Robot Horses and Banning Wikipedia

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1:24Hello, and welcome to the Rester's Entertainment questions and answers edition with me, Marina Hyde. And me, Richard Osmond. I'm not sure I like it that you keep saying questions and answers. No, I don't like it either. I think I'll just go back to the mistake. You've got to have a catchphrase in this business. My catchphrase is a mistake. Yeah. Monkhouse understood it. That'd be right. We need to understand it. Right, we must begin with some any other business. Jonathan Harvey writes in to say... The Jonathan Harvey, the writer. Now, this I don't know. I don't know. His name is Jonathan Harvey, and he's actually written something that's not quite accurate, so I'm afraid...

1:54Uh-oh. It sounds like a writer. It's got an interesting fact in it. It says, following your What Makes a Star conversation, the term star comes from Paramount Pictures, which the stars are in their logo. They made it policy to have a specific number, 24 at the time, of leading performer contracts and these were represented by the stars on the logo. So you had only made it if you got a contract and became a star. Okay, it doesn't come from the Paramount logo, the word star and why we talk about things. I mean, think David Garrick, the actor who lends his name to a club that's been in the news a little bit recently.

2:25I'm not a member and I'm assuming you're not. Yeah, not yet. But he was referred to as a star and that was back in the late 1770s. But it was true that those stars do represent the contracts. People were contracted by Paramount back in the sort of 1910s, I think. But there was a cricketer who was called a star in 1832, even described in a report about his bowling as a star. And actually the first used as a word celebrity was by Chaucer. No. Yeah. He was translating some Boethius, strangely getting his first shout out on this entertainment broadcast. Boethius, is that a... I can't believe it's a writer, is it?

3:00Yeah, Boethys is a philosopher. Oh, and he was... And Chaucer was translating one of his famous works. About Joe Swash. And about a celebrity of renown was the actual phrase. And that was the first use of the word celebrity way back in about 1400. Wow. Which you don't think of. But anyway, there it is. So like two years after Canterbury Tales, he brought out Celebrity Canterbury Tales. Celebrity Canterbury Tales. There's never a TV show, every single TV show you ever make. It used to be you'd do like four or five series and they'd go, can we do a celebrity version? Now you do like three episodes and they go, maybe we do a celebrity version now because then people will actually watch it.

3:33There was a little bit more of a run in time back then in the 1400s. It took a while before they were all slagging each other off on a talking head show. I tell you what I want to do. I want to replace The Wife of Bath with Jackie Stallone. That would have been, if I'd listened, if I'd been the TV exec back in Chaucer's day. Yeah, you would definitely do it. Yes, sorry, please continue with that line of thought. You would definitely do celebrity Canterbury Tales. Oh yeah, why have they not done it? Well, they do pilgrimage. That's essentially what that show is. they have celebrities and they do various religious pilgrimages.

3:59Yeah, I mean, I do think it is less good than the Canterbury Tales, and I'm sorry if I'm just going to put that out there. You think that celebrity pilgrimage is worse than the Canterbury Tales? Yeah, I do. Okay. Wow. My God, finally, we've come up with something we disagree about. We disagree on this big time. But listen, we've done enough Boethius and Chaucer on this entertainment podcast today, Richard. Can we please move on to another question? Yes, let's do that. See, Jonathan Harvey, I bet it was the writer because he caused so much trouble. Okay, I have a question for you, Marina. I wonder if they'll keep in the stuff about Celebrity Canterbury Tales and the philosopher.

4:32Let's find out. What was his name again? Boethius. Boethius. Yes, he's a philosopher. He's like a really genuinely big time philosopher. Oh, really? A lot of people pronounce it Boethius, of course, don't they? But yeah, it's Boe. Graham Tong has a question for us. Great. Fingersly, Graham Tong. Hit me up. Graham asks, my question relates to clapper boards, more than likely replaced by electronic boards, which no longer clap. What exactly are they used for? Outside of a precursor to the word action, is there a function in editing? Yes, very, very important. And the reason it's important is less so for editing, although that is a part of it, but it's in order to sync the audio and the visual together.

5:10There was some Australian guy way back when, a filmmaker called F. W. Thring, who came up with this idea that if you have the thing and the sound, because they recorded the sound and the visuals separately, and even if there are systems now in which they can record the two together, and actually for a while they did a magnetic strip on film, but it was unsatisfactory. Things go wrong and they still have to sync it manually. It is a really important job. It is done by the second assistant camera operator. At the start of every single take, it happens and there is a clap. And they'll say something like, 104.15.3 take two, B camera roll.

5:43Sorry, no, B camera mark is what they say. And there might be two cameras and it will need to be done for both cameras. And it's a very, very important thing. and it's amazing how often apparently they do end up still using the two files together to sync it. Yeah, if ever you're doing a documentary or anything as well, you'd always do it. I mean, by and large, we even do it on this podcast for the YouTube bit. So we use the old-fashioned thing of not a board. We use our hands to clap. But yeah, it's one of those. It's amazing, isn't it? Because I've never really thought about it because it's incredibly analogue still.

6:10But yeah, you never ever see anything. Yeah, and it's written on and they're called slates mainly, not clapperboards. But it's absolutely vital and it happens so many multiple times a day and there are two cameras or whatever, however many cameras there are on your show. And the first assistant director will call for quiet and then calls the role and the camera's rolling and the sound's going. And then you will see the clap aboard and then the action will be called. And it's every single time. It's also exciting. Yeah. Because there's the moment before it goes clap and there's the moment after and they're two entirely different moments.

6:41Yes. Quiz questions, Richard. Oh, yeah. Poor Caster has written in to say, where do various quiz shows obtain their quiz questions? it's a huge industry actually if you have a look at the credits to tv shows you'll you'll see the same names come up again and again and again um you'll have a team of question setters who are full-time on the production so you know on pointless essentially that's all year round because pointless is very hard to write the questions because you have to write them you have to send them off to a polling organization they have to come back you then have to go through them and see categories where no one knows anything or categories where too many people know too much you then have to work out how to sort of put that into the show.

7:19And then your job on the show is to make sure that every single question is written out and there's a little fact about each one. And, you know, so it's a huge job. It's not just sitting around in the morning and go, why don't we ask what is the capital of Belize? Bell, my pen. So it's a huge job and the people who do it are incredibly, incredibly smart. Quite often people will say, you've got a fact wrong on Pointless this week. I noticed you said X, Y and Z. And, you know, occasionally you look into it and go, So, oh no, it turns out that you got it wrong. It wasn't the question setters. They'd actually gone further than Wikipedia.

7:51Every single question has to be verified by three different sources, none of which are allowed to be Wikipedia. And that's a whole other job, question verifiers. That's another industry where, you know, you'll send through a whole tranche of questions to people. They will go into their local library, not really supposed to use the internet, find out the answers, verify the answers, send them back, and then that's all verified. Are you not supposed to use the internet? No. Because it's so untrustworthy? Yeah, exactly. you're supposed to go back to like you know primary sources as and when you can it's a time to crack a nut in some places i think but that's why you know some questions have very weird phrasings like they say you know which actor appeared in this film in this year so you have to be very specific sometimes about certain things and then you get show like house of games which i mean house of games the whole idea of it was that question setters are so brilliant i wanted to give them something fun to do yeah they get to write limericks you know they get to write spoonerisms they get to do rhyming answers, they get to do all sorts of ridiculous things, because they're a brilliant gang, brilliant on a pub quiz team as well.

8:46But yeah, it's a real skill. They're super, super smart. You know, people always go, I could write questions. And, you know, it's definitely a job that you can do, especially these days, we try and get people who, you know, who can work from home as well. So, you know, it's very kind of inclusive. But what's your favourite quiz shows? Look at who writes the questions, write to the exec producer. But it's Really, really, really, really hard. I would say that. It's not sitting around and coming up with some questions. And that's fun. The first bit of it is creative, but after that it's an absolutely hard slog.

9:19But they are the unsung geniuses of all quizzes. People sometimes say, do you write the questions for Pointless? I think that's honestly a full-time job. Absolute full-time job. You've got the air of someone who writes the questions at Pointless, and that's pretty nice to get away with. No, hold on a minute. The other nice thing on House of Games is I reference them. all the time as well. If ever there's a particularly good question, I'll always say there they are in their lair. So yeah, they're my absolute heroes, the question writers. And point is we ran out of questions very early on. We ran out of lists, which is why in series two onwards we ask specific questions and then ask them to a hundred people because really, really quickly we ran out of stuff because we didn't think it was going to go beyond the first series.

10:01So we threw every, you know. This will be a great problem to have if it goes any further. Yeah, because you can only ask about Tom Cruise films once. But yeah, we completely ran out of stuff. And that's again where question setters come into their own because they're brilliant at the kind of problem solving and what have you. Marina, one for you from Andrew Matthews. It says, recently the centre of London was closed down for the filming of another Mission Impossible film. Slightly judgmental, another, in Andrew's question. What is the process producers must follow in order for that to happen? Who do they approach, particularly when it is Westminster and right outside the Houses of Parliament?

10:32Do the local councils get paid? Yeah, I saw this. Tom Cruise with a bloodied shirt running across Westminster Bridge. You will have noticed, Andrew, that it was at night. Obviously, you cannot do it in the day. Although famously, there are, is it 28 Days Later? Cillian Murphy, is he going across Westminster Bridge? Or one of the bridges. But if you look at a lot of those shots, and it looks like daylight, and it's a completely deserted place. I think there's one in, I think there's another Tom Cruise, one in Vanilla Sky, and it's Times Square. But the light is often quite odd. and they will try and put filters on it to make it look like X, Y, Z but it really is at about three in the morning or four in the morning in the summer.

11:11Locations are interesting. You do pay the local councils and some places around the world are trying to incentivise people and will allow enormous amounts of disruption to their city to happen. Tbilisi, Georgia will really like come and do what you like in our country for quite a long time. But Tbilisi now, apparently Fast and Furious really trashed quite a lot of it. One of the iterations of Fast and the Furious really messed it up quite a lot. And they've really spoiled filming in Tbilisi for many other people. It's very on brand, though, for Fast and Furious. Yes, it is. To ruin a city. To just completely trash city.

11:43You're welcome. Yeah, okay, thanks, gang. But, you know, places like Glasgow was Gotham in the Batman. Yeah, when we were filming, when we were doing House of Games there, a couple of years ago, they closed down the whole of the middle for Indiana Jones. Yeah. The big victory parade. Yeah. You know, through there and they turned the whole thing into it. It's amazing. Glasgow is often something like old New York, or in this case, a sort of star-laced Gotham. They had a lot of Avengers in Edinburgh. So they do shut it down, and the council should get money. Sometimes it's sort of private land, and I was talking to someone recently who was saying, yes, six people own this particular piece of...

12:18It's like, oh, man, that's going to be tricky, trying to get all the signings off. And if you're doing it in other countries, you have local fixers who will help you negotiate with the people who may lend you the things. and obviously people have, there's a lot of things, it's quite difficult to do things in this country but clearly you can if you're big enough and you've got enough money and you'd have to be, you know, to shut down Westminster Bridge is going to be expensive but other countries may be more keen to have your productions come there because, and so they incentivise it and they will allow you to do different stunts, what damage you're allowed to do, all those sorts of things that we might have stronger rules about but yes, you have to go through a lot of permits is the short answer.

12:53When Ingrid was doing Doctor Who, they had an episode where they're in Trafalgar Square and the TARDIS is landing in Trafalgar Square. And it's amazing. It's a spectacular episode. But she said they hadn't closed it off. So there's literally just sort of barriers just out of shot with like thousands of people trying to catch sight of Doctor Who and the TARDIS. It was like absolute chaos. And so, you know, there are ways and means of doing it and just asking people if they could be quiet for two minutes. Yes, you'd still have to get a permit to film. But to shut it down completely and get rid of the public is expensive.

13:26Sometimes they sort of CGI a few lone members of the public who might be out whenever they're filming things. But in general, the more shut down it is, the more expensive it is. So barriers are a more affordable way of doing it. And there's certain things like, you know, the city of London, where places that are very business oriented, it's quite easy to shut them down on a Sunday, for example, at 6am. So you can do that sort of filming. But yeah, if you need to be in the middle of the day outside Big Ben, then that's probably, it's either Tom Cruise or CGI. Yes. Should we go into a break? I think we should do, Richard.

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15:59Welcome back from the break. We're going to go straight into a question from Kieran O 'Ryan. Question via TV scenario. The presenter strolls up to knock on the door of a house. A couple open the door. The presenter greets the couple, etc. We often see this from both inside and outside the house, and it's clear to us that they have already met to set up the shot. Is this a necessary pretense? And he then goes on to ask a question about our questions and answers, saying that you might have done research. We haven't always actually done research. We've done quite a lot of these off the cuff, Kieran, I should say.

16:26I think sometimes that is apparent. Yeah, that is quite apparent. But what about the necessary pretense of opening the door, whatever type of show it is? Yes, it's fascinating that any time you do any sort of documentary or any sort of feature show like that, almost all of your day is taken up with, could you just walk into shot? So can you walk up from around the corner of that building? You won't be able to hear me. I'll shout action. We walk around the corner of the building. Okay, I'll do that. And then can we do another one, but slightly tighter? because they have to cut these things together.

16:53There's a certain thing the human brain won't allow. If you just turned up at someone's house, you're talking to them. You have to walk up to the door. Then they have to have a shot of you knocking on the door. And by the way, they'll also say, can you just knock again just so we can get your hand knocking? And then they'll say, we're just going to get that, but from like kind of 50 yards back, we're just going to get that shot as well. We're going wide. We're doing now your close coverage of your door knock. I find it fascinating, but it is true that the human brain does not want to just see a presenter turning up in someone's house.

17:21Yeah, it would be so weird. And also there's all sorts of little edits, so you've got to get from one thing to another. And here's the key, if you're directing one of those shows, if you're hosting one of those shows, if you're Martin Roberts on Homes Under the Hammer, that's a long old day for him, but he's going away and chatting to various people. But the director then has to take every single bit of footage into an edit. And essentially the nightmare is, I don't have the thing that I need. And so by and large, directors will do everything they possibly do. They'll cover every single shot that it's possible to have.

17:52And, you know, watch Homes Under the Hammer, and there's always a brilliant shot of just the estate agent walking into the room, just looking up, then looking down. And it's exactly the same shot every single time. And I love it as a TV insider. I bet they've got a name for that shot. If you're on Homes Under the Hammer, can you just tell us what you call that shot? What's its nickname within the crew? That's a come and get us plea from me and Marina. so that the homes under, by the way, homes under the hammer team, that would not be our only question. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, we would like to do a deep dive on you.

18:20So please. But establishing shots like that are so important in absolutely everything and it doesn't have to be, you know, lifestyle programming or factual stuff. In everything, as you say, the human brain cannot, you can't just materialise in places often and there has to be a lot of stuff for people getting from A to B because otherwise it's just not believable. But that is a particularly awkward one and sometimes it is done badly in that, because if you do it, occasionally I'll watch shows, often in daytime, where someone will open the door and go, oh my God, John. Oh, I can't, oh, okay, I didn't expect you around.

18:55You can't do that. Don't do that because there's a cameraman behind you. Yeah, if there's a camera behind you and you're acting surprised you've just won the competition, I'm like Broadcast News where he fakes the two shot. I'm sorry. I'm going to have to break up with you. This is appalling. You're a charlatan and a fake. and making the public have to act when they're not, you know, I've won a competition. I don't want to have to win an Oscar as well. Thank you. Can you just tell me what I've won? I love the idea that someone wants to win a competition but doesn't want to win an Oscar. Do you know what?

19:24I've rethought I would actually like to win an Oscar. It's the ECOT. It's the Emmy competition Oscar Tony. Often in those shows as well, specifically these shows we're talking about where suddenly, you know, you knock on a door and what have you. Often there's only one camera. Sometimes there'll be two cameras and there'll always be a moment where you know you say something funny or someone says something funny to you and of course the camera's not on and they will always say oh could we just do that again because that would be quite funny if we could do that if ever I always say no I literally like it's it steals my soul I work organically I just I just can't but if you watch any of those shows you can see it constantly like a bit goes oh what's that there John a bit of porcelain you've dropped uh it looked like it was smashing and you're like oh okay and that you just but you know they've just set it up again and and i get it because shows are hard to make and they're quite cheap but i i'm i'm always on the lookout for artifice the reason that one of the best documentaries on telly is the bob mortimer paul whitehouse thing is they leave the camera running yeah you know and that's the only secret to it whereas lots of those other shows they just you know you're sitting in the back of the car being funny and then they'll turn the camera and say Okay, could you do the funny thing you just said?

20:36That's quite hard to replicate, I would say. What an awful lot we got from a question about two cameras when you're opening a door. Yes, and that has all come off the cuff, can I just say, Kieran. There was no research involved in that, Kieran. So we've answered both your questions there. I like this question, Sarah Turner. Sarah says, I've often noticed the disclaimer, no animals were harmed during the making of this film, right? Yes. We've seen that before. Sarah goes on to say, Does this mean if I don't see the disclaimer that animals definitely were harmed? I watched Napoleon recently where a lot of animals in battle scenes met a bloody end that made me wonder if it had such a disclaimer that I didn't notice or should I fear the worst?

21:15Keep it light, Sarah. I also found when I was watching that, I wonder if I'll see the disclaimer and also think I didn't see the disclaimer. Variety did say that Ridley Scott, who was the director of Napoleon, made good on his promise not to harm any horses. They had a mechanical horse rig. The big moment where his horse is blown up with a cannonball is CGI. I have to say that... I would hope so. It's CGI, yes. I mean, the old Westerns, you do not know how many horses were killed. Oh, no, don't say that. So many horses died in the Western era of moviemaking. In general, nowadays, depending on where you film it, they say if the horses died, because often background, the extras might tell people, or it might be filmed on a street outside somewhere.

21:56There was a horse, I think, in the Gilded Age recently that died when it was pulling a carriage. And that became, you know, it became a huge thing. Lord of the Rings, Rings of Power, a horse died on that. Again, it's a big thing. The animal rights organisations make a big thing about it, which is obviously a big change since the Western era. A lot of people said, oh, Joaquin Phoenix, why are you even riding a horse? Because you are a sort of committed vegan or whatever he is. So he's talked quite extensively about, yeah, I've struggled with this. I mean, it's really quite a big thing. But you now see each year on I'm a Celebrity, there are people saying it's disgusting how many of these bugs are being eaten and are being used in entertainment.

22:31So, you know, there are even bugs, right? So people are quite hot on this. And in general, if you've got a crew, people would say if something had happened. Having said that, there are people who, as we've seen on something like Rust, the Alec Baldwin production, which we must talk about actually at greater length, where the cinematographer was killed as a result of the armourer's failures. That was a crew that was not operating under industry safety standards. And sometimes in a remote location, things happen. So again, I also didn't see that, but that's not to say it wasn't there. But by and large, if an animal is on set on any show, certainly any British TV show, their welfare is paramount.