Romantasy - the biggest genre you're not aware of?

0:26Race the rudders! I'm NFL linebacker TJ Watt, and this is my personal best. YPB by Abercrombie is the activewear I'm always wearing. That's why I reached out to co-design their latest drop. I worked with designers to create high-performance activewear that holds up to my toughest workouts. Shop YPB by Abercrombie in-store, online, and in the app. Because your personal best is greater than anything.

1:01When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th. And never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end-to-end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com.

1:30Hello and welcome to another episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me Marina Hyde. And me Richard Osmond. Good morning slash afternoon slash evening to you Marina. How are you Richard? Yeah I'm not bad, I can't complain. Listen we've got lots of fun things to talk about. It's fun to be sitting in this studio, we're back in the old studio now. But I got used to the other studio, that's the problem. Oh we will be back in the other studio. But I can't do constant chopping and changing. But you can if we get to sit exactly opposite each other so we will be back in there. Better camera angles. You can watch this on YouTube, by the way.

2:02Yes, you can watch this on YouTube. Now, this week we are going to talk about... That's a stunning endorsement. Yeah, I mean, you can watch it on YouTube. Just watch the Richard's half of the screen, please. Now, this week we are going to talk about... I'm one of the few people to have helped Madam Web, the movie, limp across a very, very low UK box office tally. And we're going to talk about mad press tours. Dakota Johnson, the star of that, has been on quite an eye-catching, eyebrow-raising... It's quite hard to do a press tour for a film that everyone seems to hate. Already, the second the trailer dropped.

2:34I'm going to talk a little bit about Romanticy, which is a romance fantasy hybrid, which is the biggest selling genre in books around the world. I mean, crazily huge numbers. It's sort of like a porny version of Lord of the Rings, but it's massive. I'm dying to talk about this because I don't really understand it at all. I've had a look and I've been quite disturbed by what I've found. I've been quite disturbed by what I've found. also we're going to begin by talking about drive to survive now drive to survive is the show that runs on netflix and it's behind the scenes on formula one it has been an absolute monster success it comes back on this friday about eight days before the first grand prix of the season but what it does it takes you behind the scenes of a season so the season that's about to drop on friday will take you behind last season and so you see all the drivers and the plot lines and all the team principals and one of those team principals is christian horner who is the team principal of red bull now he has been alleged to have indulged in controlling behavior over a red bull employee and sending sexually suggestive text messages he denies all these allegations we should say but it's kind of interesting that this is all breaking around the time of the new season around the time of the new formula one season and the show so we can talk all about that richard you drive to survive watch it as am i yeah i love it it's always formula one is that fascinating thing that if five years ago you'd said um oh yeah i'll tell you what people are going to love behind the scenes on formula one that's one of those pictures where everyone would go well of course not it's like the goggle box thing we say yeah let's watch some people watching tv and everyone would go well of course not but the thing with formula one is people have always loved it if they like machines and the one of the unique things about um formula one hard to think of any other sports are the same, maybe skiing, is you cannot see the competitors at any point.

4:19You can't look them in the eyes. You can't see what they're doing. And Drive to Survive has absolutely turned that on its head and made all of the drivers characters, made them personalities, put them in a soap opera. So you suddenly, I think if you don't like Formula One, you see the point of it, which is there are rivalries, there are goodies and there are baddies. You can so see the point of it for the sport. And a lot of people always say, oh, we've been trying to make like this for years, kind of unfettered or supposedly unfettered. We'll come back to that later. behind-the-scenes access to these kind of sports.

4:47But something like between 20 % and 30 % at any point of Formula One fans now say they got into the sport because of Drive to Survive, which is sort of incredible. They needed to do something like this in a way because, as you said, you can't see the drivers. There are only relatively few races a year. There are now 24. There are even fewer when this started. And they go all the way around the world, so they may very well be happening in the middle of the night or very early in the morning and late at night, and you may not see this thing. And they're very, very rarely in democracies anymore. In the 70s, I think all the Grand Prixs were in democratic countries.

5:20And these days, you can go months before you go to a Germany. Yeah, we'll be starting in Bahrain this season, as indicated. Anyway, I mean, what should we talk about the sort of aesthetic of it? I really can't. It's a dark masterclass in that Netflix aesthetic when you're doing a documentary and it could be about Stalinism or it could be about the Second World War or it could be about Formula One. But you're not allowed to, they don't want anyone to be seen asking a question off camera. So one must answer one's own question. So you'll see someone like Christian Horner saying, what do we feel about coming second?

5:53We fucking hate her. He has a sort of intercontinental ballistic blandness to him. Yes. Which you're made to feel like you're getting all this behind the scenes thing and you might see someone swearing but it was a problem for the show that the number one driver max verstappen for three seasons refused to be involved well he said and you know he's he's right it's made for people who don't know the results of what happened yeah is the truth and you know that's why i love watching american sports documentaries i can watch the whole of the last dance and be like oh i wonder if the chicago bulls win because i don't know i don't know i didn't i didn't watch it and so if you don't know the results it's exciting but they will occasionally edit in such a way and they will overlay commentary on something that wasn't contemporary just to make it more exciting and to explain what's going on.

6:35What he rightly said, and he's really hit the nail on the head, was to say, it's like the Kardashians. And yes, I do think that the show that this is most analogous to, quite weirdly, is either keeping up with the Kardashians as it used to be, or the Kardashians, as it is called now. It's harder to keep up with Formula One drivers than the Kardashians. Than the Kardashians, yeah. And there were sort of non-participant characters in the Kardashians, really. Like you'd kind of see when she was with Kanye, Kim, you would kind of see him just off to the side of scenes because he didn't really want to, you know, ruin his fantastic reputation.

7:06He had other plans for that, didn't he? He had whole other plans for that. So, but there's something weird about the time in it because the Kardashians are so completely reported on, you know, every little detail of their lives and they're part of entertainment news stories all the time. So you constantly see all these things. And then what you're asking fans to do is to go back and re-watch, you know, nine months later, you're like, oh, you know, this is a... And you'd think that would be quite boring because they followed every cough and spit, a little bit like Formula One in Drive to Survive.

7:33They know. But funnily enough, there is something about it. The thing that it most represents for me, stay with this one, is classical drama, like ancient Greek drama. When they tell you the whole story in the prologue or in Romeo and Juliet, you know, you already know they're going to die. Everything reminds you of classical drama. Not everything reminds me of classical drama. But you know what this does? Because in the prologue of one of those plays, they tell you what's going to happen and it makes it matter more. So knowing the story, far from people saying, yeah, but how can we do this? It's not quite a turnaround.

8:01Everyone already knows that Kim's got divorced now. Oh, my God. What? Yeah, I know. Breaking. So you want to see it happen. So, yes, you know, Aeschylus, Drive to Survive, and the Kardashians. You heard this hot take first. Aeschylus in the Red Bull. Yeah. By the way, this is the reason so many people come out of reality shows or things like that and go, I was watching it back and friends have told me I was so badly edited. I came across as so boring. I came across as slightly robotic and hard to work with and over competitive. You can think, did you, Max? I can't believe they edited you like that.

8:37I think sometimes when people see their real personalities on screen, they go, I cannot believe you've edited me like that. He should remain a Kate Moss figure never speaking. The more you hear it now and she's talking about wellness, it's like, oh, please don't. Silence is the most intriguing statement of all in many of these shows. But anyway, now we know what he sounds like and you're right, he is quite boring. But can we talk a bit about the idea, so much of the way that people talk about modern sport now and the types of people who become characters? You know, we talk now about and certainly when we're doing one of the questions episodes of this show a few weeks ago, we were talking about the manager as main character in football.

9:12And there are now cameras trained on the manager the whole time because they become so much more significant performer. Isn't it interesting? Like, I mean, you know, honestly, 20 years ago, the only people who used phrases like narrative and plotline in things about things other than books were genuinely like media studies students or like some elite level publicist who would talk about that stuff. Now everybody talks about football in terms of plotlines, narratives, the characters. And these people like Christian Horner or Toto Wolff, the Mercedes principal, become these much, much more significant figures in sport.

9:44And the way we talk about sport and the way we kind of perceive it all as a story. And they become stars as well. And their whole career, if you're Toto Wolff, you're used to dealing with the egos of racing drivers. And suddenly you're famous and everything you're doing is being looked at. And he gets mobbed, Toto Wolff. He's really monetized it as well. And loves it. Like Mourinho used to love it. Like Josie Mourinho used to absolutely, thinking, oh my God, I am the biggest star on this team. And when everyone realizes they're in a soap opera, it's like they change their behaviour it's just this thing with Christian Horner and who knows what will happen with the investigation but certainly it wouldn't be as big a story if he hadn't just spent five seasons on the biggest reality show on the planet fascinating to see if that makes it into the next season he's married to Jerry Halliwell Jerry from the Spice Girls so there's a sort of certain need and he features a lot of his home life in the season you often see them trotting around on their horses in their big country mansion but the interesting thing is sports by and large and this is a massive generalization but if you want to really look at sports audience it has always traditionally been older men okay so it's skewed older and it's skewed male always has done and very smart sports worked out um not so long ago well listen if we want to expand there are two enormous areas we can expand into which is have more women watch our sport and have younger people watching our sport and it's fascinating with the super bowl and it's almost impossible to overestimate how huge nfl is is becoming in the states it was already massive and now it's you know the biggest thing in the world but it's still skewed older and they now essentially around the super bowl and and and other games they recruit youtubers to come along and do you know they literally have have the run the absolute run of the place they can do whatever they want they can interview whoever they want and it's really really working for them nickelodeon had spongebob commentating on on the super bowl but again because it goes viral it's interesting and it's about personalities.

11:39And it's turning sport into soap. It's turning sport into a reality show, like the Kardashians. But the beauty of having a sport reality show is if you're the Kardashians or if you're The Only Way is Essex, you've constantly got to manufacture drama. You've constantly got to go, sorry, can you pretend that you're annoyed that he's going out with her? And can you look at her across the bar? And that's half an episode. If you've got a documentary that's about Formula One, then every week, or occasionally two weeks, you literally every single main character gets in a really fast car and races against each other for two hours yeah i mean you can't get better than that sport you don't know what's going to happen and it's exciting and it's controversial and things can go wrong and it's dangerous and you didn't have to manufacture any of it at all the stuff behind the scenes you but of course they're manufacturing bits and bobs but you've always got that thing if you watch any sports documentary, you know, you watch any Last Chance U or something on Netflix, each episode is ending with the game they've been building up to.

12:42And you know, it hasn't been fixed. You know that they could lose it or they could win it. And it really matters what happens. One of the things I think is the sort of dark obverse to that in some ways is the sense that everything's a plot line and that it's all just hashtag content. And I was really quite surprised in one report about this, the Christian Horner allegations last week. They were saying, and you can see all the Netflix cameras were there picking up some drive to survive gold. And I thought, goodness, as I said, he denies the allegations. But if you're the person who's made those accusations, then the idea that you are just becoming drive to survive gold is a little bit like we.

13:22There's a point where you just have to stop seeing everything as content. And it is actually the real lives are involved in it. And that's, by the way, across the board for any of this stuff. It reminds me a lot of classical drama, I would say. I'll tell you what I did in terms of, in the interest of research, I watched, because, you know, Drive to Survive is a big show for them. They've done the same on the tennis tour, Grand Slam, I think it's called. They've done the same on the golf tour, which is full swing. And again, it's sort of fascinating because, I mean, really, I really recognize that lots of people don't like golf, right?

13:56but I'm watching full swing it's great because you get to see their houses you get to see their lives it's interesting and there's a guy called Joel Damon who's sort of a journeyman pro but he comes across so brilliantly and now every single week if ever there's golf on I always think oh I wonder how Joel Damon is doing but isn't that amazing it's given you a storyline to follow it's given you someone to root for and you know I will watch any sport anywhere in the world if I want one team to win and another team to lose but you know that's what all sport is do I want one team to win and so they you know full swing has done well so they had this this netflix's first ever live sports event which was the netflix cup which was just before the las vegas grand prix which was insanely huge and every star in america was there which is a new race and there was a lot of controversy about whether it should even happen and it was kind of just beyond showbiz but and let's say it did not lose a lot of money for a lot of people no yeah i think everyone came out That's the staff that was very sniffy about that as well.

14:53And then suddenly he felt his pockets full. What a purist he is. But they had four Formula One drivers and four golfers playing on the Steve Wynn Golf Resort just off the strip in LA. Two hours live. It involved golf cart. A cursed pro-am. It involved, exactly. A truly cursed pro-am. Golf cart races. They had like kind of speed holes. The presenting staff were not, I'm going to say, not traditional golf presenters. Were they traditional presenters, Richard? I would say they did not have as much live experience as sometimes I would look for. Oh, that is an absolute diss from you. If I was producing a two-hour live show, there are certainly, I'd be happy if I could look down and see Gabby Logan there.

15:34Whatever happens. Nothing's going to go very well. Balding's going to get us out of trouble here. And I think there were certain presenters I thought, I'm not entirely sure if you're a safe pair of hands. And it was sort of a mess in a way. but it was very watchable past the time and you do you know what you're watching people do unusual things and I would have thought that if they carry on doing those things and make them better because by the way it's very hard to do a two hour live show where it's Formula 1 players and golf and no one's ever done it before and everyone at Netflix wants to hit 15 different demographics and everyone's got an opinion so it's very hard to make that show look at BBC One with Gladiators it's all the same stuff it's competition it's competition and it's personalities I think your daughter is a huge fan of Gladiators my daughter is an absolutely huge fan of gladiators who wants to be on gladiators more than anything she wants one of them to retire and then she'll take on the name afterwards i'm just legend we're booking um the new series of house of games at the moment i made a uh a plea to the gladiators uh and so yeah now we have to go work out which gladiator would be best best at house of games uh and he's not even the best at being legend but yeah no i would love i would love to see legend i would love to see legend on House of Games.

16:45But also, and I hope that we're able to call them by their gladiator name. Oh yeah, of course. Do you think they will wear the leotard? Yes, please. Never break character. Never break character. Well, they might do, right? But it's funny, every single person I know who's coming on the new series of House of Games and who knows me, I think every single one of them has sent me a message saying how am I going to be on with the gladiator? They're all like, can I do the gladiator week? I would really, really like that. It's the future. We did a show years ago on Channel 5 called International King of Sports.

17:14and that's the one show if people say what show would you like to bring back i'd bring back that and it was the idea that some people are brilliant sports people but haven't found their sport and so we invented lots of new sports there's like kind of running backwards there's under hurdles there's like hitting a ball as far as you can with a tennis racket there's like all these different um things that we'd uh uh invented uphill long jump we did uh and we got properly great really really great sports people to do it but who were not professional sports people because they never quite good enough.

17:42The guy who won the first series, Adam Horder, was like almost made it in rugby league, but not quite. Australian guy and people from different countries. That's a show I'd love to make for Netflix. Just absolutely supersize that thing and invent a load of new sports and have people who've never quite found the thing. I was so nearly good at badminton and give them something that they are amazing at. That is definitely Ted Sarandos' sports adjacent content. Yeah, that's a come and get me plea to Ted Sarandos. I'm always thinking come and get me plea to Ted Sarandos. He has yet to come and get me.

18:12Weekly. I'm sure it's moments away. I'm like a kid at Christmas looking out the window. Every time a car goes fast. It's a big sack of money. Is that Ted Sarandos? Ingrid's like, come sit down. He'll be here soon. He'll be here soon. So that's Drive to Survive, which drops on Friday on Netflix. And on that note, shall we go to a break? Hold on. Gladiators in cars. Yeah, let's go to a break. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Checking off the boxes on your to-do list is a great feeling. And when it comes to checking off coverage, a State Farm agent can help you choose an option that's right for you.

18:49Whether you prefer talking in person, on the phone, or using the award-winning app, it's nice knowing you have help finding coverage that best fits your needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

19:04This 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 Get your tickets now At Sierra, discover great deals on top brand workout gear like high-quality walking shoes, which might lead to another discovery. 40 ,000 steps, baby. Who's on top now, Karen?

19:44You'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.

20:03Welcome back. We are going to talk about romanticity, which is a fictional genre that I admit I was not altogether on top of until I started reading a lot of articles about it because it is monster. Is that right, Richard? It is. Romanticity, romance and fantasy, as you would imagine. And it's the biggest genre in books in the world at the moment. There's two absolute giants of it. Sarah J. Maas, who writes Court of Thorns and Roses. And there's Rebecca Yaros, who writes the Iron Flame books. And they're the sort of leading lights of this movement. What is it? Well, what it is, it's sort of fantasy.

20:38It's elves, it's, you know, all that kind of stuff. It's a lot of fairies. Fantasy, a lot of fairies, fairies and elves, and an awful lot of sex. So it is romance, romance and fantasy. The romance, it could almost be called fuckstasy rather than a romanticy because it's quite pornographic. Yes. Like, it's a lot going on. So I think it's, I think the reason it's become massive now, because it's been around a long time, The reason it's become massive now is there are a generation of girls who grew up with Hunger Games and Twilight and those things. And Harry Potter. Harry Potter, yeah. And who want the same thing but want it a bit more spicy is what they say.

21:15They've reclaimed Spice and Smart. Yes. And that's how they kind of hashtag it on things like Book Talk so that people can talk about it. They've reclaimed Spice and Smart, the two new gladiators. my favourite who will be on House of Games soon. One of the reasons it's gone crazy is it's very well done. So Sarah J. Mars, Rebecca Yaros, they're both great writers. You know, it's not literature, but it's, you know, you turn the pages. Is it literature adjacent? I'm not quite so sure, Richard. Oh, well, I look forward to hearing about that. But it's like publishing has gone absolutely insane for it.

21:50Every four or five years, publishing goes completely insane, and it's just gone insane again. So it's been around since, I think the term was coined in like 2008. and eight. You know, it's been around for a long time. There's been great writers. Jen Williams is an amazing writer who wrote The Ninth Rain, but wrote it maybe sort of five or six years too early. But you hope that maybe people would go back and kind of refine that kind of stuff. But publishing now, every single big publisher has set up its own fantasy imprint because this is where all the money is. Waterstones have finally got a sci-fi fantasy book of the month.

22:23Because it used to be siloed. You didn't really find this stuff in bookshops and people had to sort of order, you know, there wasn't a kind of dedicated area but it's quite interesting because it has obviously fantasy has often strangely in some ways has skewed male as a genre for definite like lord of the rings what i will think of as books with a map at the front of them yeah yes some guy standing there thinking so that's how you get from the mines of asteroth to the you know planes of grisendark i love it a long time to traverse those you know i love a book with a map yeah yes i've got a certain amount of views about that yeah there's it's it's It's quite a male sort of skewing, that particular demographic.

23:00But this is a bit like that. I'm quite male skewing at times, I think. Yes, you can be. And there's nothing wrong with it. But it's interesting that this thing that, you know, The Lord of the Rings, all those sort of series that have been far outsold amongst male audiences than female audiences. Women are the sort of heroines of these books. Am I right in saying that? Yes. They have agency, whereas, you know, I often sometimes think in some of those books, and particularly some historical drama series or fake historical fantasy drama series, they sort of exist to get raped as a plot point. Or they're strong women but they're wearing a bikini.

23:33Yeah, yeah. And I, you know, another theory I have, I sometimes feel that the reason that those kind of historical drama series are so big with male audiences is because they just see women getting treated like shit. But, you know, that's what it was like back then. And you think, well, in Restoross, that was never. I mean, it didn't exist. Why don't you create a fantasy land where women don't have to get raped to move the plot along every five seconds? But anyway. That's what these writers have done. That's what these writers have done. It's exactly right. So the incredibly strong heroines and female written heroines.

24:00So it's not like a male idea of a strong woman. It's like an actual strong woman who has vulnerabilities, has a lot of sex with dragons, you know, so there's all that going on. There's a lot of enemies to friends though, isn't there? That kind of slightly Stockholm syndrome-y, like Beauty and the Beast. They start off, but mind you, that's been a romance trope forever. Like, Mils and Boone has been like that. We were talking about Hallmark Christmas movies over Christmas. And that, again, enemies to friends is a big thing. Yeah, exactly. But it's not going anywhere. I'll tell you a couple of interesting things about it.

24:33so anytime a genre gets really really big celebrities come and try and take it over no they don't come try and take it over publishers go can we get a ghost written version of this but because these books are all 600 pages long and involve incredibly complex world building and you know sarah jay must has been writing for 12 years she's put the work into making these worlds that's why people love them so much they're so rich she started online didn't she started on wordpress or something like that exactly exactly that she read law of the rings love loves the idea of law of the rings loves that feel loves the kind of feel of that narrative and then just sort of try to apply it to her own life and so has come up with a very very different version which is you know reaching a very different audience she sold 37 million books i know right there's something like 14 billion tiktok posts that have her hashtagged in it that's not bad is it not nothing to be sniffed out but it means it's quite hard to for someone to cynically just go oh I'm going to write one of these one of the really lovely things about it is is fantasy writers who've these books you have to write a big long book and your world building has to be incredibly good because that audience are incredibly smart suddenly they're all getting paid and they've had like 10 12 15 years of not getting paid or getting paid very very little because it's been seen as a niche now you've got this world where they are the most in demand writers now here's the here's the interesting economic thing that Sarah J.

25:57Mars has and Rebecca Yaros has, they sell hardbacks and nobody really sells hardbacks, right? Now, hardbacks are the holy grail for the publishing industry because the publisher, the writer, the bookshops, you make about four times as much money off a hardback than you do off a paperback. So it's all very well selling 100 ,000 paperbacks, but if you can sell 500 ,000 hardbacks, that's crazy money. And that's what fantasy fiction can do because people are fans and if you're in a fandom you want every new version of it there's this whole world of things it came from gaming originally of crates yeah okay there's a luma crate and there's fairy crate which are the big ones so once a month they will send you out a new fantasy book and they um curate it they know what their audience will like they do beautiful additions with kind of sprayed edges illustrated maps uh all sorts of things and you can you can pay up to 45 quid for one of these and if you love the world and if you love the writer you'll do that which means that fantasy people are making a huge amount of money which is great both of those companies by the way fairy crate and illumicrate both set up by women of color in their 20s both of whom are now making and it's a subscription service millions it's a subscription service uh like the book of the month club of olden days it's like the book of the month club they will send you one you can duck in and out month to month sometimes they go we're releasing like a they'll say oh we've got a special limited edition of this new book just 30 000 copies and and it gets subscribed immediately and by the way there's only about 10 books in the whole of britain that will sell 30 000 hardbacks in a year let alone in a week which is what these um crates can do and so they're both set up by women of color the books are incredibly diverse non-binary inclusive all that kind of stuff and not you know the old go woke go broke you think well this is an industry that's that's just how it's always been you know everything is fluid everything is binary people there's elves there's all sorts of things going on um and it's the most profitable industry in the whole world of publishing at the moment and it's an extraordinarily diverse world the authors are extraordinarily diverse um there's loads of great british writers now who are doing uh sarah el-arifi who had a number one book with faybound this year which is about black fairies.

28:16It's an extraordinary world and it's bringing lots of people into bookshops. It's bringing a whole generation into reading. Because I think when you get to 20, I just want you to stop reading, right? But all of these Hunger Games, Twilight readers, are now moving on to older literature. They're reading more books and it's a habit you never get out of. It's sort of the perfect storm. It's the right people getting paid for doing the right thing. I wonder what we'll see, because I think they're starting to do the deals to adapt them for television. Yes. I really wonder what the fandom will be like when they see that, because it could be, I mean, not like the absolute kind of extreme end of the Marvel fandom, which can be, you know, just the dedicated incel demographic, that four quadrant incels.