Millionaire Mutts & The Power Of JK Rowling

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

0:42A lot better than I was on Tuesday's show. Two days further away from my kidney stone. You're recovering all the time. Yes, exactly. And that makes me happy. Excellent. Listen, we have all sorts of questions from our wonderful listeners slash viewers. Can I begin by asking a question about one of the greatest shows on TV, 24 Hours in Police Custody? Oh, yes. If you haven't watched this and you think it's a sort of boring blue light show and that's not your thing, you must watch this because it's not what you think at all. But Nick Dodd says, How do they decide which cases to follow? There must be so many that lead nowhere.

1:15While most of the footage is CCTV in the custody suite or body cam, which could be edited retrospectively, a lot is filmed in staff areas too, implying a camera crew is present and someone choosing which cases to follow. Yeah, it's an interesting one. I spoke to Simon Ford, who's the exec producer of that show, also the creator of the show. And as Marina says, there's something about that show that is, every now and again, there's brilliant police procedural shows, but this one has been consistently brilliant for eight or nine years now. And every time it comes on, every time there's a new one, you know it's going to be blue chip.

1:44You know you're going to discover something about the police. You know you're going to discover extraordinary stories and the way they're filmed is something that could not have been done 20 years ago. So as Nick says, there's body cam and stuff which puts you into situations that you might not be in with a crew. But the question remains, if you do watch these things, there's incredible footage, as he says, of behind the scenes. There's footage that you wouldn't ordinarily get if you weren't following people around. So Simon just talked me through the whole process. He says, well, look, we filmed the starts of an awful lot of cases.

2:14And he said, and over the years, we've got a feel, like a copper's feel, what's going to become a bigger case. and we start following those a little bit more, lots of them go nowhere. So they film the start of it and actually they catch someone immediately. It's open and shut. There's no complexity to it. When you start really getting into a case that you know is working, then you start throwing more and more resources at it. And as Nick says, so you've got things like the initial arrests and things on body cam, but the stuff, the behind the scenes stuff and talking to people involved with the cases, you start doing that more and more with cases where you think, okay, something is definitely happening here.

2:49Now, the absolute secret to how they are able to do it, and it's actually Channel 4's decision, and Channel 4 did a very smart thing with The Garden, who make this show, and said, look, we're not going to ask you for four a year, six a year, eight a year. You deliver them when you've got one. And so they've had shows that have taken six years from their first bit of filming to the court case, which, of course, the only time they can actually show them. So Channel 4 has said, we love what you do. We love these shows. We know whenever they drop, viewers go crazy for them. There's a brilliant one at the moment about a Norfolk meth gang.

3:20And, you know, ratings are through the roof for Channel 4. It's great, you know. And so you know every time it drops that you're going to get a big audience for it. But that comes entirely from the fact that they are not put under pressure to deliver for a year. The question that often comes up with 24 hours in police custody is why do people allow themselves to be filmed? And there are two very good reasons for this. Firstly, if you are guilty of a crime, you waive your right to anonymity anyway. You wouldn't have to be pixelated, whatever happens. But Simon Ford says, which I think is very interesting and very redolent of the times, that actually most people want to be filmed anyway.

3:52Most people, whether they're a victim or whether they're a perpetrator, actually want to hear their stories told and want to talk to camera. And one of the real strengths of 24 hours in police custody is it focuses a lot on the victims. And you talk a lot to the victims, the families of victims, and you understand the consequences of the crimes. But it's also rather good at talking to the perpetrators and trying to find some humanity there, trying to find where their crimes came from, talking about their childhood and talking about their school days and talking about, you know, some of it you take with a pinch of salt.

4:24But yeah, so the real truth is, weirdly, it's a commissioning decision, which is we trust you guys, deliver when you can deliver. And Simon Ford and his incredible team of directors and producers just getting that nose for what story is going to work for them. the police obviously are very very happy to be involved in these things because it does almost always show them in a very very good light in a in a world in which the police are not always shown in a good light shows the pressures they're under which night coppers funnily enough the other channel 4 show about brighton coppers also does so for the police it's good pr i would say and and again on 24 hours in police custody they understand when a lawyer is interesting there was a brilliant one in in um one recently you know driving his big range rover and what have you and they understand that that's an interesting person to talk to they understand that every side of a crime is interesting you know every bit of it so you just get this whole human story and they they show this sort of 360 degree view of how that happens but it comes down the enormous credit of channel 4 just saying no it's not an identikit show we trust you go and make a documentary when it's ready show it and it's really really paid off for them over so they don't really know how many they're going to get a year they have no idea how many they're going to get a year so thank you so much to simon ford for all that information and also thank you for making that brilliant television show because you imagine the hours that go into that and the skin in the edit as well Alex Rye has a question for you Marina.

5:44Alex says I am a big fan of Frasier which features Eddie the dog. I was wondering if Eddie's owners received a royalty fee per episode for repeats and how it works in general when you have an animal as part of the cast. Do they receive a per episode fee the same way as the human cast? Oh yes they do. Yes they do. Eddie was actually a dog called moose eddie was paid ten thousand dollars an episode excuse me yeah thought to have earned probably i think more than three million over the whole thing um i don't know whether the estate the estate won't get residuals um but um you know he wouldn't have been in a union that's the trouble he is not in the performing dogs guild of america because there isn't one and yeah we should set that up yeah well there's quite a lot of animals which we'll get to in a minute moose was um born in the early 1990s.

6:27He was the largest puppy in his litter, couldn't be controlled by an original owner, was taken by an animal handler, adopted, and taught incredibly well because basically what Eddie had to do was just give that kind of, you know, unimpressed stare to Kelsey Grammar. He could do that for minutes at a time so he was trained really, really well. And if they wanted him to sort of nuzzle one of the cars, they put some pate behind the ears. I know. for the final two series I think he was replaced by his son Enzo this does happen that's a Nepo puppy isn't it yeah that's a Nepo a Nepo dog I don't think they got on father and son and I don't think often happens in Hollywood yeah he died in 2006 16 years old all the cast members of Frasier got the most fan mail really Eddie so in terms of animals being paid animals are paid I was a member on that show when someone was talking to Martin and Martin says I called him Eddie Spaghetti and they said is that because he likes Italian food?

7:25He said, no, it's because he's got worms. Dogs on, we talked about what Winton Tin wants before in this Q &A, that was a very well-paid dog. Lassie, Lassie was hugely well-paid. The original Lassie, yeah, it was a franchise dog, I'm afraid, was called Pal. Now, got huge amounts of money. In the first one, in Lassie Come Home, I think he got paid two, two and a half times what Elizabeth Taylor got paid. She was young. But as I say, that was a franchise dog. John Wayne once won one of Lassie's brothers in a poker game. They were making a Western called Hondo, and the trainer, there was nothing to do out in the middle of the wilderness, and they used to play poker every night, and the trainer, I think, had a bit of a problem and lost.

8:11Lassie's brother? Yeah. I'm not sure that's something I'd want to win particularly. No, no, no. You think John Wayne's going to be all right, fine. High-paid animals, yeah. Bart the bear. that was a bear that was in so many movies it played opposite Morgan Freeman he played opposite Anthony Hopkins in The Edge he made a lot of money Bart the Bear Bart the Bear yeah where does his money go to? the trainer that's the reality that's the life isn't it you've got to train a bear to do it you're a stage mum of sorts anyway animals can't be nominated for Oscars and they have they really felt that Bart the Bear should have had one I don't know what you're thinking how come Harvey Weinstein's got so many they can't be a Rintin Tin they couldn't Crystal the Capuchin Monkey Now that earned a huge amount of money, was in George's Jungle, Night at the Museum, Hangover, Dr.

8:56Doolittle. Same monkey. Same monkey, yeah, supposedly. But the most expensive animal ever that was ever, ever, ever in anything on screen, I believe it's this, and you can come at me, everybody, was Keiko, who was the whale in Free Willy. Do you know the story? I mean, it sounds free. Free Willy comes out and everyone is captivated. as it turns out is the Orkin actor who played Willie in the movie quite literally captivated what they did Warner Brothers really weirdly I don't know why they did this they put a phone line in the end credits saying you know if you want to help free whales or something and hundreds of thousands of people ended up calling so Keiko who was in the film freed was in reality was in captivated was captivated 24 hours in whale custody was captive had been sold on multiple times was in some kind of Mexican amusement park.

9:48So it became a really big backlash, considering, obviously, the subject matter of the movie. It seemed, you know, quite hypocritical, which is so unusual in Hollywood. Warner Brothers had to create a free willy Keiko foundation. Can you imagine? To introduce him back into the world. Okay, imagine some really hard-ass studio accountant. You're so like, what's this line item? Sorry, that's not in millions, is it, right? It was costing them£500 ,000 a year to take. they took him back to Iceland to train him for release. In the end, it cost more than 20 million, this whole thing. And I'm terribly sorry to tell you.

10:21Okay, prepare yourself for a non-happy ending to this story. They finally released him after spending, honestly, 20 million on this thing in 2002. And I'm afraid to say he died of pneumonia in a bay in Norway in 2003. They could never join a pod or seem to join a pod, but then couldn't join a pod. And it just didn't work out. So don't believe everything you see in the movies. Oh, man. Sorry about that. But that is, I would have thought, the most expensive animal-related thing you're ever going to see on the screen because it just ended up costing so much. I'm amazed that a group of whales have never done a podcast.

10:57I know this is absolutely not Alex's question, but I note that the Frasier reboot has just been cancelled. I know. So they did two more seasons of it, which is sort of quite enjoyable to watch in a funny kind of way. And Nicholas Lindhurst is very, very good in it as Frasier's old pal. But yeah, there's something about it that wasn't quite right. But yeah, so that is not coming back. But it really, really misses Niles, I think. Yes, absolutely. Anyway, I know that's nothing to do with Keiko, the whale. God rest his soul. Okay, this is definitely for you, Richard, about Would I Lie to You. Sarah Adamson says, How much flexibility in the truth do the panellists have?

11:35I always wonder this. Can they tell lies within the truth for comedic effect? That's a very specific question that a lot of people ask, which is, so as we know on that show, interview with researchers, you give them loads of stories about your own life. You turn up on the day, you turn over a bit of paper and either one of them is your true story or if it's a lie that's been completely made up and you have no idea what's going to be on that card. But if it is a truth and you can see Lee and David, it's the only time on that show where you see either of them try and do a bit of policing because sometimes people will come on that show, a new comic, and they'll have a story, which is a true story.

12:08And like Sarah says, they will extemporise within it facts that are clearly not true and that you absolutely cannot do. That's the only unwritten rule of the whole game is if you have a true story, the whole thing is true. If you come up with a comic conceit in the middle of it, it's fine, so long as you say, no, I'm sorry, that's me being ridiculous. Of course, I didn't do that bit. But if you insist that a certain thing happened within that story that would make it impossible and it didn't happen, that's the only time there would ever be any sort of intervention or that wouldn't be used because you over-record on Would I Lie to You.

12:37But yeah, if you are talking about a story that is true, you have to remain within the train tracks of the truth. That's the only rule. If it's a lie, go wherever you want, say whatever you want. You can include some truths in a lie, if you want to, to try and give it some ballast. But yet, if you are telling a true story, you cannot, to make it harder for the others, invent a bit that makes it more unreasonable, which I always think is quite fun. But occasionally you'll see David or Lee just go, hold on, because if that were true, and so sometimes people go, oh no, I don't mean exactly that I don't know exactly that happened I don't think I've ever got a lie past anyone or a truth past anyone on that show ever but yeah if if you're reading out a truth you can't you cannot embellish in any way you want to be entertaining you know and you want to tell the story it's such a skilled show I am that's one of the shows I'm most in awe of on television I think it's amazing every time I watch it no I'd be so bad really yeah I think I'd be awful you think yeah I just can't believe they turn over those cards and to see it right then and produce what they produce They do such horrible things to me on that show.

13:38They give me the most complicated things you could possibly have. Just for fun, David turned over a card and said, I have a 10-point plan for how to survive in prison. You could have said three-point plan, guys. Come on. It's such a good question, Sarah, because I think people ask it a lot. There is an unwritten rule not to make stuff up. If something's true, you do not make up something untrue within it. And if you do do that, you'll often get called out on it. That's lovely. Shall we go to an ad break now? I would so like to do that.

14:09Welcome back, everybody, and welcome back to a question from Gemma Morton. Gemma, thank you so much for sending in your question. By the way, anyone who has questions, you send them to... TheRestIsEntertainment at gmail.com Anything you fancy knowing, and you could be on the show too, just like Gemma. Gemma says, love you guys, love the show. She doesn't say that at all. Don't insert lies into your truths. Would it do you any harm to say it, Gemma? Gemma says, when an author sells the rights to their book, do they lose any control over changes or do they get consulted? For example, I recall the film version of Dan Brown's Inferno.

14:41We talked about him on Tuesday. The ending was completely different from the book. However, I also recall hearing J.K. Rowling only wanted British actors for Harry Potter. So do you get more control if you are a more famous author? This is a fairly short answer, but we can talk about it. But you get the control that your agent gets you and they will do the deal. And you can ask for anything you like, but it will affect... It may be that I actually remember, funny enough, when J.K. I seem to remember this anyway. We first heard that the Harry Potter books were going to become films. Someone had said, oh, actually, Steven Spielberg was really interested in making them, but he felt he had to make them in America because he's so from that milieu and he couldn't sort of think himself into the British boarding school or whatever it is.

15:19J.K. Rowling was very particular. She wanted it to be set here. And I know she's very particular all the way down to what happens in the parks and the rides and all of those things is very controlling of those things. But that's because she's able to be. but someone has negotiated her that deal. Some people honestly don't mind. I spoke to an author recently and I think they're adapting his book for a film and he said to me, actually, they've completely changed the ending and they made it much better, which I thought was a really sort of lovely, I mean, he's a very, very successful author and I thought that's amazing to just be cool about it and realise that people are just going to understand that you've got your book and then there's a whole separate thing and you kind of let them do what they want.

15:57In general, you might get less money the more control you wish to exert But if you're starting to say, I want complete control over this and that, and they're just buying an option on your book, and you're actually a relatively unknown first time author, you're not going to get it, or they're not going to do the deal with you if they can't sort of do much more of what they like. Yeah, that's the thing. It's a trade off, really. I know with the Thirsty Murder Club, when we sold that before the first book had even come out, so it didn't have a reputation particularly. But there were different parties who were interested.

16:26There were certain people who part of their deal would be, you will have complete creative control over the whole process. You can write it. which I didn't want anyway so that wasn't worth my while with Amblin and Spielberg when they came in there was a they said look it's definitely going to be in England that's the we will give you that assurance but you know nothing else than that someone else is going to write it someone else is going to do this that or the other yeah if you're JK Rowling you can probably get all the caveats you want and all the money if you are a more unknown writer then the more money you get probably the less power you have over it and the more power you want over it probably the fewer choices you have of who's going to adapt it where it might go.

17:02And, you know, you might choose to take no money up front and to control that piece of IP all the way through. I was just thinking that book Fleischman is in Trouble that was great, written by Taffy Brodess-Arachner, who, as people who listen to this podcast might know, I think is the best writer in newspapers. She writes profiles for the New York Times. But she, when she sold that for adaptation, said that it had to be a condition that she was allowed to write the script. She was a first-time TV writer. She hadn't written a TV show before, but she said, I want to be able to write the script. and they made a great show of it actually.

17:32I sat in so many meetings where people said, of course we will let you write the script and I just, I have to say, I'm so sorry. I don't want to. I'm writing the next book. I don't want to. And also there's so many great script writers out there that I do. So yeah, it really depends what position you're in. With the Thursday Muddle Club, I'm just trying to think through if there are certain changes that they would make that you would be consulted on. Certainly if you've made it in America rather than England, that would be a thing. Plot as I understand it of the Thursday Muddle Club movie is based on the first book, but it's not entirely the same because you have to change things is the truth.

18:04And to have me looking over their shoulders every five seconds, telling them they couldn't do this and they couldn't do that, I think would be hard. Chris Columbus, who has made Thursday Medical, also made the first two Harry Potters. He talks about that process and about how involved J.K. Rowling was. And so, you know, he's happy doing it either way. But I think it's more fun for a filmmaker to have a bit more creative control. Okay, here we go. Sean O 'Neill would like to say, when do actors get paid, Richard? if you're filming a series that takes several months you'd hope some is paid when you're cast are actors PAYE or self-employed are actors PAYE or self-employed finally someone asked the question they're self-employed actors answers to the question when actors get paid is one of those beautifully lovely prosaic things that make you understand that acting is like a piecework job actors get paid like most people used to get paid which is once a week at the end of the week they'll get their money through but only when filming has started not because you can't trust actors but you can't so if you are um signed up for a you know a big new adaptation or a big new series and you know how many weeks you're doing and you know how much money you're getting paid they will however much you're doing in any particular week it will be broken up weekly and at the end of each week you will get if it's a 12-week shoot you'll get a 12th of your money is what you do so every friday at the end of a filming week you get your cash which is such a lovely kind of prosaic way of getting paid you always assume there's like a million deals and people get paid this like the other i was talking to oliver slinger at independent he's one of our great actors agents represents all sorts of people and he was saying exceptions to it would be if you're doing a role where there's an awful lot of say martial arts training you have to do before you start filming or something that you have to do something unusual that you have to do you might get paid before production starts because of the extra work you're putting in so but even then quite often not quite often you will do two months worth of training and you don't get paid your first bit of money until the first week of filming is finished you're certainly not getting money up front so you know when you sign on to do something they're not suddenly paying you um if you're signing on bonus you don't get that there's absolutely none of that there's no we're holding back half your fee to the end of a run you know it is literally you get paid weekly if you are the only difference would be if you're a theatre actor you were also getting paid at the end of rehearsal weeks and also you're getting paid a lot less um but yeah essentially you get paid at the end of the week one and you get paid at the end of the week, your engagement fee.

20:24So, you know, you're signed on for however many weeks for a certain amount of money, you get that. Then, of course, you get your residuals, which used to be a huge deal, which is when something goes out, the money you get for every time it's shown, which in the days of big residuals deals and DVDs would be a lot of money. But that would be, I mean, that can be six months after a show goes out. It can be a year after it goes out. In fact, some companies will literally pay them out twice a year just for anything. So that money is not coming through for a very, very long time. and there's certainly not as much as one used to get.

20:54The big difference is some actors will get a back end on a deal. The most famous one, of course, was Alec Guinness, who did Star Wars for not a huge amount of money and he negotiated 2 % of the gross of this movie. Which I told him quite well. Yeah, and at the end of it, George Lucas gave him another quarter of a percent just to say thank you for doing such a good job. There's a great quote from Alec Guinness in his diary. So he's done Star Wars on May the 27th. He says, splendid news of reactions to Star Wars continues to come in. On June the 3rd, he says, I'm pinning my hopes on Star Wars percentage, which could bring me£100 ,000 or more if it does Jaws business as predicted.

21:33Well, it did an awful lot more than Jaws business. And he made£9 million in that first year alone. Hats off to Guinness. Well deserved. He made£9 million in that first year alone. He's made nearly$100 million since. Wow. So that's a good thing to be pinning your hopes on, isn't it? God. Wow. Wow. But yeah, they get paid weekly, actors, and at the end of the week as well. Do you know what? That absolutely speaks of lack of trust in actors. And also quite right. It's just because, you know, you can't pay them for next week because they're just not going to turn up. Here's one for you, Marina. Viren Udeshi asks, With many of the soaps broadcasting multiple times a week, has there ever been a time when the wrong episode was broadcast, such as Wednesday's episode was accidentally broadcast on a Monday?

22:15And if not, what safeguards have put in place to absolutely make sure this never happens? OK, good one. I'm not aware of it happening in the soaps, although I agree it would seem that it was most likely to. But there are two ways in which episodes are broadcast out of order, accidentally and on purpose. We will handle accidentally first. It used to happen sometimes when international broadcasters get the rights to something, there's somehow less care taken and they would be putting the wrong tape in. And a few years ago now, not that many years ago, E4 didn't do the final of Married at First Sight.

22:47They did the penultimate episode twice. Everyone was logging on and wanting to watch it with their second screen. And I think people are a bit annoyed about that. It used to happen a bit on US cable. It was just different standards to the network, supposedly. There was a funny one, Helmut Kohl's 1987 New Year address to the German people, Chancellor Helmut Kohl. They aired the 1986 address and it ended with saying, you know, happy new 1986. His party accused the state, the national broadcaster of sabotage and said, you know, I cannot imagine that an editor named Chance or technician named Mistake takes sole blame for this incident.

23:32On purpose is in a way more interesting. A lot of things are filmed out of transmission order for various different reasons. you know, location or you couldn't get all the people to get together for the ADR, which everything has ADR, as we've said this before, you know, little bits of dialogue to actually make it make sense in the edit. Sometimes they strategically and writers are often really annoyed about this because even with story of the week type shows where you think, oh, like there's no continuity here. It doesn't matter. They put everything back exactly. You can do that in something like The Simpsons, which is where it's a sort of joke that everything returns to exactly the same as before.

24:09but even on things like Star Trek actually there were small developing things. There are reasons that people that executives do it and writers tend to hate it you might want an action prologue for a series so you think oh my god do I have to sort of chew through all the origin story of this or can't we just start with a big bang and then we'll put yeah start with episode 2 and then we'll go back and we'll have how they all got here because that's quite slow and boring quite a few series have done that and the fans end up noticing and really hate it. Sometimes they might think, oh, this episode's quite spooky.

24:43Can we have this and put it near Halloween? Lots of series do that. You know, we already know this. I think that some wrestling has occasionally been aired in the wrong order, which making it even less real than it ever was. But in general, it does happen quite a lot that things, sometimes it has sabotaged whole series. I think there was something that the Jonas Brothers did for someone like Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel or something like that. and they aired every, I think every single one but one was aired out of order with some executives. But it's very hard if you're a BBC or something and a show belongs to you and is delivered to you in the same way it's been delivered to you for 25 years and every single one of these things has a, like sometimes you'll see the little clock, you know, occasionally before a TV show which you never see on air, but that clock has every single piece of information you want.

25:25It's also got digitally embedded information as well now, so it's very, very, very hard to make a mistake. However, as you say, if you bought in a show from abroad, it might be slightly trickier. Yeah, sometimes in Iceland they're going to show the good wife in the wrong order for some reason. But it tends not to be. There wasn't a mistake. I mean, obviously, Helmut Kold's new year address was quite a big cock-up. People still talking about it. Aren't they? It was a huge, you know, think about it. I can imagine how identical it must have been. Just three years later, the wall came down. Coincidence?

25:53I don't know. That's all we've got time for, I think. But we have a bonus episode tomorrow for our AAA members. And last week, I was able to tell you about my favourite ever fictional TV detective. That episode is available if anyone wants to join up. But tomorrow you're telling us all about... 20 years since Tom Cruise jumped all over Oprah's couch, what that pop culture moment meant for both Tom Cruise and indeed for the culture. And for the world. It was very much his Helmut Kohl moment. And that's therestorsentertainment.com if you want to sign up for that. So we'll see you on Friday. But otherwise, see you next Tuesday.

26:28See you next Tuesday.