When Autobiographies Go Too Far

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1:22Hello and welcome to this episode of the Rest is Entertainment questions and answers episode. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. Hello, Richard. How are you? I'm very, very well. I'm very excited about answering questions. Yes, as always. With Russell T. Davis last week, he said, I don't think I've ever been more famous than I have been this week. Did he say that? Did you bump into him? He was absolutely thrilled. It was the most boring question we've ever had. And we have said that to you, Russell. But it has kept on giving. I thought it was interesting. I like things like that. I like fonts and colophons and all that.

1:52Yeah, I'm not changing my opinion. Yeah, OK. Right. It was an interesting question. Why didn't you hit me with another interesting question? With another interesting question. This is a question from Stephen Moffat who asks, no, who asks, the test card, tell me why are there 14 different colours in it? No, Emma Craddock asks, well, she says, firstly, love the podcast. That's a good way to get your question read out. Love the podcast. Thank you, Emma. I just wondered if you had any insight on what happens if someone admits to a crime on TV within a show. The main ones I can think of are where people have confessed to taking illegal substances.

2:27but is this a worry for the show lawyers and how much do the show lawyers remove from filmed content in general? Okay, the only things that show lawyers really remove just to answer the second part first is stuff that's libelous because that's where you could be vulnerable to illegal action. Admitting a crime on TV is not a crime in itself. The show isn't vulnerable to any sort of... So broadcasting someone admitting a crime is not a crime. Saying I was intoxicated in the past is not a crime. Yes. And it's pretty hard to, I mean, you know, once in 1986. That's why you like font so much. It's hard to prove.

3:04Possession of drugs is a crime. Saying, I took some drugs back in the past, but I don't now. You know, tell me how you're going to prove that in court. Books, I think, are more interesting on this in some ways, or written word in lots of ways. The press that want Prince Harry to be banned from the US, even though they hate him, so why they want him back here, I don't know. But they have said, why is he being allowed to live in America when he's specifically admitted drug taking? There's no real evidentiary value to half of this stuff. So it doesn't matter that he might have said it in his book.

3:31Having said that, it depends what you say in your book. Now, C.J. DeMouy, who is a guy on Eggheads. Oh, my goodness. He did an autobiography. And I'm not going to name the publishing house. But I would say that certain publishing houses, the big ones, will be very careful about what you say in your book. And will tell you where you're exposing yourself. C.J. DeMouy, one of the Eggheads. And he said in the past when he was living on the streets, he'd punched a drug addict who approached him with a knife in Amsterdam. He pushed him into the canal and he said, I fully suspect I killed him. Now, I think if you're admitting murder in a book or manslaughter, you are in a whole different world.

4:08OK, it's not the same as saying, you know, I smoke some weed. He was picked up on a European arrest warrant. It was an absolute nightmare. And I think he lost I mean, he basically lost all his money trying to defend it. By the way, they couldn't match any crime with this. They hadn't found a person in a canal, sorry to be brutal here, in a canal that they were able to match with this. They accused him eventually of stealing 18 ,000 shopping trolleys. Yeah. You can see sometimes why people do say these things in books, but should be persuaded out of them, is because what people are always thinking of when they've got a book coming out is, what is going to be gutted out of this book and become a news story, which will be free publicity for my book?

4:49And yeah, I mean, if you say you murdered someone in Amsterdam, that will probably be lifted. Although that wasn't even a bestseller in the end. No. Unfortunately, just the arrest and not the bestseller list, which is a bad combination. You do everything you can. If you're going to be arrested, at least be arrested at number four on the non-fiction hardbacks. So he was pulled up in court. He was arrested. And the legal proceedings went on a long time. But he was never actually charged in the end. Because as I say, there wasn't any crime they felt they could link him with. Yeah, they tried. Like many people in murder stories, he weirdly confessed to something that he perhaps hadn't done.

5:21Now, there's another interesting one. Felix Dennis, the kind of legendary magazine editor who published Oz and was involved in indecency trials and all sorts of things. I can't remember when this was. It wasn't that long ago. It was about 15 years ago, maybe a bit less. He did an interview with Ginny Dugary for The Times. Now, Ginny Dugary is a sort of doyen of Fleet Street interviewers. And let's just say she matched him drink for drink. And I should think they'd had a few bottles, not glasses, right? And then Felix Dennis says, I once killed a man. And I pushed him over a cliff because he was abusing his wife.

5:51And then he says, weren't odd. And she says, are you sure you want to be telling me this? He says, oh, yes, yes, yes, I don't care. You know, people should know this about me, that if you harm one of mine, then I'll do this to you. The next morning rings up and says, writes to her, says, you should forget one particular episode I recounted to you after the third or fourth bottle in the conservatory, which is the title of my autobiography. and say it's a load of hogwash. I was drunk. I withdraw unconditionally. It's a bit of a weird thing. I mean, as I say, I have been drunk on occasion myself, but I've never actually suggested.

6:23So where did this come out? Was it in the article? She then still thought, well, I did give you the chance. Well, you can't retrospectively make quotes off the record. Now, this is a whole area of ethics or whatever. I also slightly feel that if you've given the person the chance to retract it in the moment, then, of course, Warwickshire police have to say, yeah, we're trying to look into this. no one's got a body there are no cliffs in Warwickshire yeah they're like he lives in Warwickshire now yeah there are no cliffs he lives in Warwickshire now but it says in the article he lives in LA as in this is one for the LA you know he lived in America I think this is one for another one of their police forces this is one for Colombo not Morse the agency or local law enforcement I don't know I've just got this off television but it's not one for us so if you admit to serious crimes like that and by the way some member of the public the police will always say yeah we can't investigate unless we had a complaint meaning I'm not investigating something that someone told someone off to foil bottles of wine in a conservatory.

7:15But if there is a complaint, which there will always be a member of the public, will make a complaint as a sort of do-gooder slash sticky beak. You can't push anyone off a cliff without someone sticking their nose in. Jesus Christ, well done. The entirely humorless British public, someone, will make a complaint. So it depends on the nature, Emma, of the crime which is being admitted. But as I say, intoxication, so what? Nobody cares and no one's going to investigate it. Yeah, and if you have a situation, if you're on the Jeremy Carl show or something like that, if someone does admit to something, then, you know, you discuss it with them afterwards.

7:47And do you put it on? Do you not put it on? You can certainly get in trouble if you say something. But by and large, murder, you would have an issue. Try not to admit murdering someone on a telly show or in an autobiography. It's just... Listen, I've been TV 15 years, never done it once. Ultimately, you are a professional. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Speaking of quizzes, this is definitely for you. The Chase. Dan Corduck says watching The Chase. Corduck? We just had a Craddock. Yeah, it's almost anagram around. It's like New York Times spelling bee. Watching The Chase, I always wonder, what is the incentive for The Chasers?

8:22Do they get a bonus if they win and prevent people from winning money? It seems especially egregious when they go hard against celebrities for charity editions. Do you know what? It's a really good question. There's something you think about a lot when you're putting a show together. There's been all sorts of shows where you have to take on celebrities or things like that and And you say, well, no, I can't do that. I want someone to win. And so that would be the big issue of the chase and Aircades as well. Aircades has got a lot of publicity this time, hasn't it? Yeah, I mean. So you have this situation where you think, okay, I love the format.

8:50The format is you come up against the very best quizzes. But me as a contestant, obviously what I want to do is beat these quizzes. But yes, there is no incentive for those quizzes. Psychologically, there's no incentive because either that person comes and wins some money or you do really well and they don't win any money. So what you're doing is sort of mean. But what the Chase and the Eggheads both do is they use quiz as a sport in exactly the same way you would have with gladiators. We just say, look, you're a great quizzer, but you come along here and this is like the ultimate challenge you can have in your quizzing.

9:22This is like, you know, going to the World Cup or something like that. So you come along. If you're amazing, you're going to win some money. But we have got a brick wall in front of you. So the Chasers, all their incentive is is to show that they are the very, very best. and right from the beginning you give them a slight sort of meanness like you might do with the gladiators as well. It's a really interesting, neat little just psychological ploy which doesn't say here's some smart asses and they're going to stop you winning some money. It's saying here is your opportunity to test yourself against the very, very, very best.

9:50You're at Top Gun now for quitting. Almost certainly going to lose because they are the very, very best but if you can win, oh my goodness. So that show, The Chase and the gladiators is you are probably going to lose but what if you won? And you know they're brilliant quizzes genuinely they're absolutely at the top of their game and there's world quiz championships and people like Paul Sinner are always at the top of that game. I think there's a great website a guy called Daniel Hurst who does all the House of Games stats for every single show that's ever been on every prize and there's this website that does exactly the same for the chase which is onequestionshootout.xyz and it's got stats for every single chase so how well they've done you know the money that's been won against them The absolute top chaser of all with a 79.6 % win record, Anne Hegarty, the governess.

10:36Would you have predicted that? I would have predicted that, but I would have been very unclear further down, I must say. Well, you know what? They're all much of a muchness. Dara, the new guy, Paul, Jenny and Anne are all within 1 % of each other. Sean Wallace at the bottom, but he's still winning over 70 % of his battles. I don't massively watch the chase, I'll be honest, because it was up against pointless for years and years and years. so I just chose not to watch it so now occasionally I'll turn it on but I went back 10 years without ever seeing an episode and I had to play a version of it once on some panel show I can't remember what it was and I absolutely didn't understand the rules and I couldn't admit that I didn't understand the rules because what, you spent 10 years not watching The Chase?

11:13Come on mate Petty But I just hadn't and so I had to really work out the rules of The Chase as I went along and even for me that was not particularly easy That's an anxiety dream Yes, a little bit but yeah, it's genuinely a good question and there isn't really an incentive other than the incentive is, like the incentive of any footballer, whoever goes, any tennis player is, they have one job and that's to quiz as well as they possibly can and the challenge of someone else is, can I beat this brick wall? Yeah, but you don't want to watch people doing underarm serves and you don't want any of that so you don't tune in for that.

11:45A hundred percent that and the celeb one is slightly different and I think it's slightly easier to win. Yeah, like all the celeb things, it's slightly easier. Because on that, it's like if you're a punter, you absolutely, this is the absolute top thing you could possibly do whereas celebs sometimes it's just people they ring around and say who will come on and people are like oh i don't mind and they go yeah i could win some money for charity why are these people trying to stop me winning money this is ridiculous uh so that's slightly different i always find it tiny tiny bit more awkward but it's such a brilliantly run show that a great format that they've got those characters so perfectly honed i kind of get it and that's the lovely thing they do on eggheads the way they really get over on eggheads which is very clever which is they are stopping you winning the money of course they are so if you come along as a team you play against the eggheads and you know you don't win your thousand pound but the thing is they are not stopping the money being won because on eggheads the money just goes on to the next show and the beauty of that show because you can't really give away very much money on bbc and you certainly can't give away much money on bbc daytime it's on five now of course is they're so good that they can win 35 shows in a row and suddenly you've got a team playing for 36 000 pound which is very very exciting but so they're not actually stopping anyone they're stopping specific people winning money but they are not keeping any money the money is going to go out but to a team who really earned it and really deserved it.

12:57A question for you Marina from Jack. No surname so it could be something that could be related to Craddock and Cordock we don't know. It might be Jack Canuck Jack I'm going to assume her surname is Canuck, forgive me. If it isn't, write in but I'm guessing it is. Jack Canuck asks are TV programmes getting harder to understand more and more of my friends in our 20s by the way now watch TV with subtitles always on. It drives me mad because it's so distracting but is the dialogue getting more muffled people are obsessed with this the subtitles is like one of the key battlegrounds of the early 21st century i think it's fair to say that including many territories disputed actual global territories in the world they recently did some research i think four in five of 18 to 25 year olds always have the subtitles on i remember the first time i heard people say to me that they were using the subtitles on an english language program which is obviously the key thing when people told me that they were watching The Wire with them.

13:50We are now talking about lots of fluent English speakers using it for shows that are being spoken in fluent English. Now, in families, younger people want them on all the time. My children want them on all the time. I find it so, and I have to beg to get them turned off. I'm like one of the last holdouts. I really, really hate it. Especially, by the way, in comedy, when you're getting the line before the person says the line. So you lose gags all the time. Totally. And people don't concentrate so much. they're looking at other screens whatever they call it sit back and so people said oh i don't like to miss things and well the irony is now you are reading television so you are missing almost everything else yeah because you're reading the things so you're you're not appreciating the production design as you might have otherwise you might have been it's changed lots of things like that whole bottom of the frame is now out for things to happen in because so many people as a yeah as a director because people have all got these things you better not have something important nabbing down there because it's going to have writing all on top of it.

14:45Having said that, in lots of ways, it's very popular. And I will come on to that conspiracy that you suggested, which is that Bong Joon-ho, who said when he won the Golden Globe for Parasites, if you've overcome the one inch tall barrier of subtitles, you'll be introduced to so many more amazing films. Now, then he went on to win the first foreign language best picture. Let's look what has just happened. Shogun, that's 80 % Japanese. That could never, ever possibly have won best drama. Everything changed. A lot changed in the pandemic because suddenly people were saying, I've completed Netflix.

15:17You heard people saying this like that. I've watched everything. I've run out of British television. People ran out quite quickly out of British American television and they went and watched all sorts of interesting things like Call My Agent. I mean, there were so many different series. And so people became used to watching things with subtitles. And that has been absolutely great. If you're a company like Netflix that's got all this stuff from different territories, only after that could something like Squid Game have been such a mega, mega hit. so all of these things can happen now and it is great you know my children will watch k-dramas and they'll they don't think twice about subtitles whereas for me when i was growing up it's like oh it's got something you know not interested you know it's like some check animation or something you weren't interested so now there are conspiracy theories because in the old days that i spoke to a sound mixer did somebody push a subtitle into a canal yeah well yeah basically someone pushed a subtitle into a canal sound mixers are not happy about this because to do the sound mix on anything with high production values, drama, comedy, whatever it is, is an incredibly skilled and difficult thing.

16:14They now feel that nobody's listening to their sound mix because people can have it, sometimes people just have it turned really quite low down and they're just reading television. Most people, by the way, would love books. Yeah. Yeah, have you tried this other thing? Because then you can invent all the pitches yourself. Yeah, yeah. They used to have to conform to an industry standard of loudness and loudness was anchored to dialogue loudness, which is crucial. now what they do when things like game of thrones came along the whole of production loudness so if there's a battle or a car crash or anything some people think dialogue has got a lot quieter and this is why you're always like i can't hear i can't hear you still have to do a lot in adr additional dialogue recording when just some lines have not been enunciated clearly enough when you're shooting it and people will go back and they will do those more clearly you can always always tell yes you can well if you're looking at the back of someone's head and they're talking that's probably been done in ADR and it sounds like it sounds like they're in a slightly different room yes absolutely yeah I like hearing all those sort of things as well people think that the streamers have done all this and they have a vested interest in getting people to watch all their foreign language content and so they want to keep things quiet so it doesn't mean so that's the conspiracy theory the conspiracy theory is but also lots of sound mixers are really annoyed because their beautiful work they think is just being put down on a low volume but some of them do have I have never done this but I actually might try this after speaking to the sound mixers some of them do have dialogue boost functions in your settings.

17:38Really? So the dialogue, it's louder and it comes up louder in the mix. Literally every single person has just stopped listening to the podcast and have gone to their smart TV to go, have we got dialogue boost? Have we got dialogue boost? And I think it's done via individual streamer or TV thing. So you have to see if they've got them. But it has totally changed television and viewing. If you go to the movies, actually, you'll see that a lot more cinemas are offering many more subtitle performances because people are simply so used to watching it like that. that they're doing anything to get people into cinemas.

18:06That's so funny. And is there anything in, because a lot of, you know, when videos come up, you know, TikTok and YouTube and stuff, there's often auto-generated subtitles anyway, which means if you are somewhere and you don't have your phone on now, you can watch it very quickly. And I quite like that sort of thing. So do I. And that is a huge part of it as well. People are so used to watching text overlay over dialogue, either, as you say, just putting the phone right down in terms of volume because you're at work and you're not really supposed to be doing it. I was going to say, it's very interesting that this younger generation who seem able to be able to read the dialogue on their screen are also the generation who will have their phones turned up loud on a train.

18:42Yeah, or in a cinema. You can't have it both ways. Or actually in the cinema. So yeah, it is interesting. I do think for anyone who works on the more visual side of television, it is quite frustrating because the dialogue's the only thing you don't miss now. Also, I don't want to bring everyone down, but if you're visually impaired like some of us are, you can't read them. So if I watch foreign language things, I've been very close to the TV. So if people do start relying on subtitles, then that is, yeah, it's slightly more difficult if you don't have a pin-sharp eyesight. And sometimes they'll have like white subtitles and there'll be a white tablecloth.

19:15Yes. How's anybody seeing that? Yeah, but as I say, you just can't have anything down the bottom of the frame anymore. But again, it's visually impaired, but for the hearing impaired, it's amazing that suddenly everyone is happy to have subtitles. It's not everything all the time. So it's, listen, take with one hand, give away the other. There you go, Jack. That was a long answer. And I think we have to consider the story developing because a lot of people have views about it within the production community. There's also something else as well, of course, is, you know, is it getting harder and harder to hear dialogue?

19:44You think, well, every single one of us is older than we were when we're talking about the times when we found it easy to hear dialogue and maybe just our hearing isn't as good as it was. But I know, I think your ear is in. It's because people are not quite concentrating that it's harder to hear. I think if you could hear it originally, then you can hear it now. You just get out of it. Listen, I don't like to boost our sponsors too much, but you can get dialogue boosts on Skyglass Television. I know that for a fact. With that semi-commercial, I think we should go into a break, Richard. Let's hope it's nice and loud.

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22:04Welcome back, everybody. Now, airport editions of books, I feel this is 100 % one for you, Richard. Rebecca Mace would like to know, why do publishers produce airport editions of books? They're usually larger format, perhaps in bigger print. I don't understand why. one they would produce a different format of a book the usual format's fine exclamation mark question mark in terribang in terribang and two it is bigger surely it's more practical to have a smaller lightweight edition when you're traveling uh good questions good observations and it's it's a red herring that they are in airports at already they're not really airport editions every time you do um a hardback so we release books first in the hardback in the uk but across the commonwealth a lot of those territories do not have a culture of having hardbacks in ireland for example you You go and they won't have hardbacks.

22:51So they have what's called trade paperbacks, which is before the smaller paperback comes out, a slightly bigger, chunkier, more impressive looking book comes out, which has a soft cover. It's the size of a hardback, but it has a soft cover. And it's called a trade paperback. And airports, because of the various rules on tax and all that kind of stuff, are able to stock those things. And so they do. And they're great because of airport exclusives. You don't have a hardback. So you get like a book that's just come out. You don't have to have the hardbacks. So I always feel quite excited when I go to an airport and they do the trade paperback.

23:21So it's simply the addition they get in lots of other Commonwealth countries, essentially, which you can buy at the airport and you can't buy anywhere else. So mine, hardback is out in September, paperback out in May. But if you're in Ireland, the trade paperback is out in September and then the paperback again is out maybe a little earlier than May. But it's an addition that they get in the rest of the world. So it's not exclusively made for the airports, but they are the only people who can stock it in the UK. And so it is an exclusive. And I always think it feels like quite a treat. But if you go over to Iden, for example, you go to any bookshop, you go to Eason's, you go to Dubray's, any of them, they will have these things that look like airport exclusives.

23:59It's just that's the trade paperback. And when you look at your sales figures, you can see trade paperback figures and all that stuff. So that's a very technical. And the price point is higher than the standard paperback, but lower than a hardback. Exactly that. And I guess the reason they are bigger than a paperback would be, to answer the question, Rebecca, is the paperback isn't out yet. But the reason they have them in airports is if you're going to have something that's the size of a hardback, might as well have it with a soft cover because that's easier to carry and easier to have around.

24:28So it's one of those weird things that it feels like there's these weird additions that don't exist anywhere else. But it's actually not. It's just the airport is the only place you can get the non-UK additions of these things. So it's a boring answer, but it's a factual answer. A question for you, Marina, from Christy John. San Diego Comic-Con seems like a large event on the entertainment calendar every year, but it also seems quite niche. What kind of impact does an event like this have on the industry, if any? And why do some companies participate while others don't? Brackets Netflix. Right, well, Comic-Con is one of those things that sort of started in some tiny hotel ballroom whenever it was in the 60s.