The Toughest Job In Entertainment

0:00The Rest is Entertainment is presented by Octopus Energy. Now, remember, Octopus Energy does something really great. If they've got your birthday, when you call in for whatever reason to Octopus, the Hold Music is the number one selling single from that year, the year of your 14th birthday.

0:19Richard Osman:And we discovered, didn't we, that yours was The Only Way Is Up by Yaz and the Plastic Population. We're going to discover mine now. yours is i just called to say i love you by stevie wonder okay yes i prefer yours do you think it's weird to have whole music which is i just called to say i love you because listen and you know that i love octopus energy but i will rarely ring them to tell them i love them yeah yeah i would usually but you know i just want to chat to them about something to do with my energy and i don't mean that sort of energy well look they can but surface the number one single of that year for you.

0:56And you can always choose not to have the music. You can choose for, no, but I think only animals do that, as I've said, and I want to go on the record as saying that.

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2:07Hello and welcome to this episode of the Restors Entertainment, questions and answers edition. I'm Marina High.

2:12Richard Osman:And I am Richard Osman. Lots of lovely questions. Thank you, listeners, as always, for sending them in. Should we get straight into it? Well, we're not going to because we have some any other business. Whoa, are you kidding me? Courtesy of Russell T. Davis The Russell T. Davis Yes What does Russell have to say? Russell says, Dear Richard Marina, I love you I literally love you more, Russell But I have to insist The greatest Chekhov's gun we were talking about this last week Is surely The Claw First seen in Toy Story in 1995 We then had to wait 15 years for the payoff in Toy Story 3 When The Claw descends And there's a spoiler coming here And saves everyone from the fiery furnace the height of cinema i actually said the claw out loud bliss okay yeah he's right yeah to be fair i'll hand it to you yeah a 15 year check-offs gun 15 years is amazing that is a long-range uh rifle yes yeah okay very good we stand corrected i have a small uh any other business from a russell p davis i don't no do you have a question for me i have a question from jamie Miller.

3:20Richard Osman:Absolutely no indication of a middle name. Jamie W. Miller, I'm going to say. You can't just fit him with a W. You can't. What's he going to do, Sue? That'd be a court case I'd like to see. Jamie says, June Part 3 and Avengers Doomsday are both releasing on the 18th of December. One, bold attempt at getting young people into the cinemas or hubristic. Two, who will come out tops at the box office. Three, is there a better portmanteau than June's Day? Portmanteaus didn't even exist. Like all of the great traditions, this has been going for about three years because of Bob and Heimer. You'll remember the story of how those two films started, was going to release on the same day.

3:58Summer is always very busy, but you'll be thrilled to know that there was also pettiness behind this, which is that Christopher Nolan, the Oppenheimer director, famously left Warner Brothers during the pandemic in a dispute about theatrical release because he wants his films to be in cinema. He always, by the way, prefers a July release. He's He's got a superstition. He likes them to be as close as possible to the 21st of July, his releases. Any reason? It's a superstition. It's not clear why. Cillian Murphy lets its live. So Universal announced first that Oppenheimer would be going in cinemas on that date.

4:30And then Warner's moved in. And Rivalry and a Little Bit of Bitterness was part of it. So again, yes, you're right. There are two films, the two of the biggest films of the year, releasing on that date at the moment. So June the 3rd part, it's Denis Villeneuve, it's Chalamet. it's not called june the third june june the third no it's not june june three that'd be a terrible name june the third um and the avengers have got the russo brothers back who did all the sort of most successful avengers movies and robert downey jr is back but as dr doom again it is a big log jam at that time of year and as we said there's lots of big movies coming out this year and you kind of want that holidays period i am hearing from various people I've talked to people about this.

5:13It might move. Some people are thinking it will move and that Avengers will move first. And Marvel are often really slow or they're unclear about when exactly they're going to release. And lots of the other studios, they've always been a little bit chaotic and things haven't been ready in time. And that's a big part of the story of Marvel. But June had everything locked down and crucially they have the IMAX screens locked down, most of them for that weekend. IMAX is a huge part now.

5:38Richard Osman:So June is definitely coming out that weekend. June will be coming out that weekend because Avengers, I think, have got very few IMAX screens they could go on to. IMAX is such a big part of the box office because apart from it making it seem like an event movie, the tickets are so much more expensive and you earn a lot more from it. So in answer to your questions, very quickly, is it a bold attempt to get young people in? I think it's probably unwise in this case because the good thing about Barbie and Oppenheimer, it wasn't like, oh, which of these two movies quite like each other will I see?

6:07They were so different.

6:08Richard Osman:They're so different that it's funny. It's fun to do the double bill. It's an interesting story to write about. You can do everything from a tweet to an op-ed about Barbenheimer. Yes. Whereas this... Whereas this, it's not like one's superheroes, one's a sci-fi thing, but it's much more likely that one audience will cannibalise the other if you put them on the same weekend. Who will come out tops at the book office? Like, oh my God, oh boy, if it's not The Avengers, people will write the death knell of Marvel. The last Avengers, I think, took 2.7 billion, Endgame. and the last Dune I think took about a 700, which was brilliant, by the way.

6:42Denis Villeneuve can make, it was such a smaller budget. He can make a somewhat smaller budget look enormous, but it has to be Avengers because there's so much riding on it. The whole sort of studio really in genre. I don't think there is a better portmanteau than Dune's Day because it's got that sense of day and date in it.

7:00Richard Osman:Terrible. You're not going to say like three Avengers or something. No, I don't have one, but Dune's Day sounds like it's the day that Dune comes out. If I was the Avengers and it was called June's Day, I'd be moving to a different portmanteau. You know, like, yeah, June Vengeance. Just something where I've got a bit, it's like that old joke on Spitting Image where David Steele and David Owen, I knew I'd mention them at some point, talking about what to call their new party. And David Owen goes, from the Social Democratic Party, we'll take a Social Democratic. And from the Liberal Party, we'll take party.

7:29Richard Osman:And we'll be called the Social Democratic Party. It feels to me like June's Day just tells you that that's the day June is coming. It's terrible. Absolutely. I would be fuming. Fuming. But June's Day is terrible. No, terrible. June's Day is the day that June comes out. And I think it will be the day that just June comes out. Oh, there you go. Well, then we can call it June's Day. Done. Sold. We'll see. Okay, this is a very good question from a very good name. Tony Swindlehurst says, how do musicals get translated into another language? Who translates them? And how do they make the translated words fit the rhythm and rhyme of the songs, especially for languages where the word structure is so different from English?

8:04Richard Osman:Yes, one of those questions where you think, oh I bet there's a simple answer and there isn't and the truth is Tony it's incredibly difficult this is the biggest head scramble this is like one of the jobs I would least like to do do you know what I would like to do because it feels like a jigsaw puzzle yeah all of the things that would seem difficult are difficult so you know you're you're fitting something to a pre-existing melody so if you're translating a book you have an awful lot of freedom as to the you know the order of things in a sentence to the amount of syllables in a particular word you don't have any of that freedom if you're translating a musical.

8:36Richard Osman:If you've got a three-note structure, you need a three-syllable word. You can't suddenly have a five-syllable word just because the German word has five syllables. So you're immediately starting in a very, very difficult place. And then things that you wouldn't even particularly think of. So if the song has a long, soaring note at the end of a phrase, which is often the case in musicals, that has to be a note, a vowel that lets the throat stay open. Any single will tell you there's certain sounds you can make for a long time and certain sounds you can't. Whereas if the word that you're translating has a very close down at the end of it then the literally the singer will die because then they're not going to be able to hold that note long enough that on your conscience no exactly so you know that's tough if you're a translator you know on top of that like a really obvious thing in most musicals in most songs words have to rhyme and you know it's this is news to people sometimes the things that rhyme in english do not rhyme in german and do not rhyme in french again that i think as a translator is quite a fun thing to work your way around because that's language and that's having fun with language.

9:33Richard Osman:The thing about the syllables and the thing about sentences having very different structures and different languages and things about the ends of sentences ending on a certain note, those are the things that I think are harder. This is why I would like to do it. So they always said that Hamilton was untranslatable. And you can really see why because it's so fast and it's so involved and it has so many little internal rhymes and the rhythm of the thing. But two Germans decided to have a go at it. There's a playwright and lyricist, Kevin Schroeder, and a rapper, Sarah Finale. So they're coming at it from different angles, but with different skills.

10:09Richard Osman:But, you know, the sort of skills that actually Lin-Manuel Miranda combines himself. And they said, you know, German words tend to be a lot longer than English words. And Lin-Manuel Miranda is packing an awful lot of dynamite into every single sentence he's got there so they had to schroeder in a finale had to invent new compound german words or use certain you know anglicisms where they where they had to just to keep the rhythm of the music they had took on this challenge every three months they would uh they they they sent lim well miranda a three column list of the latest songs they translated with the original lyrics then the uh the german translation and then a literal translation of what the german translation meant.

10:51Richard Osman:So Linwell Miranda could see that they got the rhythm of the thing. He could hear the sound of what it was going to sound like. And then he could see what they were actually saying in case it was kind of completely different to his meaning. So they would do that every three months. It took them two and a half years to translate Hamilton into German. They did it, by God, they did it. And it's done very well over there, but it took them two and a half years. it's really really really one of the toughest translation is the is the standard for doing this our friends at the lion king also told us this that's now been translated into 40 languages and you've always got these things right and it has to be approved at every different level are you following this absolutely nuts line do you know what i i really as i was halfway through this i was thinking oh my god but what about the what about the lion king lawsuit if you haven't heard about the lion king law so i'm going to fill you in there's that bit at the start of the circle of life which is a kind of incantation is one of the or mixture of two of the 12 different african languages it also sounds like he's singing arson binger yeah it sounds like you know there's a certain rorschach element to it um anyway you hear what you want to hear the lebo m who is the south african composer who wrote and performed that opening chant in circle of life there's a zimbabwean comedian called learn more janasi i love those names yeah learn more janasi who often takes the out of um lebo m there is a sort of serious underpinning to it all saying that you know actually this is kind of like about the appropriation of african staff and you know um he's made a running joke of it in his set on he's on podcast he's sung loads of gibberish versions of it the thing that has actually broken lebo m and caused him to file the lawsuit is that on one podcast recently, which went crazily viral, which went incredibly viral.

12:39Learn more Janassi said that, oh no, it just means, look, there's a line. Oh my God. As I say, he is actually making a wider point about African identity and the Americanization, et cetera, et cetera. Lebo is now suing in America for tens of millions of dollars saying that it's damaging his business relationship with Disney and his royalties income. It's a big thing. and Lermor Genasi has actually sort of tried to sort of post through it and he keeps saying, listen, I'm just, you know, I'm just raising points.

13:10Richard Osman:Well, it sounds like from the things I've seen that it is possible to translate that first bit of, oh, look at a lion, wow, it's a lion. But like with all languages, they're complex and certain things can mean certain other things. So the original writer is saying, no, it's more powerful than that. But so they're sort of both right. But the fact that it went so crazily viral and everyone loved the idea that that bit that they've sung, everyone's sung it every single time they watch this, that literally they're just going, look, it's a lion. The official translation, Disney translation, Disney have an official translation of it, of course, they control it all and say this is all hail the king.

13:47We all bow in the presence of the king through you. We will emerge victoriously or look, there's a lion. Oh my God.

13:54Richard Osman:So, but again, that's the point of translation and why it's quite just to go back to the original question why it's so difficult is actually both those things can sort of be true at the same time and that's the joy of translation a circuit judge and the court in los angeles to decide we'll wait to hear how that one pans out that that has got settled out of court written all over it it really has although i don't think he's going to i i get the vibe that he's not going to back down i'm saying look there's a judge oh my god and also i don't believe that it's remotely harming his business relationship.

14:26Oh, and he's loving it.

14:27Richard Osman:Yeah. If you go on Learn More's website, he is sending a t-shirt that says, look, it's a lawsuit. Oh, my God. Proceeds to the Superior Court of Los Angeles. Right. Shall we go to a break? I'd love that.

14:47Richard Osman:This episode is brought to you by Tesco Mobile. Now, we're no strangers to the magic of mobile phones. they've now become these sort of omni tools for entertainment photography abstract computation and everything in between but they are actually really good at their base function communication i still i mean i personally still like to talk on the phone which is that is lunacy it really is and not to send a text message first saying i would it be possible for me to call you now i like to just ring i love it when my phone rings that's the thing if you like talking to people a phone is perfect if you don't like talking to people a phone is weirdly even more perfect but the The common denominator, really, in all of those examples, me liking to text, you liking to speak to people, is people.

15:29Richard Osman:It's all about your network of family and friends that matter most. Which is why Tesco Mobile is happy to be your second most important network. Tesco Mobile. It pays to be connected. Search Why Tesco Mobile to find out more.

15:47Richard Osman:Welcome back, everybody. A question for you here, Marina. This touches on a big story which you can't massively talk about. You might work out which story I'm talking about as I read this question out. It's from Susie. Thank you, Susie. Doesn't have a surname or a middle initial. This week I tuned into Radio 2. Gary Davis was on air as a seemingly last-minute replacement for Scott Mills. In this situation, or a more common example where a live presenter is suddenly off sick, how do stations find presenters at short notice, and particularly for the breakfast show when they'd have to be awake at 4am?

16:15Richard Osman:Is there a list of emergency presenters? What if they don't answer their phone? Is there an understudy for the understudy? Oh, thank you for that, Susie. But what a lovely tangential way of talking about something we can't really talk about. We're not talking about that story. Funnily enough, we're recording slightly early this week, and it's just one of those stories where it's just so not clear what might emerge, what could come out. Exactly. And it's not that I don't particularly want to be a hostage to fortune. It's just I think the picture is quite unclear at the moment. But as it resolves, we will be discussing it further, I am sure.

16:44Yes. The answer to that from radio professionals is there is the equivalent of a sort of rotor plan. It's called depping. Depping is a phrase that they use in the music business as well. Musicians often need cover. It's a real skill in itself, by the way, depping. It's like people who can do that, who can go into a sort of machine that is working all the time and just pick something up and make it look as though they do it every day. It's quite lucrative. I'm not talking about the radio version of it. Some people make it. you can have a whole career from that. With radio, it starts with the managers who are on call receiving news that a presenter is unavailable.

17:20And then you've got a first choice step for the slot. Usually Gary Davis. Well, I was about to say, if you want a professional, you go for Gary Davis. Sometimes there's no notice at all. Say someone just gets the norovirus or whatever it is, then you've got to or there's some travel emergency or whatever it is then everyone has to decide how do we best keep the lights on somebody who's already in the building i do literally they would look around the building or um who lives really near they can get in very quickly maybe you get the person who's doing the show before to go on a bit longer so that that person can get in and very occasionally they would but it's quite rare they would actually get the person who's already on air to do the whole next two or three hours.

18:02In terms of like, what if they don't answer their phone? By the way, people like this always answer their phone because they're so professional. They work in like... Can I just say something though?

18:10Richard Osman:If Gary Davis is out of office, then it would say, ooh, Gary Davis. That's all I have to say about that. Yes. Sorry. With Gary Davis, I would have thought, it's not like, even though it is a breakfast show, this is pure speculation, but I would have thought what would happen because it was quite clear that Scott Mills didn't think anything was going to happen. and he finishes the show and then again i'm purely speculating but it would have been when he came off air that they would have said you need to talk to you or even if it was that afternoon or whatever you got you got a bit more likely it would be yeah then and then you've got the whole day to say come on gary davis yeah you are one of the bbc's most high profile primary choices for standards um but also in that particular case my again i'm speculating you're thinking like he can be a long-term-ish choice because he's going to want to do it yeah he's working for you anyway he's under contract anyway he does shows on that channel anyway he stands in for lots and lots of people so he's i mean he might as well be a full-time kind of host on that show because he's you know incredibly familiar to that entire audience and he's he's a safe pair of hands and you might need him to be a safe pair he's also great by the way yeah yeah i mean what a pro and you're going to need him to take charge for a while so i think that's probably what would have happen but they do yes the idea that people in radio like that don't answer their phones like they're so on it they're just so on it that it doesn't fortunately come up they're like first responders yeah essentially they they are they are not putting their phone on silent when they go to sleep you have it on game shows all the time as well of course you know if you if you're doing pointless or something like that and you've got couples who are coming in and someone you know train gets missing and that's you just you've got the you know people from the next you know day show and stuff like that if you're doing panel shows stuff like that a lot of careers started funnily enough from warm-up people being called on to panel shows at the very very last minute and you know they because as you say they're in the building someone is sick just before a show starts and they'll go on people will do everything to go on you know if you're if you're a captain on a panel show or if something like that you would you'd have to be really really sick for for you not to go on but what happened when that person was sick when you were on the wheel sit from the wheel are you allowed to say who it was i can't remember i know i won't say who it was but yes so they were being spun around in the wheel it it made them nauseous they had to go home but because they were filming another show later that day tony bellew had turned up early for his show and they said tony would you like to do two shows and he went yeah sure i'll do that so they were able to substitute someone in if you've got a show like house of games where it's you got five people we have always when we recorded up in scotland we would always have a scottish comic uh you know nearby a female one and a male one because if a woman drops up or a male drops out uh the same same in manchester and as you say it's actually you want a retainer for it then yeah it's a really lucrative gig i think actually story the the the actor and comic wrote a piece about it recently where she said like i've been she did it's really good two years to do this thing and and and it's for us it's like it's so incredibly useful because it just it means you don't have to panic and there are times where people will wake up in the morning and can't go on and then you think great we we've absolutely got someone and the amount of times where someone said i'm not sure i can go on i'm really i've got a migraine and i can't do this out of the other and you see the substitute who's been there he's been on the bench for like a year and a half going is it me can i can i go on and a bit of them is thinking i really don't want to go on because this is a really nice gig for me yeah i just get all i gotta do is make sure i'm i'm at home on the morning when when when this is being recorded when you start you have to find a new one yes so someone like ashley we'd always say you know you you say you want a streak they will come to a point where we want you to be on the show so you know we have to then go okay we need to find someone someone different so ashley came on the show did very well um but yeah it's a it's a nice gig being the being the dep because you know you'll get a call at 8 30 in the morning just saying you can stand down for the rest of the day and you can go about your business my whole life was like here's your money uh about everything you can stand out for the rest of the day now at 8 30 because i do get things done early in the morning but then i just like someone just say right that's it come on you've done your bit now you stand down uh but they have that on uh you know on all shows you've just made so i've had a call a couple of times on shows and it's always that there is a slight issue you know this person might not be able to make it into studio with you you know, are you available?

22:37Richard Osman:Are you around? Because, you know, I live, you know, not a million miles from TV centre and this, that or the other. And almost always in those... You've placed yourself within call radius. ...situations. I mean, yeah. But, you know, then they go like half an hour later, it's always, oh, look, it's going to be okay. But, you know, there are absolutely things in place on every single TV show just to make sure that you're not left without a show that day. I'm interested in the answer to this one. Ben asks about brands in songs when songs name drop a brand or use a brand in their title like Prada by Ray do the brands themselves have any power against them can they send a cease and desist do they earn any form of royalties and do the musicians pay a fee to use the brand name sort of the answer to every single one of those bits is no you can absolutely use brand names if you wish to same in books you know I always use as many brand names as I possibly can I just think it's more fun if someone goes to Oliver Bonus than goes to a shop completely um uh and so you know if you have what's called nominative fair use which is legal concept that allows you to use a brand name so long as you are not either a libeling that brand or be passing off as in oh prada responsible me to do this song this is prada behind this so long as you don't do either of those things and you know why would you do either of those things you absolutely can get away with it mattel for example they mattel tried to sue aqua on barbie girl because that you can you know with a video and stuff like that and it was very front and center the barbie thing so mattel said i i feel like there's an element of passing off in there's i feel like there's an element that they're trying to suggest this is an official um barbie thing mca records then counter sued mattel because mattel had called mca thieves uh and you know gangsters and bank robbers and and you know all this sort of thing so the judge heard the case with both of them he absolutely threw out mattel's case throughout mca's case as well explained that neither side had a legal claim and the judge ended by saying the parties are advised to chill that's quite good isn't it but i tell you what judy might as well have been um i'll tell you what we've done the uh the the rest of the entertainment gang we've done a deep dive into brands if that if that is interest the most mentioned brand ever in music history.

24:56Richard Osman:We've taken every single Billboard 100 song all the way from 1959 to 2023 was our data set. And we've seen how often brands are met. Now, the first time we did it, we had this answer, which was the brand that is most often mentioned in songs is Gucci with 122 mentions. So that was number one. So we thought, okay. But then we realized, of course, that what our database was doing was every single time a brand was mentioned, even in the same song we were counting it and for there and there is a song uh little pump you remember little pump uh in uh 2017 released uh gucci gang and and in the gucci gang he mentions gucci 52 times so that was slightly swaying yeah i see what we did instead is just anytime it is mentioned a song we count that as once good and see which brands have been mentioned the most often in songs exactly that's gathering but it was fun it was fun to do that because you know we got to spend an afternoon listening to Lil Pump, which is never an afternoon that is wasted.

25:57Richard Osman:I've got a top 10. I'm going to go through them, but I'll go through them very, very quickly. These are the most mentioned brands ever in songs. Rap songs doing an awful lot of the heavy lifting, by the way. A little bit of country, quite a lot of rap. Number 10, Chanel. Number 9, Cartier. Number 8, Nike. Number 7, Bentley. Number 6, Hennessy. Number 5, Coca-Cola. Number 4, Mercedes-Benz. Number three, Gucci. So it still does well, but it's not number one. Number two, Chevrolet. Just a reliable vehicle. Reliable vehicle. Reliable vehicle by Billy Joel. And number one, the brand most mentioned in hit songs, 51 songs referencing this brand, Cadillac.

26:36Oh. Number one.