Favourite Questions of 2024

0:00At Sierra, discover great deals on top brand workout gear, like high quality walking shoes, which might lead to another discovery. 40 ,000 steps, baby. Who's on top now, Karen? You've taken the office step challenge a step too far. Don't worry, though. Sierra also has yoga gear. It might be a good place to find your zen. Discover top brands at unexpectedly low prices. Sierra, let's get moving.

0:29When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp. The secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th. And never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end-to-end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com. This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher. Last year's critically acclaimed series returns to follow Evan, Gwen, and Marky as they vie for their students' divided attention. See why Cosmopolitan called its premiere season a masterclass of comedy.

1:11While glamour-raved, it's the year's funniest and most heartwarming new comedy series. FX's English Teacher. All new, Thursdays on FX. All episodes now streaming on Hulu.

1:27Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osmond. Now Marina, you and I both say it enough, but we love the questions we get in, from behind the scenes to top threes to simply our trenchant opinions. Yep, the listeners are very, very good at selecting topics for us to talk about, almost better than we are ourselves. And plus, you get the inspiration for future character names. I definitely do. The first time I actually put one in a book is going to be a great day for this podcast. You have to tell us when you've done it. Of course I will. Now listen, today we're going to revisit some of our favourite questions.

2:02Thank you so much, as always, for sending them in. Yes, thank you. And don't forget the address to send your questions to is restlessentertainment at gmail.com.

2:13I have a question from Jeff Nicholson. Thank you, Jeff. Is there any reason why, when filming, actors would use an empty cup and pretend there is a drink in it? No actor alive can cover up the fact that it's an empty cup. It immediately brings me out of the story. If you played a hundred, this is a bold claim from Jeff Nicholson. I hope you can back this up, Jeff. If you played a hundred clips of characters drinking from these cups, I could tell you with 100 % accuracy which ones had liquid in it, even if they were just carrying the cups. It is brutally obvious, says Jeff. That's a podcast. Okay.

2:47First of all, Jeff, you are not even weird. This is an obsession. People have been obsessed with this for ages. The AV Club, which is a sort of TV cultural arm of the onion, there was a guy who used to track empty cups in tv shows now the sort of obvious practical reasons for it are if you can see through the cup it affects continuity so it's just a lot easier not to have anything in it but they you can't have an empty glass so they do normally have coffee cups wardrobe would hate you if you spilt it i mean even in the studio we have to have a ridiculous sippy cup yeah little sippy yeah so wardrobe would hate you it would cause a lot of trouble you don't know how many takes you're going to have to do so they don't put anything in them I totally agree with you on the weight issue this is also an issue with suitcases that you will see on TV where people are sort of flipping their supposedly heavy suitcase up very early and putting it on the rack in the train above their head and you think you couldn't do it, it's completely empty I can do that Do you know something?

3:39I hate to go off on a sidebar but I can stow my luggage on a train or a plane without getting out of my seat how about that? and I often do it because I know people get a kick out of it Yeah. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. He's, sorry, boarding is stopped while Richard takes a bow for the stowing trick again. Yeah. Okay. The thing that you said about being able, Jeff, that people are able to tell, there's this museum of sort of illusion and perception called Twist. It's at Oxford Circus in London. And there's a really interesting exhibit in there where they make you say, you listen to the noise of boiling water being poured or cold water.

4:18and humans have internalized this so much that 93 % of adults are able to tell from sound where the water is hot water like from the kettle or from the tap and you if you do it you get every single one right and you're like I can't actually believe I just got sort of 10 out of 10 on this and 93 % of humans you've internalized this noise so much you've heard it so many times and this is a bit like drinks on tv no wonder you can tell I believe you could tell with 100 % accuracy that there's nothing or something in those cups because we these little tiny little quotidian facts of our noises of our day we are so attuned to them and you know far more about so it is one of those things that sticks out and that i think is the reason why there's like a massive online community of people who talk a lot about cups and i should say that something like 21 people wrote in about cups this week i think i think there must have been something must have happened somewhere is bulletin board is that a thing i don't know or or some or something has happened there's been some sort of egregious example of it on some show and maybe but it's it's an ongoing concern amongst people that there's nothing in that cup and it's really annoying me but in general yes you mustn't let talent anywhere near liquid yeah by like genuinely yeah you know on telly because you split it down your shirt and then you've got to stop filming that's why we've always had tippy uh tippy tommy cups on pointless because zander spilt mint tea down and literally on the first ever episode and it's you know it ruins everything but yeah that thing of continuity is fascinating on panel shows you always have to have mugs and not glasses because if you use an answer if you use the second answer first and then the first answer because for various reasons it works better and the their water keeps going up and down then you can't use it it's the same thing that if someone's wearing glasses and then they take them off when the camera is not on them and so the next time you look at them they're not wearing their glasses you have to make sure you've got a shot of them taking their glasses off or putting them you just have to make sure you got that shot otherwise people go well this is insane very important pickup are they wearing it or not wearing it yeah and that's different sort of glasses uh there was a good bit in one day funnily enough one day is very good for having things like um you know having to write letters to people and having cassette tapes all these things that we lost long ago and there's a great bit where emma is carrying a really heavy suitcase and you realize of course they didn't have wheels yes it was pre the wheelie suitcase yes so yeah but that looked heavy good it needs to look heavy that's definitely one of my bugbears so okay that was a good one Jeff thank you Richard one for you about tribute bands from someone called Paul LaRondie that is a cracking name Paul LaRondie you're just gonna have to put all of these in your books yeah Paul LaRondie yeah that's that's Paul LaRondie rather than Paul LaRondie yeah I wonder if you had a question before from someone called Paul LaRondie and Paul LaRondie is a tribute questioner to Paul LaRondie This would be deeply meta.

7:04Okay. What are some of the opinions that real bands have regarding their tribute bands? Do they see them as a positive or negative thing? I think by and large, I think it can be quite useful. It keeps your music out there. They have whole festivals now where you just see Oasis and the jam, and you're like, hold on, and you go, oh, no, it's all the tribute bands. But it's a fun thing to do. Tina Turner, I think, once sued one of her tribute acts. It was simply the best of Tina Turner story. And the woman who was Tina Turner was Dorothea Fletcher. and Tina Turner said she looks so much like me and she sounds so much like me this is going into the realm of passing off really yeah and also of course she was just about to launch you know a big live musical you know the Tina Turner story so that uh that became an issue if it's kind of in print you know if someone's doing a big tour and getting massive and you want to do the same thing and you actually are you I think you're allowed to say this this doesn't seem uh quite right but there's a long varied history of people in tribute bands joining the real band um and rob halford when he left judas priest uh briefly did come back they replaced him with the lead singer in a judas priest tribute band called british steel god i bet he was just so much less trouble oh god that's the thing isn't it that you just so many of the bands like like okay spandard ballet you can't keep it together but you know what your tribute band can so you can just see the right you know yeah and this guy's called tim owens tim owens the judas priest fan who literally became the lead singer of judas priest the same thing happened with uh with journey i think they've had quite a few lead singers journey and when the third one left people leave the band for various reasons yes exactly listen it's a journey um and neil shurn he's the guitarist he was messing around on youtube and he found uh videos by a guy called uh arnel pinada he was the front man of a filipino Journey tribute band called Zoo.

8:52And he loved him so much, auditioned him, and Pineda got the job. He's now on Journey. The best ones are amazing. You know, the point is if you're Oasis, Oasis aren't going to play again, the Pistols aren't going to play again, the Smiths aren't going to play again. So you can't go and see that. But you can, when Blossoms and Rick Astley teamed up to do a Smiths tribute, the songs are the songs. So you still get to see them. And if you get a tribute act who really, really know their business and are great musicians, then it's an amazing night out there's always there's loads of great there's fake that yeah there's one there's the there's the rolling clones there's um the faux fighters is uh and oasis have got those there's no asis there's oasis there's an amazing uh band who did bluegrass versions of um of ac dc songs they're called haysey dixie uh and in the end if you if you can find their version of this i know this and this is a departure of haysey dixie they did an amazing bluegrass version of Snoop's Gin and Juice, which is well worth finding.

9:50I will seek that out. There's a Yes tribute band. Can you guess what they're called? No. Yes, that is what they're called. They're called No. There's a Scottish Iron Maiden tribute band. You have to see this written down really, but they're called Iron Maiden, but with the iron like iron brew. There's also a band called Brian Maiden. There's the Yorkshire Bon Jovi tribute act. They're called By Jovi. I actually want to book all of these. Yeah, be fun, right? Yeah. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Greenlight. Get this. Adults with financial literacy skills have 82 % more wealth than those who don't.

10:24From swimming lessons to piano classes, us parents invest in so many things to enrich our kids' lives. But are we investing in their future financial success? With Greenlight, you can teach your kids financial literacy skills like earning, saving, and investing. And this investment costs less than that after-school treat. Start prioritizing their financial education and future today with a risk-free trial at greenlight.com slash Spotify. Greenlight.com slash Spotify.

11:14Get your tickets now. Tonight, turn down the noise of the day and focus on the rest with AGZ, the nightly drink for winding down and resting up. New from AG1. AGZ supports your body's natural sleep cycle with clinically studied key herbs, adaptogens, and minerals in amounts supported by research. And no melatonin, helping you wake feeling rested. Wind down, rest up with AGZ. Learn more at drinkagz.com

11:51Addy asks, what is substituted for drugs in scenes? If an actor is doing 10 takes of snorting prop cocaine up their nose, I expect that has to burn after the first couple, no matter what substance it is that they're snorting. That is a very good question, and I have asked some props people about this. What they tend to use is a substance called inositol, which is actually real drug dealers sometimes cut pure cocaine with it but it's it's a sort of it's a kind of vitamin b complex or maybe was it vitamin no i think it's vitamin b now the trouble with it is that it also has a slight laxative effect oh wow i love where this is going this is this is like the babies all over again yeah well ray liotta and um debbie mazard do you remember she plays sandy his mistress in goodfellas and they really run the coke business together she said it had a real laxative effect and he said it really cleans you out but you do actually snort the substance but the props department said what they want is you to get as little as possible in your nose or whatever it is because it does obviously have an effect as you say andy um so they put vaseline inside the rolled note or the straw or whatever you're using to snort it so that as much as possible sticks to the inside and doesn't go up your nose that's clever however Jonah Hill was actually hospitalized on the Wolf of Wall Street.

13:11He said, I was basically doing fake cocaine for seven months. And even though they do all these tricks and they have the Vaseline and all the stuff, he still ingested quite a lot of whatever this inositol is. And he got bronchitis from it and was hospitalized from the fake cocaine. So, you know, don't try any of it at home. So the message to kids is don't even do fake drugs. Don't even do fake drugs on a multi-multi-million dollar production because you could still end up in hospital with bronchitis. This is from Stuart Haddo. Showers, he's talking about. Steam must be an issue when filming any sort of shower scene, says Stuart.

13:46Does this mean that every time we see someone showering on screen, they're actually enduring a cold shower? Well, Stuart, you're right. It is an issue and they cannot have a hot shower. There are things that you can get, anti-fog sprays and whatever. It doesn't really work. So generally, it will be a pretty lukewarm shower. If they were having a cold shower, obviously you can't help but draw breath and be sort of squeaking. So they wouldn't have that. But they would use sort of warmish water, but a vaporizer to create the practical effect because they want to correct the effect of steam. Oh, of the heat.

14:14Yeah. So just to create the practical effect always. But also, if you're working on something that's quite high budget and therefore they have built a shower for you, say you're James Bond in one of the James Bond movies and you're in a shower, that will have been built on a stage. Therefore, it is pretty ventilated. It's enormous. So if you see Bond showering, he's not in some little hotel room. He's in a massive soundstage. They haven't got a huge crew. No, because there's so many cameras on things like that. So no, they will have rigged that up on the stages at Pinewood, I think, in that case.

14:45I would watch a film, and I think you'd make a lot of money from it, that was split screen, which was the film, and a wider shot of the filming of that scene. Wider shot of everything is amazing. Actually, well, funnily enough, if you like that, then I'm working on a TV show where you might see quite a lot of that. Oh, really? Yes, because it's all set behind the scenes at the film studio at which it is set. Another one I really want to ask you, Richard. Sarah Milton says, Richard, having written several best-selling crime novels and being generally immersed in the crime genre for years, do you think you could commit the perfect murder should the need arrive?

15:18I like should the need arrive. Yeah, I mean, just... Listen, you never know. Only if called upon could you do it. She's very much given me the benefit of the doubt there, Sarah, isn't she? Honestly, yes. What? Is my answer. I obviously thought your answer would be no. Really? Oh, really? Yeah. You don't think, I mean, you could commit a perfect murder, surely. No way. What if we had like four days to plan a murder? Of course we could. Well, who's investigating? Is it like Jane Tennyson is investigating? In which case, I don't think I'm going to go up against that. I have bad news. It's Lorraine Kelly.

15:46Oh, right. Yeah. She'll go to the point of anything. But what? You do think you could? Of course. Because, you know, the whole point when you write a crime novel is you have to find a murder that is difficult to solve. but then there's always a fatal flaw which means you can solve it so just do that but without the fatal flaw and there's sort of brilliant technical consultants most crime writers uh use so val mcdermott is one of our finest crime writers yeah it's brilliant stuff and she has a great relationship with this amazing woman called dame professor sue black and i think she's at lancaster university but she's a forensic science but yeah she's absolutely brilliant Val will take Sue out for dinner and just go, what are you working on Sue?

16:27And Sue will outline to her some new technique that forensic science has got and then Val will go, but hold on, if I turn that on its head that means I can get away with murder and Sue was telling me one time she told Val something and Sue was about to go to a conference, she had this big new something about human bones that she'd discovered and she was about to, you know she'd done a paper on it and she was about to give her first ever speech about it and then she read Val's new book and it was like the main bit of the plot and she said I haven't even announced this yet Val um so you know you talk to someone like um like Sue Black who can give you various ways of getting away with murder which is usually how to hide evidence how to obfuscate evidence things like that but it's working out the ways that you can solve murders which is usually these days cctv phone records um it is you know forensics dna exactly traces and stuff like that but once you take all of those out of the equation i think it's possible to commit the perfect murder don't by the way uh i always think the way to commit a perfect murder really wait all you don't have to worry about any of that stuff is to sorry this is a weird thing to be talking about now but anyway I don't want you to stop Richard in for a penny in for a pound yeah if I ever also now I won't ever be able to do this because I'm saying oh dear you're taking your best murder idea is if you are going to if you're going to don't commit a murder I don't need to say that do I but don't we said it twice and I think we're covered yeah we're covered legally we're covered yeah we're not going to get sued for libel is to assume you're going to get caught and to commit a murder in such a way that you will get away with it in court so you know for example if you were to commit a murder and drop a glove that later on the prosecution asked you to try and in court and it's too small for you suddenly they go well I obviously didn't do it this is your big bit of evidence I didn't do it so you would drop a glove that's slightly too small for you somewhere you try it on in a really way that for some reason no one queried and said OJ you're not putting your hand in the glove properly I wasn't thinking about OJ no I was so essentially you know just put conflicting evidence the glove don't fit yeah you must have quit also get get johnny cochran because really that was yeah uh so you know i think that but yeah so in the spirit of the question i think you spend a lot of time thinking about how people solve murders in these books and so and the the counter side to that is how someone else tries to get away with murders so i think in the context of a sort of los angeles race war would be helpful so try and Think of your cultural context.

19:04That's always helpful. Exactly. Cultural context is very, very important. Four police officers have got off or something. Yeah. Just, yes. Okay. For a police beating. I'm getting too into a specific case, of course. But you'll keep it light and general. Yeah. Me. Yeah. Listen, it was much easier in the old days, of course. But that goes for crime writing as well. So if you're Agatha Christie, firstly, she's a genius, so it's much easier for her. But secondly, the ways you could be caught were so difficult. because, you know, there are no mobile phones and there is no DNA. And so for her police officers to catch someone, it's actually very, very difficult.

19:38These days it's really, really, really hard to get away with murder, is the truth. You know, we were watching a true crime thing. This is a slight sidebar, but watching lots of true crime things and the cold cases where they catch people because the DNA from the 70s and 80s was kept. and I can't help thinking in a world where everything is incompetent and everything goes wrong the foresight to keep all of that evidence in all of those cases which now leads to hundreds of people being convicted that's pretty impressive isn't it? That was one of the most efficient things done in the 1970s across all formats But it is though if you think about everything we got wrong and how stupid we were in everything the fact that the police were going no I'll tell you what we'll just keep we will keep all of this stuff just in case you know science catches up with us and it did and then the law catches up with uh with murderers um so listen i don't approve of murdering no i'll go on the record of saying that uh i'm never going to commit one i'll go on the record of saying that uh and which is legally binding um but yeah being a crime writer makes you think a lot about how one would get away with murder but i think by and large it's hard to get away with one because to be a murderer in the first place something has to have gone wrong with your logical thinking.

20:56And so you wouldn't be in the sort of, unless you're an absolute psychopath, you wouldn't be in the place where you were able to think in that way. And if you are a psychopath, then as always their fatal flaw is they tell you that they've murdered somebody because they need to be seen as clever. So listen, it's hard to get away with murder, but as an exercise, yes, you could. I think in real life, I think it might be slightly harder, But if anyone could do it, it would be Professor Dame Sue Black. I love it. Honestly, there's so many questions that make me think, oh, we should just do a whole episode on this.

21:31Yes, thank you so much. Do keep them coming in in their infinite variety. Exactly that. There is no question too weird for us. I probably will regret saying that. Yeah, I was going to say, maybe. Actually, there's a whole section of questions that are too weird for us. But, you know, as long as it's within reasonable bounds. There are a whole series of very, very powerful red lines, which you must not cross. But apart from that, there's nothing too weird. Thank God you've taken me in hand because there's actually a whole lot of things I don't want to hear from people on. But please, the ones that you know I will want to hear from you on, could you please send them to therestisentertainment at gmail.com.

22:06Thanks, everyone. See you next time. See you next time.

22:48Liberty Mutual Liberty Savings vary underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change Your receipt did The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just$5 Only at McDonald's for a limited time Prices and participation may vary