Mushroom Murders: True Crime Wars

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1:42All within your terms. All online. All on your schedule. Turn car buying into a few clicks and not a full week's endeavor. Finance and buy your car at your convenience. On Carvana. Financing subject to credit approval. Additional terms and conditions may apply. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me Marina Hyde. And me Richard Osman. Hello, this is hello Marina. Hello Richard, how are you? Yeah I'm alright, it's still too hot. Come on man, we're not built for this. I like it, it's not city weather. Yeah, is this entertainment news? I don't know, but it is hot. What are we talking about this week?

2:18I have some thoughts on Google VO, Google Flow, this new AI filmmaking tool. tool. We've obviously moved from the era of the AI image to AI video. And I'd like you to tell you what that means. I will say just as a headline, I will say this, the revolution has already happened. Yeah, I will say that we're going to talk it through. I've come to a number of conclusions. And I'd love your take on them. And I'd love I would love our listeners take on them as well. It's a brave new world. It is. We'll have to be brave about it. We are also going to talk about documentaries and podcasts and all the sort of stuff that comes out of true crime off the back of the mushroom poisoner case which uh sort of set the world on fire the sort of rush for content anytime there's a there's a wagatha christie or a mushroom poisoner the kind of 15 different people all of whom pitch projects at the same time um shall we start with google vo which as you say it's you remember when chat gpt sort of came out of the blocks 18 months ago and everyone went oh this changes sort of writing forever well that's happened i think this week that has happened with video for a long time now people have shown me all sorts of short film videos that they've used for sort of pitch documents and and things like that and it's always been sort of great but has limitations i could you know see how it's used this week somebody showed me something that he put together in a matter of hours it's like a three minute animation perfectly synced beautifully acted looked amazing looked consistent and it was absolutely extraordinary and the reason he's able to do it this week is because google vo issued an update and this sounds nerdy but stay with me because this is where the revolution begins you can do eight seconds at a time on these um video things but it now has an update where you can take a screen grab of the end of what you are doing and that can go straight into your next thing so you can now sync sound you can sync dialogue across clips and you can also make your characters look and sound completely consistent which was always the biggest issue with these things so you can now build and build and build so you've got a big strong narrative um so i saw this thing and i thought well okay that is the end of part of entertainment history and the beginning of part of entertainment history can i talk you through some of the conclusions i've come to and we can discuss them because i've i've i'm still not entirely sure what i think about it we should say that the video tool is called flow which is this thing built yes that's that sort of it yeah like like an official name for it and at the moment it costs you 200 quid a month to use it is that more or less expensive than making television in a traditional fashion richard these days it's about the same 200 pound a month um so what do we think is going to happen well firstly in in the short term short-term content you know tiktok ads trailers anything like that i will say would be majority ai assisted by 2027 i mean really almost immediately there is absolutely nothing standing in the way now of any ad agency anyone making a little 10 second eight second clip they've just completely taken over i've seen lots of because i was sort of looking for them because i knew we were going to talk about them i've seen so many fake videos created with this that have got honestly in 24 hours like 150 million hits they're absolutely massive there's a lot i did actually notice there was one genre which is fat grandma's right grandma collapses a glass bridge i don't know what that says about our culture i don't think it's great uh but um there was a there was a whole sort of trend of those things but there were so many of them the proliferation is extraordinary yes it's it's the ease with which you can now do this you can literally sit in your bedroom at home and do it and of course it means and the first thing we're going to see is an awful lot of slop and the first reaction is going to be oh my god ai is taking over and ai just does all the work and my positive spin on that would be firstly there will be a huge amount of ai slop which is just fed into a machine but secondly anything that's not ai made immediately now has a premium i mean that's you know you go oh this is actually made by human beings so that suddenly means something but secondly the people i know who are the most excited about vo and all of these different by the way this will be superseded so quickly by by other um video creation ai software the people who are most excited are are creatives are people who sit down with a blank piece of paper and a pen and the key thing about any creative is you want the least path of resistance between you having an idea and people seeing that idea that's the thing you want to wake up in the morning have a great idea and you get excited you go i want everyone to see this now you can do that in a matter of minutes and i think it's going to unlock an incredible wave of creativity uh an incredible democratization of creativity you know when i remember when i was 22 23 and you were your creativity was i'm going to think of a tv idea and then we're going to go in and pitch it and then we're going to sell it and 18 months later it's going to be on you know now i'm just going to do it i'm going to do it this morning at home and that is not ai as a crutch that is not ai as please give me an idea AI that is genuine creative ideas driven people thinking I now have no gatekeeper between me and the public I can have an idea this morning and the public can see it that afternoon and it's going to create some unbelievably great content and it's going to create some stars of you know writing and acting and all those types of things so I think that around about 2027 you're going to start seeing huge stars emerge from this who would not have had a way of emerging without it because they're not able to go into a studio they're not able to afford a traditional way of making media so they can write a script if you're an actor you and four friends can sit around you can act a script and it can be out in front of the public that afternoon but that's i think is going to be the premium it is going to create opportunities for very funny very smart people to spread things very very quickly is what i think okay would you disagree with that no i wouldn't disagree with that but um i think it's interesting that you think that there would even be the idea that they would even feel the need to use actual humans i mean some of the stuff i've been seeing is i mean actually they're incredibly weird you know they've kind of created all these stand-up comics who are talking about um being prompts of just being the subject of prompts i saw um quite anguished scenes of people not real people at all begging for you not to write the prompt for the next awful thing that's going to happen to them you know in horror so you could you this they could you can easily see you could easily come up with a sort of um 90 minute horror movie and it can happen to unreal people even though they they seemed completely really there was no longer that kind of uncanny thing if the script was good i i would never notice which by the way is the key if the prompts are good and the script is good that's the key maybe some writers will still work that's the see and that's the problem so all the way through i'm going to try and balance the fact we will get to job losses and where it leaves people but so point two i would say is it doesn't it invents a whole new industry for creative people which is writers first you can get their work seen much more quickly than they could have done previously i mean much more quickly there will be huge jobs and it sounds like an awful job but actually when you start looking at these things for for prompt creators this is why i try and look at it as a as a tv producer i think what was it that i was doing all of that time and by and large it was prompt creating yeah that's what i was doing i think that's right it's just a different a word for it you were asking the right questions exactly that what happens next what would happen if how would it look like if right that's what you're doing all the way through the only difference being i then wait 18 months whereas now you go oh i'll see what happens if so that's if i was 22 i think there are an awful lot of jobs out there for prompt creators because ai is nothing ai isn't anything it's ai is like a camera right a camera isn't anything until you put a camera operator or a photographer behind it okay a camera is not anything it's a piece of technology and ai is not anything this clip i saw this week created by a friend of mine it was created by a series of very very very funny smart prompts but funny smart prompts that would not have been on television for a year if it hadn't been for this technology so that is a huge thing that ai used by brilliant people is going to create brilliant things so put aside the slop we will deal with all of that um nonsense but there will be amazing works of art created with this that would not have been created without it if you take other jobs so take the job of an editor and you know people are saying this can be hard to be an editor in the world of ai but there's two bits to being an editor and one bit of being an editor is you do an assembly which you take every single bit of footage that's been filmed in a tv studio or a movie or something like that and your job is to go through it painstakingly and assemble it together in the correct order and find particular shots and put them where they're supposed to be now that is a job that can be done by ai right that job can be done by ai in the same way that when i started out editors were cutting bits of tape with you know razor blades and you know suddenly a computer was able to do that bit for them which is why you've suddenly got so many montages yes exactly the montage at the end of something used to be like the most painstaking job and then it was like oh let's have three a day yeah that's so easy yeah get out the elbow cd and we will sort this out.

11:35But the real job of an editor, as anyone who works in the industry knows, is to have an eye and have heart, right? Because anyone can assemble those things in the right order if they're told to. But an editor is somebody, if you've got a great editor, you'll walk in and they will, all the way through, they'll be thinking, yeah, but what is the audience thinking at this moment? And if this shot was a second longer, would they be thinking differently? And actually, if I had that reaction shot, would it change the story? And so editing is an enormously, a large part of it is grunt work which is the stuff that can be done by ai but the great bit about being a great editor or a great grader or anyone in post-production is the heart and the eye and that is something that ai is never ever ever going to have it doesn't matter how great ai gets it's never going to have it you'll always need that uh that that humanity to it and most of the i've spoke to a few ai production houses that's a thing now and they're all they're all employing editors now all of them because they understand that ai will do a certain thing but you first So you need a great producer or a writer to prompt it.

12:33And then you need great post-production to make it amazing. So there are jobs that are new jobs that are going to be made within this world. And there's not an edit suite now that's not incorporating AI into what it is that they do. So new jobs are going to be created. Old jobs are going to be lost. We know that. I would say one piece of good news, they're probably not going to be lost in the next five years because there are enough people who are over 45 in our country to keep the fairly healthy television industry. but i would say below that any entry-level people you better get on board with what ai does in the same way that you know you had to get on board with with digital media you know 25 30 years ago you just had to you you can't you can't be a holdout anymore it it it can't be done but you know i do think the traditional uh media industry has got a while left in it and one of the reasons by the way i think this slightly extends the traditional media industry is there will be a huge cohort there'll be people people listening now who are like i do not want anything to do with ai i want human made things and that i suspect adds a good five ten years onto our traditional media industry just the backlash against what is going what we're about to see sure i do think we're in a situation at the moment in the entertainment industry particularly i've been feeling this more and more where you haven't really got particularly in somewhere like hollywood you don't really have like a middle class as an industry middle class and you've got lots and lots of people at the bottom who were kind of badly paid and actually struggling to find work and suddenly struggling to find work with anything like the consistency that they did before and then you've got the people at the top who are still to some extent like that the cartoon characters run over the cliff but is still earning a huge amount of money and then obviously in societies where the middle class gets completely screwed over they tend to have like revolutions I'm not sure that's the case with industries.

14:24And I don't think having thought, you know, I'm afraid people just become sort of obsolete. Looking at this stuff, it's completely different. And honestly, stuff that you could have laughed at two months ago, three months ago, you suddenly are like, this is ridiculous. A project I'm working on, a project I'm developing is, it's a comedy and there isn't much money for comedy. But the trouble is the location of this comedy is very, very specific and you can't really do it anywhere else. To some extent, people have always cheated things like that. And of course, you build sets and they shot Carry On Follow, that camel in Canberra Sands.

14:56But there's a degree to which you can't. Funnily enough, I went on a walk with my friend Stephen Frears, who was, you know, in his 80s and has made lots of brilliant films and is continuing to make amazing films. And I said, what can I do about this? Is there a way of like using original footage from this location? And he said, oh, no, you've just got to find someone who's brilliant at matching. And people used to do that. And even John Ford used to do it in West. It's just about where you make the cut and how you do all of that. or for that complicated sort of very very expensive location stuff i mean i was watching people i don't know where it was it looked like a war zone banging down a door shooting a sort of SWAT team going in none of this was real but it was so completely real that it wasn't like honestly three months ago i would have said yeah i mean i've just got this weird vibe that it's not real i didn't i'm afraid to say you'd you'd have to convince me that it was it is now real and that's the horns of the the dilemma right there on that one decision you've got to make because if you're 22 you know what you do yeah which is of course i i you know it's not even going to question it i just fake the location well i want my thing to be made and you can't make it without the location so am i going to you know i that already i feel yeah but i imagine you will push back a little and we'll see if we can get it made because this stuff is still going to get made and premium stuff is still going to get made and human stuff is still going to get made but if i could say one thing above all or else it is going to start to be a struggle to win that argument now.

16:18It already is. Look what they're spending on comedies now compared to what they were before. And, you know, you're having very, very different, by the way, brilliant pieces, but they are of a type because they're small and they're not expensive. It's creatively limiting. It's not sometimes necessary is the mother of invention, as we've discussed many times in that particular genre, which is almost people love to watch, but it's almost dying. And everything is becoming so much cheaper in that, to the point where lots of things just couldn't be made yeah and lots of things are about to be able to be made well and that's and that that's where we are listen it's i feel very very uncomfortable talking about it because because it takes the heart out of an industry that i love and i've worked in for my whole life and on one side i absolutely get the exciting creative creative side of it but on the other side you do think what does this mean yeah for an industry here's a concrete example it's another of my points that very very soon you see the first deal's being done now actors are going to start licensing themselves and writers are going to start licensing their their products in a way that makes things not the wild west take severance right no severance are not doing this but imagine you created severance now and you just had this big hit and it's sort of all set in a fairly you know white environment and you've got a small cast of actors say every single one of those actors has signed a contract that allows an ai use of their image within the world of severance not outside of that but within the world of severance and say you say to the writers we'd love you to write on it you know the showrunner has signed this thing and you know he needs all the work of severance to be inside this gated wall of severance ai now if you have all of those things and that's a fairly easy thing to do for the rest of time severance fans can create their own episodes of severance okay they've got adam scott's likeness they've got his voice they have all the scripts they have every single set they could want they can write scripts that will within six hours can create a five minute piece of severance content which can then go straight back to the severance people which can be shown to severance fandoms um which if it's monetizable severance can make money out of but it allows people to constantly remix their favorite television programs and allows those programs to keep some of the money from that in the same way that video games have these incredible mods that kind of change the games um that i think will definitely happen and in the same way that we've said de lebs that dead celebrities have allowed their life but when i saw that just a couple of weeks ago uh my beloved fin diesel was announcing the final fast film and it's going to be back in los angeles and it's going to have paul walker in it yeah so then how do you think they're doing that and it's definitely not with like they obviously have permission from the family and all that but they're not going to be using bits of found footage from the other things and pulsing them together he's going to be in it in some way well that's it if you're if you're doctor who or something like that and doctor who is slightly harder because so many people are still on residuals and things like that but there are groups of people who aren't if you're doctor who and you can get a core cast of people all of whom would agree to be in the new doctor who ai universe then doctor who can run forever with you know we get fan fiction now all the time it's hugely popular now you get fan videos you get fan episodes you know that is definitely definitely coming if you have something that's already a big piece of IP, if you have something that's already got a big fandom, then that will now live forever through various people remixing what it is that you have done.

19:42I think that definitively is something that is going to happen. And as a slight adjunct to that, I think we're going to find ourselves in a world where everything that was created before the last couple of weeks suddenly has a premium because people know that it was created without AI. So if you've got any movie, any music any tv program that was from pre-ai era that is going to be a holy relic like beethoven or mozart or something like that that is going to be the canon and those are the things that we'll constantly return to time and time and time again and do our own new versions of it and there'll be versions of friends in 200 years time that someone you know has remixed and it's on some streaming service somewhere in the same way that we would go to the royal abbot hall to watch you know Mozart being played in a slightly different way by slightly different people it's going to be a huge boom time if you are already a famous actor that is for sure because you know you don't you will not have to leave your house if you choose to get on board with this and you can choose to get on board with it in two ways of course which is someone offers you a load of money or some great director or some young buck who's 23 who sends you a video and you just go well that's incredible says I need your likeness and you go in the same way I might take a chance with an indie filmmaker 20 years ago okay kid let's see what you can do with that and that is going to grow and grow and grow i think and what will you do all day if you're the actor will you just be like mark warburg and like pray and work out and have showers yeah you go to the gym but also they can really you know like mark warburg can let himself go he can finally go do you know what i the i put so much work in to make himself look like that for like a two-month period and now i can be like that forever and ever and ever people will go nuts in in the age of authenticity if that happens and they see some paparazzi pictures of mark warburg being sort of beached in hawaii somewhere and then they're like what i'm so sorry i've just paid for him to be in daddy's home for and i just don't accept that he looks like this or mel gibson but you know it's films are weird the stuff in films doesn't really happen you know those actors are not i mean they're just human beings pretending to be someone you know it's the whole thing is is an artifice it has been for the whole you know the whole point about the craft of movies and tv is to make you believe something that isn't real is real that's the that's always been the job too unsettling for people no i think it'll be unsettling for people for about two years and then it won't be and then it'll become used to it well and also it will just it just won't look any different to the whole tv schedule just be ai stuff i think tv schedule is different because tv schedule this that's something that i will get onto which is this premium of human made content i don't think we can stop the slop okay i don't think in the world of advertising i don't think in the world of tiktok we i i think the landslide is already coming down the hill and we just you know you you have to get out of the way in tv i think there is still a way to and this is what we have to do to harness this premium on on on human made stuff and if you're the bbc or itv or channel four it's beholden on them i think i think they have to use ai in interesting ways they do there's no point having a blanket bound and they've talked about having tutors that stay with kids from birth through to 18 that learn how they learn.

22:55And that's a useful use of AI, something that would be unimaginably expensive to do in a human way. But I do think they probably have to put an awful lot in place about programs being human-made. If you're going to fake a drone shot on a daytime show that you would not be able to afford, otherwise maybe you can do that. Stop the drone shots. You know my feeling about them anyway. Yeah, I do. Stop the drone shots. Stop every single American documentary starting with a water towel with the name of the town on it. I think that, you know, there has to be sort of a gold standard of human-made programming.

23:27And I think that the big channels have something to do with that. I also think if you're Netflix or Amazon, it's beholden on you to do that as well. Because I know that you're purely commercial organizations. But you got big by backing creators. And you got big by backing camera operators and lighting people and sound people. you know that that's how you made all of your money and you've got to give some of that back now you've got to say there is a premium here everyone's going to experiment everyone's going to do interesting things but you have to support the industry you know because the industry supported you and without it no there's there's none of your money so i think i think that um everyone has to get together and find a way of keeping as many people in jobs as possible one of the things about all of these ai things is you know they say awesome you know it's amazing you can do like all these different camera shots and this are the other very specifically about camera operators i I think someone who I work with called Nigel Saunders, right?

24:17So Nigel's worked in the BBC forever and ever and ever, right? And a lot of the shots you see on TV, he's one of the first people ever to do them, right? They're problem solvers. Again, camera operating is not a non-creative job. It is not pointing a camera. It is absolutely fixing problems, working out different ways to shoot things. And if I was an AI company, those are the people I would be looking to employ right now as consultants, people who've been there, done it all, who've worked with the worst technology, with the best technology. I tell you now that Nigel in his head will have 50 shots that he thinks, imagine the technology where I could do that.

24:52Any camera operator, any sound guy, anyone, they're all thinking about new technology all the time. And what does that mean that I can do? So if I was an AI company, you think, great, Nigel, come in and talk to us about the ways that you could use a camera if there were absolutely no physical restrictions. And that's a guy who'd be able to tell you. And there's loads of people in the TV industry who've got all that experience. And if I worked in AI, I'd be bringing them in on a fat wage as consultants to tell me exactly how to light something, exactly how something should sound. And just all the ideas these people have got in their head.

25:22For a bit you would. And then you wouldn't need them anymore. Yeah, but if someone would get paid an absolute load, then, you know, and also that creates a new job, which is, you know, AI camera operator, which is a, that's a thing. I'm really trying to be hopeful. I'm trying to find ways through it where we protect as many jobs as possible and we protect as much creativity as possible. So I think it's beholden on all of our broadcasters to say that there's a premium on human-made product. That is why it's very, very important that traditional broadcast media has some sort of system where we keep studios open, we keep people employed, we keep a premium on human-made products.

26:02Because it's not like, how do we fight back? The fight has already been had. It's how do we regrow? How do we retrench? But certainly if I was Lisa and Andy listening to this, and I'd worry slightly less about some of the smaller things that you're worrying about, and just go, this is an entire industry that needs looking after, and that there are ways that we can legislate to make this happen. Well, we know the BBC are thinking about this enormously, and they are comparing the sort of tens of billions that's being put in by the US companies into this. And if the government's talking about tiny, tiny amounts, a billion or less, to put into developing the kind of AIs that they might be able to regulate, and that they might be able to use the powers for good, then they're just not even in the same universe as any of this.

26:47And I'm sorry this has been unfocused, and I hope people take it in the spirit in which it's intended, which is, you know, I think we all have to come to terms with it very quickly. And I'd be fascinated. I know so many people who listen to this work in lots of different areas of the industry, some of which we wouldn't have even thought about in this. So anything you do have, any notes you do have or ideas you do have, it'd be absolutely lovely to hear them. but I definitively from this week I think the game has changed yeah you know it is it is we're in an entirely new era of content creation I do think some of that is going to be amazing but um we do need to protect as much of what we've got as we possibly can I completely agree with you it's changed so much I mean I remember when Sora first came out everyone's like oh look at this I mean that looks just like something antediluvian now it's ridiculous and you look at these things you think i i just can't tell that that's not real yeah and again i think my absolute key is if i was 22 this would be the thing that i'd be using and i would be insane not to and we have we have to come to terms with that it also means of course live experiences will be a huge i mean that's they've been growing and growing and growing but the kind of kind of stuff that you can't fake you know going to see oasis live is a much bigger deal than oasis releasing a new album i mean much much much bigger and you know experiential things and you know the growth of podcasts and all this stuff stuff that is so obviously human it cannot be faked you know that that is a huge growth area i've said to you before i think podcasts are massively vulnerable to ai and anyone listening at home do if you have an insight into your particular side of the industry and things where it might be useful that we haven't uh thought of and and particularly areas where it is definitively not going to be useful that we haven't thought of as well it'd be it'd be fascinating to start that conversation yes the email is the rest is entertainment at goalhanger.com and we always look forward to hearing.

28:32Yeah and a real human being will read your emails and that's what we've got five that's a promise five years left of that maybe. Yeah shall we now go to a break. Oh yeah I'm shattered.

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30:43Welcome back, everyone. Should we spend a bit of joy with a tale of poison mushrooms? Well, yes. I mean, the mushroom poisoner, Erin Patterson, who was found guilty in Australia for poisoning various members of her extended family. And to me, it's very interesting because it was held, I don't know if you know about this, but it was held in a sort of tiny courtroom in rural Australia. And yet it grabbed everybody's attention. In Australia, the podcast Top Ten had three network-backed podcasts in it all about the mushroom poisonings. I think even The Guardian did one as well so there were basically four there was Mushroom Case Daily that was the ABC one there was the Mushroom Murder Trial there was the Mushroom Cook already there's been a documentary that they've already had ready to go Channel 9 in Australia Murder by Mushroom they've announced a scripted drama for the ABC the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Toxic and by the way we haven't even got onto Netflix which as we know is the global TV channel and people will be watching this in many, many iterations on Netflix.

31:48And to go back and unpick it, lots of aspects of this and how it sort of blew up were very interesting to me because obviously it's a sensational story. Give us the bare bones of the story. Right. Erin Patterson, who I have to say was a true crime obsessive herself, she invited family members, well, extended family members, members of her husband's family, really, who he was estranged from, including him, to a meal at her house in rural Victoria in 2023. and she served a beef wellington which was laced with death cat mushrooms she had a different color plate to everyone else and despite turning up at the hospital saying oh i'm feeling really bad they found nothing wrong well it was a cover story yes um yeah do you know what i had i'd worked that out my my copper's nose yeah nothing that's past you but she felt really bad as well so there's no way she did it yeah she so three of three of the relatives died one only barely survived um and so she has been now found guilty of murdering her parents-in-law don and gail patterson gail's sister heather wilkinson and attempting to murder gail uh heather's husband who's in wilkinson um and only as i say her husband only managed to um survive i think because he decided not to attend the meal and it just sort of it's one of those things that sort of caught fire and i suppose the story is fascinating and you can't quite believe it all i think what's interesting is how you see news organizations have all pivoted to this so while things like this are happening what we used to call a newspaper a news outlet whatever is already doing ongoing podcasts about this in the same way that they might have done about the Lucy Letby trial in the UK or whatever um and then they are so they're kind of constantly repackaging essentially the same stuff um their journalists are already being picked up as talking heads for future documentaries um but what's interesting to me is you're getting much much closer to the actual event in terms of in the old days it would take a long you know it would have been years before someone did a documentary about this you've just seen the court case that would have would have been regarded as enough yeah and 10 10 years later you might go would you remember that the mushroom thing okay now that courtroom at the end there were so many people from podcasts from you know effectively streaming executives working there were going to be so many competing documentaries about this the first time people really realized this was happening um was in with the fire festival ones now remember the fire festival it's like going to be this kind of gorgeous influencer party in on a tropical island anyway it all went wrong they had to be in sort of disaster tents and they had really bad food and polystyrene things and there weren't any influences there and it was a disaster anyway by 2019 which is quite is incredibly long compared to what we'd expect now that's like ancient both um netflix and hulu had one um it's quite interesting already in that we can start to see some of the things we're thinking they each had ethical issues with each other one of them said well you've paid billy mcfarlane he's obviously a criminal he was the guy who sort of was essentially the figurehead of it you've paid him and he's obviously a criminal or whatever um another one um sorry the the you know swearing alert the festival's original marketing firm were called fuck jerry no yeah that was their name and they'd taken a lot of footage you know to run up to do the adverts for it to stuff that they could put all over instagram so they had all that footage so that'd be all ai these days yeah exactly so they they thought we want to get access to this footage so they partnered with them and And therefore, consequently, in that documentary, can't remember which of the two it was, they got an easier ride.

35:30So what's quite interesting is that already people are becoming much more media literate. And they start thinking about the whole process of documentary making as opposed to just like sitting back and allowing it all to wash over you. So people are starting to think of like choices, methodology and things like that. I, again, I've said this before, but in the wake of the Wagatha Christie court case, Rebecca Vardy and Colleen Rooney, four people, four different production companies asked me if I would write a sort of, you know, I guess a comedy drama script about it. That's just fiction. Yeah. There were obviously lots of documentaries.

36:05There's such a race to get this stuff out here. So news has become IP. News has become IP and it's become IP really quickly. and here's what I think has now happened you know like I just said to you Fyre Festival is supposed to be in 2017 and they got the stuff out in 2019 okay it's reduced so dramatically in recent years this is roughly where I would put it now podcast daily during the trial whatever it is the news event TV special docudrama a week or a month afterwards that's called sort of docu journalism that's a new whole strand the streaming series the proper you know the sort of big Netflix same one that I don't know that that murder guy in in the US or whoever it is one of those cases um three months 12 months is now the outside isn't it you would be I mean how do you think long do you think it's gonna take Netflix to get their mushroom and that not as long as 12 months and that's season two as well of of you know what what happens when it becomes a media sensation yeah so amongst the family so that's that's a series too well scripted drama is one to three years I would say and I mean so what you're doing is in order how to make these things you've got to You've got to make it during the trial.

37:11You're just in that way that we talked about a little bit earlier about how easy it is to do montages and things like that. Now in the trial on people's downtime, you're interviewing journalists as talking head. You're building the framework for either verdict. If she'd got off, which I suppose she could have, you're building the case. Then it becomes something like, I can't believe she got away with it. Or you're building the framework for tell me what happened. Now, there's lots of different things about this. First of all, I do wonder, and I was thinking about this story when we were talking just earlier, what are we actually learning from any of this?

37:39we're stuck in this weird thing where we're essentially just rehashing things that happened 10 minutes ago i don't think we're learning anything at all i don't think we're going in any more depth you couldn't go into any more depth than you did during the trial really um and i think that dystopian fictions they're always set sort of 10 minutes into the future a lot of our culture is set 10 minutes into the past now there's so many things that we're just sort of we can't move on in some weird way we are sort of continually rehashing the very very recent present and i don't think really learning anything but it's like when you're a kid at school which is you know if you've got maths after lunch you're talking about do you remember what the thing does to have at lunch do you remember when you said that to me do you remember what i said that it's that isn't it just it's it's it's completely odd and we're not really and you're just sort of revisiting the incredibly recent past okay but what i really want to talk about as well is the whole ethical issues which i think have come into much sharper focus about it's purely because there are so many of these and they're so splashy you know when that mushroom thing comes out believe me it's going to be in the Netflix top 10 even though we've just been through it and there was a there's a woman her name is Margie Ratliff she is a participant in the documentary The Staircase a mother her mother and she had two step siblings was found dead at the bottom of the staircase in North Carolina and her father her stepfather in fact but the other children's father was charged with murder.

39:05Now, he invited, this is ages ago, he invited a French documentary crew, thinking the more people who see this, you know, and the subsequent documentary was shown in those kind of previous like real documentary spaces, you know, like Canal Plus, BBC4. But it was a sort of cult thing because it was fascinating and these children who'd just been through this awful tragedy were filmed all the time. Anyway, but a lot of people thought that changed documentary making, particularly documentary making around crime. And this is before things like Serial and all of those things, which were podcasts, but they thought that was really interesting.

39:39You could really delve deep in anywhere. And they had all this footage. Now, Netflix bought that in 2018. Now, of course, that becomes a whole, it becomes a huge thing. And then by that point, he was almost getting out. And so they then added two extra episodes. It's resold again. It's streamed in 200 countries. HBO made a dramatized version with Colin Firth, and she was played by Sophie Turner. I mean, I should say she's never had a penny for any of this, but she feels her life has been completely commodified, completely. So she's actually started something called the Documentary Participants Empowerment Alliance because she wrote this incredible article, which I strongly recommend you read, in Time magazine, saying, I was sitting on a plane and I, you know, just because I was in the mood to chat, I talked to the person next to me and said, you know, what are you going to watch?

40:27She was on a long-haul flight or whatever. And this woman said to Margie, oh yeah no I love true crime her hackles are already up because she's thinking so many people come up to her in the street the street already and say so do you think your father did it I mean it's horrific uh and she says I love that one about staircase you know about that man who got away with murder this the person sitting next around the plane and she's sitting there thinking this is so she does say I feel very sorry for the children involved in all of this this woman just doesn't recognize I feel sorry for all the children about that and she said yeah no I didn't really think about that and it's so interesting because so many people people just like us people who listen to podcasts whoever think very carefully i think these days about you know their fashion choices and the ethics of their food choices but the ethics of sort of content choices are something we don't really think about hardly at all in lots of ways yeah and anyway she teamed up some people a documentary maker including one who used to work at the ft and thought this is so weird because you know in a traditional news media setting you've got your relationship with your sources and if they're part even if they're participants in the story you know there's a whole way of dealing with it you've got an editor whereas documentaries are sort of the wild west and anyone can do anything and it depends who's brought up who and people can say sort of what they like about you especially in the u.s well that's that's that's just to give people an idea of the process if people are making these sorts of documentaries there's a number of ways of doing it so so itn for example has a very very fast turnaround documentary unit now and and and it's and it does amazing things but their job anyway is to take all footage of everything so they've got a lot of footage that they're taking in their daily life and they've got all sorts of interviews with people exclusive things and they can put that together and put it out as a documentary or you can as you say you can be in the court and say the mushroom case well there are relatives who you could say can we buy your story and you can tell the story via that person and that you know or there are might be the police officer who was involved and maybe he's retired and you say can we buy your story and you can tell the story via the police officer so so long as you've got your angle in which is i already have all the footage anyway or i bought the story and the rights of someone who has some footage no one's ever seen before or the police officer who has a view on it that we've never heard before you can do that or you can do a very very super cheap here are some talking heads here are some shots we just got from the news media putting them together oh do you remember and then she said this and then she did that which has no insight but you can do all four of those things and people do do all four of those things and yeah that the first thing they're thinking is not how do i be respectful to the people in here by the way lots of these documentary makers are some aren't but they are thinking what's my angle do i have the footage do i have the participants that i can turn this around in two weeks and set it absolutely and the other thing that's changed obviously in a digital era is that lots of times people would make documentaries that I suppose you might have originally categorized as true crime but I think how hard it was to find those things now everything's just clicking away and the algorithm will continue to serve you long ago library staff as long as you like so you can never really escape this and it's interesting so Margie participate in this documentary which I recommend watching as well it's called Subject and there's a really quite compelling moment where she sits in front of the camera and she says I know what I am signing up for by being in this documentary and says what is and yeah it's a lot what you're signing up for and people obviously have no idea and some of the people who've been subject of these documentaries there's another one in this particular documentary um it was the siblings who were sort of kept captive for 14 years and it's the so-called wolf pack and one of those children who is now an adult who I mean again whose life has been completely commodified in this way and will be completely thrown up by the algorithm to anyone who's interested in this sort of stuff forever.

44:13You can never really escape it. Also participates and says the same thing. And I do think that the ease with it is being able to be done, the sheer scale of it and the sheer number of it, the proliferation and the way in which they constantly get served back to people, that you have to push for much better ethical frameworks for these things now. Because Erin Patterson has two children and they won't necessarily understand what they're signing up for. And it's not at all clear. Well, there's that absolute blurring of the lines between. And so you can see how all these things come about. You know, we have drama, then we have documentary, then we have drama documentary, then we have things like the Kardashians, which are documentary, but clearly bits of it are scripted.

44:52So you start to think that anyone involved in any sort of area of the public eye, and a criminal trial is an area of the public eye, are fair game or are part of, you know, just some chess pieces that can be moved around. and no one's thinking that consciously by the way but subconsciously i think we're thinking no we're very used to seeing everyone's private lives on screen and we you you forget that if you're a kardashian you choose to be in that story if you are the yeah the daughter of a of a murderer it is it is not a story you chose to be no part of and you own you know you're the you're you're the kardashians you own everything you control everything you have final edits say you have all of this stuff, which you don't if you're one of those people.

45:33And just the thought of people just coming up to her for her whole life in the street saying, so did your father do it? It's sort of unimaginable. And yet it will be visited upon participants in this case and survivors and all of these things. And it is a real Wild West area of programming at the moment because there is just so much of it. There's so much of it. You go on Paramount, there's series after series of cold case things. some with reconstructions some you know talking to um to victims or families of victims and there's so much my favorite is american detective with joe kender um because that's it is possible to do these things in a um respectful way and it's possible to do these things with the involvement of families and it's possible to tell interesting stories that tell us about our world and and teach us something about our world that are ethically produced that are ethically produced uh but it is it is easier and probably cheaper to do it in a different way.

46:33And by the way, when you see cases like that case of Nicola Bully, who went into the river and just, they had to literally put a cordon around the town because so many citizen journalists of some type or another came and were making content. And as you say, none of those people are thinking of the ethical issues at all. All they're thinking is I'm cleverer than everyone else. Yeah. And there is no framework whatsoever. And victims, survivors, people who are just tangentially related are constantly being sort of falling victim to this Wild West. And there has never been more of this stuff. It is such a like it's just the tiger economy true crime of everything in broadcast.

47:14People can't watch enough of it. and I really think that there would have to be much much more stringent sort of I'd love to see there would be more stringent frameworks around it because you could see with this that this tiny town which is already tiny as you can see it couldn't support the structures couldn't support the massive interest and they certainly won't be any sort of off after event care for any of the people involved in that yeah if I can listen again I'm it's it seems a very weird place to be recommending things but uh we've spoken before about um last stop laramie the um the story of an australian murder it's possible to make great art with great humanity yes about tragic stories it really really is and last stop laramie is is is certainly that yeah it's very very difficult and it's the ease of again it's the ease of which these things can be made that in the old days was completely different it was really hard to make documentaries and also they were pushed into as I say, no disrespect to BBC Four, which I love, or Canal Plus or whatever, but it's really different from being number one on the global Netflix chart for a week.

48:20I love Canal Plus. There, I've said it. But it is obviously different. And I think that something, it's becoming more and more obvious. And as I said earlier, people are becoming more literate to the choices that are made by these documentaries. And whilst people may sort of carry on now, not really thinking about the ethics of where their content is coming from, sometime there will be a reckoning at some point and it could be a horrid one yeah that said i did enjoy train wreck poop cruise on uh on netflix about the about the cruise where the toilets stop stop working and it suddenly becomes lord of the flies very very quickly well everyone in that is so enjoying talking about it yeah yeah everyone in that is loving it that's standing around a little cocktail table going and then yeah then you never guess what happened oh my god they loved it and then they opened the bar yeah there was quite low stakes to some extent i mean I mean, I would not have liked to have been involved in that, but it's not really the same.

49:10No one died on the Poop Cruise. When they came up with the title Poop Cruise, they must have gone, okay, I think we've got a hot one here. I think that's us about done for the day. Do you have any recommendations before we go? I most certainly do. I finally caved to my children, and I watched K-pop Demon Hunters, which is really good. I don't know if you've seen this. It's really torn up the charts, the film charts on Netflix, and it's been really... I've seen the title many times and been intrigued, but not intrigued enough to click. Oh my God. I watched it. It's really funny. The music's really cool.

49:45It's very, very knowing. It reminds me so much. It's made by Sony, actually. And it reminds me so much of those Spider-Verse, the Spider-Verse trilogy of things. It's really good. I recommend K-pop Demon. With kids? Oh, yeah, yeah. It's good. But you don't have to watch it with kids. But it's completely geared towards tween and teenager kids. But it's very knowing and it is funny. And it's very well done. And the story is good. I'm going to combine our two stories this week and give another shout out for human endeavour in television. Just 24 Hours in Police Custody is back on Channel 4. And it only comes out very rarely because we've spoken before about they have to wait for the end of trials before they can have things.