When Product Placement Goes Wrong

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2:05No, they're not. They're not. Don't worry. Marina, should we start with you? Peter White, which is an absolute direct anagram of Peter With, the old Aston Villa striker. Peter, well done. Peter says, just wondering, Peter's question is about his name being an anagram of Peter With. No, it isn't. He says, just wondering why, is that niche for anybody at home? Oh, no, I think that's incredibly mainstream. We've really gone M.O.R. there. The Peter With material. You're long and strong in it. Yeah. Peter asked this, just wondering why so many films and stories centred on kids feature single parent households.

2:41Either that or the protagonist is an orphan being looked after by an uncle, aunt or kindly grandparent. Is it just because it's easier to write something with fewer characters to worry about? Or could it be a simple way of gaining sympathy for the protagonist? Good question. Good question. We'll deal with single parents first and then we'll get on to orphans, which is the even bigger category. Single parent's good because it sort of telescopes all of the, much more of the action onto the relationship with that one, with the one child or the one parent. In a good couple, a problem shared is a problem halved.

3:10We don't really want any of our problems halved in drama or fiction because that's less good for the plot. So this is why we have a lot of saintly but struggling fathers or mothers. It's also ridiculous. My mum's a stripper, but she loves me. Really? Yeah. Come on, we're doing a podcast. Mommy, I'm so sorry. But also it's one for your actor to pay. As a writer as well, you're like, if you've got a single parent and a child, that's one relationship you're dealing with. If you've got two parents and a child, suddenly you've got three relationships. You've got parent-child, other parent-child, parent with other parents.

3:44It's only going to really limit the plot. And, you know, of course you have sympathy for the adult, you have sympathy for the child. Orphans is a very interesting category. Now, orphans, they seem and they are vulnerable, okay? Sometimes it gives you a backstory, like Batman's parents, which I'm not going to... Remind me how they died. Batman's parents is a good name for a film, by the way. With orphans, there's often no reason for them to have to stay somewhere and therefore not throw themselves into whatever quest or adventure or whatever has been thrown up. Cast that person as a psychological itinerant rather than someone who's stuck somewhere.

4:19We all know that home and family is a pull and keeps you anchored. So as you say, as a writer, everyone's lived experience is completely different, but as a writer it gives you an immediate shortcut to get that person into the plot. There's no reason they have to stay where they are. There's no reason an adult is going to say to them, no, you can't do that because we're supposed to believe that those parents have either gone or they may not actually be an orphan. We may discover that their missing parent is in fact the villain. They might have surrogate or adoptive parents, as you say, like uncles and aunts.

4:48It also gives you a quest to have to find out who you are, which is a big part of lots of fiction. What we also want, especially with children, is reasons for them to have to step up in the adventure and do things that otherwise an adult will be saying, don't do it. Or Disney is obsessed with orphans. It's really interesting. Something very bad happened to Walt Disney, actually. Sorry, this is a sidebar. This is a sidebar. Absolutely. Marina Heights, absolute sidebar. When he got some money, when he became successful, he bought his parents a house at Walt Disney. Someone hadn't dealt with a boiler properly and they got carbon monoxide poisoning and they both ended up in hospital.

5:22the mother died. Anyway, that's not why lots of Disney movies we know are based on fairy stories that have orphans in them and fairy stories have orphans in for the reasons we've just said. Disney has had a particular kind of bent for orphans in all of its works. And there was a year, I think it was 2018 and they released something like 10 movies and nine of them had orphan characters. Even this year you're looking at things like, I'm just having to do this off the top of my head, but like Lilo and Stitch, Lilo's the Orphan, Snow White. It is a very, very big thing. But it is incredible how significant those family relationships are.

6:00And if you look at even things like in reality television, where it's anchoring when someone becomes the mother of a house, or even like Amanda in Series 1 of the Traitors or whatever. Diane, Series 2 of the Traitors. People say, oh, you're like a mother to me. Those are the ties that bind. And just as they do amongst, I don't know, animals in the African savannah, many of whom are actually related, When you have those relationships in things like reality TV, you're stronger. This is why people create those kind of false families in a weird way or pseudo families when they're in houses or marooned on islands or wherever they are in reality television because you are stronger as a family unit.

6:38And so orphans, to come back to that point, it just means that you don't have those ties and you're much more easy to throw into an adventure if you're the creator. I think so. There is also the thing of if you are writing a book and it's got lots of characters and you're in a family environment, the smaller amount of people in that family, the better. You know, there's nothing to stop you having a child with six siblings in your book. But then, sorry, every time you see them, you've got to go. And there's John and there's, you know, it's limiting. I was talking to Ian Rankin. He was writing a Rebus book and Rebus was sort of semi-retired.

7:12So he gave him a dog. So he thought, oh, this is a nice thing to have. And then he was halfway through his next book and he thought, oh, God, I gave Rebus a dog. I forgot. I forgot I gave him a dog. And he had to find a way of writing the dog out. You know, if you can keep relationships quite tight, if your book is not about a family, but there is a family in it, the smaller that family is, the better, the simpler it is. It's not getting in the way of everything else. One for you, Richard, from Kiran Ahuja. On University Challenge, when a contestant answers incorrectly, Amal Rajan often pinpoints exactly where they've gone wrong.

7:43It creates the impression that he has an encyclopedic knowledge of every question's background. Do the show's writers anticipate common mistakes and provide him with scripted responses? Or is he really just that knowledgeable? Listen, Amal, I love you. He's been on House of Games. I'm going to go on a limb and say he's not that knowledgeable. Any more than I am on shows. Call that one. What you would have, if it's a particularly complicated question, for example, Amal will say, look I'm pretty good on arts and literature I'm not great on science and so on a science question a number of things will happen things will be spelled out phonetically in the question there will be, if there's the holy grade of a question is are you saying on University Challenge everything is spelled out phonetically?

8:28No only if it's like a word you would never have come across so you know if it's like an Incan tribe or it's a chemical compound there might be situations you will look through beforehand and go how do I pronounce this it doesn't look like that's how you pronounce it could you for this word could could this word be phonetic the holy grade of any question is there is no gray area at all there isn't anything that they could uh answer that isn't an acceptable answer quite often on university challenge because they're dealing with people absolutely at the top of their game and people who are studying things there will be the odd gray area and on those the question writers would have a little thing saying this is the answer and they'd have a thing saying accept another answer so if they say that you can accept it do not accept this answer which is a bit which is a common mistake that someone might make with this question but it's not right because you know of this reason it's like one of those conversation trees you get in their call center yeah exactly your script now you don't have that on an awful lot of questions but what you definitely do and it happens all the time on the university challenge is if there is an answer which feels like it's very close to the right answer or feels like actually it's a different branch of the right answer they just stop recording that second you stop recording absolutely and you just go okay in the gallery the question editors will all sit together just go i mean is that could we accept that is that or is that pronunciation acceptable because it sort of sounds like that they will spend a minute a minute and a half and then say to amolzia no that's a not accept and they will give him then the reasons why he's not accepting it or they'll say it's an accept but would you say that give this piece of information as well, just so people at home don't go, why did he accept that?

10:06Because actually the answer is this, you're not watching a half hour live show when you're watching University Challenge. You pretty much are, but there will be the odd moment where they will stop it and they will talk, talk, talk and I will be sitting there chatting to the contestants and they go, okay, it's not accept. And that's when you often say, yes, I can accept that, although normally we would accept this. He's saying that very quickly, but that's been after three minutes of people upstairs working out what to do. So, So there'll be areas where he is able to extemporise for sure on areas that he knows about.

10:37But if it's something, if it is, you know, science or maths or something like that, there is a group of people, if there is an answer that could be construed as right or wrong, who will give him extra information. Robert Buckingham has a question for you, Marina. That's a good name, Robert Buckingham. Has a creative work of fiction ever been so bad that brands have actively requested their product be removed from being featured so as not to sully their reputation? or has a company ever reported a significant drop in sales because of being associated with a poorly received movie or TV franchise?

11:07That is interesting. I mean, in general, these things are incredibly worked out to the letter. Sometimes that doesn't always happen, though. You know what you're getting into, and if it's not a hit or everyone hates it, that's too bad. You agreed to it. You've done a deal. There have been occasions of removal. Danny Boyle had to spend a lot of money digitally removing Coca-Cola and Mercedes logos in Slumdog Millionaire. But that was just something that had been accidentally featured. They didn't sort of retrospectively say it. So he featured that anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's one, a young company, maybe making a bit of a mistake they won't do again.

11:40Peloton in 2021 were very excited because they thought, oh, our bike's going to appear on Sex and the City. And just like that, the reboot. It's a very expensive product. They didn't realise how it was going to be used. So have they given permission? Yes. Right. Mr Big has a heart attack while riding his peloton. And actually, their stock value decreased the next after it had aired. And they thought, okay, fine, fine. They had to try and think of a way around it, because by the way, you've really messed up if you've done that. And they got Chris Noth, who played Mr Big, they thought, right, we're going to get him in our Christmas advert.

12:13I'll lean into it. Yeah, I'll lean into it. Clever. Unfortunately, in just a few days, several women accused Chris Noth of sexual assault, and he was basically dropped by his agency, suddenly dropped by the Peloton advert. They didn't think it through. Almost the apex of product placement in lots of ways is James Bond. And talking to people who've worked on Bond films, oh my God, I mean, it's a huge deal. When product placement is happening, it happens quite a lot in those movies. It's like the watch is on set. The watch is on set. There'll be five guys from Omega and they'll have a briefcase basically kind of lashed to their hand.

12:46And they're on set and they're watching all of those takes. It's almost like an actor's meticulously worked out nudity clause. like how many seconds that watch is going to be shown no we haven't quite seen it reflected the light they're really really fussy about it and there there are many many days where you've got those people on set i mean we heard when we were searching the franchise we heard like of them just leaving things like coolers blank um so that you could just cgi the products in later because they hadn't sold it at that point oh that's clever yeah so uh and i think that was in doctor strange they had this and then it's really quite badly but it's filled with some form of drink um afterwards but in general people it's very very carefully worked out and there are teams on the set insisting you do it exactly right um but yeah peloton that was a bit of a ball drop i have to say there's an interesting one at the moment isn't there with white lotus if if people are watching that and enjoying it which i'm absolutely love it i some people said this series is quite slow i love it i think i think it's my favorite white lotus yet but um jason isaac's family who are that that's one of the great families ever in any television program they're so they're so bleak all in their different ways he's constantly wearing his his duke university t-shirt he's like a duke man that's his thing he is going through such terrible trauma in that program if anyone's watching he keeps thinking you know you keep seeing the images of him you know wanting to kill himself always wearing this duke t-shirt and duke university just they went public and just said we think this is absolutely unacceptable it's taking it too far it's taking it too far i mean they've had quite a few scandals really unpleasant scandals Duke it'll be interesting to see if they do try and get some sort of records it's the Barbara Seisand effect of the fact that they've complained everyone's now talking about Duke God that family I can't I can't even I'm loving this series haven't seen the final one yet I'm taking a tactical ad break there just to cleanse my thoughts of that family God I hope this is not Duke and Peloton that'd be so awkward

14:48This episode is brought to you by Sky, where you can watch unmissable shows, which includes the new season of the multiple Emmy Award winning Hacks, starring Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder. We love Hacks so much. Absolutely love it. I'm so looking forward to this new series. For people who don't know Hacks, Marina, talk us through it a little bit. It's focused on the relationship between the older comedian who's played by Jean Smart, Deborah Vance, who's one of those real old showbiz troopers. She plays Vega, she does residency. Debra Vancey, she's sort of, yeah, almost like a Joan Rivers-y type character.

15:21Exactly. Old school. She's the boomer and Hannah Einbinder is a kind of Gen Z-er. It's really interesting on the stuff between the ages. Yeah, so she plays Ava Daniels who essentially becomes Debra Vancey's writer. Yeah. So she writes for very cool, very hip things. Having sort of been cancelled for a joke at the start. Yes. So we start in the culture war and we continue in it. But what I love about the show particularly is the absolute reverence for comedy and the graft and the craft of it. And what a tough kind of man's world it remains. Definitely, definitely. And so how hard it is to be a woman in that male-dominated industry.

15:55Yeah, amazing on showbiz, amazing on comedy, amazing on the industry. But also just the relationship between the two of them is a really lovely generational sort of, it's like a sitcom thing. It's very dramatic, but a lot of comedy in there as well. They've got some terrific gas stars in this season. They've got Helen Hunt, Tony Goldwyn, Eric Balfour, and obviously the returning cast who are peerless. Yep, the mix of comedy and drama is spot on. You can watch season four of the Emmy Award winning Hacks right now on Sky.

16:29Welcome back, everybody. Welcome back, everyone. We've got a question from Callum. Sorry, I put you off by also welcoming people back. No, I liked it. I think you should. I stumbled over Callum H because Callum H has got a question saying how do shows like Killing Eve come up with ways of killing people? Some are very complex so are writers having to learn about poisons and guns to think them up? Thank you Callum well I thought I have views on this because I'm always killing people as you know but someone who has much better views on this exact example is Gordon Carrera our friend from The Rest is Classified it's all about spies and spying and he was a consultant on Killing Eve And Gordon has this to say to your question, Callum.

17:06Hi, Richard. Hi, Marina. It's Gordon Carrera here from The Rest is Classified. So a few years back when Killing Eve was being developed, I was asked to help as a consultant because it's all about assassins, as you know. And strangely, perhaps the writers like Phoebe Waller-Bridge weren't actually experts in killing people. Now, neither am I, but I know a little bit about it. So I was asked to come up with a document which we called The Kill List, which was all kinds of different slightly crazy ways in which assassinations might take place. Some of those were based on real events like the killing of a North Korean official in an airport when two women approached him and sprayed something in his face, which turned out to be VX gas.

17:51And that was then the model for one of the killings with a perfume bottle in the first series of Killing Eve. And it's a reminder really that in the spy world fact and fiction often collide and it can be sometimes quite hard to disentangle the two although that is something we try and do on the rest is classified thank you gordon if you liked that if you like talks of spies then you'll love the rest is classified but yeah i like thinking of ways of killing people if you know what i mean yeah yeah it's quite fun and you know writers tend to be quite imaginative people so yeah you can think of a million ways.

18:25It's like getting away with things and killing people. Well you've told me that it is possible to get away with murder which I absolutely love that all the crime writers are like no no it's totally possible. Yeah because the whole point is the only murders we know about are the ones that got solved. There's people out there who did it but the spy world is full of lots of the spy authors were spies themselves. Ian Fleming was in the Secret Service. John McCary at the very beginning of his career was as well and they certainly move in those circles and anytime someone is killed that information gets spread around everybody in that community and then And it's just like a race to see who gets to use it first in their book.

18:58I mean, that works both ways. You know, the spies will read something in a book and think, oh, that would work for us. Or, you know, writers. If you're Mick Heron and, you know, a spy sort of sends you an email just saying, thought you might be interested in this one. That material does the rounds. They like to see their stuff percolate into the world of fiction. But everybody does because everybody loves show business. Yeah. And you can be like the highest ranking spy in the, you know, CIA. You could be like privy to every secret there's ever been in the US. It's like every single thing. But if you sort of send a little note to John Grisham and say, oh, by the way, this happened, and then it's in a book, you're like, oh, my God, I'm in a book.

19:32Oh, my God, this is so cool. There are very porous barriers between the world of spy writers and spies and the world of crime writers and the police. You know, there's lots and lots of back channels. So quite often murders will be real ones. See, my murder got a mention. Oh, yeah. Oh, I like, yeah. Richard Olsen's new book. One for me. but almost always in that case you will see at the end that someone will credit they'll say oh thank you to so and so from the Metropolitan Police or thank you to so and so it'll either say they're from the Metropolitan Police or which police force they're from or it won't say where they're from in which case they're a spy.

20:06Who did the murder that this was based on. Yes. Murdered and spy by. Exactly. Thank you to murderer John Edwards for all the information. Thank you Gordon. Harriet has a question for you Marina. Hello Marina and Richard, she says. Hello Harriet. A question for you on whether TV shows have got darker. She says, I don't mean genre, I mean visually less light. It is often the most dramatically interesting bits of a show, e.g. set at night time. Do I need a new telly? Has it always been like this? If not, doubt it's accidental. So why? Okay, this has been a complaint, Harriet, for some years. And there are various different reasons for it.

20:44It's a bit like I was whining about drone shots. It's a cheap way of making something look expensive, the drone shot. dark is a sort of in my view can be not always but it can be a very lazy way to create atmosphere when you just feel like but a lot of people feel that they're completely peering at their television and like can't quite actually make out what's happening here now things are compressed for streaming and the bit rate can make it even worse so you might actually just to answer a technical question which i'm terribly bad at but there are things you have control over if there's motion smoothing turned on your tv turn that off you could adjust the brightness but there is artistic stuff that you have absolutely no control over i'm afraid harriet and i mean i think it's quite pretentious it's a bit like the one shot isn't it but the game of thrones battle of winterfell that was in the final season i've never seen it never seen game of thrones okay i've never seen game of thrones okay but i have seen game of thrones the battle of winterfell is this epic thing it's in the final season i remember talking to the script supervisor on that she said it was 55 night shoots they were all completely mental completely mental okay now fabian wagner who was the DOP on that said because so many people complained that they couldn't even see it so you've done 55 no one can actually see it because it was very very dark he said everything we wanted people to see was there I mean that season had a lot of detractors but it's not great is it when you know like it's a bit like politicians thinking we need new voters no maybe maybe the problem was with you but he said people were watching it wrong and they weren't watching it in cinematic conditions and other people said oh no but they've graded grading is something you do in a post-production and it's a way of affecting the colours and they said that they graded the blacks even blacker so people think this whole thing started this whole trend by the way normally by the way is when you're watching you know Love Island and you think how is the pool that colour?

22:29Yeah how is it? It's because it's been through an incredible grade It's really interesting I was talking to a director the other day and he said oh god I went to see an edit of my and the editor had just done something that I'd asked him to do and I came and had a look and said oh my god the whole life's gone out of it and it's just to do with a you can put it back with a flick of a switch almost slightly more complicated than that, but it was to do with the grading. And he said, suddenly, like, this kind of down mood. Some of the great unsung heroes of TV, the graders. Because it feels like, oh, it's a filter you'd have on your phone.

22:56And it's sort of that, but immensely more complicated. It can so affect the tone of something. And as I say, you know, nothing has changed in the dialogue, the cuts or anything. People think that the really dark trend started with David Fincher, with Seven. You remember, it was raining all the time. Is it, by the way, this is a technical question, is it easier to light a dark room than it is to light a light room if you know what i mean in the darkness we need lights because we got to see certain things but is it cheaper to light for darkness than it is to in some ways yes and it also covers a sort of multitude of sins there's lots of things if you've got lots of animatronics lots of props painting it black will make it sort of just you know you won't see it anymore so there's in the spaceship in alien there's lots of stuff that in the end they just like painted loads of because there was so much animatronics and things like that and puppets or whatever.

23:43They're painting it all black and then it just fades away and then it's a very dark, but obviously it suits the material. But lighting, I mean, for decades, black actors were not lit properly because in that same way that, I don't know, seatbelts are tested on men and not women and so there's this whole thing where lots of things are not designed for the people they're being used for. Black actors were not lit properly and they were just lit in the same way you would light a white actor and their skin was different and it didn't work. Like, that isn't the case now. But the whole thing about dark lighting, people just feel like they can't watch it at home on their TV and everyone sort of says, oh, you know, it should be like a cinema.

24:20But really, it's not. It's at home. Yeah, I get it. And, you know, I'm visually impaired and there gets a certain level of darkness where there's no point in me even looking at the screen, which a lot of people get when they're hearing impaired and recognise the way they cut lots of modern shows or mix them. Literally, there's no point in them listening because they can't hear it. And if I'm watching the screen, I mean, I cannot see it like that Winterfell thing. What's the point? I cannot see anything. I need something. I need some definition. So, yeah, the second something's dark or if it's described as dark in a review, there's no point.

24:50I can't see it. So it may feel classy to whoever's made it. But there's a proportion of people who are just, they're not seeing anything that you've just done. And people are just not watching their TV at home on a cinema. Yeah, exactly. Otherwise, they'd be in the cinema. Do me a favour. Anyway. Now, we talked about Last One Laughing on the main show this week. we've had a lot of questions about it and we might do some more on them next week but here's one that some people have asked david hart says uh amazon's last one laughing why are there 12 writer credits at the end of the show what are they writing when it's about comedians in a house trying to make each other laugh if you watch that show there are an awful lot of set pieces each of the 10 comics you know has their own joker to play so you know they go out and they do a set piece and lots of comics have writers and lots of certainly tv companies have writers so you know And if you're making that show, the comedians are going in and you want to make it as absolutely natural as possible for them and them just to be able to be themselves.

25:45We know they've had to prepare something, a Joker thing, five minutes. Some of the people will do that completely by themselves. Some of them will say, oh, I've got this thought. I've got an idea. And they'll sit in a room with a couple of writers and put it up because it's five minutes and they want to make it good. But also when you're thinking about that format and you're thinking about six hours and you're thinking about ideas and how we do make people laugh. and if we've got a head-to-head thing, what is the stuff that we can do? So, you know, there's a head-to-head between Bob and Richard where you have to make the face that you would have if, for example, you're on a plane and the pilot is breakdancing in the aisle and a big bald man's just come out of the toilet, something like that.

26:22That's all written. A writer has come up with that idea, yes. So when you're watching telly, Jimmy's not kind of thinking, oh, what look could you do, I wonder. Every single thing there, every single suggestion that's made, every single prompt that is given to the people has been done by producers or writers. And workshops probably by writers. Yeah, exactly. Because although, as we say, the show sort of lasts six hours, as it were, the development of it and the working out what works, what doesn't, what will be funniest has all been done in workshop, I guess, with writers. And obviously there's a lot of furniture for Jimmy and Rasheen, particularly Jimmy, not to doubt, but furniture lines that he needs to come up with and those will be written by somebody.

27:00Yeah, exactly. And, you know, 12 people sounds like a lot of people. That is not 12 people sitting in a room for the entire production process, that will be, oh, we've got 10 different people doing these bits of work. Oh, so-and-so's coming in on day one. So-and-so's coming in on day seven. Then, oh, can we do a day where we're just coming up with suggestions for the game where they have to do the faces? Oh, why don't we get two people to come in and do that? Who's available? Oh, they're not available. So we bring in other people. So, you know, in a three-month production process, 12 writers will come in for a day or two each.