do in a way. If you're making a format, the fact that there's a competition and someone wins at the end, it just means you're sort of cradled. throughout so you can enjoy it you know i would always say in a format ask a question in the first minute that's answered in the last minute and all those shows are it's ian against paul who's going to win and so we're just in safe hands we've got somewhere to return to so the points sort of do matter in a way for the format but of course don't matter in another way paul and ian are not spending the whole week kind of bony up on the news because you know they want to win three two down um i would find it incredibly hard to override to just want to get the most points it's like it's fully misunderstanding every single thing about the show but there's just an aspect of me that would want to get the most points.

5:57Occasionally you get guests on have I got news for you and you know the vibe there if someone says oh and what's this story in Scotland this week and it's about Nicola Sturgeon and you'll get sometimes a politician or something who will just buzz in and go this is the Nicola Sturgeon story. I really can see myself in this, I'm cringing at my... Let's move on, let's move on because I think I've got the point there and then you kind of go okay maybe we'll talk around it a tiny bit more before we get to the and then i'll give you the point we can't just do it's not like it's not mastermind you know it's over in 15 minutes if we didn't do exactly that jokes so you so you do have that sometimes what you would do ordinarily as you say if you're making let's say would i like to you because it's an interesting one which is you've got four guests the two team captains everyone's probably got two stories there's too much to put in the show but not by much you'll lose two or three stories and it's one of the few shows would i like to you where the compilation thing of stuff that gets cut out is one of the best shows you'll ever see because they're cutting out good stuff.

6:55So on that show, Jordan's absolutely right. Two things. Firstly, up in the gallery, you're watching, and as you go along, you're doing a paper edit. That story's definitely staying in. That one's definitely staying in. This one, oh, I don't know, it's interesting. That bit was brilliant, but that person's already got a good story in this week. But by the end of the show, you'll have a rough idea of which stories you want in. So you will know what the scores would be as per your paper edit. but Jordan is also correct that occasionally you'll also go oh I'm not sure about that one or that one which one we're losing and in which case it's either going to be 4-3 to Lee or it's going to be 4-0 so you then just get Rob to say it's a win for Lee or it's 4-3 to Lee or oh and this week it's a draw because you just want to cover yourself in the edit so you know everything you're watching is the stuff that happened but just occasionally you kind of go are we definitely keeping that story in or you just think oh that story was great but it was really long is that going to fit with the rest?

7:46same with have I got news for you you're sitting in the gallery you're paper editing as you go which you always do with those shows you record for a couple of hours and you know you've only got half an hour and when you produce those shows you get you get very experienced about what's going to make it in and what's not going to make it in and you have to lose some really anyone who's ever been to a recording of those shows goes oh my god there was an unbelievably funny bit you didn't put it in you think yeah because if we put that in we'd have to it was referencing something in the previous round which was referencing something at the beginning which happened off camera and so you kind of go you can't put everything in so you're constantly doing a paper edit in the gallery and then thinking what would that do to the score if we lost that occasionally I've got these for you you might do a kind of quick fire high point scoring round and if it doesn't go very well you think okay well the points now don't make any sense so you change them so it's a bit of everything is the truth and it's not really tv fakery it's kind of a nice cradle to have scores and you just want to make sure they make some sense yeah but certainly if you went back over every single episode of all of those shows and added up the actual scores, there'd be the odd inconsistency.

8:47Whose Line Is It Anyway? Which I used to do, right at the beginning, we'd just say, all the scores don't matter. So on that, Clive would just say, there's a million points to Ryan, there's 40 points to Colin, and at the end they'd say the winner is Greg Proops. You just gave a million points to Ryan. So how's Greg winning? And so on that show, it was just we don't have to worry about it. But yeah, by and large, people are trying to play fair, is the truth. While corpses and quiz show scoring, You can't say we don't run the gamut on this show. Marina Rod Hutchison asks, following on from your discussion of the media and Princess Kate, what is the hierarchy of reporters in a newsroom?

9:22I always imagine the royal correspondence being seen as a bit of a joke by other reporters and the war correspondence at the top of the tree. I love this question so much. I've got a lot to divulge and I've got a lot to get off my chest. It's really interesting. It would depend on the title and it would depend on the times, as in the era of the whatever. I mean, when I first started, I worked at the Sun. I was the secretary on the Sun Shaber's desk. There was this royal guy, Charlie Ray. I mean, a real sea monster. And he, yeah, but they had immense self-regard. You just feel like that royal beat.

9:53They've got a real load of... The photographers that always used to do the royal photography. I will get onto the hierarchy in a minute because I've got a lot. One of the things the royal correspondents do is that they think that the royal family like them. First of all, they become quite grand, as in they might accept a few posies themselves and bouquets from well-wishers and second of all they reckon that oh you know we have such a lot Harry used to love us it's like it should be patently obvious to you by now that he never liked you he regards you as complicit in a machine of death and he really really hates you but they're all now like he's changed we used to have a laugh with him and it's like oh my god it's really okay so it just depends when there's a lot of royal stories and if you can get the splash you know the front page of the paper which obviously now most people read things online and it doesn't mean so much But there are periods in newsrooms where showbiz is really big.

10:39I don't think showbiz is as big as it used to be. Now, most of the stories, I think, you know, it's stuff that's happened on Instagram or things that people put in the public domain themselves. Politics in, say, tabloids used to be nothing. It used to get nothing at all. And then over the last few years, you know, politics has been really in the ascendancy because of all the convulsions after Brexit and all of that. So you could really get the splash a lot of times. There's been some big storylines. There's been some big plot lines. Then there are hierarchies within hierarchies, OK? like the sports guys never come in the office.

11:05The first tournament I did, I went to the World Cup in 2006. There was no women, I was in Baden-Baden. Some of the stuff that was said to me, genuinely, it's like, hey guys, you know we're in the 25th century. I mean, it was really unreconstructed. And I wondered whether they were just like on tour the whole time. They kind of lived in hotel rooms quite a lot. They just like hadn't actually realised that society had moved on about 30 years beyond. But they have hierarchies within hierarchies, the sports reporters. I was interested to discover that somebody had at some point sort of created this system where they would refer to the chief sports writers, not all of the chief sports writers, by the way, but most of them, as the Dukes.

11:38So there was the Dukes, then there was a football number one, then there's a football number two, and then there were the scufflers. Now, the scufflers were just the ones trying to go and get little quotes in the mix zone, which is basically the equivalent of a sort of tunnel after the game. I would say that the Dukes to scufflers system was semi-ironic, but honestly, the way that a lot of people behaved, it was like, you felt like it was a sort of hierarchy that you might have seen in a failing minor public school clinging onto the cliffs in like the 1950s. I did feel that to a large extent football was kind of like that.

12:10Let me think about the rest of it in the newsroom. If you get any brackets in your job title, you've massively fucked up. Special projects, hi, you're being fucked over probably because of a mistake you've made. I mean, what is special projects? Nobody knows. It could be anything. It's just that you're not doing the job you were doing before because you were doing it badly. Yeah, it's like in TV when they sent you to online. I think that's going to be huge back in the days when it wasn't going to be huge. Do you know what? Genuinely, some of those people, you bump into them now and they're the billionaires.

12:38Oh, that's brilliant. They were sent there as a sort of punishment meeting. The lobby also don't come in. So again, there are sort of... That's the political. Yeah, that's the political. They mainly work in Parliament. There's a sort of lobby corridor and other places. So they don't come in. So again, those are sort of little communities that form that are not really part of the office life, as it were. But then, I mean, the columnists, in my view, which often don't come in, I mean, the columnists are the worst. A lot of people don't come in, but now they've tried to bring people back to the office.

13:08The columnists are the worst. I mean, you guys probably know, because, you know, we elected one to run the country. But newspaper columnists, oh dear me. I mean, I have always tried to be, they can be pretty high maintenance. Tell me about it. I try to be the lowest maintenance possible, except in salary negotiations. So if you're going to save your difficulty for something, I think that's the one to save it for. But I try to be as ultra, I've got this fantastic comment editor, a guy called Hugh Muir at The Guardian, he's great. But I try to be as super low maintenance. But in general, you've got your show ponies and they're the columnists.

13:42So in terms of the hierarchy, it is shifting. As you say, war correspondents, they don't come in. There's a particular type. I remember my agent once saying to me, I mean, I used to be able to drink so well. I could drink like a foreign correspondent. and there's I mean there's a sort of certain truism to that investigations which you know when you get an amazing investigation I always think those are people which are sort of rock stars and there are some papers that really sort of pride themselves on having those great investigations I mean the Guardian's got a great investigations editor the Sunday Times obviously have always had their insight team and it's a big thing if you get a big one of those that's a terrific thing and you are a bit of a rock star when you bring one of those in but in general you're kind of toiling away on things that are very, very expensive form of journalism to run because you can go for so long and it will need so much legal and it may never, never come to fruition because you can't get people to talk.

14:32So they're sort of quiet rock stars in lots of ways. But the hierarchy is shifting. But I don't know really what to say about royal correspondents. They're so grand themselves. I honestly can't tell you. It's a great question. Also, by the way, I don't want us to lose at the end of that answer that you gave one of the greatest pieces of advice to anyone who's starting out in any industry, which is be low maintenance except for in salary negotiations. And that sounds like a perfect place to go for a break. After this, I think we're going to talk about the secrets of TV critics and the secrets of TV theme music as well.

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16:18Okay, welcome back, everybody. Immediate question for you on TV theme tunes, Richard, from Katie Green. Now, she says, there are many timeless TV theme tunes. Shows I would watch on a Saturday night decades ago, I can still clearly remember the theme tune. There are also modern shows like The Traitors that have really well-produced theme music. Three questions. How much budget is allocated to this? At which point in the production process is it made or composed? And three, have you, Richard, ever rejected a theme for not suiting the show? Yeah, my brother did the theme for 8 Out of 10 Cats. Did he?

16:50I didn't do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're like a super group. There's like someone from Supergrass and someone. It's like really the people behind that. It's amazing. I saw that question. I spoke to a guy called Paul Farah, who is the absolute don of TV theme music. So he did Weakest Link, The Chase, The Wheel is one of his. And I put some of Katie's questions to him. By the way, he gave me so much other information that if you have any questions about TV theme music, I already have the answers. So anyone else who's got another one. From a TV producer's point of view, there's a series of things when you get a format off the ground, set being one of them, theme music, all these things that kind of make a show feel professional and real.

17:28But by and large, you wouldn't have theme music until it's been commissioned and then you go out and do it. And sometimes you just buy library music. But you have people you work with. We work with a guy called Mark Silver, who's great as well. But Paul is sort of the king of the industry. And the producer will have ideas. As Paul Farris said, the worst thing is sometimes you get producers who go, they asked me to deal with you, Paul, because I DJ in my spare time. And Paul's like, oh, okay. Oh, we got a live one here. Yeah, exactly. Now, the role of a TV theme composer is interesting. We just think of the theme music.

18:02And actually, if you watch any show, watch Weakest Link, watch The Wheel, for example, which are both Paul's, and you'll see, of course, there's theme music, but there are also music beds throughout the show. So when you're talking in transition between rounds, we have a thing called stings which is the transition so it literally let's play round one and the composer is doing all of those things they're producing all those sort of sound effects and things for the show buzzers and things like that often the composer would do as well if you wanted to be a sort of sound collage and so it's a huge job essentially scoring a television program so the theme tune has to do one job which is it's really catchy here's the show but especially these days also then has to bleed into 10 seconds, five seconds, two seconds, one second, all these different versions of it.

18:45So something like if you watch The Wheel, this is why I love working in television, right? One of the many reasons I love working in television, I've talked to Paul about The Wheel. See, that's a catchy theme tune. Yeah. The Wheel. Yeah. The Wheel. And Paul says, I don't really remember composing it, but he said, I really like it. He said, but what I do remember is so much of my time was, and this is why things are never, ever simple. So much of my time was, you've got the wheel going round and round and round and it slows down and he said and I need music that can speed up and slow down and keep time with the wheel this is the thing I need to do he said so a lot of my time was sitting in a room with the engineers who are making the wheel and they were actually timing it with making it go around and so our job is we sit down and work out you tell me the speed it's going to go you tell me the speed it can go you tell me the rate at which it declines all of that stuff and I then compose to that it's all maths yeah but me as a producer I'm thinking about Michael McIntyre and the questions and stuff like that and meanwhile in a room somewhere across you know the country there is a composer and an engineer making my show better for me by both being brilliant at their jobs so you know the role of a composer is is a complicated one in that regard so obviously you want the music to be catchy but then they have to design all sorts of other things for you in terms of when it is done by and by someone like Paul you would get in very early in a show because you want the graphic identity of the show and the music to all fit each other but he he says uh that at times he says he remembers two specific occasions he remembers a live morning television show ringing him and saying we need a new music for the end of the show and he's thinking okay when do you need it by they go oh no it's for the end of the show so he had to compose something send it through to them by the end of the show and he's like doing a match report but harder yeah exactly and he's also the music director on Michael McIntyre's big show and Aled Jones is on Send It All and Michael's just had an idea, he wants to do a version of Walking in the Air with Aled and Paul's like, oh but when do you need it?

20:46They go, well the theatre doors have opened but not that many people in yet, so essentially he's got half an hour, 45 minutes to do that which some are like, any creative you love that sort of challenge Or really understand a deadline In many ways it doesn't matter, that's probably when you started it anyway. But by and large if you have a big show like that the wheel or something like that that the composer has to be part of the team very very early on and if you are interested in sound design and music and stuff like that if it's a career you want to go into sit and watch an episode of the weakest link or the wheel and see where the beds are and see where the stings are and see how they relate to the music and and what have you and it's really fascinating and incredibly lucrative as well and you know so Paul will do Weakest Link.

21:30That music goes around the world. He was saying, oh, I'm in China and I put the TV on and literally the first thing I hear is my music. It's an incredible job, but you don't notice a lot of what they do. So theme tunes is an interesting question, but actually there's so much more to a theme tune than meets the eye. But thank you, lovely question. And also thank you to Paul Farah. Paul Farah also, by the way, said, if you ever want me to remix your theme tune, I would happily do it for free because I love the podcast. and he's like the best in the business so maybe we'll set him that challenge also maybe when we talked about Disney on the regular show this week we're going to have a cartoon cat becoming the CEO perhaps the cartoon cat needs a little kind of theme tune every time he walks into the room yeah like Steamboat Willie the only bit of Disney stuff that has actually fallen out of copy right now the little mouse doing the original Mickey Mouse before he became I'll get Paul on that as well Marina, Alison Barton has a question for you can TV critics choose for themselves the programmes they will review each week Also, if they don't have full editorial control, can they refuse to review a specific programme if there are personal reasons why they would not be comfortable doing so?

22:33Would the approach be the same for film and book critics? OK, good one, Alison. I would say that in general, if you are a TV critic, you're going to want to do the big things of the week. It doesn't mean like every week you're doing The Apprentice every week because it happens to be big at the time, but you're going to want to cover that one and you'll probably cover off the series launch. So I don't want to say there's a herd mentality because they all may have completely different views about it, But if a big show comes out like Traitors or whatever, you're all going to be writing about it because it's the big show of the week.

22:59Don't try and sort of be one of those people who says, oh, I'm not going to cover that. I'm too grand for it. If you've got a sort of whole page and you come once a week, as some of the tabloid TV critics do, or if you do, there's a TV review every day, as there is in some of the broadsheets, you can do quite a lot of things. You'll hopefully cover quite a lot of different shows. And if you're any good at your job, you'll be watching a huge amount of television anyway. But in terms of saying I won't review it, my God, I mean, I would really think you're in the wrong job. But I do hear in newsrooms now of some younger reporters saying, you know, I don't want to cover this story.

23:29You know, I don't agree with J.K. Rowling. It's like, well, so what? I mean, it's a news story. I don't agree with Donald Trump. You can write about him. I have heard that there's a more is a bigger movement to people saying I'm not really comfortable writing a story, which to me is like, well, then you're in the wrong job because your job is to write news stories. And it doesn't matter what the news is about. Critics. I don't know. Sometimes I do know that some film critics you've asked about whether it extends to film. I do know some film critics who, you know, may have connections within the business or they may know people.

23:57If that person is behind a smaller film that's not very good, then you can just think, well, that's good. I don't have to review it. I'm just not going to review that because I could probably only give it a kicking because it's not very good. You know, if that's one of the big releases of the week, you're not going to not review, I don't know, Killers of the Flower Moon or whatever it is. You're going to review all of those things. and often part of the job of critics is sort of managing those relationships because you're going to see the people at the theatre. You know, theatres know you. So you really have to think very hard, obviously, about what you're writing.

24:29Something that does happen, I was about to say not be excluded because I'm afraid that something that does happen and it's happened also within football reporting, things like that, people saying, we don't like this thing you've written about us because you're not allowed to come to our press conferences anymore. You know, we don't like the review you gave us. You now will not come to, you know, we're not going to send you Warner's films or something like that. Not to slight Warner's, I'm just naming a film company. But they might do that. And that is obviously very bad and you can't have that.

24:56We have to have freedom of speech and we have to have freedom of criticism and people should be able to write whatever they want and you have to allow people into your press conferences and things like that. But it must be said there's been an increase in that. And in those situations, what I would always hope to try and do, and there's been mixed success on this, is say, if you don't let my colleagues into, even, I mean, sometimes politicians might exclude South Jones. If you don't let us all in, none of us will do it. And I think you really have to sort of quickly form a little sort of cross title union saying, we're not going to do this.

25:28We're all going to sort of put our pens down or whatever, if you don't let us in. All of these relate to stories of criticism in some way or another, whether you're criticising a football club or a movie or whatever. But I think you have to sort of band together and say, we must have the right to disagree with something or to report unfavourably on you and then you have to sort of unionise in the moment. And also, as you say, so critics always have to do the big releases, big TV shows, big films, but then the good ones will find little nuggets that you wouldn't have seen and they'll put that on the same page.