Gen Alpha Runs Culture Now

0:00This episode is presented by E. E. Marina, are you hosting or guesting for Christmas this year? normally every other year i am a very grateful guest but i'm now a slightly trepidatious host yes it is me in the apron having a meltdown over all the cooking no i don't think i'll have a meltdown i it's a lot isn't it yeah but you have to just keep saying to yourself it's just a big chicken just a really big chicken it's just a really enormous chicken we are also hosting this You're looking forward to it very much. If you are hosting, and EE has the best broadband technology, if you are guesting, then EE has the best mobile technology.

0:39And my goodness, you need it at Christmas, right? Yes. The third babysitter, the distractor. Just when the family walk into the house, it's, hello, grandma, hello, granddad. What's the Wi-Fi password? I might need that. Yeah. Get the best connectivity for your home and your phone with EE. And if you're guesting, lucky you, EE has the best mobile network to keep you connected to music, maps and backseat streaming for the kids when you're traveling. Search EE does more.

1:08Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me Marina Hyde. And me Richard Osman. It's very nearly 2026. We stand on the threshold of 2026 but we're looking back into the mists of 2025. Remember 2025 everyone? How long ago in your brain would you say the millennium was? Like eight years? It feels really recent. It feels like maths I can do, but yes, spiritually it feels much, much more recent. Yeah, it's a quarter of a century ago. That's terrifying. But it also feels like a form of Kansas that we're not in anymore. Because when we look at some of the things we're going to talk about this year, and we're going to talk about who had a good year and who had a bad year.

1:50And some of these things, you wouldn't even know what you were, remotely what you were talking about. Oh, that's it. Yeah, we should. I mean, my first one, my first good year is something that in the year 2000, you would have understood. Okay. But yeah, a lot of them. I think let's do a year 2000 check as we go along as to what someone from the year 2000 who's just woken up now, thawed from ice, would make of it. Can I start with my first good year? Yes, please. Good year, linear television. Yeah. Do you remember linear television? I believe it was called television then. Yes, person from 2000.

2:20We mean TV. And a great year mainly for two reasons, which is celebrity traitors and dancing with the stars. So Celebrity Traitors, enormous mega hit. And we can talk about the various people in that who had a very good year because of it. And Dancing with the Stars has become a huge hit in America as well, especially with a younger generation. So in an era of consolidation and AI and, you know, no one's watching TV and no one's got any attention span anymore. And no one likes BBC things. Exactly that. And no one's watching the networks anymore. You know, it's shown that there is another generation who can be drawn onto linear TV.

2:57But, I mean, the best year of all has got to be everyone and anyone involved with Celebrity Traitors. The Traitors Extended Universe has had a uniformly pretty amazing year. Yeah. So the new one is starting, by the way, on... New Year's Day. New Year's Day. So a couple of days' time, which is very exciting. All being well, we'll be there with some reaction episodes. We're not talking about 2026, though. No, we're not. We can't. We've got to talk about 2025. Turn back from that threshold. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, okay. So within that, within the Celebrity Traitors... Who had the best year. Yeah, I mean, 15 million tuned in for the final.

3:29I mean, that's crazy. Yeah, and Gen Z, Gen Alpha, they all watched it. It was proper. I think people have let the rules on swearing, things like that sort of slip away when it's that compelling a game. And I think that it's become family viewing, actually, which I think is quite interesting. If you put things in that nine o 'clock slot, they're not supposed to be. But in all of my anecdotal experience of all sorts of families I know, it's family viewing now that yeah and so what lessons do we learn right what can you take from traders that you can move forward with and apply to another format next year to make sure you do this again and i've got a list here these are the lessons you can learn that you could apply to make something equally as big a hit i have nothing on my list because you can never ever learn any lessons from anything the big lesson to learn is you you can't it'll come out of a clear blue sky the next big hit like this just a series of things if you get great creative people and they cast something well and they make it well, then every now and again, lightning will strike and you'll get an enormous hit.

4:30And that's the only thing you can do. But like Kate Phillips said in her interview with us, which I love doing. So it's the head of content at the BBC. At the BBC, and it was very moving, her whole bit of that public service at the end. But actually what she said about that was, you know, that thing that she'd been looking for since the pandemic, she was trying to get programmes that address the three Gs, the three generations together, and anything that sort of feels like it might do, anything like that at all, she was sort of making bets on. Not on all of them, but that was... If she had any list, I suppose that would be a very, very vague, nebulous area of her list.

5:04Make sure that everyone likes. Yeah, but that might bring people together in a sort of compelling and propulsive way. I think that idea that you have to watch the next episode and all of that, and that everybody's talking about it. But how interesting it made us all feel better. Yes. And how lovely, because that's what entertainment is supposed to be, really. I know we talk a lot about the politics and the business of entertainment. But really, I hope what we talk about most is the entertainment of entertainment. And people who just sort of spread joy and do extraordinary things that they don't need to do, but they do them anyway.

5:35Well, the escapism of it, I think, particularly in that show, in a world of just ever darkening news stories, the escapism of it, the sense that it's absolutely no stakes, because honestly, like, someone's charity is going to win. Yeah. Doesn't really matter, you know. And then it's absolutely, at the same time, everything. Yeah. And you've got to watch it. You've got to watch it. You've got to be able to talk about it the next day. I'm so interested to see what it's going to do for the numbers of the civilian version, which is beginning again. Because so many people felt like, oh, I don't really watch that show, even though I know a lot of people talk about it.

6:07It sounds a bit mean. And because it was a celebrity version, they felt that they'd been given sort of license. Oh, this is a sort of standalone. It's a discreet thing. I can just go in and watch it. And now I would be so interested to see how many of them are pulled into the civilian version, which I'm told is amazing. Yes, we're told there's gameplay we've never seen before. But I do think that idea that, you know, people do say sometimes about reality shows, oh no, there's a meanness to it. And, you know, people are murdering people. You think, well, the fascinating thing about traitors, what's really at the heart is, I mean, they are, but they have to.

6:40Yeah. They have been given a job. And, you know, some people wear that very reluctantly. Some people embrace it. But it's like watching a football match and go, So it's a bit mean, isn't it? Because one team's trying to score in the goal of the other team and the other team, I mean, that is the entertainment that we have set up. But also like football in that people are talking about the tactics all the time and only about the game. Nobody's saying, oh, it was interesting when, you know, X person started talking about their relationship back home and where it all went wrong with their famous ex-boyfriend.

7:10None of that. It's just all the game, all the time. Yeah, all game, all the time. So how about a good year from you? Well, a good year for me, I would say that Gen Alpha has had an amazing year. So anyone basically born from 2010 until now, I've got three of them at home. They have been the tastemakers in so many different ways. I would say last year, I mean, sometimes you think, is this really a matter of taste? Last year, the Oxford Dictionary word of the year was brain rot. And if you didn't know what, if you got to the end of last year, you're like, what? I've never heard this word. You didn't get to the end of this year and think that.

7:45I would say kids run movie theatres. we talked about that a lot most of the big hits and certainly the thing that sort of appeared to rescue the cinema back in spring which as you know I saw and found it definitely brain rotting was a Minecraft movie K-pop Demon Hunters my god thank you Gen Alpha for that that is the biggest thing you can possibly imagine I think it's currently on its 25th week on the Netflix top 10 all the sort of all their memes I mean once you if even obviously once the Prime Minister doing 6-7 in a classroom, as my children say to me about four months prior to that moment, the meme is now dead.

8:23Oh, no. Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry to hear that meme was dead because I was really enjoying it. Yeah. Even the shows, things that became really big suddenly in their third thing, like The Summer I Turned Pretty, that's a huge hit. Although it's a big nostalgia show for millennials and even maybe some Gen X people who kind of, it reminds them of things that they saw when they were younger. that's a big big gen alpha show and i just think that in almost across everything those books came out for instance in i think 2009 to 2011 those original summary term pretty books but then now my daughter's reading them all it's almost like they came out at the wrong time and now they find their perfect moment so i do think of gen alpha as increasing like complete tastemakers obviously all the kind of games and the endless kind of churn of those roadblocks games but they become these big cultural things and they just can't really be ignored as a sort of...

9:15And very, very monetizable. Yeah. I mean, incredibly monetizable because there's just a lot to spend your money on. And they really, regrettably, expect everything to be monetized and everything to be gamified in a way that you can spend a lot of money and lose out. For instance, at the endless blind box culture, we did the LeBubus. But all of those things, they've sort of dominated. It's really interesting. I'm going to end up mentioning South Park in a later item, in a later pick. But so many of those things featured in South Park. And you think, that's so odd, because it's completely from the ground up, basically from children, and it's kind of dominated the big political satire of the year.

9:56So I would say Gen A, the tastemakers. Because when we were that generation, I mean, we had Space Hoppers and Etch-A-Sketch, and that's about it. Yeah. We weren't making any cultural comments. I mean, we were to ourselves, perhaps. We weren't making any money for anyone. It's funny, generations before us could be sent up chimneys so they were making money. This generation are making money for big corporations by demanding spin-offs from every single piece of IP, whereas we were absolutely economically hopeless. Yeah, they didn't run movie theatres for us, let me tell you. Yeah, we just sat there watching Blue Peter.

10:34Who's making money out of that? John Noakes? Not much. Should I do a bad year? Yeah. A bad year for anyone who thought there would ever be any consequences to working in Saudi Arabia. Oh. Because it turns out there are not. No. So we had the Riyadh Comedy Festival would be the main version of this, and a lot of comedians going over there, and a lot of comedians who've talked about freedom of speech and all these things, and deliberately going somewhere where we know there wasn't freedom of speech and there were things they weren't allowed to talk about. Do your bone-sword jokes. No, they didn't do their bone-sword jokes.

11:04No, they didn't do any of that. And lots of them have tied themselves in knots explaining why they did it, or just said, I did it because I wanted to, and I did it for money. And nobody really cares. Certainly not enough people care. The culture doesn't care. The people who are booking them for other things certainly don't care. The people who are booking them for shows don't care. They were allowed to do it. They got paid a load of money to do it, and they're allowed to justify the reasons for doing it. But they definitely, in the same way as the killers of Jamal Khashoggi, they got away with it.

11:33Yeah, and you could see that we recently had the Red Sea Film Festival, which honestly started about five minutes ago and was tiny. And it's now, it had so many stars and directors. I remember a director actually saying to me two years ago, should I go, they'll open it with my film? And I was like, oh, do you have to? I don't think you have to. Now, nobody would ask you that question now. Everybody went over, everyone's given these kind of confected awards. And I definitely think that the Saudis will be buying actually into Hollywood in a much more open way next year. So you're right. There are arguments for going out there.

12:07There definitely are. There are arguments for going out there, engaging, there are arguments for taking their money. When we talked about the Riyadh Comedy Festival, Andrew Maxwell had a very, very good argument for it and you think that's absolutely fair enough and there are definitely some of the American comedians, when you listen to their explanations, you think, okay, yeah, I absolutely get it. But certainly for people who think this is a tide they are going to stem and that there are ways and means of stopping people taking money that they think is unacceptable, that I think is impossible now.

12:41I think comedians, once you've sort of gone through that barrier once, once you've breasted that tape, I think that tape is forever broken and people can run through it at will now. And I think they will as well. And as I say, sometimes there'll be good reasons for it, but certainly it's good news if you are happy to be paid a lot of money and not worry too much about the ethics or optics of that money because there are no ethics and there are no optics left. Okay. My bad year, which I've got to hope that the tape can be somehow unbreasted, is control in the world of entertainment. I think that obviously Trump's attempts to control entertainment, we had lots of different things.

13:25We had Jimmy Kimmel being taken off air for sort of perceived disrespect in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting. We had Trump quite clearly wanting the Ellisons to get Paramount. And who knows how the ongoing story with Warner Bros. will play out. He's got this thing called Media Offender of the Week. And it's not that he does it because you expect him to do things like that. it was very very disappointing that ABC under the aegis of Disney took Kimmel off the air I think that was very very dangerous I have to say there's some great pushbacks I have loved South Park and even though they've had jokes in the series about like oh no South Park is just all about politics now but it's been great that something exists on the Addison's platform which you know that they don't want to have there and also America is all about politics now.

14:20Yeah, yes, I'm afraid it is. So what are you going to do? So I've loved that sort of pushing back against control. The other area in which I think control is becoming a big problem, I think documentaries are becoming totally corrupted. I think there are so many documentaries that are executive produced by their own subjects. Obviously, the Beckham one was a very high profile one at the start, but the Simon Cowell one, which we talked about, the Victoria Beckham one was even more so. And I really found essentially just, there's a big story in her family, which we ended up talking about quite a bit this year, which is that they're estranged from their eldest son.

14:50None of this was mentioned in the documentary. And I realize it's painful and awful. But if you're going to do a supposed waltz and all documentary, you talk about that. Megan with love. All of these things are completely controlled by their subjects. I have to say, a lot of them are on Netflix. And if you talk to great documentarians or read the work of some of the ones that are now dead, they have incredibly strict rules about what they think their ethics are and how you deal with subjects. And it really is one of the most precise and ethical and moral kind of versions of the art form. I think that's all gone.

15:28You know, if I'm watching a sort of advert for Victoria Breckham's makeup brand, and she's really going to end up because of this, probably being able to sell her makeup, you know, I get what it is. But I think what's worrying is that people just don't, And people don't notice that anymore. So I don't know whether that tape can be unbreasted, but there will always be quality documentary makers who understand how to engage with subjects. If you were a celebrity, though, or someone with a... I mean, it's hard to argue that you should let somebody else produce your documentary if you are allowed to.

16:00No wonder. This would never have been allowed in the past. You look at all the great documentary producers or people who ran documentary departments, someone like Sheila Nevins at HBO, and they had very, although their documentaries were about quite outlandish and extraordinary things, they had very, very strong rules about how these things should be run. And yeah, now I think that everyone just, it's like once you start giving people copy approval or I mean, they've all basically got copy approval and they know how to parcel out bits of stuff and kind of memeable bits of content that are good enough and give a sort of impression of candor and an impression of a curtain being revealed.

16:38but in fact they're actually all about control and the subject has commissioned themselves. They're sort of dreadful vanity works in my opinion and I really would love to see less of them. And, you know, the people who don't make documentaries like that, I'm all for. But it's become such a fashion now. If you're a celebrity, as you say, why wouldn't you? Let's go for a break. We're going to come back with a good year and a rather lovely good year, I think. Oh.

17:07this episode is brought to you by channel 4 now richard settling down on a winter's evening turn the tv on what sort of thing are you searching for um well when you think about channel 4 you think about quirky you think about slightly off the wall i my absolute go-to is well three things my absolute go-to is grand designs because kevin mcleod is the greatest television presenter uh in the history of factual entertainment 24 hours in police custody again because it changed the way those things were done you know it changed we'd seen all sorts of police investigation things but 24 hours in police custody absolutely had a had a new unusual refreshing way of covering those cases and every single time there is a new one they have to release them they can't sort of release them week by week because they're literally waiting for court cases to come through some of them are waiting for years for years and years and years but anytime a new one pops up uh in on on the streaming service i'm like here we go and i also love the dog house which is um just about rescue dogs and people who want dogs and it's almost like a like a sort of slightly kind of matchmaker-y type show fantastic i endorse those messages and you can stream them all now on channel four

18:19welcome back everybody now richard you promised a nice good year yes um a good year for love oh can i read you out a series of celebrity couples from this year and you just give give me your immediate take on them okay how would that be yes okay i'm going to start with taylor swift and travis kelsey getting engaged your english teacher's marrying your pe teacher Yes, please. We all loved it. It was a sort of another way for her to have full spectrum dominance of all the headlines. It feels sort of real, though. Oh, no, I think it's real. Yeah. And he seems nice. He seems like a very nice guy. So, yeah, that was good.

19:00That was a sort of happy ending, and it seemed like it was happening in a perfect way. So we all enjoyed the internet breaking, although, of course, it doesn't really ever break. It never breaks, really, does it? I wish it would. Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson. Well, they were in the naked gun and then they, yeah, they seem to have had, we now know that it was not a showmance, which I obviously thought it wouldn't be. But also it's such a sort of, like she said, the way she's described it, because it seems to have existed in a very time-limited period. She said we had an intimate week. It was like a Nancy Meyers movie.

19:33I mean, just keep talking, Pamela, I'm loving this. You know, we haven't seen each other really since. But it was so sort of revealing. And I think people just saw, oh my God, these two wonderful sort of, I can't even call them older people because they're still so gorgeous and amazing. But there was something stolen and dare I believe this to be true. But also it'd be a wonderful movie in the future. Just, you know, Pam and Liam's week. Didn't Liam chase a bear away from their front door in his dressing room or something? Yeah, and she helped him with some form of gardening task. I mean, I'm here for absolutely every second of that week.

20:05Sydney Sweeney as Pamela Anderson and Glenn Powell as Liam Neeson. Why not? Why not? In the future. This is a late stage role for them both. But how lovely as well. They both went, yeah, it was a week. It was great. Yeah. But we move on. I absolutely love that one. Okay, hit me with another one. They've done the whole thing with a minimum of drama. Yeah. And the maximum of seeing to know what's healthy and happy for them. Yes. That's the way to do it. I wonder if you have the same view on this one. I think there's a similar demographic to it, I would say. I don't know if it feels the same. Liz Hurley and Billy Ray Cyrus.

20:39Okay, that one's great. because they revealed she was essentially costumed in a plaid shirt and a sort of achy-braky coat. I don't know if she actually watched. I feel sure she would have been wearing cowboy boots at the time. Everything about the union of the two dynasties, the Cyruses of Nashville, who are pure chaos and drama, and Liz Hurley, who is sort of mother bikini designer, sheep farmer. I can't remember what her ever-expanding Instagram bio is, but I love it all. That was great because it was so unexpected. This is what we want. We want culture clash things. And as far as we know, that one is still extant.

21:15Yes, it seems to be, doesn't it? I think that's still going. I want to hear plenty more about that next year. And interesting, in terms of celebrity power, those two really multiply each other. Yeah. Don't they? Which is not always the case. Pam and Liam, they are both absolutely famous enough in their own regard and they have a real similarity, I think, of status. There's something about Liz Hurley and Billy Ray Cyrus where you think, It's just pure chaos. You are both amplifying each other. Yeah, different audiences, the whole thing. Isn't that what love is, amplifying each other? I think we do now need to, okay, and if they have to executive produce a documentary about themselves, fine, I'll give up my principles and watch it.

21:49And they met on a movie as well. Yes, they did. They met on Christmas in Paradise. Yes, yes, which I watched. It's always Christmas in Paradise. Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau. Oh, my God. I want to hear a lot more of that. There was a funny thing where they were having to go and see some former world leaders, and she was there in like an absolute little mini suit the other week. There's a lot more on that bone, let's just say that. I think there's a bouncing back from Orlando Bloom and him bouncing back from, you know... Canada. Yeah, from Canada. Because his dad, Pierre Trudeau, who's also Prime Minister of Canada, he briefly dated Barbara Streisand.

22:26Well, there you go, there's a precedent. I'd like to hear a lot more about that one. I think it's Prime Minister.

22:34Sorry. Very good. Very good. I'm going to finish. Listen, we have to finish here. I mean, love, it takes many forms, does it not? And relationships take many, many forms. And, you know, there are people that we're so happy for and people who wear their love very, very lightly. I wonder if we could talk about the marriage of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez. Well, I mean, this is a... What I found interesting about this, I mean, as, you know, I yield to no one in my admiration for people who have... I mean, actually, on one of our very first podcasts, We talked about, you know, their place out in the desert where they've got that 10 ,000-year-old clock or something, that 10 ,000-year clock, and Lauren was draped over its cogs.

23:12Well, we've come a long way since then. They took over Venice, as we remember, for the wedding. But I will, yeah, of those, that is a completely, what they've given is a completely different ultra-rich aesthetic. It's like goodbye stealth wealth or all your quiet luxury, okay? She wants to look really hot, really rich, and really in love, and like she's having a really, really good time all the time. This is a different... Perhaps she is. She does look as though she is all the time. It's been quite transfixing, that one, and we'll have to keep an eye on it, but they want to put it all out there all the time, which I find sort of fascinating, because what normally used to happen in the old days is that when people became very rich, they retreated into kind of snobberies and privacy and all sorts of things.

23:58I do remember, we did talk about this briefly, but when they had the party for Kris Jenner, whose new face certainly had a good year, they made everybody get out on the pavement outside, everyone from Meghan and Harry. Even though you can drive in, because they want people to go in front of all the paparazzi. Do you think it's performative in some way, their love? That seems very similar to me. He's so incredibly grateful that he wants to have sex with him. I can't, nobody could be more grateful. Yeah, you can see that. But so listen, a good year for love. Our favourite romance, I think Pam Anderson and Liam Neeson.