The Secret PR War Over Graham Norton's Sofa

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1:19Ballot through 325. While supplies last. Soil offer excludes Alaska and Hawaii. Loyalty program subject to terms and conditions. See Lowe's.com slash terms for details. Subject to change. Point boosters subject to exclusions and more terms apply. One-time only offer. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Restless Entertainment Questions and Answers Edition. I'm Marina Hyde.

1:38Richard Osman:And I'm Richard Osman. Hello, Marina. Hello, Richard. How are you? I'm very well. Thank you, listeners and viewers, as always, for your wonderful questions. Yes, I feel almost viewers in preponderance should be coming first now. But anyhow, we will begin immediately for you with a question about Graham Norton's show. So many people have asked this. I know it's funny, isn't it? There are certain questions crop up again and again. And this one seems to be a particular obsession. Yeah, it is. D Neville in this instance says, how is the guest order decided on the Graham Norton show? Is there a hierarchy from left to right?

2:12Is it at all to do with money or is it designed for the best possible level of interaction?

2:17Richard Osman:wow a little bit of everything is a truth it's been asked so many times and i've always sometimes with producers of shows i'm like there are secrets that you don't really want to give away one of those might be who you put in what positions because there are reasons but i i thought i would ask graham stewart who is um um graham's long-term producer and also by the way doing claudia's new chat show which i'm sure we'll talk about at some point oh my gosh we certainly will But Graham gave me the exact answer. Oh, great. So this is absolutely from the person who knows. Graham says, first he says, interesting question from one of your media savvy listeners.

2:54Richard Osman:That's good. See, that's how you do a chat show. You know, you make sure people feel good about themselves. My answer can be summed up thus. Welcome to show business where all stars are equal, but some are more equal than others. Media hierarchy is primarily driven by publicists. And we've talked about that many times. And seat one, which is the seat next to Graham, is the primary aim of all of them for their clients. I've been on that show a number of times. I do not have a publicist. No one ever talked to me about seat one, Graham. But seat one is the one. He says, and he's absolutely right, our sofa is so star-packed that those publicists have to work very hard to get what they want.

3:33Richard Osman:And you're right, there are certain shows where, I mean, literally. Is it a trial by combat? They fight each other, the publicists? There are huge amounts of people, huge amounts of big stars. these publicists have to work very hard to get what they want. Here's where we draw the curtain a bit. I leave it to you to imagine how long that process can take. Wow. So, you know, different publicists are saying, we must be seat one, we must be seat one. After that, we aim to arrange the order to maximise chemistry. So you've got seat one, which will be the one next to Graham. So that is the primary of the state.

4:03Richard Osman:Seats two, three, and four. And that is chemistry-based. And not hierarchical. Not hierarchical. It's absolutely just what works best. he says seat four is interesting so seat four is the seat furthest from graham same on house of game so on seat four actually you feel like you're slightly further away from somebody the same on the graham show seat four is interesting traditionally the birth is for a funny person but it can also accommodate an artist we know will play the talk show game correctly and help create the right kind of conversational flow now by saying someone who knows how to play the game it's literally someone who who is fun in conversation and he wants to hear from other people and you can throw in their own things which are funny and fun but also can be sat a fair amount of distance from graham that's not to be an ego issue yeah within the spirit of the show yeah proceedings yeah and deliver sort of acid asides or whatever yeah um i think that that it works that that works as well for that person well there's an interesting thing if you're sat in that seat is that the camera angle on you you can look off yeah and you can look to the audience in a way that you cannot do in seats two and three.

5:06So you can absolutely be, what's going on here? Yeah.

5:08Richard Osman:Oh my God, Johnny Depp and Tom Hanks are having an argument. If you're competent in some way, it's the safest seat because you get to be the most yourself. It's the most fun seat. You're not having to sort of... You're a no-one slipstream. You're not having to nod at Arnold Schwarzenegger and then sort of look the other way and nod at Scarlett Johansson. You know, you can... Which I hate at dinner parties. You can look off at the band and say, are you hearing this guys uh so the seat form uh as i say someone who knows how to play the game he said but the key factor in all of this and this is why graham is absolutely right about this graham stewart so the key factor in all of this is the extraordinary ability of graham norton to ringmaster a soft furnishing base line of giant egos nobody does it better he is brilliant i can agree more and by the way i think when graham said giant egos there he's not saying anyone's a diva He's just saying that people are there to do their own thing.

6:02Richard Osman:They work in show business. Whenever I go on other TV shows, I'm playing a different game to other people, I think, a little bit. You have to go on and you have to promote things. But I'm always watching how it is presented and produced. And sometimes you go on shows and you're like, okay, well, I guess they'll fix this in the edit. But on that show, I'm watching the brilliant art of Graham Stewart and Joe Magnusson, who produce it, and also how brilliant Graham Norton is. is because i can see the production that's gone on i can see the stuff that's prepped i can see the stuff i can see the rhythm that they want i can see you know the kind of structure that they put together but then i can see how when you get a host like graham norton how they can riff off the back of that and how they can turn it into something different but the uh the seat one stuff is is fun isn't it it's really fun i just really want to imagine all the publicists having to do incredibly vicious tasks versus each other.

6:58Richard Osman:But also now you have to look back over every episode of Graham Norton and see when two people have a similar level of fame and you just go, and then you just have to imagine the conversations. We talked about it once before, the old Concord seating arrangement. It's very, very difficult. Who goes in 1A? Oh, yeah. You've got Jagger and Rupert Murdoch. What do you do? I mean, I know what I'd do, but I don't run the world. I would head back to the Ryanair queue immediately. A question for you, Marina, from Danny Miller. The Marty Supreme marketing campaign has surely succeeded in terms of getting an indie flick about a table tennis player from the 1950s into the cultural zeitgeist.

7:35Richard Osman:What are the greatest movie marketing campaigns of all time? Yes, Marty Supreme has become A24's most successful movie via the North American box office, which is what they really count and care about. It's been helped by a very, very willing star who's willing to do unusual things, Timothee Chalamet, and he's obviously done funny behind-the-scenes campaign videos, which they put on the whole thing, the orange clothes, the Kylie of it all, the Kylie Jenner of it all. He's a Graham Norton seat one. Yeah, he's absolutely a seat one. The last one we really saw like that was Barbie with Margot Robbie, who absolutely hauled that film around the world.

8:12They had premieres every year. We turned up to every premiere in a different and amazing kind of pink outfit. again it's sort of costuming but it's fun and it's knowing but there were many other things with that they spent i think it cost 145 and they spent 150 on marketing so more money million yeah and that color remember they ran out of that specific pink for set painting in the uk that specific shade of barbie pink um but they had saturation marketing for that you know like everything from google changing its name on all of those things but the thing that they you couldn't really predict was the barbenheimer phenomenon and that came up organically and that was great for both that and oppenheimer do you think that's better for i know that that nolan

8:51Richard Osman:is a is a huge filmmaker and has made a lot of money in his time but do you think it boosted oppenheimer more than it boosted barbie yes i do i really do um and i think that you didn't see killian murphy or or nolan trogging around the world i mean she was everywhere margaret she absolutely dragged that movie around the world and i think she did brilliantly and she was really out there i've i've got a huge amount of time for i think she's fantastic yes agreed okay we talked about i will just do this one quickly jaws was amazing because it opened coast to coast and it had a lot of tv ads which was crucial and that poster is iconic so jaws was one of those going to further sort of steven spielberg monster films jurassic park was incredible because that campaign was all about something.

9:38I mean, he obviously learned from Jaws that, you know, maybe the anticipation and not seeing the monster, the shark in that case, or the dinosaurs, it kind of gets more, it serves up more suspense and it serves up more drama. You never saw the dinosaurs. You could hear them. You might hear the footprint, but you never saw them. And there was such an expectation for what do these things look like, because it was obviously going to be the CGI triumph. So that brings me to my next one. no one knew avatar as always when someone takes a big swing you know there's always these people out there saying this is going to be a complete disaster it's going to flop it's going to tank so badly you know what's james cameron thinking of and that was definitely the narrative about avatar which was it was all going to be a big disaster and so i remember what they did was that they got lots of journalists and whatever and they gave them a 15 minute screening and they gave them a look at the world and it completely destroyed the disaster narrative overnight because those people we would not have even known what the word influencer meant at that time but they effectively were cultural influencers and that turned everything around overnight again star wars everyone thought that would bomb there was nothing in popular culture that said oh there's the star wars shape gap missing in this particular thing so it was a really big swing i think in a way the marketing for that was brilliant the campaign for that was fantastic but also what george lucas did was that he got all those toys ready he believed in it so much he got all the toys ready in advance he understood that merchandising was part of the law was part of the way in which young people were going to understand the world and not as a sort of afterthought but part of actually the world the universe building well i was i was six years old

11:19Richard Osman:when star wars came out and we went to see it we're not we were not a family who ever went to the cinema when we were not a culturally rich family but i just remember just the assumption of course you would go and see star wars it's my it's like like jury service it is now it is now my weekend to go and see star wars and the excitement of the thing and absolutely no idea where that came from because they weren't influencing me particularly and my mum is almost uninfluenceable so but but but there you go something worked yeah well okay god i loved that film when I went to see it. So amazing. What a lovely film to have as your first, you know, like a film that's so brilliantly made and has endured.

11:56Richard Osman:I can, you know, buy or leave the rest of the Star Wars universe. But that as a... But the toys then serving as a sort of, because the toys were so big, serving as a sort of iterated campaign. By the time you played with them and you're in the world... I can live without the toys. I can live without all of them. But they were a huge thing. Oh, for sure. And they were a way that by the time The Empire Strikes Back comes in, you've been playing with these things for three years or whatever it was. I think I was still on Action Man at that point. Okay, Deadpool was great. That was a brilliant sort of Marvel campaign in a kind of peak to try and do something different within that universe.

12:29For me, I love things like this. So the Blair Witch project was unbelievable. That movie cost$60 ,000. It created the idea of found footage as we know it, which now is so hackneyed as you can't even do it anymore. But it became a cultural immersion. People were completely obsessed with it. They created fake missing persons posters. It had a website. Wow. Wow. Yeah. This is 99. It had a website. It had fake newsreels. It had police reports on the website. It was something completely different and ultra, ultra avant-garde and modern in terms of anything. And people were obsessed with it. As I say, the movie cost$60 ,000.

13:10And so there are lots of great horror ones, actually.

13:12Richard Osman:That's one where you can't say that movie cost$60 ,000. No. And they spent$70 ,000 on marketing. You're quite right. You're quite right. But there are lots of horror ones that are good. Hitchcock did it by accident with Psycho because he really didn't want to give away any forms of twists that may or may not be in the movie. He didn't want to give anything away. So he said to the theater owners, no one can be admitted late to this film. And they let it be known that he'd said this. And so it created this whole kind of idea of, but why? And so they had all these, there were long queues and people could see in real life there were long queues around the cinema.

13:50So that was a big one.

13:51Richard Osman:Blockbusters. Yeah. Cloverfield, which is a kind of horror sci-fi. I think this one was an amazing one. It was a viral ARG game, you know, alternate reality game. And it was so clever. That was a J.J. Abrams movie. The Dark Knight did this too. And they involved sort of MySpace pages for the characters. There were fake websites. There were all these kind of Lovecraftian elements. And it was sort of possible to piece together the idea of what the monster might be from what there was out there. And again, The Dark Knight did this, you know, to make the fans players before they have ever got to see it is incredible.

14:25Richard Osman:Which now we take as an absolute given. We do. I credit all of those with having had amazing habits. Sometimes it's just a slogan, and I've talked before, so I went bang on about it, like, you know, in space no one can hear you scream, all of the sort of alien thing, the alien thing which was just an egg on the poster. Again, what's in the egg? That sort of anticipation. but I would say in terms of actual really quite concerted and clever campaigns or in Hitchcock's case almost accidental although he's so calculating that it's hard but Marty Supreme has certainly in a time when we've you know press campaigns getting quite tired and they're not doing that has broken out of the strictures which means that essentially you can spend all this money and it not really and things not even really get noticed that has broken out of that and a huge amount of it is credit to timothy chalamet and the way he did it and the way he leans into those things because most stars don't want to promote their movies it's and it's fascinating as well that thing of when something enters popular culture and you haven't worked out how it is to to be able to sort of cross that rubicon into mainstream popular culture which is very very very hard to do i i remember i must have been 21 22 or something and i remember reservoir dogs oh Oh, yeah.

15:36Okay.

15:37Richard Osman:And I don't know anything about the story behind that marketing campaign. I remember seeing that poster and I remember everyone going, oh, I'm so excited for that film coming out. I cannot wait for that film coming out. And this is a movie by someone we'd never heard of before. It had people you knew in it. Most people didn't know those people. Yeah, exactly. It wasn't a new Tom Hanks movie. It just had that black and red and white poster with sort of people wearing sunglasses, you know, kind of walking towards you. And everybody wanted to see that movie. And the music, the soundtrack took on a complete cultural life of its own.

16:21And that's always very helpful.

16:22Richard Osman:Yeah, it's amazing. And it's got a how that's that that alchemy is is quite something. Yeah, so Star Wars and Reservoir Dogs both had that effect on me. And I think this Christmas so did Marty Supreme. You're just like, oh, of course I'm going to go and see that. I don't really have an option not to. You know, I mean, that's just the next thing that I'm going to go and do. It's an amazing skill and it helps when the movies are great. Shall we go to a break? Let's do that.

17:04welcome back everybody well here is a question after my own heart from nick richard about the salt path have sales of the salt path been affected in the aftermath of the observer's investigation this was the one that cast doubt on the stories behind this unbelievable best-selling book is there any sense it's caused lasting damage in the publishing industry it's a story that

17:25Richard Osman:really caught light isn't it interesting and stories don't often catch light in the publishing industry is the truth it's quite hard for for publishing to get on the front page and this was a story about a book that in publishing was big but in the wider world you know was still relatively small so a phenomenon within the world of publishing but outside the world of publishing didn't have the name recognition which it now definitively does something about this story that really caught people's attention something about the lie of the thing something about By Rainer Wynne and it's about going off on a walk when they're sort of made homeless, apparently through no fault of their own in the telling of the book.

18:03And her and her husband, who has a seemingly terminal illness, go on this walk around the south part in Cornwall and he is semi-cured via this journey against the elements.

18:14Richard Osman:And yeah, all sorts of inconsistencies were shown up and so it became a big story. By the way, I met someone who knew Raina Wynne's husband. So this is one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet. I mean, it doesn't help with our narrative here. So yeah, it was a big story. So what effect does it have? And again, we have to talk about the thing that the publishing industry is an ecosystem all of its own. It doesn't work in the same way as talking about marketing campaigns for films and stuff like that, where there is a place for them to be as central in our culture. It's not the case with books. And if you look at something like The Rise of Freedom at Fadden, that has not come through traditional means.

18:51Richard Osman:So she's the absolute biggest name in publishing, self-publish, but it comes more via Facebook and word of mouth and things like that, which happen with books. The other side of that is you can have a huge scandal like this, like the Salt Path thing. And it was a big story. You know, if this had been a TV story, if it had been the BBC, we'd never heard the end of it. The people who would have resigned would have been absolutely crazy. But the net impact of it, I would say, across sales, across the culture of the publishing industry, is literally zero. It is nothing. Sales figures didn't really get a bump, particularly when it came out.

19:35Richard Osman:I guess the amount of people who suddenly thought I'd like to read that was offset by the amount of people who were suddenly going, ooh, I don't know if I should read that. So sales had sort of no impact whatsoever. So ever, the sales chart is exactly where it was before. It's had an impact on Raina Wynn's next book, which hasn't come out. And I don't imagine will come out anytime soon. But her next next book, which I imagine will be about this, I suspect will do rather well. But it's had no impact there. And I've talked to various agents and editors about stuff that goes in on submission now and what publishers are looking for and what commissioning editors are looking for.

20:10Richard Osman:They say it never comes up. What, fact-checking? Not even fact checking, just the idea that this might have had an impact on an industry whatsoever. There are a couple more legal queries than usual on some submissions, major. But certainly no commissioner is going, oh, I don't know about doing real life stories because it's a lot of hassle and people now sort of doubting everything they read. No one is doubting what they read more. No one is saying, oh, we can't do a thing about walking along a path. A couple more queries from the legal people no one has resigned no one's lost their job no one's really all that fussed about it and it has had no impact whatsoever on sales it said that you know it's had an immediate impact on Raina's career because the next book is not going to come out but that will be substituted by the fact that the book she does next course will be about what happens when you become the center of a media storm what happens to your family what is your truth a metaphorical storm this time as opposed to the other types of the elements exactly where you were sitting in your farmhouse in france rather than walking down a coastal path like you said you were going to so yeah it's had it's had no impact at all really the salt path movie julian anderson and jason isaacs didn't either well or badly but yeah when when all this story came out there were people saying actually this is going to send people into the bookshops to buy this book it's going to go crazy it did not go crazy other people saying well that's it she'll never sell another book in her life she is still sending books so it has had absolutely zero effect whatsoever i find publishing a fascinating sort of bubble in the middle of things where different rules apply you cannot you cannot apply the rules of other bits of culture television film music even to the world of publishing it exists in an entirely different sphere to answer your question in a way it has had no impact whatsoever i love that story yeah it tells its own story and that story happens to be true which is rare these days marina a question from isla carrigan like marina i am obsessed with the idea of the charlie xcx mockumentary the moment coming at the end of the month what are your top three mockumentaries that's a really good question and i really like the form the first time we ever heard that word was in the opening sort of monologue by rob reiner i mean he created that word for us at the beginning of spinal tap right the beginning of spinal tap so by the way i've divided these into cinema and tv i'll do kind of tv first i think i what is it about the form i love it's fun to write it's really fun it's a fun sleight of hand isn't it i tell you why in some ways you like it because it's a format and it's always funny to play with a format so you're saying here's a set of rules for how we do these things and as a writer yes you know there are moving parts there are talking heads there's found footage there's this there's all of these things and then we put it all together it's a little bit like doing a play within a play or something like that is that you can play with the form and you can make it but writers love it so there have always been you know mockumentaries is an absolute favorite of writers especially comedy writers yeah yes exactly all of mine are comedies to my tv ones she's not in there yet but she probably will be in a series or two all the cunk ones i have cut she's like just outside the top three yeah all of those number three i'm gonna put summer heights high which i think may have aged really complicatedly in some departments, but is genuinely hysterical.

23:30So that's Chris Lilley, the Australian. The Australian guy, yeah. And it's a sort of documentary behind a story of just a high school where a girl from a private school does an exchange with a girl from their school. We never see her. I find it hysterical. Number two, I'm going to put them at two equal and I almost feel they're not really mockumentaries.

23:48Richard Osman:So is this number one and number two? No, this is number three I've just done because I've done it properly. Well, you haven't if you're doing joint number twos. Oh yeah, you're right, I can't. You can have them, but if Summer Heights High is number four, and these two are joint number two, you can't relegate one to behind Summer Heights High. It's almost like I should be picking a genre, because those ones that came in the wake of mockumentaries, the TV comedies, like Modern Family, like Parks and Recreation, they sort of are, because there's a lot of people looking at the camera. But let's be quite honest, you're not sure where on earth this documentary would be at.

24:20I'll say Parks and Recreation because you can conceivably imagine that someone would do a documentary about local government in Indiana.