Extreme Weather & Sexy Monks

0:00Tron Ares has arrived. I would like you to meet Ares, the ultimate AI soldier. He is biblically strong and supremely intelligent. You think you're in control of this? You're not. On October 10th. What are you? My world is coming to destroy yours, but I can help you. The war for our world begins in IMAX. Tron Ares. Rated PG-13. May be inappropriate for children under 13. Only in theaters October 10th. Get tickets now. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment Questions and Answers Edition. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. Happy to be in the studio. Happy to be answering questions as well.

0:42I'm always happy to be in the studio with you. For members of our club, we have got a new episode coming, which is about the greatest TV, the best and the most interesting TV detectives. Yes, I've chosen my favourite ever TV detective. It'll be revealed on that. If you want to join the club, go to I Never Remember This, go to therestisentertainment.com. That's right. And you can listen ad-free, get bonus episodes, be in the chat community. If you don't want to join it, the podcast and the Q &A episode continues, as always, free to air. And I would like to say that we are beginning. Regular listeners and students of kinky monk literature may remember that one of our questions last week concerned a book about a kinky monk, which the Thursday Murder Club is mentioned in that book.

1:23But what got me really hot under the collar was your speculative description of the commissioning process for how this monk, a former Hellraiser, how his ex-boyfriend, now a magazine writer, turns up and ends up, how he becomes part of the plot. For the benefit of those listening orally, for the benefit of the tape, I am Sierra Simone. People listening orally. OK. Sorry, have you read too much of this book? I've read a lot of this book. There's a monk. He used to be like a millionaire playboy. He goes over to Europe and then his former lover... It was in Kansas monastery. Listen, do you want me to take it over from here?

2:01His former lover comes over to do a magazine article. Your only comment, which was about 25 minutes or so, who on earth would commission this article and send this journalist over to Europe? You have read the book now or some of it. Yeah, I don't know if you know, I'm an investigative journalist and it's really important to me. So I have read the Kinky Monk book, or up to the bit where you're mentioned, And your book is mentioned anyway. Let's put it that way. OK. Now, I want to just put readers into the picture. I'll put you inside the action, as it were. Aidan is the main character, now Brother Patrick.

2:31He's chopping wood, but he's also the monastery's chief financial officer. Oh, is he? CFO. Now, he's having a silent day. But anyway, the abbot gives him a choice of being sent to three separate Trappist monasteries as research for the brewery. Yes, the monastery's got a brewery. A lot of them do. And it's a corporate espionage, but ethical. Now, two monks then rush in. Aidan's got a visitor. Brother Patrick now has got a visitor. He's only a staff writer for Mode. It's Elijah, Aidan's former boyfriend. And I tell you what, he's getting married and not to Aidan. Well, obviously Aidan's now a monk.

3:04Anyway, so then he goes away. So he tells Elijah this news. He comes back a few weeks later and the abbot says, I tell you what, this guy wants to do a magazine piece for Mode. He wants to do a retreat with us and then he wants to write an article about it. Anyway, the article which ends up getting written is called The Eternal Call of Monks, Beer and Prayer in Some of the World's Loneliest Abbeys. Yeah, that's good. I would see that as an... You could imagine that article being commissioned. Yes, you can actually and I would probably read it. Have you withdrawn your objections? No, I haven't.

3:36Your suggestion as to how it happened I don't think was entirely accurate. However, let me tell you how the Thursday Murder Club gets mentioned, which is how we went down this whole rabbit hole. The magazine writer, Elijah, his fiancée, Jamie, He invites his fiancée, sorry, it's a funny sort of retreat, isn't it? He invites his fiancée Jamie to the monastery. No, what, parading him in front of Brother Patrick. I don't know, you treat this monastery like a hotel, isn't it? I mean, I would have said that, but anyway. And it's awful for Aidan because Jamie's absolutely lovely. Let me tell you how we know he's lovely.

4:03Jamie is as friendly as his smile and his glasses make him appear, and at least two times as wholesome. It turns out he doesn't run an eighth grade orchestra. He's a librarian who focuses on senior outreach. He teaches Sunday school at an Episcopalian church and has dinner with his mum and dad every week. His hobbies are hiking, baking and camping and the last book he read was The Thursday Murder Club, which he's happy to mail me at any time. So you see, it's used as a signifier of his absolute niceness and wholesomeness. Interesting. Yeah. Okay. I don't know what happens then, I had to put a wash on.

4:35And then he bent him over the altar. The talk of The Thursday Murder Club made him so horny. You're right, Joyce would love this book. Oh my God, yeah. This Joyce would go absolutely crazy. Can you do a cat bag? A call bag? I don't know whether they call it. Oh, that's a really good idea. Oh, my God. I'm literally 75 ,000 words through the next Thursday Murder Club, one at the moment. So I'm not a million miles from finishing, but I can absolutely... Pretty sure that Joyce might need to just decompress with some kinky monkdom at some point. I am. There's nothing in that, because if I put it in, people might go and buy it.

5:08It's fine. There's nothing to... It's kind of okay. The politics are okay. The politics? But you know what I mean. Oh, my God. I can't do another 25 minutes on this. But I want to bench that question and come back to it later. Perhaps off air. Listen, this is a question as an answers episode. But if I put it in my book, it's okay. And if people go away and buy it. Yeah, I mean, as long as you say it's a kinky monk book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, they don't come with 18 certificates. But it's fine. Yeah. Okay. I might get Joyce to mention it. That doesn't feel like it was a question. It was a question from last week.

5:39It's more of a book festival. This is more of a statement than a question. OK, sorry, that was more of a statement than a question. Shall we get an actual question? Sorry, yes. For you, Richard, from Oscar Khan. Gladiators is an enormous production and requires hiring out an entire stadium. How long does it take to film? How long are the contestants around for? And how long does it take to switch sets over? There's all sorts of shows that you can get tickets for. And I know that tickets for Gladiators are in huge demand as well. There's a huge waiting list for things. But you have to be very careful about which TV shows you go to watch, I would say.

6:12Gladiators which have filmed at Sheffield Arena that is one that takes a very very very long time to film because there's all sorts going on there's all sorts of different setups there the games are very different every single one of those games has to have incredible health and safety around it every single one of those games is shot in an entirely different way so between every single game you're playing there are enormous camera moves there are enormous set moves people can get injured you've got an awful lot of different cast members an awful lot of different setups You've got Bradley and Barney.

6:44You've got the setups there. You've got Mark Clattenberg and setups there. Then you've got the games itself. Then you've got the interviews after the games. So that is a show which takes forever to film. You're hyped up in between, of course, as great warm-up people and all sorts going on and prizes and games going on just to keep everybody hyped. So if you're a nine-year-old kid, it's probably like an absolute dream day, I would say. If you're the parent of a nine-year-old kid... Take sandwiches. Take sandwiches. Yeah, you definitely should. so that would be a very very long one there's certain shows you know if you in the olden days you should go and see pointless you would just do a 45 minute episode in an hour and there would be like a two minute break to move one of the podiums out in between rounds if you go and see something like have i got news for you it's just like watching or would i lie to you it's just like watching a long version of the actual show there's zero camera moves zero changes nothing is going on but anytime you see a show where the set changes where the camera angles are changing a lot then you are going to be there for a very, very long time.

7:41And Gladiators, which my understanding is, it's an amazing show to go and watch, but it is long. Yeah. It is long. Alistair Otto has a question for you. He says, I've always found it curious and perhaps a little ironic. Oh, I like where this is going. That major news outlets like the BBC, ITN and Sky send reporters to cover severe weather events from the very locations they warn viewers to avoid. How did news organisations navigate this contradiction? And in your opinion, is it necessary or even responsible for them to report from such hazardous locations during extreme weather events? This question in itself has become a classic over the years because where all this started was in America and the type of news reporting they do in America, which was always much more brash and show-busy.

8:23And you'll hear American weather reporters say, this is our Super Bowl about doing this. And they obviously get a lot... Their relationship with their weather in America was traditionally always very different to ours because, you know, we had sort of climate and they had weather. Yeah, they've got crazy things happening all the time. Huge things happen. It's a big deal. Everything is a ratings war. And I have to say to you that people want to watch this. People, you watch it in that same way that you watch sort of NASCAR thinking we might see a crash now. People want to see reporters in those situations.

8:57Reporters want to do it because it's a great way, as I say, it's a great way of getting attention. Storms are content. You know, storm chases is a big, big thing. someone I haven't mentioned for way too long on this podcast. Glenn Powell played one in Twisters last year. Wow, Glenn Powell. Sorry, I didn't mention Glenn Powell for a couple of weeks. I think at the very top table of this podcast, Glenn Powell, Lauren Sanchez and now James Watt. And Steven Seagal. Yes, oh, and Steven Seagal. By the way, if you don't know who James Watt is, not the man who invented the engine, listen to our Tuesdays episode where we will introduce you to him.

9:29The man who's trying to invent himself as a celebrity. Storms are content. Storms are content. There is a sort of fake thing that they say, which I think is rubbish, which is that the networks say that the most effective way to say to people it's best to say inside is to show someone kind of hanging on to an iron railing, dealing with the elements. The Weather Channel, they obviously had a whole channel devoted to this in the States. And when these big storms come in, it's a big deal. There was a guy on the Weather Channel. There's a funny clip from a few years ago. I'm sorry, I can't quite remember the year.

10:00One of the hurricanes blowing into Florida. and he is doing this in the foreground of the picture. When you say, honestly, I do not want to teach you your job in any way whatsoever. And I know that broadcasting is new to you. When you say doing this, for the people on YouTube, they're really enjoying that, just for people on their dog walk. I wonder what it is you were doing. And looking like he's almost at a 45 degree angle to sort of set himself against the wind in the foreground of the shot. and you just see these two guys strolling past him in shorts in the background of it. There's a lot of hamminess to it in the way they do it.

10:37I think one of the very first people to do it was Dan Rather. Now, Dan Rather, he did it in the 60s, this kind of outside broadcast way of reporting storms. And he's now what? Dan Rather became the legendary, one of the legendary three anchors of US News and he was CBS. And Dan Rather was originally drew a lot of attention and some people think it helped his rise because it was a sort of new way of doing it. We've imported it, definitely. And the reason this question is good because of Stormow Inn last week and there was a lot of stuff. You saw a lot of reporters saying, absolutely, you must stay in your house and any wave could come and take you right now while standing really close to the water on a beach.

11:15And we've imported this. Like anything we import from America, it doesn't matter, you could import, it becomes a way in which to criticise the BBC. Sooner or later, the argument that anything, the probability approach is one that whatever we've imported will just be a way to criticise the BBC. So people criticising the BBC for putting their reporters at risk, blah, blah, I'm sure they're not really at risk. There is a sort of slightly odd thing that you have to think about, which is the last part of your question was, you know, is it really necessary? A lot of outside reporting of any type, completely unnecessary.

11:46It's not really necessary, yeah. Does Chris Mason need to stand outside Dining Street at night? Does he think the Prime Minister is going to come downstairs and say, I'll tell you what, Chris, I'm just actually watching inside. I don't quite think you've said that right. Can I just give you a little bit of exclusive live on air? There's no reason for him to be there. But it sort of looks better. These backdrops look better, which is why not everything is just done in a studio because we have to try and break it all up and make it look more interesting and go to the outside areas. But there's a huge amount of reporting has absolutely no need of taking place against the backdrop against it, which it takes place against.

12:16But if they don't do it, we wouldn't enjoy watching it so much. That's the truth. We are absolutely complicit in that. When they say, oh, we don't need to send people over to here, people don't need to be in the stadium to watch the football, you think, well, yeah, we don't need to be doing anything. It's just a good way of doing this. You know, we are entertained by it. I think one of the key things to talk about the safety of the thing is if you are sent out to, you know, a seaside town by Sky or by the BBC or by ITN, each of them has risk analysts. Each of them has, you know, insurance in place.

12:46The first thing you do is you're in touch with the emergency services there because you're reporting anyway. So you're talking to the police, you're talking to the authorities. They have a pretty good idea of where you can stand that is going to look good, but is safe. And when you say you mustn't go to these places, there are certain places that these news crews would not go, definitively would not be. Sky, the BBC and ITN usually will be right next to each other and their vans will be parked right next to each other. But they will be in a bit where in the background you can see huge waves, but those huge waves are not hitting you.

13:18So they are in touch with every single authority in that place. The authorities, by and large, welcome them in because they want you to show that actually it's looking windy, it's looking dangerous. And so they will put you in the right place. The real danger now is people, you know, with their own YouTube channels and things like that. They will stay behind in places where hurricanes are about to hit. They do not have anyone with health and safety involved. They are not in touch with the authorities. They are not being told where to stand. If they're Glenn Powell, they've got a thing that can drill his SUV down into the ground in Twisters so that he can watch, so he can capture the storm.

13:50but it's like a sort of Bond thing that it can drill the SUV down into the ground so that Glen Powell doesn't get harmed while making content. Amazing. The single best bit of extreme weather reporting, of course, is Big Jet TV in the storms where he films people landing at Heathrow. Yes. It's a go-around. It's a go-around. We've never seen one taken by the elements. Yes. Although it would be a great inciting incident, wouldn't it, in the first moments of a comedy about running a network news station if they lose one. When you lose a reporter. You lose one. I think we better go to an ad break before we give away all our amazing ideas for free, Richard.

14:27Yeah, I think we need to get this podcast back on track.

14:33Welcome back, everybody. And we've got a question that I really would like to know the answer. I've thought about this often myself. It's about audiobook reading speed. Amy says, am I imagining it or are people somehow able to read an entire book aloud more quickly than most people could read it in their heads. I look at the running time of most audiobooks and there's no way I could have read the book in that time. Yet the narrator has managed to read it first in their head, then out loud, and sometimes switch voices. Is my theory correct? Amy, thank you. Your theory is actually incorrect, other than in specific examples.

15:05It is quicker to read a book yourself than to listen to a book. I spoke to my audiobook producer, Meredith, who's absolutely brilliant. She's taught me through every version of this. She says, The average human reading speed for an adult is about 250 words per minute. And so if you're reading a 90 ,000 word novel, which is roughly how long a novel is, it would take you around five to six hours to read a book with absolutely zero interruptions, you know, without the phone ringing, without, you know, a delivery. Five to six hours, if you're happy just to do it, that's how long it would take you.

15:36The average length of an audio book of 90 ,000 words is nine hours. so actually it takes about half the time again to listen to it than it does to read it um so the basic principle is it is quicker for you to read it than to to listen to it however we all have different reading styles and if you have any form of dyslexia adhd if like me your your eyesight is not what it might be it will take you significantly longer to read a book it'd take me a lot longer than five or six hours to read a 90 000 word book audiobooks for me are an awful lot quicker Meredith talks about all sorts of other things as well, which was great.

16:12So a nine-hour audiobook, that is not just Nicola Walker who does We Sold Redders. That's not her sitting down for nine hours and reading it all out loud. The recording of a nine-hour audiobook would essentially take three to four days. It would be about 18 hours worth of recordings, all sorts of different things. And also, if you're Nicola Walker or lots of other audiobook readers, before the day you go in, you've read the whole thing. You've read the whole thing. you know any pronunciations that they've come across that they're not sure of you know are raised with the producer fiona shaw who did the books three and four of thursday murder club rang me and asked me about various characters gosh uh she said i can't believe you've got two two people from liverpool there i can't do a liverpuddy and she says the one accent i can't do uh and so you know she'd been through the whole thing had lots of questions about motivations nicola walker did the same thing we had a long chat about the book and about the characters and who I thought they were.

17:05If a book is set in a certain area, my books are set in Sussex, Kent, and We Solve Murders in Hampshire, they will ring the local, or the producer will ring the local authority just to make sure of pronunciations, of place names, of things like that, like any shops that are mentioned and things. So they will ring, they will go to source and ring and get absolute exact pronunciations of things. I've never listened to an audiobook. Have you not? No. I love them. And, you know, Meredith's job, amongst many other things, as the actors are reading, obviously there's retakes, there's pronunciation things, but she's also marking up every single second in which there's a chair squeak or someone's stomach is rumbling or there's a slight pause or anything like that.

17:49Every single bit of that is kind of noted before it goes off to the editor. So it's an amazing job. You know, a great audiobook reader, they're not just sitting down and reading the book out loud. They're going into the whole thing. They're reading the whole thing. They're getting into the characters. they're understanding who the characters are. The audiobook producer is just making sure that the whole process is kind of as seamless as it can be. In answer to your specific question, Amy, it is quicker to read a book yourself, but sometimes I think listening to one can be more fun. I'll say thank you so much to Meredith for all those answers, but also for how brilliant she is anyway.

18:21Marina, Lisa Turley has a question for you. We're back on the news. When someone from a news agency or newspaper, etc., appears on a current affairs programme and does a five-minute interview on a story of the day, do they get paid or is it all in the spirit of a mutually beneficial news cauldron? I love the news cauldron. It is a witch's brew, isn't it? Yeah. The answer is that mostly they do get... We're talking about talking heads, aren't we here? Pundits. Yes. We're not talking about someone doing a shift covering the... Yeah, OK. Well, there is a sort of price list for these things. I can do you some prices.

18:53Yes, please. So if you're going on something like question time or any questions, those are proper programmes, any questions being on the Radio 4, Those are proper programmes. They have a whole big budget. You know, they're providing like an hour or whatever of airtime. So you get a proper fee for that, which would be probably in the low thousands. For things like just turning up on radio to talk, if you think of like during the Brexit wars, when we had permanent news encampments out on College Green in Westminster and people were constantly being, journalists were always on, You get about£50 or£75 for going on BBC News or radio or TV.

19:30I think that journalists do this only for what I would call brand building. I personally don't do it because I think it takes quite a long time and I'm not interested in brand building. You're not interested in brand building? No. Why? I don't want to go and talk about the news. That's the ultimate brand though. Is it? But I already do my column so that's enough. The thing about Marina Hyde is she's not interested in brand building. It's such a unique take. Silence being the most intriguing statement of all. No, it's not. It's just laziness and not being interested in that sort of thing. But if you want to go and do the Sky News paper review, you do get asked a lot of these things.

20:06And it's sort of like, do you want to come out to Isleworth and do it for£75 on a Sunday evening? Yes, absolutely, to build a profile. It's to build a profile. There's plenty of people who've started doing shifts on Sky News, reading the papers a couple of times. And then a producer goes, oh, they're pretty good. And they bring them back in for something slightly bigger. They obsessively watch these and always say to me, now, tell them I was going to say, because we watch her on the paper review. And I'm like, God, I mean, it's a really big thing. So it is a big thing. Expert guest, you might get£100 ,000,£175 ,000.

20:33Sorry, let me start again. You have to be ahead of an expert. Expert guest, you might get£100 ,000,£175 ,000. The one thing I would say is that there are times, as I say, I was talking about those Brexit wars, there was also a period, if you remember Jeremy Corbyn's leadership, where he didn't have a whole load of, I don't know, the political editor of the Mail or whoever to talk about on your behalf, you know, of a right-leaning paper, if you're a conservative leader. They didn't have any of those. And they had, so a whole sort of class of journalists sprung up who were sort of the media outriders for Corbyn.

21:03Who could talk about Corbyn, who were, they were sort of unofficial spokespeople. And you could get, if you're getting 10 appearances a week and you're going between the different broadcasters who are encamped on College Green, you could be earning easily£750 extra a week. But it adds up. Once it can add up because there's just the scale of it because we were in political turmoil and news was big business. But then, of course, when Jeremy Corbyn went, having lost the second election, the little appearance fees can add up to quite a lot if you're in political turmoil. But if it's just normal, we haven't had normal political times to some extent, oh, this is our new normal, then you're really doing it for profile building because you can't get the scale enough to get it up to a sort of reasonable sum.

21:49But the profile building may be worth much more. Yes, worth a lot more. I mean, listen, we haven't even got on to whether they send a car or not, which is a whole different question. Oh, that's a whole thing. Yeah, will you send a car? Yes. But as I say, if you're doing the studio things and then you have to do the hair and make-up and all these things, it becomes a long time. If you're going out to a sort of, you know, it's several hours. It's also fun. It's fun, though. If that's what you want to do, then it's brilliant fun. If that's what you enjoy. It's profile building. But if you're not interested in doing that, then it's a lot of time out of the schedule, in my view.

22:22And you can get your hair cut. Oh, you get yours cut, which I find hysterical. Well, because I need a cut at the moment, is the truth. And I'm thinking, well, when am I next on a TV show? Unbelievable. You know they've got hairdressers on almost every high street. Hairdressers. Yeah, you can go into one of those. But I'm a multitasker. Yeah, you are, you see. just making time, carving extra time, carving 26 hours out of every day. Exactly. Question for you from Natalie, Richard. When a band is coming up with a name, is there a list of already taken names they have to consult? Or can bands have the same name?