Backrooms: Has YouTube Just Saved Hollywood?

Summary

The Rest Is Entertainment

Episode: Backrooms: Has YouTube Just Saved Hollywood?
Date: June 1, 2026
Hosts: Richard Osman & Marina Hyde
Theme:
Exploring the disruptive rise of YouTube-native filmmakers and horror’s renaissance at the box office, the episode looks at the film “Backrooms,” Gen Z’s grip on horror, drama behind-the-scenes of “Mobland,” the phenomenon of “Strangers” and memoir culture, and the future of entertainment formats.

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Episode Overview

Richard Osman and Marina Hyde scrutinize the explosion of YouTube-trained creatives in mainstream entertainment, focusing on the seismic box office debut of “Backrooms” and its 20-year-old director. They connect this to the wider trend of indie horror box office wins, discuss rancor on the set of the Paramount series “Mobland,” and examine the controversy around Belle Burdon’s memoir “Strangers.” The episode ends by reflecting on how new formats—like “micro-dramas”—and generational shifts are upending TV, film, and publishing.

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Major Segments & Insights

I. Horror’s Gen Z Takeover: The Case of “Backrooms” (02:23–21:30)

• The Phenomenon:
  “Backrooms,” a $10M horror film from 20-year-old YouTube prodigy Kane Parsons, shocks Hollywood by making $81M opening weekend (03:10–03:51).

  • “It did not make $25 million. It did not make $45 million. It made $81 million. The third biggest opening of the year behind Mario and Michael Jackson.” — Richard Osman (03:42)

• Why It Matters:

  • Young, YouTube-native creatives like Kane Parsons (“Kane Pixels”) are leapfrogging traditional routes.
  • Parsons started with a viral, nine-minute “Backrooms Found Footage” horror short at 16.
  • The film is rooted in the online “liminal spaces” subculture—originating from a 4chan post in 2019 and associated with worlds that feel strangely familiar and unsettling (04:49–06:30).

• Creative DNA:

  • Parsons’ creative inspirations are meta—often not the original works, but their parodies (e.g., “Treehouse of Horror,” “Ready Player One” references to “The Shining”).
  • “He calls it a tainted nostalgia or a type of purgatory.” — Marina Hyde (07:30)

• Audience Engagement & Industry Lessons:

  • Gen Z’s horror fandom is described as hyper-engaged and communal, contrary to expectations about youth and solo streaming.
  • “74% under 34—the audience for Backrooms in the US.” — Richard Osman (14:16)
  • The outbreak success mirrors a pattern: another cheap horror, “Obsession,” made $100M on a $750K budget (09:14–10:11).

• Horror as Launchpad:

  • Many breakout directors (Ryan Coogler, Jordan Peele, etc.) cut their teeth in horror due to low budgets and high returns (14:41–15:53).
  • “One film is a phenomenon, two films is a movement.” — Richard Osman (09:14)

• The YouTube Training Ground:

  • YouTube hones both audience understanding and creative rigor.
    • “If you put things on YouTube, you sadly cannot kid yourself about audience.” — Marina Hyde (11:11)

• Platforms and Shifting Power:

  • The new creative class is less interested in “going mainstream”—success is on their own terms and platforms, not chasing legacy media validation (16:07–17:35).
  • “They go: I’m literally driving a Maserati. All the people I want to impress are on the platform that I’m on and they’re not on the platform that you need me. I don’t need you.” — Richard Osman (16:54)

• Caution Ahead:

  • “There’s gonna be some bad movies coming out of this.” — Richard Osman (19:14)
  • Hollywood is now scrambling to find the next Kane Parsons, with likely mixed results due to lack of native understanding.

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II. “Mobland” Drama: Tom Hardy in the Tabloids (23:49–32:33)

• The Row:

  • “Mobland,” a Paramount hit about an Irish crime family, faces intense rumors that star Tom Hardy has been fired following on-set strife and creative tensions (23:49–25:18).

• Media Hysteria and Gender:

  • Tabloid stories allege Hardy was disruptive and clashed with co-stars, especially Dame Helen Mirren, though Mirren shut down the rumors by posting support for Hardy on Instagram (26:06).
  • Richard and Marina lampoon the all-male “executive producer” team and riff on male workplace behavior:
    • “That’s the trouble often with men...if you get a group of men in a room, they get so emotional.” — Richard Osman (27:14)
    • “I am a huge supporter of this experiment...of men in the workplace. I’ve been thrilled that they’ve had a go, but I do sometimes wonder if they’re too emotional for the performing arts.” — Marina Hyde (27:26)

• Industry Connections:

  • Unexpected connection: Finn Bennett, who plays a stoner in "Backrooms," is the real-life son of “Mobland” writer Ronan Bennett (31:14).

• Precedent:

  • The conversation turns to other famous firings (Roseanne, Charlie Sheen, Community) and the rarity of actors truly being replaced, illustrating how much networks try to patch things before letting stars go (29:30–32:09).

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III. Belle Burdon’s “Strangers” and Memoir Backlash (32:37–45:51)

• The Book and Its Blowback:

  • Belle Burdon’s memoir “Strangers,” about her high-society marital collapse, is a bestseller now set for Netflix adaptation (32:39).
  • Recent press accuses Burdon of failing to disclose her own wealth, undermining the narrative of financial jeopardy and sparking a heated “discourse” among (especially) wealthy readers (34:34–35:04).
    • “She was never really in what anyone normal would understand as any form of financial jeopardy.” — Marina Hyde (34:49)

• Memoir, Memory, and Truth:

  • Discussion of cultural and editorial biases: the way the “stakes” in Burdon’s memoir appear more emotional than material.
  • Editors increasingly ask writers to raise the “jeopardy” for relatability, sometimes at the expense of reality (38:38–39:08).
  • The public wants “my truth”—but as Osman points out, people are least reliable about their own stories.
    • “The worst lies you tell are the lies about yourself.” — Richard Osman (45:28)

• Controversy in Memoir Publishing:

  • Parallels with Amy Griffin’s questioned memoir “The Tell” and others (Salt Path, Baby Reindeer), raising issues of fact-checking and publisher responsibility.
    • “Book publishers are not investigators. This is Amy’s story. We trust her and all our authors that they’re recounting their memories truthfully.” — (Quoting editor Whitney Frick, 40:47)
  • Osman’s “commercial theory”: publishers rarely fact-check because hits are so rare (41:35–42:15).

• Wider Trend:

  • Memoir boom is traced to a hyper-woke era of publishing where first-person narratives were seen as safest for avoiding charges of appropriation (43:56–44:25).
  • Ironically, some first-person stories have proven among the least reliable:
    • “The most powerful first-person pieces seem to have been the least reliable and most questionable of all.” — Marina Hyde (44:59)

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IV. The Rise of Microdramas & The Shape of Entertainment To Come (45:51–48:51)

• TikTok and New Formats:

  • Issa Rae’s “Screen Time,” a 57-episode TikTok microdrama, is mentioned as a viral hit (46:14–47:11).
  • “This is the first breakout one of these things that a very recognized creator has done on TikTok, and it has blown up completely.” — Marina Hyde (47:11)
  • Osman: “We are in a moment...It’s not even a transitional moment. The transitional moment was two years ago. Now we’re seeing that we were in a transitional moment, and nothing goes back to what it was.” (47:12–47:35)

• Media Landscape Shift:

  • Richard discusses how the content world has changed: traditional media need to collaborate and rethink their role, but the new creator economy is vibrant and exciting.

• Recommendation:

  • Richard praises the new season of “Amanda Land” as an example of how traditional television, at its best, still delivers unique value (47:37–48:26).

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On The New Generation of Creators:

  • “If you put things on YouTube, you sadly cannot kid yourself about audience.” — Marina Hyde (11:11)
  • “I’m literally driving a Maserati…I don’t need you.” — Richard Osman (16:54)
  • “There’s gonna be some bad movies coming out of this.” — Richard Osman (19:14)

• On Hollywood’s Disruption:

  • “It’s the Beatles playing Hamburg for two years, isn’t it? Night after night after night, you see exactly what works and what doesn’t.” — Richard Osman (11:21)

• On Industry Gender Dynamics:

  • “If you get a group of men in a room, they get so emotional.” — Richard Osman (27:14)
  • “I do sometimes wonder if they’re too emotional for the performing arts.” — Marina Hyde (27:26)

• On Memoir and Memory:

  • “The most powerful first-person pieces seem to have been the least reliable…” — Marina Hyde (44:59)
  • “The worst lies you tell are the lies about yourself.” — Richard Osman (45:28)

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Key Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | Content/Highlight | |-----------|--------------------------------------------------|--------------------------------------------------------| | 03:42 | “Backrooms” box office numbers | $81M opening weekend – Big shock to Hollywood | | 04:46–05:35 | Liminal spaces/Backrooms origin story | The internet aesthetic, viral image, collaborative lore| | 10:11 | “Obsession” box office anomaly | Another YouTube-to-cinema horror success | | 16:54 | Creator independence | “I’m literally driving a Maserati. I don’t need you.” | | 19:14 | Market reaction | Bad copycats impending as execs chase new talent | | 26:06 | Mobland setbacks dispelled | Mirren’s Instagram upends narrative | | 31:14 | Industry connection | “Backrooms” actor is son of “Mobland” writer | | 34:49 | Burdon’s memoir challenged | Critics: Financial jeopardy undermined by hidden wealth| | 40:47 | Memoir controversy response | “Book publishers are not investigators…” | | 45:28 | Self-narrative unreliability | “The worst lies you tell are the lies about yourself.” | | 47:11 | TikTok microdrama milestone | “Screen Time” viral on TikTok (over 160M views) |

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The Hosts’ Verdicts

• On “Backrooms”:

  • “I absolutely loved it…a huge mood, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.” — Marina Hyde (19:50)
  • “It’s a vibe…great to be in a cinema full of young people.” — Richard Osman (20:10)

• On the Industry:

  • “All the things that people say they want to happen are happening…and yet to some degree, they are still not being served.” — Marina Hyde (18:35)
  • “Everything has already changed. Things are not changing. We just all have to get our mind around [it].” — Richard Osman (48:26)

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Recommendations & Looking Ahead

• Microdramas:

  • “Screen Time” (TikTok, Issa Rae) — must-watch to see new format trends (46:26–47:11)

• Traditional TV:

  • “Amanda Land” series 2 — British TV excellence (47:37–48:26)

• Next Episode Tease:

  • A special feature on “Is everything becoming generic/basic?” plus a Q&A edition for members (49:08–49:26)

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Summary

This lively, sharply observed episode captures a media landscape in flux. YouTube-bred directors are storming Hollywood with cheap, original horror films, upending assumptions about how—and by whom—movies get made. Gen Z audiences and horror’s communal draw are spotlighted, as is the industry’s mixed readiness to respond. The Mobland drama delivers a knowing wink at tabloid sensationalism and gender bias, while the scrutiny around Belle Burdon’s memoir exemplifies new challenges of truth and narrative in publishing. With TikTok microdramas rising, Osman and Hyde argue the old guard must adapt—or be left behind—in a world that’s already changed.

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Written for listeners who want to be fully in the know or revisit the episode’s juiciest analysis, quotes, and trends.

Transcript

[Marina Hyde]

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[Richard Osman]

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[Marina Hyde]

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[Guest or Contributor 1]

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[Guest or Contributor 1]

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[Marina Hyde]

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[Richard Osman]

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[Guest or Contributor 2]

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[Guest or Contributor 1]

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[Marina Hyde]

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[Guest or Contributor 2]

Hello, and welcome to this episode of the rest is entertainment with me, Marina

[Richard Osman]

Hyde and me, Richard Osman. Good day to everybody. Good day, Marina.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Hello, Richard. How are you?

[Richard Osman]

I'm not too bad. We're going to be talking to Steven Spielberg this week, so we're still looking for questions. If you want to send your Questions to thereses entertainmentalhanger.com we would love to hear them. We'll put them to Spielberg. But how's your week been?

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Not too bad. You?

[Guest or Contributor 1]

I mean, you know, it's not ups and downs.

[Richard Osman]

Too hot, too hot, too hot. I'm going to come out and say it, but I wish people would tell the truth.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

We both saw a brilliant film.

[Richard Osman]

Yes, we do.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

And that is one of the things we're gonna be talking about in a Sort of wider.

[Richard Osman]

We are. We're gonna be talking about Backrooms and Obsession for a number of reasons. We're also going to be talking about what I would say for our podcast and our listeners might be quite a fun story, which is the story of Mobland.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Has Tom Hardy been fired or not

[Guest or Contributor 1]

fired from Mobland Cliffhanger.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And we're also gonna be talking about the Bellburden memoir of her marriage breakdown.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Strangers is like an absolutely monster hit. And like all monster hits, it has now got a back clash. We're gonna be digging into why.

[Richard Osman]

Yes. Is it Salt Path or is it Morden Sea Salt Path, Essentially that. But now Backrooms is a. It's a horror movie came out this weekend and we talk a lot about tracking on this show. Hollywood tends to be able to predict how a movie is gonna open, how what it's gonna do. And it's a very cheap movie. There's $10 million. And the tracking first came out and said, this movie is gonna make $25 million. And everyone's like, whoa, this is on its opening weekend. And then about two weeks after that they said, oh, no, hold on. It's not going to make $25 million. We reckon it's going to make $45 million. This super cheap movie, which we're going to talk all about. We think it's going to make $45 million. It opened this weekend. It did not make $25 million. It did not make $45 million. It made $81 million. The third biggest opening of the year behind Mario and Michael Jackson. Where has this movie come from? Why has it been so successful and what does that mean?

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Okay, well, this is an A24 movie.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

It's actually A24's biggest opening now of all time.

[Richard Osman]

It's gonna be their biggest movie by a long way.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yeah, it's the second biggest horror opening of all time.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Only after Stephen King's It.

[Richard Osman]

Yeah.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

It stars Chiwetel Ejafor and Renata Ryan Sven. It's directed and created by a guy called Kane Parsons.

[Richard Osman]

This is where it gets interesting.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

This is where it gets interesting. By the way, he's 20.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

He is not only the youngest director ever to have been given a studio film so beating people like Brian De Palma, Orson Welles.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

He is the youngest director ever to

[Guest or Contributor 1]

have a number one film. He is an unbelievable YouTube native and

[Guest or Contributor 2]

he was called Kane Pixels on YouTube and he made lots and lots of interesting things, including music. He co creates the score for this film and one of the things that he made was Called the Backrooms Found Footage when he was 16. It's a sort of nine minute horror short and it went viral and it's

[Richard Osman]

based off a single still posted on the Internet, isn't it?

[Guest or Contributor 2]

What was the original Backrooms? The Original Backrooms is there was an Internet sort of fascination with liminal spaces, which I suppose are sort of empty spaces, sometimes transitional spaces, abandoned spaces, strangely purposeless.

[Richard Osman]

We all love that sort of stuff. Like you'll open a little iron door in a tube station and wonder what's behind it.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

The Backrooms was an aesthetic and it grew out of a 4chan thread in 2019 where somebody said post disquieting images

[Guest or Contributor 1]

that just feel off.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And they added, this photo is essentially the entire aesthetic of the Backrooms now that as you can see this film. And by the way, it is an unbelievable production design. I thought it was. The art direction is beyond. It's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous photo.

[Richard Osman]

I think it was an abandoned store in Oshkosh.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Well, you don't know what you didn't know washed. It was abandoned. It was not clear at that light. It's like, was it abandoned offices, A hotel? Yeah. They later discover it was an abandoned

[Guest or Contributor 1]

furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And there are all these.

[Richard Osman]

I would like to live in Oshkosh. Sorry. That's an absolute sidebar. Yeah, that's a cool place name.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

It's a good place name.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Yeah. I wouldn't like to. Yeah. Anyway, but someone had said about.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And it had this sort of weird yellow light and a kind of Dutch angle to it all. And somebody said if you're not careful and you.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Noclip out of reality.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Noclip is a gaming term where you kind of can walk through walls or whatever it is in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the backrooms where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum buzz and approximately 600

[Guest or Contributor 1]

million square miles of randomly seg empty rooms to be trapped in.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

God save you if you hear something

[Guest or Contributor 1]

wandering around nearby because it has sure as hell heard you.

[Richard Osman]

And by the way, that's the movie.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yeah, well, that's. But they call it Creepypasta. But it's kind of like one of those urban legend online ghost stories. And it was collaborative and everyone could add to it and people expanded this whole. It became this whole universe and people were posting their own sort of liminal spaces. It really took off in about. In the sort of early 2020s, this particular thing.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

And the idea of these kind of creepy, liminal spaces.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yeah.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

When we can go and.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And there had been a website that

[Guest or Contributor 1]

I'd remembered from, honestly, 25 years ago called UK entrances to hell.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And I had to check this weekend. Is it still there?

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Go online and it's like this incredibly, like, basic website and you'll see what someone's done.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

They just.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

People kept adding weird doorways or blocked in things and they give them names and they say that their entrance is to hell.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

So there's a sort of element of that.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Like everyone can join in, everyone can whatever. But it became a sort of subculture of popular imagination. And Kane Parsons, who's like extremely online,

[Guest or Contributor 2]

said he's interested in why people are drawn to that. Cause it's kind of like you've been there before.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Like, he calls it a tainted nostalgia or a type of purgatory.

[Richard Osman]

And by the way, he's like 16 when he's starting off with this, so where he's getting tainted nostalgia from.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

But.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Yeah, exactly.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

But you can see how influential it is because Dan Erickson, who created Severance, and if you've seen Severance and you haven't seen the backrooms, you'll understand that idea of these kind of corridors, weird

[Guest or Contributor 1]

office space, whatever it is.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And Dan Erickson says that the Internet sort of subculture of the backrooms really influenced Severance.

[Richard Osman]

Yeah, I mean, you can see, you can see.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

But also those things are influenced by kind of our cultural memories of things

[Guest or Contributor 1]

like the Shining, which is full of corridors.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Again, there's a lot of sort of

[Guest or Contributor 1]

weird space in that film.

[Richard Osman]

Yeah. The artist Mike Nelson used to just fill sort of whole rooms with. Just so you'd be in an unusual, weird backroom that wasn't quite right. Things are slightly off.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Lots of people created things based on this idea. And his nine minute short, they went the sort of most viral. He was offered a deal by a 24.

[Richard Osman]

His shorts, by the way, were digital animation.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yes.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Yeah, yeah.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

He used like Blender and something else to kind of create. And now they've built it and they've

[Guest or Contributor 1]

built like 33,000 square foot of these sets.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And it's all, you know, they've realized

[Guest or Contributor 1]

it and it's all a practical set, but there is obviously some CGI and what have you.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

But obviously so many people have gone. They've spent very little on the marketing. They've spent about 10 million. But they've done it all in the native areas where this thing sprung from. So when I went on Friday I went to the earliest possible screening I could, which was at 3:45 on a Friday. The cinema was full of, I would say 18 to 25 year olds, like obsessed, really wanting to see it. We're gonna talk more about horror in general as this thing as a place

[Guest or Contributor 1]

where the things that we want to happen are happening.

[Richard Osman]

Well, here's the other thing. You know, one film is a phenomenon, two films is a movement, and the other film is obsession. And that's made by Curry Barker, who is 26. You must have thought he was pretty cool making a movie at 26. Now Obsession costs $750,000, which is very, very, very cheap for a movie. It has in the last three weeks made over $100 million. Three weeks in a row. Its box office take has gone up and you might go, yeah, but that happens with lots of films because people go see them and then they like them. Everything does best in week one, everything. To do better in week two is almost unheard of. To do better in week three. Do you know the last film to do that, to go up three weeks in a row? Is it something et et 1982. Occasionally at Christmas, Christmas movies go up, but other than that, that's the last movie to do it. An obsession. 750,000 pound it cost. It has made over $100 million. Again, a 26 year old director who absolutely honed his skill on YouTube.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And it's a horror again. It's a horror. It's part of the sort of YouTube

[Guest or Contributor 1]

to cinema pipeline that obviously includes Kane Parsons.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

But we talked about Markiplier who made that film Iron Lung, which I think

[Guest or Contributor 1]

actually was quite expensive by some standards. It was $3 million, it made $51 million.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Hayley Boston, who does the TV show

[Guest or Contributor 1]

for Netflix called Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen.

[Richard Osman]

The Philippine Brothers in Australia. Yes, there's lots of good examples.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Hayley Boston had only ever been on

[Guest or Contributor 1]

a film on a set once on sort of two week placement as a runner. She is now the showrunner of a massive Netflix show.

[Richard Osman]

The thing I love most about Kane Parsons, he said, well, I didn't really watch films because why would I? Because I had all the entertainment I needed. I saw it, I think it was in the New Yorker. And he committed to not watching Blue Velvet. And they'd gone, are you kidding? You haven't watched Blue Velvet. And you know what? Right there, right there is the issue about why cinema went wrong and where it has to go next.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

It's interesting that lots of them start

[Guest or Contributor 1]

in the found footage Horror genre. And they're all really young.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

One of the things that I think is very interesting about these people is

[Guest or Contributor 1]

that they massively understand audience. Because if you put things on YouTube, you sadly cannot kid yourself about audience.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

You understand a lot of things very quickly.

[Richard Osman]

Well, it's the Beatles playing Hamburg for two years, isn't it? It's night after night after night. You see exactly what works and what doesn't work and why. And they've had, you know, without even thinking about it. It's just what they've been doing in their bedrooms for five, six, seven, eight years. And every single time they see exactly what works and what doesn't. And that's not, by the way, a sort of cynical eye. It is actually. If you're a creative person at all. Getting that kind of feedback is incredibly instructive sometimes. Cause you're still being your creative self. You're just going, oh, do you know what? I won't make that single mistake though. Or I'll take the fact that they liked that and I'm gonna twist it in this direction. So I think.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And a lot of these things they built, you know, it's really interesting. Kane Parsons was still making backroom stuff for YouTube for two years of the development of this movie. I think they shot it in about six weeks last summer. And he kind of stops in about May. Cause they're obviously starting to shoot in July. But he wants to then expand it. He now wants to make maybe a nine part limited series about it. But what's fascinating, I definitely is that they haven't often seen any of these things. They've weirdly, they've seen like the parodies of things like Khari Babaka said he had seen, you know, the Treehouse of

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Horror, which the Simpsons do their Halloween episode every year. He saw a 1991, which is a

[Guest or Contributor 2]

monkey's paw thing and said, oh, that changed my life. Because in the same way that.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Have they seen the Shining? Not really, but they've seen, you see

[Richard Osman]

so many takeoffs of the Shining.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

They've seen the Ready Player one scene where all the players like storm the Overlook Hotel. And they're all making in jokes about room 237, whatever it is.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

It's conceivable that maybe they've had those experience. But they often haven't seen the original thing. And the reactions, I think, to the work is quite fascinating. It's really weird. This film obviously is a huge hit, but it's got a B minus cinema score. And that tells you a lot about

[Richard Osman]

by the way, that's the cinema score is you ask people who've been to see the movie what they thought of it.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Critics like it.

[Richard Osman]

Yeah, the critics like it. Of course they do, because it's gonna save Hollywood.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

But he's had to serve two audiences, the incredibly invested sort of fan community who say, oh, no. But then he didn't include this or he should have included that.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Deviated.

[Richard Osman]

Here we had a few walkouts in our screening of people who literally couldn't sit still at any point before they walked out and then walked out. I think it was just. I think they couldn't take how long it was and how, you know, I think I can point something about the.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

I mean, and there are people saying,

[Guest or Contributor 2]

well, he doesn't own this.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Which is kind of like, okay, well,

[Richard Osman]

that Steven Spielberg doesn't own sharks.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

No. And no one owns folklore. It's just one of those things. And if you're the one who's made it.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

But I do think that the genre itself, horror, which we've talked a lot about on the podcast, it is the place that the thing we say we

[Guest or Contributor 1]

want to happen is happening. People are not spending huge amounts of money on films, even on the marketing.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

They are filling the theaters with people who want to have a communal experience,

[Guest or Contributor 1]

who are young, who are hyper engaged.

[Richard Osman]

I think it's 74% under 34. The audience for backrooms in the US

[Guest or Contributor 2]

I was genuinely twice as old as

[Guest or Contributor 1]

pretty much as anyone else.

[Richard Osman]

We were as well. Everyone was young.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

I mean, like, everyone was young. I went with a 15 year old, so mine said that was fine.

[Richard Osman]

Normally I go and watch like art house things and we're always the youngest people there, like, oh, this is nice, isn't it? And this time it was like, oh, but also no one on their phones. No one. Absolutely no nonsense. People who, you know, it was an absolute treat.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

This is what we say we want to happen. And it's really interesting how many of the kind of big name directors who are young who have done stuff in horror. Ryan Coogler, Zach Kreger, Jordan Peele. I mean, you're doing things in horror. When people saw get out, they were

[Guest or Contributor 1]

like, all right, this is a horror movie. But it's sort of about race.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And it's, you know, people are tackling themes in horror that it's not just slasher stuff. There's a movie I'm really looking forward to later this summer called Teenage Love. I don't know if you saw that as a trailer as yours, but I'm Dying for it.

[Richard Osman]

The disclosure day is the trailer. The trailers are terrifying.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

The trailers. Yeah. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. I'm dying for this with Gillian Anderson and Hannah Ironbender. And it's like a meta horror remake thing. But, I mean, if you look at it, you can see it's incredibly sort of creative and prestige. And this is why.

[Richard Osman]

Well, we've Got Scary Movie 6 coming out next week, which, again, might do absolutely enormous numbers. I wonder.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

It's got so much to satirize because we are in the era of, we said before, of prestige horror. This is like auteurs making horror. And they always have done to some degree, because people could get started cheaply in the genre.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

But actually.

[Richard Osman]

But also, you know, the Shining is horror and that's Kubrick. I mean, you know, people. It's a great format.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

But it's particularly now where almost all of them with, I would say someone like, obviously Greta Gerwig hasn't done it, but a lot of the young directors are all.

[Richard Osman]

Although we haven't seen her chronicle Narnia, it might be terrifying.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Yeah. Which would be a way to go with it.

[Richard Osman]

But. So there's the horror thing. But I think in some ways even more interesting is this idea of, you know, cinema has been made by a certain generation for a certain generation for a very, very long time. And, you know, we understand where the sequels come from. And for a long time, they went, oh, no, we understand what young people like. They like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Great, we've got that covered. And actually, because that audience was not being served, they were serving themselves. And they were doing something completely underground that anyone who was under 16 was seeing Day in, day out, but anyone who was over 40 was not seeing. And all of those nascent careers are now coming to fruition. And they don't have to, by the way, go into multiplexes, other than. It's quite a nice way. Kane Parsons, let's assume he's going to make $25 million from this. Something like that. So it's a nice way to make $25 million if you built that stuff up online. But they don't have to. The message in music, in television, in film and everything these days is these people do not have to go mainstream. They don't have to do it. And also, they're not even that interested in going mainstream. That fish you can dangle that says, oh, and do a. A Channel 4 series now if you want. They go, I'm. I'm literally driving a Maserati. I Don't I. I don't know what. And also all of my audience, all the people I want to impress and entertain are on the platform that I'm on and they're not on the platform that you need me. I don't need you. And in the last few years, I know we've seen that happen gradually, but it has completely changed now. The ecosystem has completely changed, but surfacing

[Guest or Contributor 2]

stories and creators, which people are already interested in, which is a form of known ip, you know, rather than the

[Guest or Contributor 1]

IP of just like, oh, how about we find a different way to do Spider Man?

[Richard Osman]

Yes, good idea.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

The known IP is kind of percolated through the Internet. People see it all the time and finding these people. But you have to say that Hollywood executives and the people with money, and you don't need much money as we're showing, have not done a great job of finding those people.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

They are there.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

We know the audience is there. How many horror movies have to come out each year which do incredibly well and which make so many multiples of their budget back? Not like if another film, you know, if very expensive films do well, that might make three times the budget back. I mean, this is. These films are doing.

[Richard Osman]

Stations has made about 170 times its budget now.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

It's like those things like Long Legs or whatever, those micro budget that become absolutely massive and it's almost without exception in this genre and young people are going to cinemas, as I say, all

[Guest or Contributor 1]

the things that people say they want to happen are happening and yet to

[Guest or Contributor 2]

some degree they are still not being served and they're still not finding those creators. I think after this, surely it's somebody's

[Guest or Contributor 1]

job in every single studio to come up with people like this.

[Richard Osman]

I was talking to a TV producer the other day. He said, when we spoke about micro dramas a long time ago, he said it's the first time I'd heard people talking about them. He said, I now do not go into a single meeting in any drama department of any company anywhere where they don't first start talking about microdramas. It's all anyone talks about. Now the thing you can see about that, backgrounds, by the way, we haven't reviewed it, which we should. We'll get on to whether we enjoyed it or not. But the one thing you definitely know, firstly, there's gonna be great opportunities for a new generation of filmmakers in the same way that you had that incredible generation of filmmakers who launched themselves in the 70s. This is a very different generation. But secondly, my God, there's gonna be some Bad movies coming out of this.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yeah.

[Richard Osman]

Because everyone's gotta chase it.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yes.

[Richard Osman]

I mean, that's the problem.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

They don't know what they're chasing because they're not natives themselves.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

As in.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

I'm talking about the lonely people and the big executives who are much, much older.

[Richard Osman]

Yeah. And you know, everyone's gonna be looking for the new Curry Barker and Kane Parsons now and. But there will be more that are not. There'll be. Oh, my God, there's gonna be some shocking films coming out. But then there always have been. What did you make of the film?

[Guest or Contributor 2]

I absolutely loved it. I have. It's a huge mood and I haven't stopped thinking about it since. I think it's.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

There's something about it that's so sort of open ended. I can't say, I won't say anymore

[Guest or Contributor 2]

because I don't do any spoilers. But there's something about it that's so

[Guest or Contributor 1]

open ended, it's quite hard to give

[Richard Osman]

spoilers in a funny kind of way. Yeah, it's a real vibe of a movie.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Just the aesthetic and as I say, I thought the art direction, the production design was unbelievable. I mean, extraordinary. And it just, it seeps into you. It's.

[Richard Osman]

Yeah, I thought it was Ingrid watch. Lots of it, you know. You know, there's always gonna be a jump scare, you know that memory, you know, there's gonna be a jump scare and she just had her head in her hands throughout those bits. But actually he doesn't use that many jump scares. But yeah, I thought, yeah, it's a mood, right? It's a mood. And I didn't look at my watch to see what time it was at any point. And I always do. I usually look at my watch even if it's the best film in the world. About 15 minutes in, I'm like, I got another two hours of this film that I'm really enjoying. I'm already out of pick and mix. But yeah, I thought it was great and it was great to be in a cinema full of young people who are in day one and afterwards just hearing them all talking about it when they're coming out and you think, God, that's just what films used to be. So I think, I mean, God, fair play to Kane Parsons and to a 24 who really.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Because it's difficult to. There's something very, very different about what

[Guest or Contributor 1]

he did on YouTube to what they have created.

[Richard Osman]

Oh, yeah, yeah. And be very exciting to see what he does next.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yeah, it's really exciting. I just thought it I felt excited and that it was something different. And because I knew, because I was

[Guest or Contributor 1]

slightly obsessed with those liminal spaces back

[Guest or Contributor 2]

those few years ago, I could see where it had come from. And I thought it was such an interesting way to surface that story.

[Richard Osman]

Now do Rom coms. YouTube, please. That I'd like to see. Or heist movies. Oh, that's what I'd like. Come on YouTube, let's do some heist movies. There's not enough heist movies around.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Verticals will do.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Heist movies.

[Richard Osman]

Yeah, vertical heist movie in a tower block. And you've seen Obsession as well?

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yes.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

I really recommend seeing both films.

[Marina Hyde]

This episode is brought to you by Lloyds. Now, I love it when characters are

[Guest or Contributor 1]

part of a club.

[Marina Hyde]

You wouldn't know anything about that, would you, Richard?

[Richard Osman]

Thursday Motor Club, in some ways reminds me of the A team.

[Marina Hyde]

I would now like to map each of those characters onto the A team

[Guest or Contributor 1]

and feel I probably could. Good.

[Marina Hyde]

I mean, Elizabeth is Hannibal and it's not even close.

[Richard Osman]

That's exactly right. And Ron is howling Mad Murdoch.

[Marina Hyde]

Well, there are definite perks to being in a club. Just ask the members of Club Lloyds, because with Club Lloyds, you can bank on Lloyds to give you more. Wherever you are, if you join Club

[Richard Osman]

Lloyds, there's all sorts of benefits you can choose between. There's for example, six free cinema tickets.

[Marina Hyde]

They've got an annual coffee club and Gourmet society membership, which would be mine.

[Richard Osman]

And also something that the Thursday Meadow Club Club would enjoy very, very much indeed. To top it all off, you have fee free spending abroad, which means wherever you are, you won't be charged by Lloyds to use your debit card when you're traveling. Now, joining this club costs five pound per month, but that is refunded in any month that you pay 2,000 pound into your account.

[Marina Hyde]

Now that is a club that's worth being part of. Check out Club Lloyds today. You'll need to be a UK resident and aged 18 or over to apply.

[Alan (from The Rest is Football)]

It's nearly that time, everyone. The rest is football will be on Netflix every day for the world's biggest tournament. Join myself, Alan and Mic for daily debates, unfiltered takes and the most special of guests, all from the heart of New York City. Yeah, that's right. We're excited too. See you soon.

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[Richard Osman]

Welcome back, everybody. Now, Mobland Tom Hardy, should he stay or should he go? What's going on there?

[Guest or Contributor 1]

There is drama on the set of Mobland. A drama. This is the Paramount show about an

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Irish crime family that was co created

[Guest or Contributor 1]

by Ronan Bennett and Guy Ritchie who directed some of the episodes of the first season.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

The showrunner and EP is Jez Butterworth.

[Richard Osman]

One of our great playwrights.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Yeah, one of our great.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yeah, it stars Tom Hardy, but also Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan, friends of mine. It's kind of held together by, I would say having watched it by the

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Tom Hardy performance anyway.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

But it's a huge hit for Paramount,

[Guest or Contributor 1]

really big hit for them. However, there's been some fallout.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

I read last week that Tom Hardy

[Guest or Contributor 1]

had been fired from mob land and it was like sudden spilling out of all this stuff.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Tom Hardy was said to be very angry. He didn't love the scripts, he didn't love that it was becoming more of an ensemble piece and his anger manifested itself again.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

All of this is reportedly and allegedly because you'll see how undermined it becomes later on in the story.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

It manifested itself by him apparently offering

[Guest or Contributor 1]

lots of script notes on Jez Butterwell's scripts.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Ronan Bennett and Jez Butterworth co wrote the whole of the first season. I don't know if that's the.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

But anyway, and by the way, for

[Guest or Contributor 2]

season two, which is. This is what we're talking, just as

[Richard Osman]

a recap, Jess Butterworth wrote Jerusalem. He wrote some of the best plays of this century. He's been a writer forever. Ronan Bennett wrote Top Boy. Again, these are both people at the absolute top of their profession. Tom Hardy a great actor.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yeah.

[Richard Osman]

So I don't know. Who do you take script notes for? I would say the scriptwriters.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Well, he was staying in his trailer apparently and he was being late for Pierce Brosnan. Helen Mirror.

[Richard Osman]

Don't be late for Pierce and Helen.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

It was described.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Anyway, the lateness thing supposedly particularly annoyed

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Dame Helen in some highly dubious bystander quotes that I read in the Daily Mail.

[Richard Osman]

Do you mean made up?

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Well, I'm just saying this is an

[Guest or Contributor 1]

insider who talks like all tabloid insiders.

[Richard Osman]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

She expects better. She holds people to a high standard. She's 80. She's been there and seen it all. The behind the scenes crew watch it all and believe that she no longer looks as happy working on scenes with him. It has all become quite personal between them.

[Richard Osman]

She's got a very interesting way of talking. It's like she's in Howards End or something.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

I agree. She talks exactly like a tabloid bystander. Or it could have been a man.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

In fact, it would have been a man. We're gonna get to that later. But Helen Mirren then unfortunately put a picture on Instagram of Tom Hardy and she said, love you now and always. Which seems to me like the bystander had got things a little bit wrong about the relationship, those two.

[Richard Osman]

That's unlike a bystander.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Also, it seems that maybe Tom Hardy hasn't actually been fired and that the

[Guest or Contributor 2]

producer are going to have a sit

[Guest or Contributor 1]

down with him and maybe they can work it all out.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Richard, I would say two things.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

First, that this is very unusual, that this much stuff has come out into the open.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And second, that this drama's so much

[Guest or Contributor 1]

better than Maud Bland. I mean, I mean, just enjoy it, right? This is. It's very, very watchable, this particular drama,

[Guest or Contributor 2]

you know, which I don't necessarily feel about Mobland.

[Richard Osman]

I've not seen Mobland. I have to say that I'll say

[Guest or Contributor 1]

this, which is try and imagine the Makerfield by election, but in a fictional TV show set in about some Irish gangs in London.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Sort of like that, or, you know, like those.

[Richard Osman]

The thing I did notice, there's some big personalities involved. Jez Butterworth is a big personality. Guy Ritchie is a big personality. Tom Hardy is a big personality. There are 12 executive producers on that show. Let me count how many of them are men? Hold on. 1, 2, 3, 4. All 12 of them are men. And you sense that's the trouble often with men. If you get a group of men in a room, they get so emotional.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Well, that's what I, you see. I mean, I am a huge supporter of this experiment, if I can call it that, of men in the workplace. I'm a huge supporter of it. I've been thrilled that they've had a go, but I do sometimes wonder if they're too emotional for the performing arts. And I don't want to say that because, you know, I love to think that people can buck their biology. But can they really have it all?

[Richard Osman]

Richard, it doesn't look like.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Can they have it all? No. There's so much testosterone on that set. If I walked on that set, I would grow a beard that literally just by osmotically, I would absorb it.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Actually.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

That's a misconception about Tom Hardy and Guy Ritchie and Jez Butterworth. They don't actually have bits. They're clean shaven every single morning and by lunchtime they've got these fulcrum things that you see them in because there's so much testosterone on that set.

[Richard Osman]

The same with Guy Ritchie and Tom Hardy's accents. Yes. You talked to lots of people who went to school with them and they're like, oh, that's interesting. They used to speak like that.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yeah, it's something.

[Richard Osman]

They used to wear those caps.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

There's something in the waters or in the something. And as I say, I mean it's very, very watchable.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

We don't know how this be will

[Guest or Contributor 2]

will play out other than, you know, as I say, I would love the

[Guest or Contributor 1]

experiment of men in the workplace to continue. So I hope everyone can work this out.

[Richard Osman]

But it's, you know, lots of it's happened lots of times before. It's interesting if an actor is really badly behaved. That's what we're talking about here. When the story first comes out you're like, oh my God, he must have been so badly behaved because if you've got a big star like Tom Hardy and he is brilliant, I mean he's so watchable in everything he does. Look at him in Peaky Blind. There's all sorts of things. He can really carry pretty much any scene he's in. So if you've got him in your show then you're delighted and the same with it. If you've got Pearson Helen there as well, you're delighted.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

You want to keep him in your show if you're Paramount because they need these big shows that go on and on and on.

[Richard Osman]

Exactly.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And you build up big libraries of them. They did with Yellowstone.

[Richard Osman]

So you think, wow, you must have done something really, really awful when the news first came out and said he'd definitely been fired. Now of course everyone's slightly backtracking going, no, we're going to sit around a table and do this or the other. So maybe it was just a warning shot because it doesn't happen very often though actors get replaced. Charlie Sheen, when he got replaced on Two and a Half. I mean the stuff he had to do to get fired was completely.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

I don't think they would have. But you can see that on these. On another Paramount show, look what happened on Yellowstone eventually. Taylor Sheridan, Kevin Costner again, you know,

[Guest or Contributor 1]

I'm just wondering about that hormone.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

But there was so much butting of heads that he wasn't There for the end.

[Richard Osman]

Kevin Costner, Chevy Chase on Community again. I mean, you have to really, really.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

It was really impossible.

[Richard Osman]

I mean, any. Always read about Community, I think that was a troubled set for lots and lots of different ways, but.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And I love the show so much.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

It's amazing what came out of it.

[Richard Osman]

Yeah, it really is amazing. Isaiah Washington and Patrick Dempsey on Grey's Anatomy. I mean, any of these shows, they've had a few that had. Yeah. Any of these shows that are ensembles. Because that's the thing with actors is it's. I think it's quite hard for. If they've got something that's an enormous success, it's quite hard for them to accept that success might not be down to them, I think. Katherine Hagel was nominated for an Emmy for Grey's Anatomy, and she publicly asked to have her name removed because the work she had been given to do wasn't good enough. Which is. She's saying to Shonda Rhimes, no, this is tat. She did later admit that that was perhaps slightly unclassy. But, yeah, it's quite hard. Roseanne Barr is another one that they, you know, essentially, she came back and then they immediately replaced her with every single other person came back from that show. They renamed it the Conners and, you know, it continued. But you really have to do something pretty spectacular as an actor to get replaced on something. So I guess we'll watch this space with. With Tom Hardy and Mobland. But I'm just.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

As I said, it's very entertaining. Just enjoy it.

[Richard Osman]

Yeah, exactly. And it. But it is. You just think maybe, maybe, maybe one executive producer who's a woman might be helpful. Do you know, by the way, the connection between Mobland and backrooms that we talked about earlier?

[Guest or Contributor 2]

No, I don't.

[Richard Osman]

So in backrooms, there are two characters who work with Chettle. Ejiofort in the furniture store. You know the young stoner guy.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yeah.

[Richard Osman]

He is not American. He's English. He's Finn Bennett and he is the son of Ronan Bennett, who writes Mobland. Yeah, he's terrific as well.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

He's very good.

[Richard Osman]

Yeah, he's very good. But, yeah, so there you go. A little connection. I won't always be able to do connections between our first two stories, but I have today.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

I love that.

[Richard Osman]

Have I blown your mind?

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Yes, you have.

[Richard Osman]

Yes. The more usual thing about actors being replaced, certainly way back when, is because they asked for too much money. My favorite example of that is Valerie Harper, who was on the sitcom Valerie in the 80s, got paid a lot of money. It was a big hit. The first season of that asked for too much money. So they fired Valerie from Valerie and replaced it with someone else and called it Valerie's Family. That's bad. And also Monk, which is one of my favorite shows of all time. His assistant in the first few seasons disappears mid season, completely disappears and is replaced. And she was amazing. And then you look it up, you go, oh, it would have been a huge hit. So all the male actors got a raise and she didn't. So she asked for one and they fired her. So there you go. But again, that's.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

That's showbiz.

[Richard Osman]

That is showbiz. Yeah. Yes. What's showbiz? If you're a woman, for sure. Talking of women, how's that for a segue?

[Guest or Contributor 2]

I love it.

[Richard Osman]

Belle Burdon. Tell us about Belle.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Right.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Belle Burdon is the author of a book called Strangers, a memoir of her sort of disintegrated marriage. Now it's been an absolute monster hit since it came out earlier this year. It's already going to be adapted as a film for Netflix and Gwyneth Paltrow's.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Yeah, yeah, I know.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

She sort of plays just sort of meta version. She's.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Since her on retirement from acting, she's sort of playing ironic meta versions of herself. As far as I can see that after that Marty supreme role, which is sort of hilarious.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Anyway, it is the story of an unexpected marriage split. If you haven't read it, I've actually

[Guest or Contributor 1]

just read the magazine Serialization because I

[Guest or Contributor 2]

don't particularly read bullets like this, but it's a.

[Richard Osman]

It's a. I thought you'd say I don't particularly read books.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

No, I don't.

[Richard Osman]

I thought it's a hell of a.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

It's a story of unexpected marriage. It's unexpected.

[Richard Osman]

On the true story, by the way.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

A true story. Yeah. He's a hedge funder, she is a stay at home mother. And during the pandemic, they decide to

[Guest or Contributor 1]

move from their New York place for

[Guest or Contributor 2]

lockdown and they go to their waterfront

[Guest or Contributor 1]

house in Martha's Vineyard.

[Richard Osman]

I'm gonna say, thus far, I'm not sympathetic to either of them.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Well, yes.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Okay. So. And then during this time, the husband of a woman rings her to say that her husband is having an affair. Her husband leaves her and says basically,

[Guest or Contributor 1]

you can keep the kids.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

She's completely hit for six emotionally.

[Richard Osman]

He sort of leaves literally like the next morning without any. He just puts her back and bubbles off.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yeah.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

And goes.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And she's hit for Sixth emotion. Then she tells this. As I say, I read the magazine

[Marina Hyde]

Serialization, which I thought was sufficient for

[Guest or Contributor 2]

me, but other people have been completely

[Guest or Contributor 1]

gripped by this book.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And, you know, going through and saying, were there signs? But what she says is that she, you know, part of the sort of stakes of the book is is she gonna go off a financial cliff edge? She's gonna lose her house. She has a prenup, which. Which her lawyer before marriage has sort of advised her not really to sign. And what's clear from this is that she has kind of given over aspects of her financial control to her husband.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

I have kept up with the feverish discourse of this, but I'd like a feverish discourse.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

There's now a new backlash. A New Yorker article came out saying that this wasn't the whole story and that actually Bell Burden had concealed her wealth. She has a number of family tribes.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

She's basically worth tens of millions.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

So she was never really in what

[Guest or Contributor 1]

anyone normal would understand as any form of financial jeopardy.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And some people are saying, oh, this fatally undermines the book. Others are saying, well, she wrote about

[Guest or Contributor 1]

a very rich lifestyle all the way through. You know, they've got a waterfront house in margins of India.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Work it out. And anyway, the emotional truth and the devastation is the same. And she clearly didn't pay enough attention to her finances or whatever, which is interesting. But other people are saying you have to disclose everything and you haven't made it clear. So I think this is interesting. So Belle Burden has responded in a

[Guest or Contributor 1]

statement that says that she tried to own her privilege as much as she could when she wrote Strangers, but she feels like, you know, the emotional truth of it is a book about her heartache and her betrayal. And also that a reminder that we should all pay attention, women particularly, to finances within their marriage.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

One thing I will say about this,

[Guest or Contributor 1]

I've spoken by chance to completely to a number of very rich women about this book.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Since they've. Since it's come out, they're all obsessed with it. Like, genuinely obsessed. And what I find fascinating is this kind of deep fear and the sense that they might. You know, they're gripped by the idea that she missed red flags in her own marriage.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Yeah, Again, like, this is the grinding agonies of the super rich. You know, a life of indolence can be quite exhausting because you got a

[Richard Osman]

lot of time in your hands treating

[Guest or Contributor 2]

your marriage as a sort of detective story where you've got to keep. And Whereas the female labor in that

[Guest or Contributor 1]

marriage, because it's always the husband in these particular cases who are rich have

[Guest or Contributor 2]

got to sort of keep an eye on, you know, am I missing things? And maintaining this is almost like me

[Guest or Contributor 1]

maintaining the interiors of somewhere, keeping them up to date.

[Richard Osman]

It's almost like owning a football club.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Yeah.

[Richard Osman]

You're just like, oh, God, I'm just the capriciousness of fate and of these.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And they have a sense, what I found extraordinary of the people I spoke to, the sense that does Jeopardy lie around the corner for them. So anyway, so to go back, like, okay, did she misrepresent it? I can see for her that she felt like there's such an ingrained class thing here that she wouldn't really be talking, that it's not the Kardashians where,

[Guest or Contributor 1]

like all the money's up there on

[Guest or Contributor 2]

the screen and they want to talk

[Guest or Contributor 1]

about it all the time.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

She's a sort of Waspish East Coaster

[Guest or Contributor 1]

who clearly has massive generational wealth.

[Richard Osman]

Her grandmother was a famous magazine.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

I don't know. She's from, you know, she's from money, I think.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yeah. And I think she makes it, you know, to most people fairly clear that she's got lots of money. Having said that, the book does keep suggesting that she might lose the house or not be able to buy her husband out of the house or whatever it is.

[Richard Osman]

See, I think again, this happens. Same as Saltpath. Well, I think Saltpath is slightly different because I think there were some factual inaccuracies there that were probably unacceptable. I think in the case of this, again, I've only read the sort of long form extracts in various places, but it's really well written, as you say. It absolutely touches a nerve because it's not about woe is me, I'm going to lose my house. It's about, have I been living with a psychopath all of this time and did I misread things? You know, have I been an absolute idiot? I've been long about it.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yeah. It's an exhumation, it's like an autopsy going back to try and see what happened.

[Richard Osman]

And that is incredibly compelling to read. When she writes it, as you say, she is rich, but she doesn't particularly know that. If, you know, in. In the same way, sometimes rich people don't know that they're rich. But she's not professing poverty. There's obviously bits, as you say, where they say you're going to lose the house, but that to me is like the editor has said, and maybe, maybe it's time to be.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

That's what I think. We should talk about trust.

[Richard Osman]

They didn't trust in the emotional honesty of the. I think the reason people love the book is cause it's about, do I trust my partner in a really good way.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And it's weird that. And I bet it has come from the editor. That kind of the idea that.

[Richard Osman]

Understandable.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Yeah.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Often when you're writing fiction or you're writing even TV fiction, and they don't

[Guest or Contributor 1]

understand the stakes for your protagonist, they always say, could she need money? It's like one of the things that

[Guest or Contributor 2]

people always say, could she have some sort of financial pressure?

[Richard Osman]

You will never ever see a show where a good person is moved to crime, where they don't have a relative and a career.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yeah.

[Richard Osman]

Just saying to keep it here, we need another 11 grand. I got no way of getting it. And he goes, hold on. Didn't I have a chat yesterday with that guy who said I could smuggle some gold for him?

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Okay, so let's get on to who the editor is. The editor is someone at Dial Press, which is a Penguin Random House imprint. I don't think we would be talking about this quite so much had this editor also been the editor for ips.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Another memoir that was huge, but has since suffered a really big backlash. And I'm gonna talk about that one.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Cause, my goodness, that was the tell by Amy Griffin. Amy Griffin is honestly one of America's richest women. She had illegal.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Because these things are not legal or not yet legal. Although her husband is a big investor in psychedelics firms. She had illegal mdma assisted regression therapy.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Her memoir is about her recovered memory of being raped multiple times by her school teacher when she's in middle school. So starting when she's about 12.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Now, this book was picked by Oprah for her book club, picked by Ruth Witherspoon for her book club, picked by Jenna Bush Hager for her book club.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Again, it was on the bestseller list for a long time. Since then, a lot of questions have arisen, including one former schoolmate is suing, saying, these are my memories and you've stolen my story, saying she was the rape victim. And it wasn't this teacher at all.

[Marina Hyde]

It was a different teacher.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

The teacher who Amy Griffin, effectively, people have been able to identify him because you can work. Yeah. There's never been any other complaints against him. He, I think, has had to sort of go into hiding.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Both of these books, Belle Burden's one and Amy Griffin's one, were edited by someone called Whitney Frick at Dial Press, who understandably now is received quite a Bit of pushback.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

What she said about when Amy Griffin's memoir began to be questioned was, book publishers are not investigators. This is Amy's story. We trust her and all of our

[Guest or Contributor 1]

authors that they are recounting their memories truthfully. Well, okay, this is a recovered memory under late psychedelics, but okay.

[Richard Osman]

And also, this is exactly what they said about saltpath. They said, no, we have to trust the author.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

I have to say that I think that if you know your book, a book might even. Might be big. And lots of people have said this over the last week, if you know a book might be big and it might have a. As I always say, there is always a backlash because people do remember things differently. Maybe we're all unreliable narrators and we can get to that. But if you know that. But why can't they be fact checked to some degree? And that is a protection for the author as much as for the reader

[Guest or Contributor 1]

or whatever it is.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

I've got a theory as to why this is a bit of a.

[Richard Osman]

Okay, I have a commercial theory, but

[Guest or Contributor 2]

you know, about why there's a Manuel

[Richard Osman]

fakery issue about why publishing never changed checks. Publishing Never Checks by Richard Osborne. No, I honestly think that no one expects any books to be a hit. I think when something comes in like this, they will do everything they can to make something a hit. Because hits are so few and far between in publishing. I mean, vanishingly few and far between. One in 30 books might turn a profit. One in 60 might be like a phenomenon. And so statistically, the book you are currently working on, the Bell Burden book, is not going to be a hit.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

No.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

These books got massive advances.

[Richard Osman]

It doesn't matter.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Okay. But if you're paying that much in advance, I think you should pay for some form of fact checking because you've actually essentially backed yourself. If you're giving multimillionaires already a big advance and there's a bidding war, then you are backing yourself to say, I think this will be a hit. As much as I can know anything

[Guest or Contributor 1]

in publishing, which is not a lot,

[Guest or Contributor 2]

as you say, then in which case, why not invest in something that can help the author as well? Because as you. It's not clear that Belle Burden at all felt she was misrepresenting anything.

[Richard Osman]

It doesn't sound like.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

It doesn't sound like influencers misrepresent. They give us sort of invite us into their lives, but they sort of don't and they curate and they, you know, downplay some things and they amp up others.

[Richard Osman]

And yeah, I think if you're rain a win and saltpath, and you're saying you don't have a property and you do. That's one thing I think. If you're saying I did worry, well,

[Guest or Contributor 1]

there's a number of things with that one.

[Richard Osman]

If you're saying I did worry, you know, I worried about my financial security and the financial security of my children. I'm sure she did. I mean, anyone else in her situation wouldn't because she's obviously backed up by quite a lot of money. But I imagine that's definitively what she felt.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

So if you're saying I've had my memories recovered, oh, that's different. Is this not a red flag for a publisher?

[Richard Osman]

I would have thought on that case? Yes, I definitely would have thought so. But again, they're probably thinking, well, this is unsuable because she's telling us that she had her memories recovered. And as you say, they'll go, oh, no, you'll never identify that guy. And that's the problem is we live in a world where you can identify anyone. Anyone is going to be agree.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And so therefore this is something that it must be. We said this was a sore path. You're gonna have to catch up with this world.

[Richard Osman]

Baby reindeer.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yeah.

[Richard Osman]

Yes, the same thing keeps happening, but

[Guest or Contributor 2]

I think where the boom in memoirs and obviously some of those are going to have question marks over them. I always think of it as like

[Guest or Contributor 1]

the My Truth era.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

The books we're seeing published now or quite recently, they were probably bought at a point where the absolute moment of peak woke us. Publishing in particular became so woke that even fiction was kind of fraught with danger. Like, oh, can you really ventriloquize the person of a different race? Can you, you know, of different gender, a different sexuality? In the end you get to the point where first person articles or memoir

[Richard Osman]

are the safest genre because you mustn't deny anyone's truth.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

You can't deny anyone's truth. The act of fiction itself is almost political and not in a good way. So what you're left with is people saying, my first person story, very powerful,

[Guest or Contributor 1]

et cetera, you know, so not, this

[Richard Osman]

is a thing that happened to someone. This is the thing that happened to someone.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

This is my.

[Richard Osman]

I can talk about it because I am me.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And no, I'm not allowed to tell any other truth. No one else is allowed to tell anyone else's. And I think that lots of these books were commissioned during that time and where a particular sensibility was abroad, where almost nobody can pretend to Be anything.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

And actually, what's ironic is that some

[Guest or Contributor 2]

of these people seem to have been pretending. Some of the powerful, quote unquote, first person pieces seem to have been the least reliable and most questionable of all.

[Richard Osman]

I mean, does anyone, any of us, truly know ourselves?

[Guest or Contributor 1]

No, probably not.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

And I. But it's. I think it's a function of that particular era where almost memoir felt like

[Guest or Contributor 1]

a really safe genre because it couldn't

[Guest or Contributor 2]

suddenly become canceled because everyone was saying, how on earth can someone pretend to be a Mexican woman? Or how on earth can someone.

[Richard Osman]

Which is crazy because if you or I tell an anecdote about someone else, it's usually fairly factual or they will ramp up certain bits. If we tell an anecdote about ourselves, that's the biggest lie we've ever told. I mean, honestly, the spin we put on that. And then, yeah, I guess there was five guys with knives and they were all coming at me. And it just is absolute nonsense. The worst lies you tell are the lies about yourself.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

I agree.

[Richard Osman]

Any recommendations? Marina?

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yes. You know, I've been banging on about micro dramas and thinking, oh, someone clever and someone brilliant.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Even though I, you know, there's a lot that. I've had sex with my billionaire CEO werewolf boss.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Those who.

[Richard Osman]

I know that, but we were talking about microdrama, so we shouldn't. Sorry. I know this whole. Another story about that confessional is like.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Yeah, it's powerful, though.

[Richard Osman]

That'll be the express.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Yeah.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

So Issa Rae, who is the brilliant creator of Insecure and has now turned her attention to microdrama. She's produced a 57 episode vertical microdrama

[Guest or Contributor 1]

called Screen Time that's about sort of two couples that are on a double date and things turn very weird. There's a hacking situation.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

I looked yesterday and it had 160 million views on TikTok. This is the first breakout one of these things that is completely. That a very recognized creator who's brilliant has done it. People have been completely gripped by it. And it's the first one on TikTok that has kind of blown up in this way because there are all these other platforms as I've talked to you about before, like things like Real Short or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Which are, well, Crunchyrolls anime, but. Oh, yes, things like Real Short that are specifically dedicated microdrama platforms. But this is done on TikTok. It's a recognized creator and it has blown up completely. It's called Screen Time.

[Marina Hyde]

Have a look.

[Richard Osman]

And I would say if you add the success of that, which is a phenomenon to the success of backrooms and obsession. We are in a moment, I would say a transitional moment. It's not even a transitional moment. The transitional moment was two years ago. Now we're seeing that we were in a transitional moment moment and nothing goes back to what it was. Which is why sometimes the things we talk about, about building, you know, BBC and all the different public service broadcasters together, why it's so important now.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Because.

[Richard Osman]

Because this. This.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Yes, this.

[Richard Osman]

The fight. The fight is not what it was. It's not all these channels are against each other. It's. The whole world has completely changed. And if we want some of the traditional jobs and some of the traditional media we've had, we have to understand that everything has changed. I'm going to talk about traditional media, though, because I just finished this latest series of Amanda Land, which is superb and reminds you of what terrestrial television at its very very best can do. Beautifully written, beautifully acted, so British, so funny, Very, very charming. Feels fresh, feels new. And so, yeah, Amanda Lennon, six episodes, series two. It's just. Yeah, I mean, what a. You know, tis joy to be alive in such a time that that is made. But everything has already changed. Things are not changing. Everything has already changed. And we just all have to get our mind around.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

But lots of it is incredibly exciting.

[Richard Osman]

Exactly that. There's still brilliant people working. Creatives are still doing the same things they were always doing. There's probably more money now for creators. There's probably more money for young creatives who didn't have an entry into the industry. There are lots of ways in which this new world is better than the old world. But we also have to try and protect and border the bits of the old world which we know work right.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

On that bombshell, on that clarion call, we will be back on Thursday with our questions and answers edition. And for our members, there's the third part of my series in which I was talking to James Kanagasari. It's. I don't want to say is Taylor Swift a basic bitch?

[Guest or Contributor 2]

But it's saying, is everything becoming generic?

[Guest or Contributor 1]

And if so, why are we all basic bitch? Are we all.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

Is everything becoming.

[Guest or Contributor 1]

Yeah, are we all becoming basic?

[Richard Osman]

I definitely am. I'm not becoming. That's how I started.

[Guest or Contributor 2]

But it's a very interesting chat about genericism. That's if you want to join. And for ad free listening and bonus episodes, it's the resticentertainment.com Otherwise, we'll see you on Thursday.

[Richard Osman]

See you on Thursday.

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