Is this the era of entertainment washing? Saudi money in Hollywood.

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1:25Hello and welcome to another edition of The Rest is Entertainment with me Marina Hyde. And me Richard Osman. Hi Marina, how are you? Hello, I'm very well Richard, how are you? I'm really well. You've been working incredibly hard all week on your huge American show which we're not yet allowed to talk about. I'm filming it and we shall... And that's all we can say. That's all we're allowed to say. It's very secretive. I think lots of things are very secretive. I'm never quite sure why some things need to be so secretive but I'm very happy to make this one very secretive. So what are we going to talk about this week?

1:52We are going to talk, as we promised last week, we ran out of time last week because we were talking about AI. By the way, the response to that podcast has been phenomenal, extraordinary. So I think we'll talk about it a bit more at some point. And I've had lots of interesting chats with people about some upsides and a few other downsides as well. But last week we promised we'd talk about Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabian money going into the entertainment business in the same way it's gone into the sports business. So we'll talk about that. I've also, just we talk about overnights a lot. So I've just gone through the top 100 overnights from last week.

2:24Also going to be looking at the ratings of GB News and picked out a few stories. This is TV ratings. TV ratings, yes, sorry. This is a basic explainer. Yeah, the overnights. We're also going to talk about distraction and dopamine on the back of a really fascinating, brilliant sort of state of the culture substack post by a guy called Ted Giola, which we're going to explain and talk more about. And it's really interesting and quite alarming in lots of ways. But every week we talk about alarming things now. That's why I'm going to do the rating so I get to talk about Call the Midwife at least. Anyway, Saudi Arabia.

2:56From Call the Midwife to Saudi Arabia. Right. We're going to talk about Saudi Arabian money in entertainment. Obviously, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, the effective ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, for a while famous for the murder of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who went into an Istanbul embassy to get a marriage license and was murdered and dismembered within that embassy. I promise we'll be talking about Call the Midwife soon We're going to go to Call the Midwife soon He was the international persona non grata No one's going to work with him And even on a sort of funny entertainment level The movie star Gerald Butler I will not do my visit to Saudi Arabia I will not film anything there Needless to say Kandahar Which is the first film to be shot entirely in Saudi Arabia Stars Gerald Butler as a CIA operative I think who has to fight his way out of Afghanistan The plot details are irrelevant I'll believe anything with Gerald in it World's leading meteorologist.

3:49Yes, I'll believe it. I'll watch it. He is symptomatic of a wider trend, which is that there is... Mohammed bin Salman wants to put a lot of money into cultural projects, Western cultural products. He started a big Red Sea film fund. He started a Red Sea film festival, which has drawn lots and lots of big names. We'll come to those in a minute. And there was a very interesting, sort of funny, awful Vanity Fair article about his bromance with Johnny Depp. And Johnny Depp has spent a lot of time in Saudi Arabia. he's given sort of various, it almost sounds like sort of hostage video quotes, but they are about how exciting he is about the emergence of new storytelling in Saudi Arabia.

4:25You know, he's listened to all the excuses about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and seems to have believed some of them. But if you're asking how Johnny Depp got into this, it's quite interesting. How did Johnny Depp get into this? It tells us a lot about film financing and whatever. You know, when you go to the cinema and you sit down and the titles start and it will say Canal Plus, you know, the Lower Saxony Lottery Fund, the Slovenian Cultural Heritage thing. And you get all these cards starting in the titles before you even get to the main titles of the film. And you're like, God, how long?

4:56Oh, here we go. UNESCO, all of these things. Now, someone has had to stitch together all those little pieces of funding and it is incredibly difficult and it is very, very hard to find the money to make films at all. So essentially, when you look at those things at the start of a film, Some of those are the people who are producing the film, and some of those are just sums of money that you had to make$20 million and you had$15 million and you start. Really, really hard, and it can fall away even while you're shooting. Now, while Johnny Depp was shooting some French movie, period French movie, about a courtesan, Jean Dubarry, he is told by the film's producers he needs to meet this guy, Prince Bada of Saudi Arabia, who's a sort of cultural bag carrier, as far as I can work out, for MBS, Mohammed bin Salman.

5:43And he says, no, I don't want to do that. You know, I don't have to do that. And they are like, well, I think you do really have to do that because I think our financing is going to fall away if you don't do it. Anyway, he meets this guy. One thing leads to another. Soon he's having all expenses paid, trips to Saudi Arabia. He really likes this guy. And as Vanity Fair article put it, which I found slightly hilarious, about his bromance with MBS, both knew how it suddenly felt to go from golden boy to outcast. Wow. It's like, oh, you just dismember one guy. It's really hard. As for the Johnny Depp, I know there are a lot of Johnny Depp fans out there.

6:18It's incredible. Online, if you write about anything to do with Johnny Depp, there are a huge number of single-issue human beings whose single issue is Johnny Depp's ex-wife was horrid to him. And they will go to the mattresses on that. They will work online day and night to defend Johnny Depp in this. However, what a lot of people are saying now, there's an interesting tortoise podcast about it now that lots of stuff that came up in Johnny Depp's trial with his ex-wife Amber Heard were bot accounts paid for by Saudi Arabia to sort of act on behalf of Johnny Depp online. Really? Yeah. And so there is a huge sort of, I mean, this is what he can give you.

6:55Apart from chump change to make your ridiculous movies about French courtesans, he can give you all these sorts of things. Well, they say he's, although he's not the richest man in the world, he has the most spare cash of anyone in the world, MBS Mohammed bin Salman. He can literally if you're looking for someone to give you money don't go to Musk, don't go to Bill Gates MBS has the most money of anyone in the world that he could just give you out of his pocket tomorrow. And it gives him great pleasure to sort of buy these things, you know, as football fans often say, you can't buy 200 years of history it's like, well you can can't you?

7:26Because they just have Yeah exactly, by the way we are sponsored this week by Visit Jeddah We're not for sale. I suppose to some extent there have always been I was talking to a very, these kind of bromances between dictators and actors. They're both in the entourages game. They are both not used to hearing the word no very often. And there's something about the cachet of each. Someone very eminent in the media was telling me that he once had lunch in Havana with Castro. And as a wine was being bought, Castro said, all of this is from my friend Gerald Depard, his vineyard. He's my best friend.

8:05And now I get, I mean, now he's been cancelled in France, which is incredibly hard. I mean, perhaps the hardest country in the world to get cancelled. Well, second hardest since we're talking about Saudi Arabia. And he's now doing it, I guess, with Putin. He's now probably Putin's best friend and sending his wines to Putin. And it's like Steven Seagal and Kim Jong-un and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, and Steven Seagal and any dictator. It is fascinating. there's a sort of infantile playground attraction between incredibly rich billionaires and incredibly vain actors. There's something that each is missing the other because I guess the billionaires, all they want to do is be light.

8:42And I guess actors, because they're paid millions, the only thing left for them is to be paid billions. And so there's like a symbiotic relationship. There is something there. And having said that, it's this Red Sea Film Festival. Of course, I'll tell you who went out there, Will Smith. So we're talking about the semi-cancelled man. But Will Smith went out there and he was paid, I think people say he was paid a million dollars to go this most recent time. It's in December, the Saudi film festival. But, you know, Guy Ritchie went out there. Gwyneth Paltrow went out there. What people understand, apparently what the big agents are saying, I've talked to some agents about this, they're saying, yeah, people know that if you go to Saudi Arabia, you get paid.

9:18So you are paid essentially to appear in the country. It's like a PA, but in the country. Yeah, which is what they've done with golf. Yeah. Yeah. You literally just have to turn up with a bag of clubs and you get money. So, I mean, it is, listen, we're very, very familiar with sports washing and what Saudi Arabia doing that and trying to sort of have that soft cultural power of, you know, extending the brand of Saudi Arabia. They seem to be enormously successful in that. Live Golf is going from strength to strength. And I think Saudi Arabia money is staying in golf forever now. Briefly, it looked like it might be seen off, but I don't think that's going to be the case.

9:51they are putting money into other sports but they are now deliberately targeting the movies and television and they've built extraordinary studios there I mean really amazing studios that people have to come and see and then they're told they'll not have to pay any tax and it's they will do anything to get you into the country and Baz Luhrmann went to visit the studios recently and he was very impressed I bet he was but you know it's hard even for Baz Luhrmann to get films made in Hollywood currently because that's what's happened. This kind of mid-level, as we've said, across lots of different disciplines, mid-budget things have fallen away.

10:28So you've got these massive kind of tentpole things that the studio are doing. But if you want to make a sort of$80 million film, which is mid-budget basically, it's much, much harder. And this is where people like this come in and will pay for things. Well, that's it. So sport always had a money issue. If you want to know what the greatest vice at any given time is in a culture, look at who sponsors sports so in the 70s and 80s it was all cigarettes it was the embassy world championship um then it was booze you got a carling cup and things like that now it is betting and crypto so essentially mcdonald's mcdonald's but football is always on the lookout for money sports always on the lookout for money and saudi arabia have money and want to soft advertise themselves as you say film and tv now tv used to be the bbc would fund your program itv would fund your program Channel 4 would fund your program.

11:17That's now impossible even for the most basic show. So you always have to get finance from other places. Why would anyone be financing film and TV at the moment? Because the money has sort of gone from that industry. So, you know, it's much, much harder to find seed funding for anything. And that's a perfect opportunity for Saudi Arabia because they have got an awful lot of money. And as you say, that's why Paltrow is out there. That's why Depp is out there. How much money is enough? I think it's dreadful. I mean, what's she doing out there? Her company's valued at 250 million or maybe more. And she has absolutely no need to take the money there.

11:52You know, they've got a women in cinema event that they have there. I can't wait to hear the Saudi Arabia view on the women in the cinema. I think women are even allowed to pick and mix in the cinema. So someone else has to pick and mix it for them. Of course, MBS is the only person who can actually afford pick and mix at the cinema. I sometimes think I'm not a fan of cinema. I'm a fan of pick and mix. I'm never looking forward to Harrison Ford. I'm always looking forward to some fizzy strawberries. Well, there's actually, economically, that is actually what's happened to them. They've sort of become food courts with a kind of digital film screening thing attached.

12:20I'd watch a documentary about the pick and mix industry. But who's the big company behind pick and mix? Could you name it? Who's big pick and mix? Yeah, but who, yeah, exactly. I don't know, but I'd love to. Yeah, who's big, you know what? It's probably the Saudis. It's probably. They probably took it over. Follow the money, Richard. Follow the money. Yeah, follow the money. Anthony Joshua was fighting out in Saudi Arabia this year. boxing you'd always tell it's like the porn industry yeah boxing will always find the newest the newest source of money uh and you know boxing has really sold its soul to uh to saudi arabia and joshua's fighting out there not for the first time this week so you know it's a it's a it's an avalanche and it's it's coming for the movie and television business as well what's interesting is that the producers who i mean obviously it's always been a sort of immoral business movie making but The producers are saying things like there was one guy I saw who was saying, oh, the greatest power I've seen from the kingdom is their long term thinking.

13:13They have the ability to think in five or 10 year or 20 year plans. This is not really possible in the United States because the leadership of the studios change. It's like, oh, this, you know, this, you know, this democracy meritocracies are just getting in the way of getting your ridiculous film about someone who has to fight his way out of somewhere made. Listen, the justification that all these actors would give and lots of sports stars would give is better to engage with Saudi Arabia than not engage with Saudi Arabia. Oh, bullshit. Well, listen, I'm just giving the devil's advocate. It's better to think of Saudi Arabia in 20 years more liberal than it is now, less liberal than it is now.

13:51It's better to have a big, stable, cultural powerhouse somewhere in the Middle East. This is what they are able to say, you know, all the way from Lee Westwood, the golfer. And I don't know if I believe you, Lee. I don't know if the liberalisation of the Middle East is your key concern. I take all of my cues on this from Lee Westwood. You know, from famously the most sort of liberal town in America, Hollywood, where, you know, everyone's up in arms about everything at all times. Fascinating to see the shapes of people. I'm sure that people in Hollywood hold their values and beliefs very dearly.

14:27but they also I know that was literally just an absolutely unfiltered laugh but I think they hold the desire to get their film funded even more dearly but their number one belief is in money so that's the thing that makes all the other decisions they don't have to compromise their beliefs this is literally this is nothing to do with movies I'm going to go back from screen washing to sports washing the snooker which as you know is one of my greatest passions is one of the few things I really get hit up about now they're messing with snooker and NBA's gone too far they've got a tournament out there where there's a special golden ball on the table which if any player scores a 1-4-7 they get to try and pop that golden ball for an extra 20 points it'll be the largest break ever made in snooker history it'll be a 1-6-7 no one's ever seen it before yeah because you've had an extra ball that's worth 20 points of course someone's done it before but you get half a million pounds if you do it surely it should be a solid gold ball that you get to keep oh that's a really That's a really good idea.

15:26I think you'd get a kick, though, probably. Yeah. I think probably the gold would not run along the cushion quite as well. Also, when they take it away from you at the end and say, yeah, we just say that for the cameras, are you going to say anything out loud? No, thanks. Just take me to the airport. Thanks very much. I'll be off. Yeah, but listen, I look forward to Sean Murphy getting a 167. But listen, I mean, this is not a story that's going away. EnBS is not going to get this influential. There will be big, big movies that are funded by Saudi Arabia. Keep an eye out for that title card, which will say the Red Sea Film Initiative or things like that.

15:59You're going to start to see it. And also any number of umbrella organizations beneath that. Well, that's it. And it's important to say that whatever title a company has, whatever title a fund has, they are all tied into the Sovereign Wealth Fund. They're all tied into the ruling family. If anyone wants to justify what they're doing, they have to accept that that's where their money's from. And by the way, and sports stars have pointed this out, and I'm sure movie stars will, there's always been very dodgy money from very bad places in sports yes and in hollywood it's just this one seems to be a lightning rod where you can you can jump one side or the other and the hypocrisy is sort of even greater because of course most of these films offend about a hundred of their indecency laws yeah i think it's probably a good rule of thumb if your movie is funded by a country where your film would be unable to be shown then then maybe you should look for your money elsewhere.

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18:58Hello and welcome back to The Rest is Entertainment. Yes, welcome back everybody. I said let's do something gentle now. We talk about the TV overnights quite a lot, So I just thought we'd look through this week's top 100 shows and see if there's any interesting stories about what it is we are watching as a country, anything unexpected. And this, by the way, if you are interested in Overnight's broadcast magazine, which print them all, then is sort of the Bible of the television industry. So thank you to Broadcast for all this. I had a little chat to Chris Curtis, the editor there as well, about some of the trends that are happening.

19:31Biggest show in Britain last week, Call the Midwife. Three of the top four shows in Britain, Call the Midwife, Death in Paradise, Antiques Roadshow. You know, whatever we're talking about on Twitter, it is not those three shows, right? Sunday Night is massive. Yeah, Sunday Night, and just sort of big mainstream drama. By the way, they're getting about five and a half, five million, those shows, and 15 years ago, they'd be getting 16, 17 million. And there'll be more on catch-up, we should say that, because people are often saying, oh, look, this show's viewership's fallen away, or whatever, but it hasn't necessarily because people watch on catch up.

20:06Yes, this is pure overnight. Funnily enough, catch up usually follows the path of what the biggest show is. Absolutely. Anyway, it's very rare that a show would get one million and suddenly seven million people watch it on catch up. But if there's a show like Gladiators that's up against Anton Dick's Saturday Night Takeaway, both of those shows will do very well on catch up. By the way, Gladiators beat Takeaway this week for the first time. I saw that. Which is a terrifying prospect for ITV and a wonderful prospect for Nitro and Legend. By the way, House of Games booking news, we have a gladiator.

20:38I can't tell you who it's going to be. Oh, my God. Yeah, we have a gladiator. There's been a lot of chat about which gladiator. A lot of them were up for it. But, yeah, we have… You have your first gladiator. We have our first… Your first gladiator. Gladiator ready. I can't wait to be saying that. So it's interesting that right at the top of those ratings are shows that aren't really in the cultural conversation. No. That's not super unexpected, but interesting. but what is really fascinating looking at the top 100 is what's happened to the soaps now EastEnders Corrie Emmerdale used to absolutely dominate.

21:13They used to get 20 million they were just complete behemoth. Plotlines would be on the front of the tabloids Tony Blair when Deirdre Barlow do you remember when Deirdre Barlow was falsely imprisoned and Tony Blair talked about it in the House of Commons he didn't watch the show he just was told to say but it doesn't matter It was big enough to have to make comments about it. But you know what? He got stuff done. Is she still in prison? No, she's not. No, she's not. Listen, at some point we've got to reassess his legacy. Sorry to go all Alistair Campbell there for a second. But the soaps, they put a lot into it, put huge amounts of money into the sets and what have you.

21:50£89 million, that new set for EastEnders. For EastEnders. In that top 100, the highest episode of EastEnders is in position 64. You're kidding. 2.3 million viewers. Again, it will get more on catch-up, but 2.3 million overnight. That's lower than the one show. It's lower than all sorts of things. It's not a great rating. It's properly on its knees. Coronation Street, slightly better, 3.5 million, but still only in 15th, still gets the same as Michael McIntyre's The Wheel. Emmerdale, again, 3.4. So EastEnders is in the biggest trouble. but the other soaps they're not doing what they used to do for channels which is anchoring people for the evening which is bringing people in for the evening and then showing them other things you turn up at 7 30 and you never leave exactly but you know there's other other shows are taking up the slack in the top 10 this week the one percent club the lee mac quiz how many i think you know this how many people are watching on linear because that is interesting you could still keep people in technically if how many what's the percentage of people who watch on linear well But again, you know, if you look at Twitter or talk to people, they go, well, no one watches live TV.

22:5664 % of all viewership is on linear, is watching on the day that something goes out. While it's going out. Yeah. Which, by the way, is down from 100 % 20 years ago. But it's still a significant amount of people. It's still a business that has some juice in it. And so, you know, there's still healthy stuff going on in that top 100. But, you know, that thing of I always remember my NANDS remote control, the one and the three. were completely worn out. And people go, no, but people don't really mind what channel things are on. 97 of that top 100 shows are on BBC One ITV. Yeah. Okay, there's one Channel 4 show, Gogglebox, and there's two BBC Two shows, University Challenge, and, hold on, let me look.

23:39Richard Osmond's House of Games is the other one there. That is, sorry, I was just checking my... Sorry, sorry, yeah. Richard Osmond's House of Games, sponsored by Visit Riyadh. so that's where the mainstream of our culture is in those top 100 shows because we talk about different things and i think it's worth talking about reach yeah i remember last summer i interviewed jesse armstrong on stage at the um edinburgh tv festival and we talked about his career and everything and he is very self he's the man behind succession peep show uh fresh meat thick of it all these things and yet he said just a sort of throwaway comment while i was talking about him he said most of my shows i've made i'm not very high rating at all and we moved on we talked about other things but it's interesting that his shows which have had i mean you think of the sort of full spectrum cultural purchase of the final season of succession where everyone is talking about absolutely everything there are a million think pieces about it also things like peep shit or the thick of it or whatever but these are not kind of mega mega rating things whereas things that are often very high rating sort of nobody talks about and they don't seem to have the hold.

24:42And I suppose, I know you want to come on to GB News, that's quite an interesting one where you have this kind of the tension between reach and viewership. And I think that's interesting. Yeah, between signal and noise. Yeah. And I think, you know, I genuinely think if you're interested in politics in this country, and quite often you talk to politicians, if you don't understand that Britain is Call the Midwife and Death in Paradise and Antiques Roadshow, So Countryfile, which is also in the top 10, that's who is voting in this country. Okay, that's who's voting. And every single bit of noise around politics in this country is about completely different groups of people.

25:23Not in the top 100 because of the way it's measured, but often the biggest show on TV every single night, takes an awful lot to beat it, is local news. The BBC local news at 6.30 in your area. you add them together that's the biggest show in the year that's britain that's what britain are watching and that's what millions of britons are watching which is the thing that's important for election so the local news is a is a is a huge success story i often say to my publishers when they talk about putting you on tv shows to promote books i said sit me on local news i said that's that's where everyone's watching and that's where people who buy books are watching you know that's the that's the thing and yeah so i thought i'd look at um gb news and again broadcasts were very helpful uh and the biggest show on gb news as you say it has huge cultural cachet we hear about almost nothing else it's one of you know if you looked at column inches for tv channels it's right up there you know behind the big terrestrials the biggest show the first the three biggest shows in fact are farage's show which is on at 7 p.m and the biggest rating of last week was 126 000 okay 126 ,000 people watching that to give you an idea of that a repeat of as time goes by the old jeffrey palmer judy dench sitcom on drama was getting 275 000 so double double okay now this is not to denigrate gb news by the way we did a um we did a big industry news quiz this week where everyone gets together for charity and gb news did unbelievably well well they are they thrashed my They've thrashed my team.