Top Three Spielberg Films

0:02Hello and welcome to the Rest is Entertainment Questions edition with me Marina Hyde and me Richard Osmond question and answers edition you're very very welcome I'm going to hit you with our first question do you need an answer or I'm out of here if this carries on I'm out of here we did issue a please give us this question plea come and get me plea come and get me plea come and question us plea could people ask us about our top three Spielberg movies I can't remember why we issued that plea I know it's for a good reason I think we just wanted to say what our top three Spielberg we got I think it was probably that simple I mean I would have thought that makes sense and also it's a hard one very hard one to do this is why where the whole answers thing comes into this podcast this is this is the beauty of it oh my god i hadn't thought is that people might actually need an answer we also said by the way because we were fairly open in asking people to send it to us they said if you've got a good name we are more likely to read yours out we got an awful lot of people asking this yeah some people did not get this memo i just just a shout out to both dan smith and gary wilson to say if we're asking for this question and we're saying please give us a name that's going to be interesting to read out.

1:04Dan, God love you, but Dan Smith is not, we're not going to be able to have a lot of fun with it. And Gary Wilson. There's a snooker player called Gary Wilson. When isn't there? But that is not going to cut the mustard. But the person whose name we've chosen, of course, the question we've chosen, Dan and Gary, take notes. Max Spiegelberg, apparently not related, but often mistaken, says Max Spiegelberg. So I think maybe it's his real name. Max's question Yes. What a run up. He's absolutely gone route one as well. What are your top three Steven Spielberg films? It's a good question, isn't it? Okay, I cannot believe...

1:37Should we do 3-3-2-2-1-1? Yes, you taught me how to do it because I think we both know this isn't my strong suit. Because, you know, everyone's got strong opinions. It's very... It pains me to leave out Close Encounters, but this is... I mean, it pains me to leave out all sorts of things, but it pains me to leave out Duel, it pains me to leave out Schindler's List, but... It's one of the few directors you could do a top ten of and not ever run out of quality. I'm putting Jaws at three excuse me, wow Jaws at three, that's interesting any reason or it's really hard for me not to put, I knew you'd absolutely lose your mind if I said I wanted to put them all equal number one of course you can't put it equal number one so I knew you'd lose your mind, okay Jaws is at three why don't you marry three people, why don't you do that why don't you say to your husband, maybe I have maybe I have, breaking okay, so okay you've gone Jaws at three, my number three you just mentioned I've gone with Jewel, just because it was such an explosion on the screen.

2:36You just think, oh, wow, here's a... It's an explosion on the small screen first. It's a TV movie first. Yes, it's a TV movie, exactly. But you just think somebody who comes along... People often think, what is it that directors do? Isn't it all script? Isn't it all actors? Jewel shows you what a director does. Someone who just takes a simple idea and just makes it look extraordinary. And you know you're in the hands of a master. You just looked after throughout that film. And you haven't seen anything quite like it. The thing he's brilliant at is you think, oh, I've seen things like this before, but I haven't seen this and that's such an extraordinary school to have All the studios in Hollywood when that became a TV movie were just like sorry, who is this guy?

3:08Yeah, but exactly it's interesting sometimes you get it with songwriters you get it with musicians you get it with actors sometimes where they just turn up and everybody all at the same time goes yes, that's the thing that we are after that's the thing that people struggle a lifetime to do and just straight out of the blocks which doesn't negate the hard work he puts in and the incredible hours he puts in but right from the start he had that vision that Hollywood loved but most importantly viewers absolutely loved as well so it's a great piece of cinema but also it's it's an entertainment so I've gone dual for my number three for number two again it's so hard 80 he's so good with making films with children and using children in that way it's such an extraordinary story and it's so beautifully told and it is totally heartbreaking god I remember being in the cinema we watched this in the cinema me and my sisters and my mother and one of my sisters was sitting next to my mother and she had her arm around her and halfway through Lorna said mommy why is my hair wet it's because my mother had been just crying on her head um anyway et is my number two i remember uh watching that's the first ever pirate video i ever saw when i was because we didn't have vhs's when i was a kid i'm so old and the uh the witchells who lived opposite us they got like a video recorder so this had been whatever year et came out early 80s uh and they were the talk of our road and then suddenly there was this um this bootleg version of et so The first time I watched it, I didn't get the full cinematic scale, but I had the utter awe of being able to watch a major Hollywood movie illegally on a television.

4:38So actually, in a way, it gave me as much happiness as watching it on a huge IMAX. Should I do my number one? Okay. Because we've spoken about it already. My number one – oh, no, I've got to do my number two. Raiders of the Lost Ark. It never stops. Every time there's like a breath, like something else incredible happens. it's just absolutely well it's my number one so I can chime in at this point it's my number one I have to put it because it's the one I probably even though there are all his films I rewatch a lot but I rewatch that most the character is obviously extraordinary there's actually some really amazing I'm going to try and find them these script these script meeting notes between George Lucas and Steven Spielberg for Raiders of the Lost Ark it's a story conference oh my god you've got such pleasure coming to you if you haven't read those you just think wow this is some people really thinking when you see some absolute sort of rubbish i'm not even going to mention some of the directors i can't stand but you know who they are um and you see we watch something like this and you think this is like a different species it is so extraordinary it's amazing the character is one of the greatest characters of all time uh the direction everything about it the adventure the thrill so many of the shots when you first see the hat all of it is iconic and i have to put it at number one because it's the one i re-watch most frequently by the We should do some one-offs where we talk about some of our favourite films.

6:00Because that's the thing about the production notes. Behind so many films, there are amazing books and stuff that we can talk through. A horrifying amount of which I will have read. My only special subject. Maybe we'll do a series on some of our favourite films and we can just do facts behind it. We'll do a watch-along type. I would love that. That would be a fun thing to do. All right, hit me with your number one then. My number one is something else we should do a watch-along of. It's your number three. It's Jaws. Again, something that visually is so arresting. And you think, yeah, but loads of people have done movies about sharks and movies on the sea and movies about small towns.

6:29You think, yeah, but none of them looked like that. None of them had this sort of absolute clarity of vision. And Spielberg is incredibly good at, if he's got a story, literally nothing gets in the way of the story. Nothing gets in the way of your enjoyment of that film. There is nothing where you kind of go, oh, maybe just lose that bit. Maybe lose that line. Maybe just lose that scene because actually we want to get on with the action. everything is in the service of the character and the action at the same time and the look of it is extraordinary if you want to think about scares in cinema and if you want to think about how cinema is used and some of those moments in jaws where you just think well that's the template for so much that came after and spielberg by the way would be the first person to say oh no but i was working on templates of other directors from many many years ago and of course he was but you have to at some point go there's a pantheon of cinema moments but he was also working on the fly because as we discussed before the shark was such a problem and it doesn't work and in the end you see very little of it and it's all point of view the shark all of those shots from above and someone in the water my mother told me that that summer didn't matter where you were people did not want to go in the sea of course so she said it was people talk about so do i i still think about it's like you're in cornwall don't worry yeah because when people are doing open water swimming you go um there's a little movie i'd like to tell you about i don't know if you've seen it's called jaws so maybe you shouldn't do that mike listen there's worse things in our sea um there's also an object lesson to anyone who's writing anything or anything that sometimes your biggest problems are your biggest solutions because the fact that they couldn't make the shark work made them go oh we're just going to hint at the shark and the hint at the shark is the thing that makes the movie and it's always the case in pretty much any work that you do anywhere the thing you think oh there's no way of fixing this the thing your work around is the thing where people go oh i hadn't seen that before yeah i think yeah because no no one had had to solve that specific problem before for a long time they had the shark at the universal studios tour right back in the sort of 80s when people used to go do the universal studios tour and people used to laugh when the boat goes past and the shark comes out of the water and it became it was a sort of comic piece because when you saw it you're like oh it looks crap yeah but as it there's that great photo if you ever seen that great photo of spielberg like reclining in the jaws of the shark while they're on set he's in the water but he's in the shark's teeth reclining i'll try and put that on the um on the on the newsletter as well because it's fun uh here's a question for you then from shell Doley.

8:47Shell asks, during the filming of The Shining, Danny Lloyd was under the impression, he's the little kid, Danny Lloyd was under the impression he was filming a drama movie to protect him from the scary elements of the movie he was actually making. I'm wondering how horror or particularly intense films are made when working with child actors. Are they filmed in a certain way to hide the scarier or more dramatic elements of a film? Ah, yes. Well, Shell, because you know children are often in horror films. They somehow make it matter more. Or they can be quite creepy themselves. out so it's one or they're either in it for one or the other reasons um and in the shining you've got both types of child you've got oh dear this poor innocent child and then you've got things like the twins now and anyone with two kids by the way has both those types of child yes sometimes in the same child sometimes at different times now that's what they did do with daniel lloyd and the twins the two girls now they have to be in a that they are in a horrible scene where there's lots of blood and death what happened there i think was that the props department they showed them the fake blood and they gave them the blood to take home and I think they talked about it afterwards as a sort of fun experience because it's all you try and make it a bit like Halloween often what they do is they'll show you the rig if it's a stunt or something like that and the children are always fascinated and things like that I have to say that my middle son accidentally I don't know quite how this happened watched it when he shouldn't have watched it this sounds like a subtweet to your husband no no it's not I don't think I think it's probably my fault anyway I don't quite know how this happened anyway he watched it and he was terrified of Pennywise the clown one night he said it to me at bedtime and I thought oh my god I know what to do and then I suddenly remembered had I not seen some pat pictures on set of Pennywise and he was stuck on the zip wire and then you could see Pennywise having a sandwich and a cup of tea while they were sort of resourcing it all out once I showed that to him my son he never minded about it whatsoever again it was like and it was that exact scene that he'd been terrified by where Pennywise kind of scoots down into a park so that made it all right when I was a kid I used to Tales of the Unexpected used to terrify me and I'd watched one accidentally and it's still to this day the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life and if I was upstairs and I wasn't asleep and I could hear downstairs my mum watching Tales of the Unexpected and that music started it would it's Pavlovian yeah they re-show Tales of the Unexpected on Sky Arts oh do they?

10:58yes in the mornings on weekends absolutely brilliant but even now when that music starts I have to just calm myself but I've always done the thing of I saw again you saw saw the filming of a film on telly and saw the clapperboard. And so I always just, if I was watching Scary, imagined the clapperboard going at the beginning and the end and imagining the cameras where they are as well. And that makes things less scary to me. But also do you remember that in, actually I tell you who had a bad time, Linda Blair in The Exorcist, she had a terrible time because although she says, I knew nothing about what I was doing.

11:30I didn't understand why I was stabbing this thing with a cross. I didn't understand any of that. And I honestly didn't get it and it didn't matter to me. But she was physically very harmed in that because they had to put her in a harness when she cut the coming off the bed. And she got a spinal fracture, a lower spinal fracture from that. But another thing you have to say that happens really mostly in these things is that you often will not see the child in the same frame as the horror. And very often they will not have been even on set where the horrible bit that they're even looking at is shot.

11:59They are not actually, if you watch how it's cut, you don't see them all together. They're not in the same frame and you realise that they haven't been involved in it at all. So they are very careful. And obviously, compared to when Linda Blower was in The Exorcist, there are now a number of different things you have to do to protect children. And they are very well protected on set. But I tell you what a really dark one is, is Jodie Foster. Well, Jodie Foster, when she played the child prostitute in Taxi Driver, she was 12. By the way, she had made way more movies than Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro at that time.

12:29Martin Scorsese apparently used to just giggle and say, would try and say, can you open his flies? And then would have to walk away because he just found the whole thing so excruciating. I mean, she's extraordinary, isn't she? She says she sort of took her, she's by far the most experienced person on set in terms of being in films. So she sort of took over and got on with it, but they were sort of both unable to deal with it. That's pretty grim. You can't really get past that in that role. Yeah, but it is that interesting thing of there's lots of artists and stuff who say, my kids can't watch any of my films yet.

12:59And when their kids get a bit older and they can suddenly show them stuff, it's a nice moment. But yeah, there'll be lots of kids who have never seen the film that they're in until they get a little bit older. Richard, here is one for you. Dr. Dan, it feels like a TV doctor is asking you this question. What if that's Dan Smith and he's finally seen the error of his ways? He goes, I'll get you now. Oh, I did two questions, but I put the wrong name on each one. Dr. Dan. You should have done that for the Spielberg top three anyway. Dr. Dan has got this question on, says, having just heard Richard declare his devotion to family fortunes, it made me reflect on TV titles in other countries.

13:32In Australia, our equivalent to family fortunes is family feud, which I believe is also the case in the US. I'm wondering if you can provide other net examples of names of TV programs that differ and shine a light on why producers might change for different audiences Yeah, it's an interesting one because TV is certainly 15 years ago in the absolute height of the TV formats business there was a real concentration on having exactly the same title in every single territory so when Who Wants to Be a Millionaire went around the world it tended to keep exactly the same title everywhere Also, by the way, the same theme music, the same graphics, the same set.

14:08Why was that, the peak of formats? It was the peak of formats because... Sorry, just sidebar. Yes, because it was the peak of linear TV. And, you know, there was lots of advertising money sloshing around and everyone needed to fill their schedules. And, you know, formats were such an... You know, in America, it had always been scripted and suddenly you got this big non-scripted stuff coming in. So there were just lots of markets that were very, very open to big new unscripted television shows. Thank you. And so Big Brother, Millionaire, Weakest Thing all happened at roughly the same time as each other and all went around the world.

14:42All with the same name, by the way. Now, that's one way of doing things. So Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? If you don't know the song, you understand the expression. It's not, you know, it's not... And by the way, there were versions of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire where there was not a million up for grabs. but people just kept that title and people understood it. Weakest link the same even if you don't have that expression in your country you kind of get it Deal or No Deal when we did it and as I say it came from a Dutch lottery show and Deal or No Deal doesn't mean anything in the UK or it didn't because that was pre-Brexit when suddenly everything was Deal or No Deal and that is if you've got a piece of IP and you've got something you protect it's nice to have that brand, you know Coca-Cola calls itself Coca-Cola everywhere in the world you know there's reasons for it and the graphic identity is the same certain shows that have gone around the world you do have to change so strictly come dancing would be a really good example of that so strictly come dancing huge on the bbc that goes around the world as well now that title literally makes no sense to anybody so it comes from the fact that you said come dancing used to be the bbc show and it came out a few years after strictly ballroom and so it became strictly come dancing it is so idiosyncratic that it couldn't possibly yeah i mean you could try and get away with it but you know certainly in america they would say look this isn't i mean when i went to abc and they were like tell me what the exact show is in the title yeah exactly so over there it's called dancing with the stars yeah right which is perfect it's sort of it's probably a better name uh than strictly come dancing but strictly works beautifully over here but in other countries they can call that other things it literally doesn't translate so pointless but it doesn't translate to other countries because pointless is a pun which is no points but also it's sort of a slightly quirky kind of um underdog british title so everywhere in the world that's called like nilga punked and things like that so it's always called different things because if you've got any sort of pun it doesn't quite fit the bill yeah so family feud yeah that's that was an american show and you bring it over and in the uk you kind of think i'd feud doesn't suit our personality type whereas if we call it family fortunes we keep that lovely but the trouble is we do argue and so it's like should we not remind ourselves of that yeah so it had that thing in the 70s and 80s and british tv of being slightly more aspirational a different version of that would be um strike it lucky the barrymore show which in america was called strike it rich yeah and we got to the point in our culture then where we go oh i think this is it came out you know during the year of thatcherism where we're like oh maybe strike it rich might be a bit on the nose for for our times so we call it strike it lucky yeah over here so again it's these little kind of cultural things that come about some shows you have to rename university challenges college bowl in the states and firstly we don't know what a college is we know what university is and we don't know what a bowl is no because you know like super bowl or things like that we don't understand that that's a competition so if we call that college bowl over here that would essentially be like calling Strictly Come Dancing, Strictly Come Dancing in America.

17:45It would make absolutely no sense at all. So by and large, you will try and protect the name of your show and you'll try and have the brand go around the world. But there are moments where you just think this is just not going to work in our territory. If you have a show that's a real roller coaster, like Millionaire, like Weakest Link, you can call it whatever you want. So you can say to the Americans, you can have it, but you have to call it this. if you've got shows that they're just picking up off the shelf you know a few years later then it's harder. Traitors which has gone around the world, the most recent show really to have gone around the world, that's a pretty simple translation into pretty much any country so that's called the Traitors pretty much everywhere but yeah so sometimes it's just the power of the brand that you already have so you can impose it on people so House of Games by the way is called Richard Osmond's House of Games because there is a show called House of Games in America so we weren't allowed to call it that so we had to put my name in the title but obviously if we went abroad with that, we would not call it Richard Osmond's House of Games.

18:39Although I would like it. Yeah. If I go to Slovenia and watch Richard Osmond's House of Games hosted by someone else. Or looky-lucky. Some kind of, the equivalent of the ginger woman. They do that on Pointless. Some of you watch Pointless in some countries in the world. They literally have a guy wearing glasses at their laptop. And you just think, okay, I kind of see it. I mean, I'm more than that. Yeah. I'm more than a pair of glasses. But yeah. Has he written any books? No. Yeah. No. No, they also then legally have to write murder mysteries as well. Otherwise they get fired. And with that, I think we should go to a break.

19:16Welcome back, everybody. Marina, this is a perfect question for you, given the show that you've recently been making. Christian Marne asks, I see hot off the heels of Harrison Ford, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. There is now a movie with a de-aged Tom Hanks in production. Is this latest foray into unrealistic, plastic, fantastic fakeness, down to your point made previously that there are no more leading men under 40 except Timothee Chalamet. Right. That is the movie here that stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. It's interesting. That one, I feel, is different. It's directed by Robert Zemeckis. I cannot wait for this film.

19:48I can't wait for it either. It's got one fixed camera position, and you're going to see them through all... You can see the trailer now. You're going to see them through a whole... As they age. I feel that, in fairness, Robert Zemeckis has been interested in ageing. If you think he's always been interested in ageing and how people change in place and time. If you look at Back to the Future trilogy, you look at Forrest Gump, he's interested in that anyway. So I would throw him a bone, as it were, not that he needs one. And it's based on a comic book as well. It's just a very, very clever device of the camera is the thing that stays still when people move through the camera.

20:19Even back to prehistoric times, if you see the trailer, it's the same fixed shot. So you couldn't do it without some sort of device whereby you have the de-aging. You have to do it there. Otherwise, we have seen it creeping up much more there were a few it was in things like Benjamin Button and things like that that you'd have to obviously have it but then suddenly in 2019 I think it is um obviously it happened with Harrison Ford I'm of the view that it's one of those ones that some of these are just because you can do it doesn't mean you should I mean I particularly like the fact that imagine if they just de-aged Marlon Brando I mean Marlon Brando you would if you'd had the technology you'd have had to do it every time I turned up on set by the end.

20:59Because he turns up on set for Apocalypse Now and he's enormous. And they're thinking, what the hell am I supposed to do with this? I mean, actually, and another great film. I mean, not a great film, but another absolute classic, Dr. Moreau, which I strongly revise anyone. Have a look at that. The Island of Dr. Moreau. And then there's a wonderful documentary about the making of it. But in the end, what Coppola has to do, again, necessity, he has to push him so deeply in the shadows in Apocalypse Now. and those incredible shots you get of him sort of looming out of the darkness, which seemed to be, of course, all of this was planned because of the nature of the book.

21:34But a lot of that came from necessity. But in general, this de-aging thing, I don't know, it seems to me that it's more part of nostalgia and people are doing it because of nostalgia and nostalgia is a huge thing. Do you know that in the late 17th century, nostalgia, they thought it was a disease you could be cured of. It was named after Swiss mercenaries who were fighting for all the various different powers in Europe and they thought you could be cured of it. But now we think that you make so much money out of it that no one wants to cure anybody of it. But in terms of your question, sorry, going back to it, these old movie stars, yeah, they can open the movies still.

22:11And even when you're going to see Gladiator 2 later this year, you'll see the people who like Paul Mescal don't, as a rule, genuinely definitely get themselves up and go out to the cinema. I think they will, by the way. I think you'll come for Denzel Washington and you'll stay for Paul Mescal. But you'll see a lot of Denzel Washington in that trailer because people get up and will go and watch Denzel. And is he de-aged in that? No, he's not. That's relating to the part of the question. It's like, is this because we can't find any leading young men under that certain age? You will find them, but they will also use other people to get in.

22:38In terms of the technology, I actually think that the workarounds that they had to do in the old days were in general better. Sometimes, in the case perhaps of this Zemeckis film here, which we'll have to see, it seems to me like there's no other possible way you could do it. It's the only way to do it. He's not going, I'm making this film and I'd like a young Tom Hanks in it. He's saying, I'm making this film with Tom Hanks and I have to have Tom Hanks a series of different ages. And it's one of the great themes and tropes of his work as a director. So I'm interested. But it is definitively we're going to get more and more and more and more de-aged actors in movies.

23:08Because, I mean, why wouldn't we? We can do it. And by the way, we're going to get, we've talked before, we're going to get to the point where you are going to be in movies because the AI is going to be good enough that we take an image of you and suddenly you're going to be in Back to the Future. Oh, yes. Sorry, that was a little thing. We talked about Delebs before, the Book of the Dead, dead celebrities and how they make money. Now, an AI firm only this past week has brought up the voices of Laurence Olivier, Judy Garland, James Dean, and I think like Burt Reynolds, who are going to read audiobooks.

23:36Liza Minnelli is like, I'm so happy to see my mother's voice available to the countless millions of people who love her. I can't help feeling she might be thinking of some other countless millions. But anyhow, so this is a thing. This is real. This is happening with the permission of these estates. The Delebs are on the march in terms of AI and reading, and they're going to do audiobooks. Yeah, I don't know how you're going to, because the great audiobook readers, I mean, there's acting and emotion. We're not just listening to a timbre, a voice, or, you know, I mean, how are they getting the acting?

24:06I don't know. Well, we'll have to see. But the trouble is, everyone's saying, oh, it's irreplicable, all this human stuff. I think we're going to find more and more, as we've said so often before, that it's not perhaps. Or it's replicable to a level that people are happy with. My children will watch the most awful AI narration on YouTube. and I was saying at the weekend to them, can you just turn this off? I can't listen to it. And they're like, what? They don't even notice it or hear it, that it's all almost individual. Well, it is. It's individual words that have been taped together to say whatever you want.

24:35Yeah, they'll say, this is a tennis ball factory. Oh my God, it's already listenable to, but not to them. In Denver, in Colorado. Yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah, the next few years are a long, slow process of working out that humankind are not as special as we thought we were. That's annoying, isn't it? See you in the catacombs. Yeah. right richard that's a you know what that's a that's a great catchphrase for the show so you're the catacombs guy it's all downhill from here yeah yeah yeah the rest the rest is catacombs richard i'm dying to ask you this question it comes from matt stubs but also me uh what's your favorite yeah stubzy he says what are your absolute favorite top three shows that everyone else seems to have forgotten well it's interesting that because it's the first one i would talk about is i saw the traitors is up for like a bafta for most original show yeah uh and 10 15 years ago we were all trying to pitch a version of it because we all played that wink murder or mafia or whatever you want to call it or werewolf so everyone played it so the the bbc uh tea time version of traitors which was on about 10 15 years ago hosted by tony liversy so the bbc have had a series of this before they literally did it as a tea time show but they play out in half hour episodes and at the time i thought this is really i love this show it's really really good it ran for one series and everyone's like that's never going to work and then became the biggest show in the world so if you can you can find an episode on on youtube i mean there's so many brilliant comedy dramas right at the moment that they really slip through the net the one i absolutely love the two seasons of it now but it didn't seem to trouble the scorers here is upright which is tim minchin yeah tim minchin and uh sort of taking upright piano across australia for reasons that the plot will uh will lead you into and that's a show i just think it's so brilliant and it's like half hours and it's got a really great british sensibility there's no there's no barriers to british people loving that show and tim minchin is great in it and the rest of the cast is is amazing as well in this golden age of scripted television there are just so many shows that have just slipped through the net just brilliant bits of television that are lost forever but upright i'm not sure they will be i think they'll be will we watch in this whole new era of with ad tears and everyone licensing everyone else's content i think all of this stuff that they made during this period slightly like the suits phenomenon but they'll reshow all this stuff because they simply can't afford to make anywhere like as many of them and a great show is a great show is a great show and remains one but that i would really really recommend oh i'll do one of my own once because we did a show called international king of sports on channel five and there's still some footage of it we filmed it down in Cheltenham and it was a series we made up loads of sports essentially like under hurdles and things that you know lots of backwards running and loads of different things uphill long jump and we got competitors from all around the world there's some spoiler they were all like british universities but you know so we had nigeria and australia and japan so and they'd all wear the kit of their country were they athletes in any Yes.

27:29That's the idea behind the show is there's loads of people who are unbelievable athletes, but haven't quite found the sport for them. They did tennis and they did rugby, but they didn't quite find the one that they fit. So we invented loads of new sport and it had world records and stuff like that. And we pretended it was like the 50th annual version of International King of Sports. So we had loads of records. Adam Parry commentated on it and we filmed it in stadiums and what have you. That was a show that I loved. I'd love to remake make it for Netflix with like a multi-billion dollar budget.

27:56It was just like one of those shows that was just an absolute joy. And you do think, by and large, every show I've ever done has got its just desserts. Some have been more successful than they should have been. But International King of Sports was the one that I think, ah, that's the one, that's the one that got away. You can see with the casting how it could be so amazing because there's backstories in that way that during the Olympics, which everyone is about to get incredibly into the stories of athletes they've never heard of before. Exactly. You are all about to become obsessed and moved and transported by people who you've never heard of before.

28:26And in sports that, by and large, you have zero interest in at any other time of the year. Yeah. And also you'll flick on to like the quarterfinals of the 110 metres hurdle. So you go, I have not interest. And then suddenly you see in lane three, there's a Brit. So you go, OK, I'll watch this one. And by the way, this is still an era where you get away with calling a show International King of Sports. And it was it was all men, which you definitively wouldn't do now. The international champion of sports and it'd be much more interesting for it. it was of its time it very much did not have a live audience in it and you can really tell but it's uh it was an awful lot of fun okay i love that one final question for you marina i'm asking you this because of the show you've just been working on emma godbert asks i have always wondered what happens when the plot calls for another fictional show to be filmed do they use prop cameras lighting and actors to act as the team or do they use the crew that is already there filming the actual show but add some extra cameras aha okay well i can speak about the The show specifically that I have, which has not aired, but has finished shooting.

29:21Are you allowed to say what it's called, by the way? Yes, it's called The Franchise. You will be able to watch it on HBO or Now or Sky or wherever you get HBO shows like Succession or House of the Dragon. It's all backstage on, I'm not giving anything away to say, it's all backstage on a franchise film. And we had an entirely separate fake crew, entirely separate props, everything. I will only say that on day one, when we got there to shoot the pilot, it was such a head scramble. It was so confusing. You couldn't tell because they looked so like that person might look in the crew. And you've got a very, very big crew on a show like that.

29:55And therefore, you also have a very big crew on a big superhero franchise movie. So you need to have a very big crew of supporting actors who are all those people. You actually worked out eventually that people had yellow lanyards and black lanyards for real and not real. Like Inception with a spinning top. Yeah, exactly. But I couldn't get my head around it. I was thinking, is that part of the set or is that our tent that the writers sit in? or is that where the writers in the thingy would sit? And you couldn't work it out. And actually, people were told, like, don't touch that. You've got a drink of water from the water.

30:24It was like, no, that's for continuity. You can't touch that as part of the set. And so we were in such a muddle throughout. And even right by the end, we were still saying to people, is that, can I just, you know, who you thought were on the crew and they'd be like, I'm not on the crew. But in order to keep the realism, we had to have all of that. Yeah, and totally separate cameras, totally separate everything. The whole thing was almost like a double of everything. That's amazing. It was fascinating to look at. Yeah, but essentially if you're ever seeing a camera or a camera operator on a film, then that is an actor.

30:50They are always an actor. They're too busy anyway, the people who are doing those jobs. They certainly wouldn't want to be so asked, do you don't mind mucking in, do you? Never ask a crew to muck in. No. You can pay me to muck in if you want to, but yeah, you muck in all you like. I'm doing a job of work. Absolutely. And they are very, very busy. So it will always be, as on that show, an entirely separate crew of people. That's us done, I think, for another week. I think it is. Oh, and don't forget, you can sign up to the newsletter, of which I've touted various things this week, at therestisentertainment.com.

31:20Lovely. See you next Tuesday. See you next Tuesday.