Shrek 5, Book Signings & Going For Gold

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0:51Hello and welcome to this episode of the Rest is Entertainment questions and answers edition. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. Hello Marina. Hello Richard, how are you? Yeah, I'm okay. No cool talk this week I don't think. If that's all right. Can we begin with Henry Kelly? The going for gold legend has died. He has such an interesting career, Henry Kelly, because he came on our radar really when Game for a Laugh started. I say our radar. No younger listeners will have heard anything about Game for a Laugh, but it was a sort of prank show. Yes, and as always, hopefully this is an education of sorts.

1:28It was a prank show. Jeremy B. Beedle did it. Henry Kelly did it. Matthew Kelly, Sarah Kennedy. And yeah, it was pranks, studio stunts. It was sort of, you know, Anton Deck's Saturday Night takeaway before its time. It was silly. But Henry Kelly is on this thing. It's where we first saw him, really. Then he went on to going for gold. But he had such an interesting story before then. He was a very, very serious journalist, Henry Kelly, in Northern Ireland. And wrote a wonderful book he's written. It was a very serious journalist. Very, very, very. During the Troubles. During the Troubles. Very well respected.

2:01remained very well respected his entire life, but then decided to take this probably more lucrative career course into Game for a Laugh. Hadn't he been a friend of Wogan, Terry Wogan's? And that's why he just thought, oh, this is my way in. I'll have a go at that. Well, I think he probably saw Terry Wogan's house and went, hold on a minute. I seem to be working quite a lot harder than Terry and I don't have that sort of house. But he was such a wonderful presence. Going for gold was an interesting one, which used to be on every lunchtime, used to be on after Neighbours, that sort of absolute golden hour.

2:37And again, for pretty much all listeners, it was a pan-European quiz show with a number of contestants. They all came from different countries. Obviously, the ones from Switzerland and France and whatever had to be absolutely fluent in English, as Henry Kelly was asking questions about. It wasn't that international. What the county town of Derbyshire was. He was really great. It had an amazing theme tune. Absolute belter. I've had it on the brain all week as a result of the music. The theme tune was Hans Zimmer. The Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer did that theme tune. Yeah, we listened to the four-length version.

3:13Worth listening on Spotify. It's got verses you didn't know existed. Go for it for gold. I'd love to know the later verses of it. The heat is on. The time is right. It's time for you to play your game. Everyone's running. People are trying. Trying to be the best that they can. When you're going for, going for gold. so it had this amazing we were listening to it in the car the other day and ingrid said this must be the biggest difference between the portentousness of a theme tune and the quietness of an actual show because the show itself was you know it's in a shed somewhere in you know west london like like all these shows are henry was great you know you're playing catch up who am i all that stuff you're in the two zone and it was listen you can you can seek it out on youtube but henry kelly is fascinating when we think we know people and you know you've got images of people from the television and to know what he did before that light entertainment thing to know how respected he was and i met him a few years ago when we did point the celebrities and we just we chatted for about 20 minutes about all sorts of stuff political stuff all sorts of things he was asking so many questions about um things as well and about writing uh and you know i i thought he was terrific and he had a wonderful sort of what you call a retirement for a light entertainment which is classical radio and things like that, which he loved as well.

4:30But I would say a life well lived. He absolutely educated people. He was smart. He was brave. He was a great writer. And then he entertained people. And I loved it and understood that those two things can exist side by side. That's what I think is the thing. Yeah, he just had a go at all sorts of different things and didn't think he was above or below anything. And I think that's quite unique in lots of ways. I'd love to do a deep dive on Game for a Laugh one day. Oh my God, I loved it so much. It was just, you'd never seen anything like it. I would actually love to do that, but okay. I remember there was a bit where, it was all like games and stunts and things like that.

5:06And someone had to do the game of putting their hand through a hole in a box and describe what it was that they could feel. And sometimes it was like spaghetti and sometimes it was worms. And then this woman had to put her hand through it and we could see what the things were. And it was Duncan Goodhue's head. And I thought, if TV is going to get any better than this, then I would be very, very surprised. To me, I mean, that's my The Sopranos. Yeah. It really is. But yeah, listen, Henry Kelly, RIP, and thank you for everything you did. And it's so lovely to have a career just spent, you know, just being there and doing the thing that you want to do and doing it with such skill.

5:45Oh, this is a good question for you, Marina. Christian Alcorn, after recently reading articles from former contestants in shows such as Married at First Sight and The Apprentice, where they state they were made to look bad in the edit, Can the people editing the footage really make a contestant look bad? We see them say the things they say. We see them act the way they act. Is the expression, they made me look bad in the edit, really just covering up for a behaviour they are embarrassed slash ashamed of? It's a very good question. But I definitely, yes. First of all, absolutely, yes, they can give you what became to be known as the villain edit.

6:18And certain people in reality TV, and particularly in those early years, or what we think of as the early years of reality TV. In fact, it started much earlier. But in the 2000s, they were so lawless and people were made to look like real bad guys. I mean, you have to understand that even now when they're doing something like The Traitors, they don't edit the first part of the show. They have the round table and then they see who's going to be threat and then they edit the show to make that kind of, to make it fit with what they know is coming at the end. So to some extent, it's always artifice.

6:50And more importantly, they know what's happening at the entire end of the series as well. So they have an absolute idea of what everybody's journey is, how much we're going to see of them, when they're going to go. They understand all of those things and they then have to construct a version of it that we're going to find understandable and believable. Yeah, because even Fly on the Wall documentaries, you know, that fly's got an edit suite. Yes. And they can actually work. It's got 50 screens. Yeah, it's got 50 screens. you've got to remember that when you're trying to put together one of those shows in some ways even in the early days when they were doing these things in the early 2000s they were modeling them on what already existed which were dramas and so you thought or sitcoms you know you'd have maybe this is quite a crass way of putting it but it is the reality the reality an a plot a b plot and a c plot even though it was done with real and it became clear that when it really worked, they were sort of aping the conventions of drama.

7:48And then reality contestants and viewers did become very literate and they'd be like, oh, she's going for the villain edit because they thought, oh, it got them more screen time because then quite quickly, those really early, you know, everyone always says the first series of Brig Blather is so different to anything else. The first series of Survivor is really different to anything else. The first series of all these things where people didn't know how to behave on that specific format and have ways of, Traitors is another example, they have ways of kind of getting it and particularly wanting to get producers' attention.

8:16There's actually a memoir by a contestant on The Australian Bachelor, which is called The Villain Edit. And this is extraordinary. During filming, she thought, oh, hang on, I can see, I'm not really seriously being considered as a person who's going to end up with this guy, because she'd had about 15 minutes with him. So she said, oh, I wanted to buy myself more episodes. No, fatal. So she started offering little quips about the castmates. she started doing these little acid asides and she became a sort of funny it was useful for the producers because rather than them having to do a voiceover explaining what's happening someone is offering that kind of editorialising of the action that's taking place it's like a game show when one of the contestants describes the dilemma you've just put them in you go great thank you so much I don't have to say that out loud exactly but it is a slippery slope from being the kind of funny narrator to getting the villain edit and she did get it And then somebody ended up saying to her, you're a bad person.

9:13And she really took it all to heart, the way she was, in her view, edited. Most people go away and like let them in. She went back twice onto Bachelor in Paradise, deliberately seeking to say, I'm not that person I was portrayed as. She did get a more sympathetic edit. And the second time she went on it, she got a husband. Wow. Isn't that mad? Yeah. It's absolutely mad. But I have to say that in those early things, they had something that was called Frankenbites. This is so immoral, by the way. But in those lawless kind of speaking of things, we've really got to do a special bonus episode on Mike Darnell.

9:48Oh, my God, the absolute small evil genius of reality television. Truly a monster in so many ways, but in an entertaining one. In the US. In the US. He had a show called Joe Millionaire. Well, they thought they were a manga millionaire, but in fact, this guy was just a sort of Joe Schmeyer. They created this impression that this pair of them had gone with the woods and had oral sex. And she said something like, do you think it's easier if we lie down? And in fact, that was audio from much earlier in the week where someone had done a massage on one of, you know, and editors sort of suddenly, once you shed your morality, it's quite easy to think, okay, well, I've done it once now.

10:25And it was called Frankenbites. And they would literally put words and make things completely different things. Reactions to one thing were made to seem like reactions to other things. And it was really, really immoral. Which we have much less over here. I can't bear it if I'm watching a reality show over here and you see the cutaway of someone's reaction and you know it's not to the thing that just happened. I just think it's absolutely unacceptable in every way. You know, sometimes you go on a TV show and they'll do it to you and you're just like, but I wasn't laughing at that. You can't show me laughing at that because it's not fair.

10:57At the same time, you know, if you're doing The Apprentice and someone sort of gives a side eye when someone said something, you're thinking, I don't know if that side eye was to that. Because I don't know how you've got those two cameras both on. I don't know how you've got like a one shot of that person and you've weirdly captured this thing. I think it's from somewhere else. This is like the plot of broadcast news. Well, they're two cameras. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. But it's, as I say, over here, it's much less so. When people come across as villains, it's because that's how they behaved.

11:26and people don't like to see themselves. It's quite hard if you're a certain type of human being and then you come up against people you've never met before and afterwards people go, I'm not sure you're the nicest person in the world. People don't really want to hear that about themselves. People don't really want to really confront their behaviours. You see it on The Apprentice all the time as well. And talking of that thing of all reality shows are edited backwards, but you know who's going to win. It's always worth those first three or four episodes of The Apprentice. You're always on episode four.

11:57You go, wait, hold on a minute. Who's Martin? I haven't seen him before. No, you haven't seen him before because there's like 20 contestants in that. And they really have to cut in the people who are going to be in the boardroom in those first three. And that's a lot of people. So the people who are going to go further in the process, you haven't seen them because their stories will start to emerge when there are fewer and fewer people. So if you have worked in that world, there are quite a lot of spoilers in those shows as to exactly how they're edited. It's hard not to know who's being voted out when you watch those shows, when you're watching the edit.

12:30Except that one show, which I'm not going to say what it is or need the name of the contestant, but I spent the whole of the run of it saying to you, did that guy turn out to be a sex offender and they just can't get him out of the shots? Because I haven't heard him say one single thing. I started Googling to see if he'd been picked up for something, because I honestly couldn't believe, and I know you know which one I'm talking about. I do, as far as I can work out. Plenty of people listening to this will remember that as well. He wasn't a sex offender. I don't know what happened there, but anyway.

12:56Something happened for sure. Something happened there, because I never saw him speak. Yeah, they call that a purple edit, named after a character called Purple Kelly on season 12 of Survivor. I think that was just, she wasn't particularly interesting, so she was edited around throughout. So now when a contestant is absolutely chopped out, they call it a purple edit. Why, because you sometimes hear about actors going to see a movie and being so embarrassed to discover at the premiere that they're actually not in it anymore, and that someone's neglected to tell them. But on a reality show, that's quite a different kettle of fish.

13:28Like, well, I'm not in like 16 episodes of this thing. You're just having to spot yourself in the background every now and again. God, I'd like to read... Would I like to read her memoir? She's obviously quite boring, but, you know, I'd love Purple Kelly's memoir. Yeah, OK. So sometimes I listen back to this podcast and it's just, it's all you. And I'm like, wait a minute. I think it would be the other way around. Trust me. It would be the other way around. But yeah, these things are often edited like a drama. But by and large, it's quite hard to make someone seem awful if they're not awful. No, but yes.

14:02You can make them more of it. In those Wild West American shows of the noughties, it was 100 % possible to do that. And people would just make offhand remarks. And the way they put it with the incidental music or the different reactions, things were cut from whole cloth plot lines that just hadn't occurred. That doesn't happen here. And we actually have much more recourse to various bodies for complaint if you do feel something terrible. People often come out and say, and it's weird because I talked a lot about X and they didn't put any of it in. You go, yeah, it was really boring. I mean, what do you want us to do?

14:35Yeah. We're not, you know, you do, there are certain... I'm making an entertainment show, sorry if it's confusing. Matt Hancourt, I've gone on this to educate people about dyslexia when I'm a celebrity. Have you? Yeah, okay. Well, I'm sorry to break it to you, Matt, but we didn't hear a lot about it. What was the Farage thing when he said, this is how you get in the edit. That was Farage when he said, you know, if you do a trial, you get 25 % more airtime. Yeah, well, he's very savvy on his edit. Yeah. Shall we do some adverts? I think we must. Excellent.

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16:27Welcome back, everybody. Now, if you're actually a member of our AAA club, there's a Discord where people can ask questions and chat about television, all those sort of things. And this one, Richard, is from the Discord. Okay. Okay, it's about book signing. Snake in the garden. Real name. Real name. Do you know what? before the edit, he was butterfly in the garden. And it's like, come on, man. Give me a break. Richard has mentioned signing books for days and days around a launch, but his wife said to Chuck Summers his signature was getting too scrawly. Does this mean Richard is signing pages that are bound into books later, or is Richard taking delivery of thousands of books at a time to sign?

17:02Yeah, it would be, but I think for maybe the fourth Thursday in Medical Club, I did 48 ,000 signings. Later on, if you're going into bookstores and things like that, once the book is out, you sign real books. If you go to a festival and you bring along a book and I can sign it and put your name in it. Before then, the bookshops in America say we'd like 2 ,000, we'd like 4 ,000. The bookshops in Australia say they want so many, you know, Waterstone, Smiths, they all want something. And so that year, that led up to 48 ,000. I've had to slightly cut back. And when that happens, now you get sent what are called tip-ins.

17:34So you just get huge boxes full of A4 bits of paper. and they have a template on each one which has the, says the name of your book and you just sign those. So you're signing individual bits of paper. And they're cut down later and bound into the book. They're cut down and heat glued in when all the pages are heat glued in. So as long as you do them, you know, a few months in advance, they then get heat glued in. So they're all really signed. It's just, as you say, 48 ,000 books. I mean, 48 ,000 bits of paper take up a room, let alone 48 ,000 books. and it's I figure if it's I did the maths where if it takes you five seconds to sign a book because I'm quite fast at doing it if it takes you five seconds that is 66 hours worth of signing which is signing for four hours a day for 16 days straight and so as Snake in the Garden said at one point Ingrid was looking over my shoulder and said you cannot allow someone to have that in their book because my handwriting was getting so scrawly and so I had to So why are you going insane?

18:34When I had to do it, I felt like I was going absolutely insane. I bumped into someone I knew in the street and couldn't speak because I couldn't explain what I'd really been doing, which is just writing my own name. Yeah, over and over and over again. Yeah. I found a school textbook a couple of years ago when I was at my mum's and I'd practiced my signature in the front of that. And I just thought, you know what? Be careful what you wish for. The signature is exactly the same, but I was doing 48 ,000 of them. I didn't have a signature. I just write my name. I've never had a signature. and my agent said to me, it would be good if you developed a signature.

19:05I was like, what now? It's too late. I can't go into bat right now with no signature and just try it out on all these thousands of ones I've got to do. Not only develop a signature, develop a short one. Yeah. That's the key. I did feel bad because I try and make them all as, you know, because it's a nice gift. But then I bought a copy of the Taffy Bredeser-Akner book, Long Island Compromise, and it happened to be a signed copy. And her signature, a disgrace. Really? Which made me feel really good. That made me feel very... But she's got a long name. So I get that. Fair enough, yeah. But no, tip-ins are the thing.

19:37During lockdown, you couldn't even get tip-ins. So you'd have tiny, tiny little bits of paper. I mean, like boxes full of these things that were sort of the size of Panini cards that you'd have to sign. And that made me feel ill. Because at least with a bit of A4, you can move them about and you can sign them. But that was like... Then you have to repack every single one of them in the same box it came from and send it back to America. But it's 48 ,000. I don't think I'd do 48 ,000 before. Somebody said online that they didn't, but said, this is too perfect. And I was like, I'm so sorry. Your signature was too perfect.

20:15And I said, by the way, this has been printed. And I said, I'll tell you what, why don't you go and get yourself a drop of water and smear it down and that ink will run. Yeah. And then they came back and apologized. Yes. God, well done. I was like, I'm sorry. Having done it, I'm not going to have the accusations that has been printed. I need to take a look at one. Have you ever signed a book for me? I don't know. I can't remember. Possibly. Yeah. Typed it. Typed your name. Got like a robot to do it. Like an AI signature. Well, no, there are those robot arms. I think Margaret Atwood has one. Yes.

20:49You know, where you write it on, she's signing in one time zone and it's coming out at the other end. So it is sort of her writing it, but it's coming via, you know, some wonderful technology. and some on satellites that's probably not very nice. If it's just those A4 bits of paper, you just sit there and do it by yourself. If it is books, you go to a bookshop or just before Christmas last year, I signed 3 ,000 books for independent bookshops because it's just before Christmas is a great time for them. And then you actually need a team of people because you need someone to flap the book, that is to put it to the page where you're supposed to be signing it, someone to pass it from here, someone to unpack it from a massive box, someone to flap it, someone to pack it in another massive box, and then people to take that massive box away.

21:32But even then, you can do like a thousand an hour if you really go for it. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is literature. That's literature. Marina Jess CB has a question for you. In both rugby codes, the refs are mic'd up. In T20 cricket, some fielders are also mic'd up, and commentators refer to what they've heard on stump mic. I would love to listen to player interaction. So why do you think there has never been a red button option to listen to a mic live in football. Is this due to a lack of demand, too much financial or logistical need, or because the sport would not allow it? The number one reason is because of swearing.

22:06You can hear it in the US. The US games are different. Also, the crowd noise is different. You know, they're singing, you know, fight and win and let's go Chiefs and stuff like that. You know, like none of our chants. They're constantly having, if anything gets picked up, you're constantly apologising for what's happened at football, as it is. the pandemic was very difficult because obviously there were no crowds and although having said that if you didn't put the fake crowd noise on, who are you? It was so haunting Yeah, it was horrible, it was really dark I had to have a fake crowd It's interesting, so there's lots of different reasons the players union doesn't want it you have acknowledged Jess that it would probably be for swearing reasons because you would hear so much swearing but it doesn't matter because the tabloids would just sit on the red button feed and then you'd get 10 stories a day about what people were saying to each other how they were interacting It's the same reason all the players put their hands in front of their mouth when they talk to each other now.

22:59It's not just tactics, it's literally they're talking about something that they don't want in the Daily Express. And that's the reason that the Players Union doesn't want it. However, there are alternatives. We've almost got this one artefact that's really fascinating, which is in the 2018 Cup Final, PGMOL, the match officials body, and the Premier League allowed the footage to be from Michael Oliver, who was the referee from his mic and they gave it to NBC in the US. They introduced this sort of thing as a kind of historic, like this is really interesting and you can still see it on YouTube, but this is from 2018.

23:35It's the only clip we have like this. So we don't really know what you would hear apart from this one thing. And I was watching it again and it's really interesting. Okay, basically it's Chelsea Man United. Eden Hazard is fouled, in my view. Bye, Phil Jones. That's never fouled. Not in a million years. Yeah, okay. But you hear what Michael Oliver is here, and from his mic as well, and the audio is like, people are shouting, dogs, oh, dogs, oh, which means denying obvious goal scoring opportunity. Then he's saying, not now, not now. Then you can hear all the assistants coming in. I mean, this would be crazy if you were listening to this.