How do you save Channel 4?

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1:15hello and welcome to another episode of the rest is entertainment with me Marina Hyde and me Richard Osman hi Marina hello Richard how are you I'm all right we're in a slightly different studio today um and i'm not someone who really likes change but i think i'll be okay it's literally next door to the other studio it's next door but it is different well the decor is quite similar yeah and i'm opposite to you rather than at a slightly oblique angle i actually prefer this but okay you know we don't if we can't have change we won't enforce it upon by the end of this one though i won't want to change back that's the thing it'll take me anyway listen shall we talk about some uh some stuff today we are going to talk about channel 4 which is just announced that it's going to lay off about 15 of its workforce it's going to sell its london hq in horse free road which is a sort of iconic building and it's going to go mainly digital streaming by 2030 i think they're in real trouble we will uh we will talk about it but i think they're in real trouble for for various reasons we're also going to talk about someone who isn't in trouble which is mr Beast who's the biggest YouTuber on the planet.

2:18And he is close to doing a TV deal with a streamer which may have been done by the time we just airs but we'll have to wait and see on that one. He's the most famous person on the planet you wouldn't recognise if you saw him in M &S. And we're also going to talk about films getting cancelled, almost finished or completely finished films getting cancelled. Halle Berry's movie for Netflix, The Mothership, which is a sci-fi thing, has got completely pulled. So we're going to talk about that because it's part of a bit of a trend in the industry. An epidemic. But we'll start with Channel 4, shall we?

2:48As you say, so job losses this week. The big issue in TV is the collapse of the advertising market. So advertisers are not advertising on linear television or it's much, much less than they did. So if you're ITV or Channel 4 or Channel 5, that's a huge problem. And so you have to cut your cloth accordingly. But while Channel 5 and ITV have ridden this out rather well, Channel 4 seem to be slightly stuck on the rocks of it for a number of reasons, I think. But, you know, it's a very difficult environment to run a TV channel in, that's for sure. And we should say that Channel 4 is special because Channel 4, although it is sort of commercial, it's self-sustaining via supposedly, hopefully, advertising, it does have a public service remit.

3:31So in some ways it is analogous to the BBC in that it actually has this different thing, which something like Sky or Paramount or ITV doesn't have. Absolutely. And while the BBC have obviously got a lot less money than they used to, at least they sort of know the money they're going to get because, you know, they know what the licence fee is. The government sets it and they have cut it and cut it and cut it or, you know, they haven't raised it. So the BBC can sort of plan ahead, whereas Channel 4 don't seem to have planned ahead quite as much as they might have done. Because I think it's fairly widely predicted, this advertising slump.

4:02And I think people at the channel think it's going to turn around and perhaps it will. I suspect it might not. but they have really sort of run into the ground in the last 18 months, completely run out of money if you talk to any producers. They're not commissioning. There are shows on the shelf which they are not putting out. Well, that's quite an interesting part of it because the indie sector, the independent producer sector, which was essentially created by the existence of Channel 4, because Channel 4 existed, we built up this amazing, vibrant sector in this country and let's not forget how big the creative industries are in this country and it's in some ways one of the last great things we make so um they had built up this whole sector what a lot of indie producers have said and rightly or wrongly their anger is has been directed at channel four because they say that there are finished shows on channel four shelves that are ready to air that have not been scheduled and have and and are not sort of being aired and there is some speculation that the reason this is is because one of the other big things we haven't mentioned yet is that for how long the government that channel four have been in a sort of dogfight with the government over whether or not they were going to get privatized which they didn't something they didn't want to happen but successive conservative governments have been threatening this and some people think that because they wanted to sort of show a you know not not have a loss on their balance sheet immediately after having fought off this bid they can list the unaired programs as stock so it makes them look more valuable there has been quite a lot of anger amongst a sector which owes its existence in some ways to channel 4.

5:38Like a lot. And, you know, let's speculate some more. One thing they stopped doing last year, by and large in independent television, what happens is you get a show commissioned, the channel cash flows that show, you make it, you make your 10, 15 % off the top, and everyone's happy. They now ask the indies to cash flow a lot of their shows. So they will commission a show, say, we are not going to pay you until this airs. And if you're a Banner J or a studio lambert you can carry that cost because you know you've got plenty of cash flow but most small indies which are the ones that channel 4 really should be encouraging can't do that now there are exceptions to this rule by the way but by and large that has been the business plan for the last 18 months and so they are keeping shows that they have made on the shelf because they haven't paid for them yet and they want to pay for them in the next financial year because they're hoping that advertising kind of ticks over and the reason channel 4 got so big and so great and made all those shows that we remember is that incredibly great relationship with creators.

6:35And that seems, listen, it might just be perception, that seems to have broken down a little bit. And you talk to anyone in the indie sector now, and it's hard to find anyone who has a particularly friendly relationship with Channel 4. It was fascinating when the government did, you know, they talked about privatizing Channel 4, and you would expect an enormous outcry from the indie sector. And there wasn't really. I think a lot of the indie sector thought, yeah, I mean, OK, that seems fair enough. You're not making the distinctive stuff that you say that you're making. You're not treating us the way that we used to be treated or the way where we can run a business properly.

7:12And so actually the support for Channel 4 was quite soft, I think, for that reason. OK, well, I accept that. But I think that's really hard because I think that one of the really difficult things is, and this, by the way, is for all sorts of television companies, the people who are, by and large, the chief executives or running these companies have pretty much, in fact in almost all in all cases only known successive conservative governments where they've been at that level of of power within those companies and all those governments have cared about is those channels all and this is across the across the spectrum those channels news programs and how they appear on them they do not care about creativity they are not interested in public service broadcasting none of those things has been the lesson of the last you know 13 years and it's been very, very tough, particularly for someone like Channel 4 that is sort of, to some extent, overpriced and underscaled.

8:04It's very hard to survive in that when you're in a dogfight for your survival and to some extent, the BBC has been also in this kind of, it's a state of constant existential crouch, basically. And to some extent, you know, there have been, obviously people have, different people have wanted to buy them. There have been mergers suggested, but as the government found, really, when they were trying to sell Channel 4, you're not going to get a financial investor because it doesn't sort of make sense in lots of different ways. So you need to get a strategic investor. You need to get someone, I don't know, maybe it's ITV or maybe it's Sky or Paramount.

8:38I don't think Paramount would be interested in the sort of public service obligations because it doesn't sort of make sense to them. Something like UK TV, which is co-owned by the BBC and it's BBC Studios, it's sort of Dave and Gold and Alibi and, well, hang on, Yesterday, is that the history one? Yeah, drama.

9:24been good for anybody to be in a sort of permanent fight against the government and under permanent threat. It has been really bad for the creative industries, which is something that, by the way, I just don't think the last successive governments have understood whatsoever, even though they're massively successful. Well, that's it, because as you say, they just get slugged off on Channel 4 News and that's all they care about. And they don't care about the multi-billion dollar industry. It is so one-eyed to care just about the news programming. So I would agree that they have fought fires very well at Channel 4 against the government and against what's happened.

9:54I absolutely agree with that and that that takes up an awful lot of their bandwidth. I do think, however, though, that television, it's many, many things and, you know, it's digital first and it's getting young eyeballs and all that kind of stuff. And there's a million things you can talk about, a million things you can write papers about, but it is a hits business. It is a hits business and nothing else. And BBC has been under enormous fire. And it's amazing what traitors and agladiators will do to you. ITV has been under the same pressure for advertisers. It's amazing what Mr. Bates versus the post office can do.

10:27It's amazing what making your own IP and exploiting it can do. Channel 4, I think, has had trouble creating hits in the last five or six years. It just has. Most of the big hits on that channel, Grand Designs, Location, Location, Location, First Dates, Cats Does Count, and all of those things, are shows from a very, very long time ago. And the hits they've had would be Bake Off and Taskmaster, which they simply bought off the shelf from somewhere else, which, if you're an indie, is not something that you think of when you think of a distinctive broadcaster. I think it's right that they do that.

11:02I think Taskmaster fits perfectly on that channel. I think Bake Off fits perfectly well. But you can't have those as your only hits. The idea about getting those is you produce what we always have, which is a halo effect, which is people come for Bake Off and suddenly they see all your other offerings. You can put a great show afterwards. You can put trailers in all the ad breaks in Bake Off. That's why Bake Off is so valuable. Same with Taskmaster for a younger audience. It also drives people to digital. But when you do that, you have to have a big stable of new shows that people really, really want to watch.

11:31And I think they've had difficulty doing that. I think they've had difficulty updating the slate. You know, Last Leg, you know, again, is from years and years ago. So they've got great shows there. but other than perhaps the piano it's hard to think of anything that's been a breakout hit on channel four and the problem with that is is the law of diminishing returns which is if you're not having the hits you can't promote the new shows that you've got and then those shows aren't hits and then you can't promote other new shows so i think that while they're dealing with the government and they're dealing with the the pressures that face them have been exemplary i think i think perhaps there has been a slight lack of investment whether that's financial or emotional in new programming in shows that they own bake off they're not making money from taskmaster they're not taskmaster's made by avalon and they are many things but they are not a charity you know and bake off is made by love productions and again you know they signed that's a huge deal they signed and love productions are doing very very well out of that i can't see that channel 4 are doing particularly went out of that.

12:34So they just haven't built that up. And I think that ITV and the BBC... But we should say things like they are still the best place that if you were trying to get a comedy in somewhere, you would want to go to Channel 4 because people think that making a comedy at the BBC is, for various reasons, very, very difficult. And I'm not saying that the BBC don't make great comedies, but it is regarded in general as being quite difficult for various reasons. A lot of things have to go through various layers of approval. and some people find that very difficult to deal with. And Channel 4 have always had that sort of natural edgy home to it.

13:06So they have got lots of assets and I really hope that they manage to sort of pull it together because I do think things look pretty bad for them now. Yes, this is the unique problem they have. So if you're Channel 5, so Channel 5 doesn't have a public service remit. Channel 5 really, really, really knows its audience. Now, if any channel should have gone out of business, it should be Channel 5, right? If you look back five, six years, you go, one of these big five channels is going to go out of business first which will it be you'll say of course it's going to be channel five um and then ben frow comes into channel five and is so laser focused on that audience and it's so laser focused on the people he wants to work with and the producers who can make the sort of shows he wants to make and will make quick decisions um a quick no is the second best thing in tv after a quick yes you know because you move on with your life but that's because he has an audience that he understands who they are they're slightly older and so he can absolutely just make programs for that audience.

14:00Channel 4 are in this position where they're still supposed to be making programs for a younger audience, an edgier audience, and that's very hard to do on a big mainstream channel. It's very hard to get 2 million viewers for anything with that sort of remit. So it's been very, very hard, but hits change everything. I remember years ago when Kevin Liger was in charge of Channel 4 and they'd had a bad year. He's now the director of programs at ITV. at ITV. And he was, myself and Tim Hinks, who used to run Ender Barley, he just said, guys, can I tell you what I need? He said, I just need a hit. Have you got one?

14:36And we said, do you know what? We've got this thing, Deal or No Deal, that we've been kicking around. And why don't you come along and have a look at it? Came along, had a look at it, said, yeah, I'll have 200 of those. And it was getting 5 million within six months. And that's because he's a programme maker, understood what he was watching, understood where he could play it, understood why people might want to watch it. They don't have a hit quiz, Channel 4, which is crazy. Every channel has a hit quiz. Hit quizzes are sort of actually quite easy to do because people love quizzes. You get a great format.

15:05You get a host that people like. Boom, you're done. And BBC Two's biggest shows, House of Games Only Connecting University Challenge, they don't cost them anything at all. People love them, and they can make hundreds and hundreds of episodes. That's the sort of thing you need on the channel, just to bring people just day in, day out, a simple thing like that. And they don't have it. Entertainment hits a few and far between as well. It's hard. What they're doing, what they're trying to do, the business they are being asked to run, it's very, very, very difficult to run. But it would be easier to run if just two or three times a year you just had a massive hit that everyone went crazy for.

15:41And they had a documentary last week on the miner's strike. And it's hard to think of anything that's more in my wheelhouse than a documentary about the miner's strike, right? That to me, unless it's a documentary about the Iranian embassy siege, the miner's strike. I've seen all of them. Yeah, and I didn't know it was on. I didn't know it was on. And that's not their fault, other than I hadn't watched another show on Channel 4, which would have told me that it was on. And that's the spiral you get into. You get into a death spiral pretty quickly. And I think, yeah, the unique way they're funded, the unique audience they're supposed to attract, and the environment they are in now with huge ad downturns, I mean, it's a very, very hard ship to turn around.

16:18Yeah. And as I say, I have a huge amount of sympathy because the semi-unique companion of the BBC over the past few years is being under sort of existential attack by the government. It will be helpful for our very, very successful creative industries in this country, perhaps not to be allowed to be a business and to be allowed to be as successful as they as they can be and as they are without being under constant attack. And it's not a particularly part of political point. It should be a business point from supposedly the party of business. should we end on a positive note and send people in their direction a couple of shows recently so the piano is great go and watch that on all four yes and big boys the sitcom is really really good just started the second series there's there's good stuff out there so you know support them if you can uh all of those on on all four well now shall we talk about someone who is not in trouble in any way who nadine doris is not trying to shut down who nadine doris is not in any way who none of the culture secretaries could or would shut down because they probably don't even know he is is Mr Beast.

17:18He is the world's biggest YouTuber. He's on the point of doing a deal to bring a series to one of the streamers, probably Amazon. By the time you hear this, maybe he'll have been inked and they will have announced it. He's famous for his competitions, which we're going to talk about in a minute. And he's been shopping it around and it's rumoured to be a sort of$100 million deal, which I think he could probably get more. That'd be almost nothing to him. And it ties into the last thing because YouTubers, I think in our brain, And we still got that thing of just someone talking to a camera saying, hi, guys, I'm having my breakfast.

17:51Yeah. And us going, why are people watching this? But actually, Mr. Beast, who sort of started roughly doing that, the stuff he's making is brilliant. He's 25. Yeah. I mean, I find it quite awful that I'm using the phrase mainstream media, but you do not really see him covered in the mainstream media. and yet when he releases one of his videos which my children pounce on the second they come out along with within an hour something like 44 million people have watched these videos which is more than by the way will watch any of the major series on any of the major prestige networks now his biggest video ever which perhaps is a good way in to start talking about the sort of thing he does he did a sort of copy of Squid Game where I think 456 contestants competed to win$456 ,000 that has been viewed 600 million times on YouTube.

18:42You know, Richard, it's incredibly high production values. It looks amazing, must have cost a fortune. The best thing about it is he didn't even have the rights. He just did it anyway because he's so massive. He's just like, listen, what are they going to do? They're not going to close this down because it's huge for Squid Game. What's that thing that people say? It's better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. That's a real, that's what he did there. But it's really great. The Netflix version of Squid Game, the challenge, that had to go up to 4.5 million to try and compete. Exactly that. It's really, really good.

19:11He puts proper money into these things. He says the average video costs 1.5 million or something and loses money. He loses money on those big videos and gains all of that money back on his smaller channels, which are sort of the game playthroughs. I've watched him play a huge amount of Minecraft, I'll be honest. Him and his friends, I've watched it. It's extraordinary. You know, he'll do things like, you know, 50 hours buried alive or a week drifting on a raft in the middle of the ocean. And or the most amazing laser, you know, laser maze. Those sort of like entrapment, the movie, which really dates me.

19:45I'm sure it was many years before he was born. Mr. Beast is going, what is this entrapment you're talking about? He started at 13 in 2012 or something. And his first big one was he had to he counted to 100 ,000. I don't know how long it took. It took him like a week. Oh, my God. But this is why I really like the guy. Oh, I've got a huge amount of time for him. Started out doing game run-throughs, which is the traditional thing. Then started doing stuff about other YouTubers' urn. He said then him and his friends sat down and just all they did was study the algorithm. They studied virality. Yeah, virality is exactly what they did.

20:21That's like you. I need to understand how this thing works, and I'm basically just going to order him food and stare at it for five years. If I'm going to do the work anyway, I want to know how to get that out to the maximum amount of people. But he didn't just do that, which, by the way, there's a million companies who give you AI content and journalism who studied the virality. They studied that and then studied what people love to watch and then made what people love to watch and funded it. I mean, someone counting to 100 ,000 across a week, you kind of think, OK, that's a terrible idea. But then you think, yeah, but I really like to watch it.

20:54I remember on 8 Out of 10 Cats once, Sean Locke was saying, you know what, they should lock everyone in the Big Brother house and then take away all the cameras. And everyone's laughing. And then Sean goes, mind you, I'd really like to watch that. It's that, isn't it? And he's very, very good at those things. He did a format where he's got 100 contestants and they have to stand in a circle. And the circle gets smaller and smaller across the week. So it's harder and harder to stay in there. If you even put a foot outside, you get done. But then he will cut that down into 20 minutes. And he also does a lot of philanthropic things.

21:29And he's even got a sort of thing, the philanthropy channel now. He built 100 wells in various different countries in Africa. He gave cataract operations to 1 ,000 people who were basically registered blind. And what's kind of interesting is that there have been a lot of people sort of criticizing that and saying, oh, this is all for clicks or whatever. and funnily enough when my children first showed me him quite a few years ago now I was like this is awful he does it all for clicks this is terrible you should do these things anyway not for clicks and I then went away and thought about it and thought you're such a twat Marina not for the first or last time because I tell you what it was always like this okay the Medici's building half of Florence it was basically for clicks it was the Renaissance clicks right Andrew Carnegie building the libraries or whatever building things in New York, starting.

22:18Henry Ford is, you know, helping his workers. It was all for Gilded Age cliques, OK? It was always like this. This kind of thing was sort of paternal and feudalistic and whatever, but the fact that he's doing it at all, a 25-year-old kid is doing it at all. Also, I don't think there's anything that weird about it. This is someone who's grown up in an age where, I don't think it's any coincidence, as I've said before, that superhero films have become this huge kind of major kind of part of culture because all the institutions have failed. You're growing up in a time of institutional failure where two kind of ancient men are going to spend probably this year fighting for the US presidency to run the world.

22:55And things don't work. And is it a weird response that young people think that maybe this is... And yes, the message should be that institutions cure people who are register blind and build these wells and do all the things. But given that they don't, why was I sort of... What was wrong with the cliques? What made him any different to the Medici's? Apart from he hasn't murdered anybody. But you know what I mean. At time of recording. Yeah, at time of recording. And I felt I was being a real stick in the mud about it. And I think he's amazing. And there's two ways to get clicks, of course. You can do it the Mr.

23:31Beast way. By the way, he's called Jimmy Donaldson is his name. But Mr. Beast, I think, is a better brand. You can do it the Jimmy Donaldson way or you can do it the Andrew Tate way. Yes. And I'd rather people were doing the Jimmy Donaldson way. and I'd rather kids were watching somebody digging wells, whatever the motor behind it is, than someone spouting. I would too, 100%. Although the flaw in the sort of mainstream media, again, to be a term that I can't believe I'm completely deploying all the time now, but is that when people sort of started hearing that this Amazon deal might be in the offing, people started saying, oh, he's the anti-Andrew Tate.

24:06And it's kind of like, no, no, no, he's much better than that. He's much bigger and he's a much more successful. I know you've only heard of two YouTubers. You don't have to bet that others are available. But I think he's a really fascinating, interesting, kind of amazing character, really. And it's interesting that even people like Amazon, who obviously are the sort of among the richest corporations in the world, feel that unless they get these people in, I don't know, maybe they'll never lure young people into traditional programming and that you might permanently lose them to different platforms.

24:40so to bring him in to Amazon if they do do the deal or another streamer does it is really kind of fascinating doesn't always work when YouTubers are brought onto programs and onto streamers or to kind of legacy media channels which has happened a bit because people are terrified by what's happening on YouTube but I think I'm pretty sure that whatever he does will work certainly Amazon need him an awful lot more than he needs Amazon you know I'm assuming that they'll come to him with a deal and say look it's 100 million and he'll talk to his people and go, well, we don't lose anything by doing this.

25:10No. So let's just do this. He doesn't really care about making money particularly. He makes money. He makes huge amounts of money, but he loses money on things and he sort of cares more about the beauty of the high concept and executing it and these incredibly expensive things. He is not sold on sort of like, you know, margins and things like that. He has made a large amount of money, but it's not his motivating factor. And he works with all his old school friends as well, which is lovely to see. I'm just going to look at his YouTube channel and see what his top videos are at the moment. Because genuinely, you kind of go, oh, God, who is he, Mr.

25:41Beast? And then you sort of click on YouTube and you go, okay, I would like to see that. Hold on, Mr. Beast. I watched huge amounts of elephant toothpaste coming out of a – breaking a whole house apart the other day. Elephant toothpaste breaking a house apart? Yeah. You know the thing you do with – I don't know what, I can't remember what the – you mix things together. It's like a kind of giant monster slime explosion. You mix two substances together and it creates this. I bought the world's largest mystery box for$500 ,000. Yes, please. World's most dangerous trap. I spent seven days on solitary confinement.

26:14I would like to see that. I rescued 100 abandoned dogs. I've seen that one. Survive 100 days trapped, win half a million dollars. Yeah, so he opened up like a chocolate company. So he had these chocolate bars. Feastables. Feastables, exactly. And to advertise them, he essentially did Willy Wonka. he said I'm going to do this competition if you win this competition which is like a knockout competition you can either win a chocolate factory or half a million dollars and of course they went for half a million dollars but you know it's so smart everything he does and he does it in such a smart way I was watching one where again a knockout competition but where they had one representative of 200 countries from around the world competing against each other you know you'd have Syria against you know Uzbekistan you know in an egg and spoon race and it's just He makes them 20 minutes long.