The Baby Reindeer Controversy

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1:30Hello and welcome to another edition of The Rest is Entertainment with me Marina Hyde. And me Richard Osman. Hello Marina. How are you Richard? Yeah I'm okay. I'm not too bad. I'm in the midst of a very big deadline this week. So this is a lovely little relaxing kind of amuse-bouche. Yeah before the horror begins. Before the horror begins which is the subtitle of our show this week. Because we're talking about baby reindeer and Liz Truss. Yes. Are we not? And indeed AI celebrity chatbots, so really the full banquet of... Some lovely bits in there as well. Yes, some jolly bits as well. The AI chatbot thing is something that you drew my attention to this week, and it is one of the most terrifying, weird, sort of dystopian things I've ever heard of in my life.

2:15So keep listening for that. Yes. Shall we start with Baby Reindeer though? Let's start with Baby Reindeer. It's a huge show, it's on Netflix, starring the comedian and written by Richard Gad, He had a true life story about a time when he was stalked and various things that happened after that. And it has been an enormous hit for Netflix, what they call a breakout hit, so big it was even featured on Gogglebox. In fact, when it was on Gogglebox, I kept waiting for them just to be on their phones and Googling because you know that's how everyone watches every TV show now. You can't watch an old Top of the Pops without Googling where the bands are now.

2:46You can't watch any of those American series, the true crime things. You sort of have to wait till the end. and all you want to do is Google who every single person is because of course you do. That's what human beings are. That's how we watch television and drama producers know that as well as anybody. So you have to be so careful at all times if you are trying to hide people's identities that it is impossible to find out who they are. It's the story of Richard Gad's stalker and also of his relationship and interactions with a TV producer who was sort of older and more powerful and without any more spoilers, I won't say anything more than that.

3:23And certainly, yeah, it's become the most talked about show for a long time for a couple of reasons. One, of course, these extraordinary ratings and I suspect that Jessica Gunning, who plays Martha, will be up for every award going as well. But two, because it does depict real life events and it has sort of bled out into the real world this week. Apart from the cold open, the first words you see on screen are this is a true story. Now, that is actually even within the genre of based on a true story. That's very unusual to see this is a true story rather than based on a true story. But last week, what has happened is that because the show has become such a massive hit and it says this is a true story at the beginning, people have got caught up in an absolute frenzy of internet sleuthing.

4:07The woman who Martha is based on has been identified, you know, and obviously she did a very bad thing. journalists outside our home she's suffered huge numbers of sort of threats online and the tv producer has been misidentified i don't know don't know about correctly identified but certainly people have been wrongly identified richard gad himself has had to issue a statement saying please stop this sleuthing this is not what our show was about well we'll come to that and it is an absolute sort of frenzy and i've talked to a lot of people involved in shows like this this week and it's a big hot topic in the tv industry at the moment everyone is talking about this show and as i said netflix made this there are shows to which it owes certain things that sort of first person point of view it doesn't break the fourth wall there's a lot of fleabag in there to some extent which was also based on an edinburgh show richard gad did two edinburgh shows we should say because that might become relevant later i may destroy you which was michaela cole's story of her own sexual assault and the attempt to sort of unravel that and an exploration of the idea of consent and all sorts of things like that.

5:13Anyway, now both of those were on the BBC and in the case of I May Destroy You was a co-production with HBO. But there's something called compliance in television. And I mean, all the writers and all the producers and all the executives I spoke to this week were like, this thing that's happened with Baby Wendy O 'Wright should not have happened. I don't know what Netflix have. You know, maybe if they had a proper compliance department, they wouldn't be able to pay their chief executive $50 million a year. but who knows? In fact, Martha is very close in various ways to the real-life person who stalked Richard Gad.

5:47It is easy to identify. It's been very easy for people to identify her. It didn't say any actual sleuthing. No. You can Google certain phrases and it comes up immediately. Certain phrases are used in the show. Now, you know, some people may say, oh, well, maybe now she can see what it's like to have people sitting outside her house and getting horrible messages over the internet, which is what happened to him. But, you know, I don't feel that we should, criminal justice should happen in that way. If you talk to people involved in things like the BBC, they say, you know, we've got, clearly in this show, in Baby Reindeer, there are vulnerable, both contributors and people on whom it's based, deeply vulnerable people.

6:24And you have someone who is, the BBC have a part-time commission executive who deals with these types of issues and would have advised. In something like I May Destroy You, they, you know, they made sure the defining characteristics of the lead characters were really different so that people didn't say, oh, I wonder if it was this, I wonder if it was that. There is a sort of slight sense of Netflix that it's a bit of a Wild West and that, you know, now at the moment of his big professional triumph, Richard Gad is right in the eye of a storm and so are maybe other people upon whom the show is based or not based.

6:56Well, that's the interesting thing. As you say, there's a very, very serious thing that happens and Richard Gad, as you say, did the show in Edinburgh and has been very open to people in the industry about who that person was. So people in the industry know who that person was. Well, that's the difficulty, you see, the complexity of him having put the material out there before in another format. And obviously that person hasn't been prosecuted, has never gone to trial, but everyone knows who he is talking about. Now, it comes out now and a completely different person is identified, someone who has produced Richard Gad before, but is definitively not the person in any way.

7:28But the person they've cast in that role looks like this other guy, looks like the guy who's been falsely accused. and it's such a weird, bizarre thing to do because this poor guy's now, he's had death threats and he's had to issue a statement and say it's not me and it is not him, definitively not because people in the industry know who it is and it is definitely not him. Richard Gadda said it's not him. Yes, Richard Gadda said it's not him. Honestly, I think they had no idea it was going to become such a huge phenomenon. Yeah, because it arrived sort of without fanfare. It really did. But there's something very compelling about that first-person narrative that just draws you in and it is very, very compellingly told.

8:02Yeah, it's sort of unlike anything you've ever seen before in an interesting way. But I can't think they would have predicted it. And so maybe the eye was taken off the board. Yeah, but they should have predicted it. And actually, in terrestrial public service television, they would have had to have predicted it. And somebody's, you know, neck would be on the chopping block if they hadn't. Because I have huge sympathy with both, at much lesser extent with Netflix, who I don't necessarily have huge sympathy with, but with Richard Gabbard. Because are we saying now in this era of social media that people can't tell their stories of what happened?

8:31People have always told their stories of what have happened to them. And to a large extent, what's happening here is this is TV companies failing, in this case, to do stuff that they actually wouldn't have never had to bother with in the era before social media because it wouldn't have been possible to do this. And these frenzies, that phrase we've used before that no snowflake thinks it's part of an avalanche. You know, you're writing this, you're sharing this thing, you're saying maybe this thing. You don't realise that, or you don't think, you're not conscious that another 100 ,000 people have shared that thing as well.

8:59In an interview to promote the show, he said of the real life, Martha, we've gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don't think she would recognise herself. Well, I'm afraid that isn't the case. And it's certainly not even the case with really quite half-hearted sleeping on social media that people recognised her. You don't have to be Colleen Rooney to work out who she is. Now, I believe that, you know, it is the job of TV companies that are hugely rich and powerful to understand what era they live in. You're telling me Netflix doesn't understand big tech? Well, I think it does.

9:32It is big tech, okay, to some extent. It is. And I really think it's extraordinary that it's got to this stage. Lots of stuff wasn't changed. So you're left with Richard Gad, who I do think, of course, should be able to tell his story. And he's done so brilliantly in it, blah, blah, blah. But these things should have been better disguised. And I don't think this would have happened. I don't think for a minute this would have happened at the BBC. And I don't think it would have happened at ITV. I think that far more care would be taken with compliance and you don't know how this story is going to end now and I should say that you've just got to be so careful you know when I was thinking of talking about this I was thinking about something in my own life that I could perhaps use to shed light on this this morning when we were chatting and I thought you know what I'm not going to do it because even I and perhaps because I'm in the news media but I can see around the corners and I could see how people could uncover what I was about to say and I could see how people could find people who about whom I may talk and you probably think you're keeping this so vague I don't actually know what you're talking about and I suppose that's the point I am trying to keep it very vague because I can see around the corners it was their job to see around the corners and they failed to do so and when you've got a mega hit like that by the way this has been like number one in loads of other territories not just the UK it's massive and they didn't particularly promote it I wasn't like aware of it as one of their big shows that was coming they should have understood this and they must understand this going forward in an era of social media which we've been in quite some time now yeah i mean so richard gadd who's been around a long time and has won edinburgh awards and done you know incredibly interesting very unusual shows edinburgh for years and years and yeah this should be his crowning triumph he's taken something that happened to him something that was clearly very traumatic he's written i would say a fairly great piece of art about it a very unusual very compelling uh searingly honest too honest it turns out and it's his huge break and suddenly he's got the thing that he always wanted and you know judging by the quality of what he's written the thing that he always deserved as well and it has led immediately to absolute panic for everybody involved so it must be very very unusual and difficult place for i mean it's almost it's it's so odd because it's so sort of meta it's echoed in some ways in the show within the body of the show itself and it you know he sort of goes viral in the show itself and and so yeah you would think that it was dealable with i wonder if because it did start as an edinburgh show and so all these things have been aired already and which is such a smaller environment and you're not going to have this great social media but perhaps the filmmakers and netflix were thinking well this has been pre-legaled but as you say an edinburgh run you know what an edinburgh run and a very minor netflix show might have similar um audiences and similar issues but an Edinburgh run and the biggest show in the world for a week have very very very different audiences and as you say that's that's the point of all the money that is spent on compliance and aftercare and all of those things is just in case and this is the absolute classic example of just in case.

12:26Maybe we can talk a little bit about based on a true story particularly via Netflix some producers just almost think it's an IP genre in itself it gives a show such a lot of and obviously sometimes shows like Fargo say this is a true story and it's not because that's a different reason it's a sort of, you know, it's a trope it's a fictional meta of something but in the case of true stories which Netflix have really tried to corner the market in they're very sued, even in the US which is quite weird where they sort of regard libel like cheap gas as their birthright you know, First Amendment I can say whatever I like all the time things like that, inventing Anna Now that, which is about this con woman, one of those kind of scam artists, it's often the sort of supporting characters in shows like that.

13:10Because real life is messy and it doesn't quite fit, sometimes those supporting characters become quite caricatured in order to wait, you know, without getting too technical on the writing, to make the story work when you're coming to tell it as a fictional thing. They have to be a certain sort of engine. Exactly. And because they're a supporting character, a side character, they're kind of there as, not entirely as a plot device, but they're there to help that. Now, a lot of those supporting characters are suing Netflix. And in the case of Inventing Anna, that case is going ahead in the US. Again, as I say, it's quite hard to prove defamation in the US because they're kind of allowed to say anything, very much unlike the UK.

13:46And Netflix is becoming a very sort of sued entity by people who feel they've been misrepresented in these so-called based-on-a-true-story shows. I like the idea of being a sued entity. Yeah, there's a lot of these cases that are either going forward or in the pipeline, and whether we'll get to hear them or not. But I really think that if you say this is a true story, and there are elements of this story, by the way, particularly involved in the resolution, which are not what happened in the true story. Yeah, absolutely. So talking to executives and commissioners and all sorts of different people this week, some of them said to me, yeah, I think even based on a true story would have helped in this.

14:22But it's saying right off the bat, this is a true story. And the online chatter about it is always, is absolutely, oh my God, this actually happened. Yeah. well, this is real, that's a real person. Sorry, and I guess the reason I brought this up is that people love a story that was real and they can't believe it. You know, a huge amount of it is like, oh my God, it blows my mind that this whole thing is true. But now people are talking about things that happened. If you look at the online chat about it, they're saying, oh, well, all this sort of stuff happened. And you're thinking, yeah, but that was the bit in the this is a true story that didn't actually turn out in that exact way.

14:55And so... There's like a breakdown he has at a gig, so you would maybe look for that footage and that footage doesn't exist because, as you say, that's a plot line. Well, I would say that the sort of legal resolution with the stalker did not occur in the way that it is presented in the show. But people think that the show is complete fact. Yeah, the denouement of the piece, which is in a court case, which I won't go into details of, but didn't happen. I mean, it didn't happen and people have assumed, of course they've assumed because it says it's a true story, that it did happen and it's part of the story and it's not.

15:29It's an imagination. Yes, it is an imagination. And without getting too deeply into it, I think that it is obviously is presented as fact because you're constantly thinking it's a true story. It's quite tricky that now. And I think they really are going to have to think much, much harder going forward because social media is a fact of life. And these companies are definitely not going to look after anybody, the TikTok or Twitter or Instagram or any of the places where people are trying to do their sleuthing. Yeah, I think that certainly if you were making a show now for any of the streamers or for anybody that is about a real person, then this week your compliance just got tightened by about 8 ,000%.

16:08I think this will be the sort of patient zero of Netflix compliance. Maybe they've got a big department. I don't wish to speculate, but they're not doing a very good job. Richard Gad says in the most 2024 sentence ever this story is emotionally 100 % true by the way I absolutely get what he means because he has taken his trauma which is genuine and turned it into a piece of art which is a genuine piece of art people must be allowed to do this because people have done this forever and they must be allowed to do this I would say though as a counterpoint is it a counterpoint that it's really worth a watch I mean a little pinch of salt and please don't do online sleuthing and all the usual caveats but I do think Jessica Gunning who plays the stalker is going to win every award going.

16:47Oh, she's fantastic. Yeah, she's brilliant. Performance. It's very interesting and it's an interesting case of what happens when you suddenly have an enormous hit on your hands. If there's even the slightest crack in the foundations of that hit, then it will open into a chasm. And that, I think, is what's happened here. I mean, I'm sure they're happy. It's an enormous hit. I think Clark and Well Films make it and Richard Gad and Netflix must be fielding an awful lot of calls this week and rightly so. Shall we go into a break and then return with the cheerier subject of Liz Truss's book sales. Let's have a break.

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18:47Welcome back, everybody. Shall we talk about Liz Truss? Don't turn off. We're talking about her book sales. Don't worry. We're talking about Liz Truss as a publishing story. I promise it's fun. I don't think we'd describe her as a publishing phenomenon, would we, Richard? Well, I think, yeah. Well, everything's a phenomenon. It's a thing. Yes, exactly. So her book, Ten Years to Save the West, Ten Years to Monetise, her brief moment in number 10. a lot of hoopla about it serialised in all sorts of places I've even seen articles this week I'll go on to one in The Spectator which is the single worst thing I've ever seen written about the book industry of all time well done guys we will get into it but yeah I've seen hoopla saying it was a bestseller it sold 2 ,200 copies which I'm going to go on record is that in the UK because it's had a UK and a US release we should say in the US there are charts that go down a long way it is not in those charts the UK was the one it went in at number 70 and by the way your first week that's your big week week one after week one on two because that's when all your promotion is happening everything and if you can manage to get yourself in the top 10 in week one then you know then there should be a long tail etc but you can build also week one includes every single pre-sale so every single person who pre-ordered that that all counts in week one and that all led up to about 2200 we should say it was serialised in the Daily Mail all over the media She was number 17.

20:09Number 59, selling 3 ,300, was the Sticker Dolly Dressing Magical Kingdom. My daughter's got that. Oh, well, there you go. Yeah, I haven't got the Liz Truss book, but yeah. And that wasn't even in week one. That's just nicely bobbing along, the old Sticker Dolly Dressing Magical Kingdom. So yeah, it's a very low seller. It's sold fewer than Matt Hancock's book sold in its first week. That, by the way, Richard, is at certain weeks of the year, not the weeks you release your books, obviously, but at certain weeks of the year, that is enough to maybe scrape you into the top 10. You might scrape in at 10.

20:39You might scrape into the top 10 hardback nonfiction. You have to keep adding extra words. This is Matt Hancock's Pandemic Diaries. I think that would be doing quite well if he'd done that. It went down to 600 the week after, I think. First of all, it was published by Biteback. And Biteback have got a good sort of... In general, they've got quite good economics. They only paid, by the way,£1 ,500 for the publication rights to this book. By the way, Liz Truss has only got an American agent, which I sort of love. Like, yeah, I don't know. There's someone called Javelin. Javelin was the code name of Donald Rumsfeld, the Secret Service code name of Donald Rumsfeld's wife.

21:16And Donald Rumsfeld, former chief of staff, runs this book agency. Wow. You forget he was married to Fatima Whitbrook, don't you? You forget. He doesn't talk about it very much. So Biteback bought them for£1 ,500. I think whoever is publishing him in the US, I think they paid 6 ,000. I should say, by the way, that I've not seen this discussed. Sorry if it has been, everybody. But I saw in her register of members' interests where the MPs have to say, you know, what money's coming in and what they've, you know, she's making, by the way, a lot of money from speeches, a lot. I saw that she was making like 15 grand, which is...

21:50No, but sometimes 65 grand, sometimes... Yeah, yeah, she's got a lot of big ones that she gets and then sometimes it's a little bit, but it's in London. But, you know, you're going to China and you're getting 65 grand. I can't really... I mean, that feels like someone deficit funding something, doesn't it? Yeah, it feels like a lot of things. I don't think if you're the O2, you're not thinking, let's pay Liz 65 grand. You know we'll make it back on the bar. I agree on this, but she says in that that she's taken 90 hours to write this book. So I haven't seen that. That's about two weeks' work. Oscar Wilde actually claimed to have written The Picture of Dorian Gray in less than two weeks.

22:23And I'm going to go out on a limb here. It is better than 10 years to save the West. having said that okay so ByteBat have got this good publishing model 90 hours yeah I mean it keeps saying it's 100 ,000 words which by the way it's not because I looked at the page count yeah but that would be she's writing 1 ,000 words she claims it's no more yeah we're aware she can do things quickly look at how quickly she crashed the economy yeah she can do it in a heartbeat like that she can do it in one speech I don't think she's written 100 ,000 words in 90 hours well yeah so ByteBat have this thing where they give you a very low advance and if you do well I think your advice is always if you can afford it Take a low advance Or don't take it Some people don't even take one if they are able to Clive James once told me, no I never take advances anymore Because you earn out miles quicker Can you explain that bit to me?

23:12So it says she's got a£1 ,500 advance I think it would be£6 ,000 actually Because I think she'll get paid in four chunks So I think her advance is£6 ,000 And people were laughing and saying Oh Boris got half a million and this out of the other The whole point with an advance is it sort of doesn't matter what your advance is. Certainly if you can write a book in two weeks, it doesn't matter what your advance is because you haven't had to fund yourself for those two weeks. I don't know what Oscar Wilde's advance for the picture of Joy and Grey was. And what it means is if you do get an advance, so Boris gets half a million for a book he hasn't written yet, you have to earn that back for the publisher before you see another penny.

23:45And so Liz Trusser would only have to earn back£6 ,000 from this book and would then start getting royalties. In fact, I think the Independent quoted someone as saying she's relying on royalty payments to make serious money from the book. Here's a newsflash. If you sell 2 ,200 books in week one, you are not going to be making serious money from royalties. Again, in this Spectator article, I'll get onto it, it said that Biteback have already made their money back. I mean, they definitely haven't made it back on book sales. They might have done on serialisation, but yeah, they definitely haven't on book sales.

24:15There was a lot of sort of thing like, oh, we've had to reprint because Amazon have run out of it. Which are completely different things. So Amazon run out of books sometimes. Amazon, work out how many people want to buy a book. Because Amazon don't want to have extra stock in their warehouses. This is like a really technical... Are you saying they didn't buy 500 ,000 copies of Liv's Tross' book? They did not, weirdly. Wow, Betos, what's wrong with you? Wake up. And so I'm going to talk about this Spectator article. Every bit of it was so bad. It said, oh yeah, Amazon sold out, so they've immediately gone for a reprint.

24:46You think, right, no, they haven't gone for a reprint, right? The reprint is quite expensive to print a book, So you print however many you think are going to be sold. I don't know how many they would have done with Liz Truss's book, 20 ,000, maybe something like that. Amazon say, we're going to sell, you know, 1 ,000. And when they get towards the end of that 1 ,000, they will immediately say they're out of stock and you have to then deliver more to their warehouse. And when they deliver to the warehouse, it comes back into stock. So it's not that it's sold out. It's not that you're having to reprint because of, you know, incredible demand.

25:15Second run on Liz Truss's book in 14 minutes. Yeah, exactly. It's because Amazon didn't think it was going to do, Amazon sort of roughly work out how many it's going to sell, never overstock, and then at some point you have to restock them. So it hasn't reprinted, and Amazon is immediately back in stock. So the spectator have written this article about Liz Truss's book sales, which is the most incorrect article I've ever read in my life. It's beautiful in its incorrectness. It starts by saying her book sales may ruffle feathers. That's the tone of the thing throughout, and it gets more and more bonkers as it goes on.

25:48so I'll just pick up some reasons why it's bonkers. It's talking about how it's number one in political biography on Amazon. Now, Amazon has this brilliant thing, and it works really, really well, where they have a million different subcharts, so everyone can be number one somewhere. I'm always number one in rural life humour. Okay, that's where my book is always. I saw Liz Truss was number one in political philosophers at one point, whatever that is. Political philosophers. And this Oscar and the Spectator said, it's talking about Rory Stewart, our friend Rory Stewart, and said, Roy Stewart may be displeased to learn that he's number 90 in political biography.

26:18Yeah, that's because his book has been out for a year. It'll be crying into his bank balance because that sold a load. Roy Stewart's book in week one sold 25 ,000 copies. That's 11 times more and has gone on to sell, I think it's up to about 200 ,000 hardbacks, which is a lot of books and certainly more than Liz Truss is ever, ever, ever going to sell. The Asked and the Spectator was also talking about the Prince Harry books. It's even outsold Prince Harry. Oh my God. It's the biggest selling hardback non-fiction watch of all time. You know, that's like saying last week more people watched House of Games than watched The Moon Landings.

26:55Because last week they did, you know. But The Moon Landings is still the biggest TV show of all time. It was absolutely extraordinary. It was doing everything to say this is a huge hit. And listen, it sold 2 ,200 copies. Plenty of books would be happy with that. But not books where you've been in the papers all week. and you know if we could talk about serialisation for a bit because that is quite interesting so serialisation goes direct to you and it doesn't necessarily count against the everyone's got a different deal but in general you would expect that to go to the author now so she would have got a decent whack I'm trying to think how much now Matt Hancock got£48 ,000 for his pandemic diary serialisation which is also in the mail the mail often gets these because they've got a lot more money than a lot of Fleet Street and so they might buy these things but that also included an interview and serialisation.