Phone hacking. What happened, who was there, and what is the fallout?

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1:11You've taken the office step challenge a step too far. Don't worry, though. Sierra also has yoga gear. It might be a good place to find your zen. Discover top brands at unexpectedly low prices. Sierra, let's get moving. Hello, and welcome to another edition of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And me, Richard Osman. It's nearly Christmas. It is very nearly Christmas. I don't know if that's going to be news to our listeners. I mean, it depends when they're listening. They might listen a week later, in which case, oh, it was just Christmas. It was just Christmas. Yeah. Either way, we're breaking something here.

1:47Yeah, exactly. Breaking news. You went to Winter Wonderland at the weekend. I did. I was in the 10th circle of hell. It was, you know, go in early and leave early. It's like invading a country, I would have said. But yeah, we got out there with, I think, our dignity intact. So great advice for Winter Wonderland and great foreign policy advice as well. I spent my weekend watching, firstly, loads of Christmas movies on Hallmark, which we'll talk about later, and secondly, watching Michelle Moan, thinking that being interviewed by Laura Kunzberg was a good idea, which maybe we'll cover at some point.

2:18She is some kind of monster, and I'm fascinated by her. Well, someone showed a clip saying, what was she like when she was on Pointless Celebrities and showed a clip, and I had no idea she'd been on Pointless Celebrities. I could not remember it. It was from a long time ago. It was pre-beard. Mine, not hers. But I watched it and she was getting something badly wrong, so lots of people were tweeting it. Really need to call that episode up. Okay. All right. Very good. We're also going to be talking about phone hacking, Prince Harry's partial but really quite significant victory against Mirror Group newspapers for phone hacking.

2:49And we're also going to be talking about the Netflix data, which has been released after people begging for about a decade by Netflix, which shows data on 18 ,000 of the titles available on their platform. And it's called What We're Watching Report. And it's a really fascinating look. And we're going to talk about why it has happened and what it means. And try and make that interesting as well. Yeah, so it all came out, a data dump, I think you'd called it. A lot of information. It's like one of those things when, you know, a government department releases like a 15 ,000 page report because they know that no journalists are ever going to read it.

3:24And this felt a bit like that. There's 18 ,000 shows, but what do you think the main takeaways from it were? I think the main takeaway, that this has been done by Ted Sarandos, who's the Netflix CEO, is the streaming wars are over, kids, and Netflix have won. Once you see all of this stuff, the fact that they are releasing it now, they're doing it to say to any of their competitors, try having an advantage over this, because you won't. You just simply won't. Good luck, Paramount+. Yeah, good luck, many of these other ones. It's quite interesting what's happened to Netflix over the last few years, because obviously, first of all, let's go do a quick reminder of ourselves that they were originally a DVD service by post.

4:00And actually, a lot of people via Netflix got into that idea of box sets. And so they've pioneered, once they came to actually be a streaming service, they pioneered that kind of binge-watching model where they drop all the episodes of something at once because they understood that the audience was there for that. And so they have gone through quite a big sort of weird journey in the last few years. During the pandemic, there was a point at which they were more valuable than ExxonMobil. I'd agree with that. Yes. I use them more. Yeah. Well, do you? We don't really know how much we use. ExxonMobil.

4:30Petroleum products. But then there was a sort of market correction, and people loved calling it a market correction because they thought it being really euphemistic, and they were kind of saying, yeah, yeah, Netflix is really – they're not done for, but they're not nearly as big as they thought. But actually now when you see this, I'm afraid that it's quite clear that Netflix have one, and they are stronger than anybody, and nobody else can really compete with it. They are really the world's first global TV channel. 30 out of the top 100 shows are Korean and Spanish. And part of that is a function.

5:00They have a very weird metric. I don't know what you think about this, Richard. They measure an individual hours watched. Yes, so it's a huge advantage if you're a long-running show. If you've got 10 episodes and you're up against a one-episode thing, then you're going to get 10 times as many viewers, which slightly skews. Various people have written the list. So I think top of the list is The Night Agent. Yes. There's a lot of very, very mainstream shows at the top. It's the stuff that Broadcast Network TV used to put out. Exactly that. You can probably watch it while you're looking at something else on your phone.

5:28It's not the big kind of think pieces and the big sort of billboard shows that they always promised they're going to do. So Ginny and Georgia. That's like a Gilmore Girls reboot. Not reboot, it's effectively like a Gilmore Girls sort of rip-off. People haven't even heard of this show and yet it is enormous. But I think it taps into something which I notice a lot, which I find quite sad in a way. When I talk to a lot of teenagers and I say, you know, what are you watching? They say, I'm watching Gilmore Girls. I'm watching Grey's Anatomy. I'm watching Friends. These shows came out how long ago before you were born?

6:03That turn of the millennium mood. Obviously, there's been a lot of Y2K stuff in fashion, but there's a turn of the millennium mood about a lot of these big Netflix shows, which are, you know, what people are watching, and about the movies that are really big on Netflix. You know, you've got like Adam Sandler, Jennifer Aniston, kind of romantic comedies. insanely middlebrow which I quite like and interestingly these ratings are for the first six months of the year, this six months of the year which will come out soon number one will be a five years old series of Suits Suits has been this phenomenal story because Suits was originally, I think it was there's some sort of channel in America I can't even remember, it's called the USA channel or something like that and Suits was made for that and it starred not actually in a leading role contrary to what you might have assumed if you've never watched it, Meghan Markle, before she embarked on her new life.

6:51I've heard of her. I've heard of her. We'll come to her later. I've done my research. Yes. But Netflix licensed it and it was the runaway hit of the summer. I mean, repeatability is an absolutely huge thing and of course it doesn't cost a huge amount for Netflix to license that show. Much cheaper than making Stranger Things or something and you get bigger ratings for it. I think in the New Year show, when we talk about 2024, I want to talk about why certain shows get cancelled on the BBC and why certain ones don't. So I think like Doctors and Question of Sport are both been cancelled. But it comes back to the same thing.

7:24But it's fascinating, the long tail that Netflix shows what you can do with a long-running, very middle-brow, very watchable television show, which that's what television used to be. And they need that, though. They need that between their originals. They can't make it work unless they have lots and lots and lots of this stuff. One of the interesting things I think that they have done is I've seen someone once describe them as a sort of universal adapter. And also now lots of young people watch TV with subtitles on the entire time anyway. So they didn't mind so much watching foreign language things.

7:57So this is what, you know, Squid Game could never have been this successful when I was growing up in like the 90s. It just wouldn't have been a thing because people just didn't really watch subtitle content in that same way. It would have been a cartoon Squid Game, wouldn't it? But as for why Netflix have done this, I think they've been quite disingenuous. Ted Sarandos has said, oh you know it was quite clear that talent weren't happy now there's lots of reasons why talent why haven't been happy because and i'm a member of the writers guild of america the wga had a strike earlier this year as did um sag sag after the screen writer screen actors rather and what part of that was about residuals now residuals are basically success-based royalties for your tv show and a lot of people said tell us if our shows are here we don't even know on streaming if it's really a hit and if it is a hit pay us more and actually what the wga finally got them to agree to the streamers is that like six people are going to be shown a little bit of data in a room six people from the wga with these incredible kind of cast iron contracts and on that basis they will be able to work out a slight success based residual for streaming the reason ted sarandos has not done this is not because of that i think that this will actually enable netflix to pay less for shows because creators will be told, where else can put your show around the world?

9:10Where else can platform it in this extraordinary way? And I actually think they'll end up paying less for shows. The interesting thing is, I think actors and directors and producers have loved not knowing what their ratings are. My entire career in TV, you get the overnights the next day and it makes or breaks a television show. So loads of times you've done a show and you know the next morning that no one's watching it, you're not going to do another series of it. And with Netflix, you don't know that. And when they're saying, we want to be told viewing figures, well, listen, if you've got a successful show, you will be told the viewing figures.

9:39And no one can prove otherwise until now. As a behind-the-camera person, I think it's a real shame. It's been lovely for five years. Lovely not to know. They had one week in ITV where the overnights broke down and no one could see the overnights. And Footballers Wives had just come out and they didn't know that it rated incredibly badly. It had amazing reviews and so suddenly everyone loved Footballers Wives The next week they understood no one had watched it. But by that point, there was enough momentum behind it that it went on for many series. So sometimes not knowing the ratings is rather nice, isn't it?

10:16It's interesting that very few British shows on the list, probably Black Mirror and Top Boy, pretty much the only one, and the Luther movie, which does incredibly well. But when you think about the shows that people talk about, there's not a lot of them on this list. No. I saw someone tweeting the other day about how You is a huge show and he'd never heard of it. This is a TV writer. And you think, I mean, You, that's a massive show and has been a few years. And that's number sort of three on the list if you count all the series together. And the biggest launch they've ever had, Wednesday, which I didn't see, which Tim Burton did.

10:52It's based on Wednesday, Adams. Yes. I mean, I have seen it. I thought it was really overrated. but they almost didn't give it a second season until it became suddenly they thought, okay, they weren't going to give it a second season. That's the thing that Netflix does as well, which is that they will just happily, well, we're going to talk about this later and walk away. But they weren't at all sure on Wednesday, but it became such a massive hit. But again, that I think almost of teen content. They do a lot of that sort of teen content that kind of hangs around the, like the original, the CW was a network and it had lots of sort of teen content.

11:26They had things like One Tree Hill Smallville, which was a really big show for them. They didn't have Dawson's Creek, but it was kind of like that. They ended up having Gossip Girl a bit later. There's a lot of content on Netflix that's like that, that's meant for teens and meant for people who have those family subscriptions, which is probably the last thing I will say on this is this is very clearly done by Ted Sarandos because he wants to build their ad tier. At the moment, I think they've got 250 million-odd subscribers, and only 15 million of them are on the advertiser-funded tier, and they'll want to grow that because they think they can get many, many more subscribers if they bring them into that.

12:01So being able to give advertisers this data and saying, look at us, is great for their business. And another headline is there's a huge disconnect between the shows that people talk about and the shows that people are actually watching. I don't remember ever having a conversation about Night Agent. I don't remember ever having a conversation or even hearing about Ginny and Georgia which if you put the series together is the biggest show in the world you know Bridgerton's in there but it shows that people are not speaking about no one's talking about Suits over here no you know everyone's talking about Succession I interviewed Jesse Armstrong creator of Succession this summer and he is the first to say you know I've never really made high rating shows which there seems such a disconnect in that because obviously Succession was such an enormous show this year and obviously the last four seasons.

12:46But these are shows that win huge numbers of awards. They completely dominate the cultural conversation. You know, when the big event happened, if you haven't managed to catch season four of September, I'm not doing any spoilers, but when the big event happened, it was covered on the front page of the Daily Mail as an obituary. And there was sort of 15 think pieces on the bag that Cousin Greg's girlfriend had taken inappropriately to Logan Roy's birthday party. And yet it gets lower ratings than Celebrity Antiques Road Trip. It's extraordinary. And this is the sort of disconnect. And this is the disconnect with kind of popular shows and with, I suppose, shows that dominate the awards and dominate the kind of cultural conversation.

13:28It's lovely to have both, though. In fact, can I talk very briefly about terrestrial TV? Now we've talked about Netflix. Please do. We were watching the Strictly Final on Saturday, crying throughout. Best series ever for me. Best final ever. And I just thought it's two hours of absolutely extraordinary television. And again, we talk a lot about succession and slow horses and stuff like that. But this is Saturday night, light entertainment, shiny floor. And it is done so brilliantly by so many amazing people. Everything there from choreography, lighting, hair, makeup, everyone is at the top of their game.

14:03Everyone's going the extra mile. And for one reason only, that's to put on a show. And that's to put on a spectacle. and to put on a spectacle for families, for generations of people. They don't have to do it, but they do do it. And I think that's why I got into television, because television, to me, it is family and home and safety and all of those things. And if you don't have those things, it's dreams and it's ambition and it's all that stuff as well. So I just wanted to mark it by saying to everyone, it made Strictly, well done, because it was absolutely terrific. It brought a lot of people together and a world of a lot of cynicism.

14:34Nice to see a bit of magic. I found myself quite emotional in that speech. That was very lovely, Richard, and I agree. And no, I wouldn't do it. Would you? No, I couldn't. No, no, no. Shall we go for a little break? Yes. This episode is brought to you by 20th Century Studios' new film, Springsteen, Deliver Me From Nowhere. Starring Golden Globe winner Jeremy Allen White and Academy Award nominee Jeremy Strong. Scott Cooper, the director of the Academy Award-winning movie Crazy Heart, brings you the story of the most pivotal chapter in the life of an icon. Springsteen, deliver me from nowhere. Only in theaters October 24th.

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16:21Welcome back to The Rest is Entertainment. Now, there was a little story this week in the press involving the husband of Meghan Markle from Suits. Prince Harry. Prince Harry, you might know him as Prince Harry. He bought a case against the Mirror Group of newspapers, alleging that he and those around him were hacked and stories were published which were based on unlawfully obtained information. Now, the judge, Mr Justice Fancourt, has found in favour of Harry's claim that he or someone around him was hacked. In about half of the incidents he suggested, I think it was 15 out of 33. When we're talking about this case, we have to be very careful for a number of reasons.

16:59many people involved in it have issued denials or forms of denials and it is currently still active in lots of ways because Prince Harry still has cases against newsgroup newspapers which is the publishers of the Sun formerly the News of the World obviously now defunct as a result of phone hacking the Times the Sunday Times he's also got a case against associated newspapers with the publishers of the Mail and the Mail on Sunday and both of those will come next year as will a drama by the prolific and brilliant dramatist Jack Thorne for ITV on phone hacking. Oh, really? Yeah, I don't think that many people know that, but it's coming out and it's based on Nick Davis's book, Hack Attack.

17:38Now... Hack Attack? If we go back, I shall give you a little bit of background into phone hacking. Nick Davis was the Guardian reporter whose stories about phone hacking really broke the scandal open. But what happened was that in 2007, there was a royal reporter, and that's very significant, at the News of the World, a guy called Clive Goodman, and he was jailed for basically this illegal interception of voicemails and a couple of other things in 2007. And the editor of the time of the News of the World, Andy Coulson, resigned. It sort of felt like it was one bad apple. They made it sound like it was one bad apple.

18:11By the way, I worked in tabloid newsrooms, started as a secretary on The Sun, and I ended up also working at the Sunday People very briefly. Relatively briefly, like more than 20 years ago now. I can see that. I used to work at The Guardian and The People, so I would work Monday to Thursday in The Guardian, and then on Fridays I went to The People, which was contrasting. Wow. Is there anything you could pitch them both? Not a lot, I have to say. Bono's got a podcast. Nowadays that would probably straddle the boundary. So Clive Goodman was jailed in 2007, but in 2009 The Guardian, which is the paper I worked for and worked for at the time, started running stories on phone hacking, which was a practice that was sort of known about but hadn't really been covered.

18:57And because newspapers operate in a sort of a murder and they don't like to offend the rest of the club, it really wasn't picked up by that many people, Nick's story, and he carried on with it, but anyway. And funny enough, I was talking to him about it some time later and he said, the editor asked me what I was going to do next and I said, I'd quite like to, I quite fancy going to the EU. I think there's quite a lot of corruption in the EU. I'd like to go out to Brussels. as I'd like to report on the EU. And he was all set to do that. When News International basically said, this is completely exaggerated, all Nick Davis' stories, blah, blah.

19:29They were all, you know, it wasn't anything like an industrial scale, like he said, this didn't happen. And he just thought, huh, what? Well, hang on. Hang on. He thought, I'll leave the EU for a while. That's going to be there for a long time. That's not going anywhere. I'll go back to phone out. And he went back to it and he started digging again. And it was in that second tranche of stories about it that it was reported by Nick Davis and Amelia Hill that Millie Dowler, a schoolgirl who disappeared and was later found to be murdered, while she was disappeared, knew the world had hacked her phone.

20:03And that was the story that just took it completely mainstream. That was the lightning rod. Just an unbelievable sort of wave of public revulsion. It became clear that it had been done to almost everybody, phone hacking. I have to say that it's really hard thinking back to that time because it was done to absolutely everybody. It was the editor's phones were hacked. Other journalists' phones were hacked. My phone was hacked. What did they find out? I don't know, but all my messages had always been listened to. Always. If they'd had the mobile number of Rupert Murdoch, they would have done it to him.

20:35And it's really weird to sort of think back to that time because I suppose the big irony of phone hacking is that the little bits of tittle-tattle that they gleaned from it were of nothing importance. The really big story is that there was a criminal enterprise as part of one of the pillars of the establishment, I suppose, the press, against other people in public life. And it was massive and it was widespread. That was the era. Phone hacking was the era defining story all along. Not some stupid argument Prince Harry had with his girlfriend or Kylie Minogue had with her boyfriend. Piers Morgan, who was at the Mirror when this was all happening, has issued a very, very vehement denial, very carefully worded denial.

21:16He's admitted in print and in interviews that he knew what phone hacking was. He knew how it was done. He had heard messages that had been attained in that way but he is saying that it was nothing to do with me. I never commissioned any. I suspect he's not going to back down. I suspect Harry is not going to back down because he's fired up by the fact that his mother was killed and he thinks that the press was somehow complicit in that. So he's never going away. It's made me think a lot about that sort of groupthink where it's hard to explain, but a lot of those people will have thought that they were sort of doing God's work and that someone, this is how odd it is, not telling them that they've had a miscarriage or not wanting to discuss their cancer treatment means that they are lying to the journalist.

21:59and that lie, consequent, I hope you can hear the sarcastic air quotes here, but I'm putting them in, and that that lie needs to be exposed. And it's made me think a lot about how a kind of heard, awful groupthink can result in people just doing really criminal things by any means necessary to get, I mean, really completely ridiculous stories. And I think in the 90s and noughties, the newspapers were sort of the masters of the universe in a lot of ways. They were awash with money, circulations were high, very different to now where essentially they're sort of click farms and they know they are as well so I think then you know they were riding high and anyone coming into that newsroom you sort of fit into the culture that's there and I genuinely think that a lot of the people who were involved think they are innocent they're able to say I did nothing because in their heads they think they did nothing or they think that what they did was fair game because it's what everybody else did and it was the culture at the time.

22:58And I think they think it would be very unfair for me to go to prison. It's really fascinating. He's got this sort of kind of kamikaze mission. And whatever you think of Harry, and I often think he's a kind of complete pain, but you can kind of understand how he got that way. There's something quite heroic about this. They found the one person, because so many people, for quite rightly, by the way, this is no shade on anyone who's settled out of court for phone hacking, because not going to court is one of the best things you can ever do in your life but this he will not back down and so it's sort of fascinating to he's stuck in a lot of cases because the evidence is not what we might wish it richard the evidential picture i think uh news international had a unexplained sort of email deletion the day before they handed all their stuff to the police what are the chances boris and rishi's whatsapps all over again and and mirror groups have had a huge deletion and um obviously the police at the time a little bit like the old death of a spinal tap dramas sort of felt it best best left unsolved because of course there's a big revolving door between former police chiefs being given kind of columns in um particularly in the case of Murdoch newspapers but also there were there's significant amount of payment between the police and journalists there were police officers arrested there were nhs workers arrested There were people from all sorts of places that might have access to private records arrested at the time as well.

24:19But again, best left unsolved, it always seems. So the one thing I do think is interesting in terms of what this story means and where it's taken us in terms of something quite simple, which is entertainment journalism. And you mentioned Andy Coulson, Piers Morgan. Actually, when they were celebrity showbiz reporters, this sort of practice of phone hacking didn't exist. They were of a different generation of people who had to get stories and scoops and scandals. And if you like stories and scoops and scandals, which I do quite like, the marmalade droppers, you had to go out to parties, you had to meet people, you had to make friends with people.

24:55And you had to hope, there'll always be people who want to sell stories for revenge or for money. But otherwise, there are people who want stories in the press for one reason or another. Or you can just try and track it down in the old fashioned way. And there was a generation of reporters who could do that. And you got some you had sort of fascinating and fun stories often. But after that, the phone hacking thing, you had an entire generation. I'm not saying every entertainment journalist at that time was involved in phone hacking. But there was a whole generation of entertainment reporting that was essentially based on phone hacking.