Quiz show cheats and could Bullseye return?

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1:25Hello and welcome to The Rest is Entertainment, questions, editions. Questions and answers edition. Yes, yes. Lovely to have you here. Thank you very much because last... Not you. I didn't mean it's lovely to have you here. Of course it is. I met people listening. Now, any other business, we're starting with any other business, which is the wrong way about it, because last week we talked a little bit about cooking shows and food being what temperature is it served to the judges. And Jay Rayner, cooking show judge and listener to the show... Fan of the pod. Fan of the pod. Has written in and he says, Richard is right that it's often not exactly piping hot, but that's only part of the story.

1:58Food show producers go out of their way to present the dishes to the best their advantage. If an ice cream is involved, it will be stored in the freezer. Oh my God, you know what? They say TV producers are thick. Where's the ice cream? It's in the oven, I think. Okay, if it's a chocolate fondant, which might go solid if left too long, it is prioritised. But the food we eat in the MasterChef critics' chamber, however, is served hot. It's staggered start for the chefs, as it was when the critics cut it off against each other for the glorious special broadcast between Christmas and New Year. Usually there's a gap of about 40 minutes, so you're allowed to eat the food straight from the kitchen.

2:29But there are other ways. A couple of years ago, Jay was a guest on the huge global cooking show for Netflix called The Final Table, which weirdly didn't get recommissioned. I imagine. OK, he's being ironic there. Each episode was themed to a different country with appropriate judges who rode a judging platform that rose 90 foot into the air. Surely not. Sounds brilliant. I must dig it out. My colleagues for the British episode were Kat Dealey and Sunbrook called Gary Lineker. The choice of judges was, I believe, anybody British with a valid O visa. on that show the judging on camera was going to take so long that there was a pre-judging in a room off the floor the moment the food was finished so it was hot and i hope that helps that really does help and that's like um eurovision isn't it the uh the juries watch the rehearsal and you watch the live one aha i didn't know that yeah it's exactly the same as the final table with jay rayner kat deely and gary linnecker thank you jay that's very kind of you okay i've got a question for you richard that comes from donnell who wrote get sent this one on on twitter what is the cheapest type of tv show to make his guess is that it's a chat show like wogan or norton presumably the main expense is the presenter's fees would the guest typically charge a fee or is exposure for their book film etc payment in kind it's a very good question um chat shows are actually quite expensive for a couple of reasons firstly you know if you want to get american stars over you have to fly them over first class and their entourage over first glass and put them up in incredibly nice hotels but mainly because you only film one at a time and the way to make cheap television is to make five of them in a single day so quiz shows are probably the cheapest just you know the most expensive thing about making a tv show is the studio and the crew in that studio and if you make one show a day the studio cost is exactly the same as if you make five shows a day so quiz shows are probably the cheapest they're certainly the cheapest in terms of bang for your buck because they rate very very highly and they're crazily expensive to make clip shows if you own the catalogue of the clips are very cheap to make if you're the bbc and you own top of the pops it's very cheap to bung a few kind of chyrons across a top of the pops and say give us a fact about shawaddy waddy that's cheap essentially anything in a studio is fairly expensive and unless you make a lot but things like you know bargain hunt is not crazily expensive.

4:42But yeah, chat shows, weirdly, are very expensive. All right, you've mentioned bargain huts, so I've got to go on to another question, which I think is quite interesting, this one. Kath Venable says, why is there so much antique-related programme for me? That's a good question. Why would you think? I don't have the answer, by the way. It is hugely popular. Funnily enough, I suppose, this isn't a reason why it exists, by the way, but it's people in the antiques trade, and I have talked to someone in the antiques trade about this, who's really funny about it, who said that basically people now come in and they've learned what they believe is the negotiating technique, which you're very funny on, from bargain hunt or whatever.

5:22And so they say, no, you know, I've seen this on bargain hunt. What's your best price? I should get this, you know, I should get this discount. He's like, yeah, yeah, but for the same reason you were saying on a previous episode of this show, the reason people are getting those discounts is because it's, you know, you're on television and this is the sort of thing that happens on television. Another thing he said that happens is that people, So people have learned because of those shows how they think they negotiate with these people. It's obviously been great because it does send people out into the business.

5:46And it's been a boost for kind of fares and all sorts of different types of sales. But also, if people feel they have a piece that's similar to something, we'll send photos of it and we'll say, as seen on, you know, salvage hunters. And therefore, we'll expect the same price. And again, he's like, yeah, the reason you're not getting the same price for the thing is because this happened on television. So whilst it's been brilliant for the trade, a lot of people have had to sort of say, yeah, it doesn't happen quite like this off the television. It's not exactly representative. And also, you know, it's very hard to pick up three things, retail, and then sell them at auction for a profit.

6:20It's like insanely difficult. And it's not necessarily the thing you do. But it's also one of those things that's got an amazing hook. The key thing with formats is ask a question in the first five minutes, which is not going to be answered till the last five minutes, but that you want to know the answer to. and it's almost impossible to see someone buy like a brass plate for 15 pounds and not think oh i wonder what they're going to sell that port you know but this it eats away at you i was watching one where they bought like this old bicycle with a with a shop sign on it and they they'd really smashed too much they paid 175 quid uh and i honestly i had somewhere to be but i thought i'm gonna have to watch to the end because i think they're gonna lose money i think that's crazy they spent 175 pound this they've asked me a question that i want to know the answer to and i'm going to have to wait through six other purchases and then i'll find out and actually that bite sold for about 220 so he did a great job but the beauty of all this is all the antique shows almost all of them end with an auction so every single time you're shown something at home you can kind of go ask clarice cliff and is uh but is it it's not a full set it's a tiny and there's a tiny little chip isn't there i'm gonna go a 70 to what if they paid 90 i don't think so uh antique shows have got a great little hook which is you've got something you can have an opinion on that and at the end you discover if it makes money or loses money and you're pretty happy either way yeah okay a question uh for you marina by the way can i just say the questions we get are so good yeah but if you have sent something we've literally got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds so there are plenty that we will get to in time.

7:56But please do keep sending them in. Exactly, because every week there's like a new one, you think, oh, we have to answer that. Kenny asks, when I watch football on TV, after a goal is scored, they always have a full replay of each manager reacting, starting from before the goal is scored to after. Does this mean it's the job of two people to each track only them with a camera and nothing else for the entire match? Well, I think this is a brilliant question. I'm going to come on to another little bit related to it in a minute, but some people connected with this podcast do have something to do with football.

8:27And so we've been quite lucky. Yeah, quite lucky to have Rory Stewart has given us this. No, he's given us this fantastic answer, which is since the advent of Sky, live matches have been covered by an increasing number of cameras, including one which is called the reverse camera. So this is actually on the opposite side of the pitch that the normal broadcasters' cameras are on. So you can't really show anything from it because otherwise it would look like all the players are running in the wrong direction. So the biggest job of the reverse camera is to get reaction shots from the benches, which are usually positioned on the same size as the main cameras.

8:58However, with the advent of the manager as a major character, which I sort of love, which is sometimes more important than players themselves. Main character energy. Yeah, huge main character energy. And the game's been up by broadcasters, often with two cameras covering the benches permanently. So that's why there are so many reaction shots. Now, a brilliant movie critic called David Thompson, who's also a big Chelsea fan, and he wrote a very interesting book about television. And I really love the way he talked about the evolution of football after it became essentially, as it is now, a television event, because so many people, obviously people have been priced out.

9:31And most people experience in this country, experience football as something that they see on television because it's very, very, it's much harder to get to the games. Now, what's interesting is how that has affected what you see, which is that footballers have become like performers. Their celebrations are far more operatic than they ever used to be back in the days when it wasn't. So many cameras now track them. they know that they are being filmed and they are part of a system of slow motion and close-ups and it has affected how they behave and they are far more operatic in the way that they behave which is very interesting what I find also very interesting is that now when I watch my son if he misses he turns really slowly away and puts his hands up to his head really slowly in that slow mo disappointment shot that he's seen so many times so I find it really fascinating the way it percolates down also i was literally just think as you're talking there there was a thing they used to have on football shows which has percolated into our culture now which was the tense in which a footballer would talk about when watching their own goal back oh yeah i've gone down the wing i've crossed it linic has headed it in i was delighted you know so there's a weird tense and now that's what they do on reality shows if you watch the traitors for example they will be showing a round table and they will cut to someone in an interview going and i'm thinking what on earth's going on the footballers tents has come into the TV writer jack rosenthal used to call that the football continuous it's as though it's always happening while it while while we're all everything is happening now and always well that's all american reality shows and now uk reality shows are in the are in the footballers continuous the studio shows by the way it's a similar thing you will you will if you've got say two panels and a host you'll have a camera which is called an ISO which will constantly be showing the host and there will be two cameras which are ISOed on the two teams so you get the two shots and then you have three roving cameras who are picking up other shots so yeah you will often have an ISO camera which is just picking up the thing that in the edit you know you're gonna need in football it's live but in you know any sort of entertainment show it's just so wherever you are you can go via any of the people on the screen via ISO cameras and sometimes they're locked off which just means they don't even have a camera operator so people don't get bored i worry about a camera operator just on an iso camera because that's not fun that's like that's like all day here's another one for you marina stewart patterson asks what does it mean when on-screen talent gets an executive producer credit in the latest season of true detective matthew mcconaughey and witty harrelson both get credits even though they don't appear in the show what do they actually do for that asked stewart aha well okay that's a good one what i i don't know the specifics of this but what will have been the case is that they were obviously the stars of the first season of True Detective.

12:12And in order probably for that show to get greenlit originally, you would have had to have had two big names attached. And part of the deal that their agent got them was that they would be named an executive producer. It's to some extent a vanity credit. And they will take money probably, even though, you know, the new season, which I must actually look at, apparently it's fantastic with Jodie Foster in it, but it wouldn't have got off the ground had they not been attached. which you'll see a lot of writers known as different types of producer. I'm currently working on an HBO show in which I'm an executive producer.

12:44It essentially means writer. There are some extra things you might do, but really production in the sense that anyone from the outside would understand it is being done by someone who is a proper sort of line producer and will find the locations and will deal with the studios and the sets and the builds and all those difficult things. The thing you need to understand, I guess, about US showbiz particularly is this is unbelievably unionized. And so part of the reasons why writers are given sort of things like different types of, you know, you go down the credits, you get executive producer, co-executive producer, supervising producer, consulting producer, all of that can basically just mean writer.

13:20WGA and agents really push for those because you get different types of fees. And it's a way of being credited. That is a medium that really venerates writers, I guess, and particularly a broadcaster that does HBO. I mean, Will Ferrell is listed as an executive producer of Succession and you'll see his name up in the title and think, what's Will Ferrell got to do with the show? In fact, Adam McKay, who directed the first episode of Succession and set a lot, you know, whoever directs the first episode is very significant because it creates the whole sort of visual tone of it and the way the camera moves.

13:49And, you know, a lot of that was sort of, you might think was quite influenced by The Big Short or whatever, which is an Adam McKay film. So Will Ferrell has been, as a producer, he has a production company with Adam McKay and he's been on there right since the start. Sometimes the awards people, I am told, can get quite fussy about people turning up to awards ceremonies when they're listed as executive producers or whatever on shows who clearly don't have any form of involvement with the show at all. And they can be really quite sniffy about it, but some people still turn up and still try and, you know.

14:20So to answer the question, what do Matthew McConaughey and Willie Harrelson do for their credit? They bank the checks. Yeah, they bank the checks. Now, that's what they do. But they got it made in the first place. Exactly. They're the ones that made the money in the first place. Okay, now let's go into a break. Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from EBCLIS. After an initial dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking EBCLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.

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16:36Welcome back, everybody, to this question and answer episode of The Restless Entertainment, or the questions episode if you are Marina Hyde. Richard, this is a really good one. Tom Adcock says, cheating in quiz shows do you think it happens have you ever suspected it and any sympathy with the theory that charles ingram who obviously famously was accused and found guilty of cheating in millionaire who wants to be a millionaire it that he's innocent it's a good three-part question i'll take the last part first no i don't believe he's innocent uh i think he was absolutely bang to rights one of my lovely um producers i won't name her just just in case it's sub judicy but um she was the one who walked past the window as he and his wife were discussing what happened and the wife was berating Major Charles Ingram for making things too obvious and messing it up.

17:21So she was one of the star witnesses in court. Yeah, I mean, he definitely did it. When they did the... Sorry, I've got a little tiny something on this, a snippet. When they made the ITV drama Quiz, which was written by James Graham and directed by Stephen Frears and was sort of absolutely brilliant, it was a huge hit a couple of years ago, people from within Cellar Door said they no longer think it was done by coughing, but they know he cheated. However it was done, yeah, he definitively cheated. It's quite hard to cheat on quiz shows, mainly because you are mic'd up all the time and your sound is isolated to the booth.

17:55So if we're presenting Pointless, for example, and somebody is talking, then we can hear it. On the Pointless celebrities, people cheat nonstop. We once had someone on, and I think it was Anna, said, oh, you need to stop conferring. and she said we're not conferring we're just talking about the answers so okay uh but honestly occasionally it's it's it's like running a south london minicab office sometimes in my ear during point of celebrities because everyone's sort of chatting away it's really hard to cheat i would say it's i guess you could hack into where the questions were i don't know where you'd find them and they are very siloed as well you know they're they're sort of taken care of i have all the answers written down so you could you know i turn them over if anyone's anywhere near but you know no one's cheated as as far as i've known there was one tv show i can't remember what it was called but it was produced by a guy called um david young who did the weakest link and stuff like that and um they'd filmed i think 50 of them and a camera operator on the last episode just said i think if you're on podium four you can just about see the presenter's screen there was no indication that anyone had cheated but the fact that if you were on that podium you could there's a you could sort of lean and see the screen david young said i'm scrapping everything i'm going to fund a whole new series it's not you know i can't because it's bbc and i don't want anyone to be accused of cheating he said he'd just been paid 40 million quid for his company so he was he was all right um but you know he just said look it's it's the integrity of the show is absolutely everything it is on all those shows so he said I'm funding a whole new line of the series I want to say I went back and saw how many podium fours had placed it I mean my understanding is there was no evidence of that at all I have that thing on my screen on House of Games like anyone's going to cheat on House of Games which means you can't see a screen from a certain angle you know that sort of privacy screen it means I can barely see it when I'm looking at it but yeah really really hard to cheat on quiz shows Popmaster they all cheat on don't they you could hear that if one Ken Bruce's pop master that the occasional person is on Wikipedia that, you know, they'll say, who had a hit with Too Shy in 1981?

20:11They go, oh, I don't know. Kajagugu? Yeah, yeah, it is. I guess it is Kajagugu. But so, you know, you can cheat on that. But, you know, if there's no big prizes, it doesn't really... That's why on House of Games, there's no cash prize or money for charity just so people can do what they want. marina i have a question for you i am going to demand an answer it's from adam ford there is no question that they are good but is it really the case that no one else apart from ant and deck has done enough in the last hundred years or so to deserve a best entertainment show gong discuss okay i guess this is about ant and deck winning the national television awards whatever they the nta's every single year for the last 22 i can't remember what the exact number is but it's it's a huge number of years i guess the thing is they present the biggest shows on television and it is a voted for by the public award.

21:03Now, do I think that that is open to gaming? Should we put it? I mean, they don't have the UN election officers taking a look at this particular voting. So I suppose you can vote early and vote often. It often skews quite ITV heavy. I'll just say that. Do they have armies of voters? You know, are there Macedonian troll farms pulling down the other elections just to do the NTAs? It's possible. I must say there is clearly you can sort of as I say you can vote early and vote off and so that sort of thing could be manipulated having said that they present the biggest shows it would be nice to think that Claudia Winkleman might get it for the traitors one year because I think that maybe that's maybe it will turn out that that's been the biggest show if if they don't and it continues to be ITV heavy I suppose at some level we must have our own suspicions but yeah I will also say that they sort of demonstrably are the best as well and whether they're 22 years in a row the best i don't know but i think of our generation they are the the greatest presenting duo i mean they're just amazingly great at what they do but um and they've had the best shows yeah and that it's very hard to get past those two facts the best shows and the biggest rating shows and once you have all of those it's quite difficult to imagine in a voted for by the public award in a sense they're voting for the public every time they turn on to one of their shows and that's why they are the biggest rated um so i suppose it's but obviously the hegemony must be broken at some point exactly finally you said it right let's end with this question from mary wilson brown given the surge in interest for darts and bringing back old shows do you think we'll see bullseye being revived and if yes who do you think will make a good host um i mean they did bring it back with dave spiky yeah as host i mean yes i guess that a channel would bring it back you know it's like one of those things we always say oh they should bring back blockbusters and you're going to go yeah they they bought it back like five times yeah simon mayo did it lisa tarbuck did it uh dara obreen did it these shows that sort of come back and then slightly disappear i think that probably it wouldn't have the mass appeal of a gladiators for obvious reasons it's some quiz questions and then some people throwing darts so i would guess no and what we want as we discussed before is that what people really want now is people will love the series behind the scenes in darts you know the drive to survive of darts would be a much more fascinating thing the kind of tastes have changed to some extent and people will love that i think that will be very i think that'll be fascinating to see how that does actually yeah but i i don't think there's a rush to bring back big break or um big break or bullseye anytime soon there's a there's an amazing true crime documentary which is called the bullseye killer which is a guy who appeared on bullseye so they just got loads of clips of him on bullseye then he's a murderer you think that i don't and the bullseye thing has nothing to do with the rest of it's correlated not causal yeah yeah exactly jim bowen was not involved give him a break at any point so you'll never beat you'll never beat jim bowen and nor should you want to nor should you want to thank you so much for listening again do keep the questions coming in the rest is entertainment at gmail.com we will see you next Tuesday for our regular episode.

24:19I hope you enjoyed this one. Yep. Keep those questions coming in. Thanks so much. Bye-bye. Bye.

24:40During that conversation, we're like, well, I wonder if it's the same with AI, right? Are we using a lot of power in AI that's not giving us a great benefit. And that's really what sort of kicked off a series of research efforts around this, trying to understand how do we make things more energy efficient? So this was the 21st century equivalent of Newton's apple falling from a tree. Join me, Chris Hadfield, on the On Energy podcast. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.