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This episode is brought to you by Octopus Energy.
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Now it is award season. Everyone is wondering who's going to clean up. And we tend to think awards are about that one big moment. Like, oh my goodness, that one night, that speech. I can't believe I've won.
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But the effort that goes into winning
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an award, everyone going for one of those big movie awards, it's not a coincidence that Academy members or whatever are saying, oh, you know, did you see that thing? Yeah, I did. It was really good. There is a remorseless many months campaign and there are tens of people working on every single film's awards campaign. Campaign.
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A
I thought you were gonna say tens of thousands. No, no, but there are tens.
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B
Yeah, there are tens. But that's quite a lot when you think of like one. And it's a full time job.
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We mention this only because we are announcing our presenting partnership with the lovely people at Octopus Energy who have just won the which recommended provider of the Year for the ninth time in a row. And that is not something you get just by.
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B
Which is hard to win, which is hard to win, which is hard to.
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A
Which is hard to win, which is
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hard to win, which is hard to win.
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But nine in a row, I would say that makes Octopus Energy the Meryl Streep of the business.
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Oh, yeah, they're the Merrill. They're the absolute. They're the Merrell.
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I call them Merrell Energy. That's what I call them.
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Hello and welcome to this episode of Rest is Entertainment Questions and answers edition. I'm Marina Hyde.
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And I'm Richard Osman. Hello, Marina.
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Hello, Richard. How are you?
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I'm very, very well. We had so many questions about Prince Andrew and various aspects of the OTT is formerly known as artists, formerly known as Prince Andrew, Andrew, Matt Button, Windsor. But so many. So should we just pick one and sort of talk around it?
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Talk around it?
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Yeah, that might be. That might be the way to do it. Steve Lloyd, you've been chosen. Well done, Steve. Because he's come in via the photograph, which I think is interesting.
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Oh, my God, the photograph is epic.
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But thank you everyone for all your questions. So this is the one we will use. As Representative Steve says, how did Phil Noble's photograph of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor leaving the police station end up on the front page of every newspaper the next morning? How did he get the shot and how much would he get paid for it?
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Yeah, it's one of the all time sort of great news images. I love great news images. I've got so many books of them. I've got great one of National Choir famous images. This is absolutely up there with all of them. Phil Noble at Reuters took it. He works for a news agency, Reuters. So to answer the first bit, first, he is contracted to Reuters. That was always going to be sold around the world. But if it had been an individual publications snapper, then they would have. They would have got, you know, then they would have been their exclusive picture, which would have been one of the great exclusives.
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A
But again, if it was, say it was a Daily Mail photographer, would the Daily Mail then be able to license it around the world? Yes, of course, they'd be making.
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B
And they would. But there's something amazing about that first image and they would have kept it to themselves at the start, but it's very difficult now when everyone could just kind of scrape it off online and people are just going to unauthorizedly steal it anyway. It's not like it used to be where you think like, okay, that photo's on the front of the sun or whatever, and you're going to buy the paper because that's the only place you can see it.
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A
Yeah, Ostensibly every single time you see it in any like normal news organization, online or anywhere, they had to pay, they paid Reuters.
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B
But they also have deals with Reuters that are like long term, you know, they can use. But it's a bit like the Associated Press or any of those news agencies where you might. You have a kind of overall deal with them that you take that content. It's very clever how he got it. Phil Noble. It's really difficult, this. It's fine if, you know a celebrity is going to come out of a nightclub and all the snappers are standing outside there waiting for it to happen. The whole point of this arrest was they didn't give anyone advance notice of it because they thought it would become a complete feeding frenzy, which it obviously would have done. It's in Norfolk, which everything's quite spread out and there were about 20 different police stations he could have been taken to.
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A
Yes. So they didn't say exactly where he'd gone, just he'd gone to.
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B
They never would tell you that because they would say you might get a confirmation if it's the Met, like a Central London police station. But they knew it was somewhere in Norfolk. He had a tip off. Phil Noble. And you can read about this, he's talked about it now. And some of the Reuters went to Aylsham and there were only like three of them there. And they waited all day and they waited and waited and waited and then they just thought, nothing doing here.
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A
And this, by the way, this is like about an hour from Sandringham as well. So this is not the local police station by any manner of means.
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B
So presumably there were 20 potential.
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A
Presumably there were photographers outside, pretty much every single one of those. And some people would have gone to the nearest one, some people have gone to the biggest one.
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B
And because it's so spread out, you've got to call it. You're not going to hear, oh, he's just driven out and then, hey away over there. That's done. You've missed it. There's nothing you can do apart from take a pun.
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You've got to be directly.
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But he had a tip on. So it's proper sort of quite old fashioned stuff. They think, okay, nothing doing here, let's just check into a hotel and.
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Yeah, sorry, sorry, interrupted. So they're outside Aylsham police station. Yeah. They've had the tip off and they're like, they're getting to the stage like in a movie where they go, it's
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been dark for a few hours.
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A
I think this is bum information.
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B
Yeah. And they. But they think they'll check into a hotel. And he was actually walking on the way down to the hotel, which is wherever it was local. It must have been some sort of pub or something. And he got a phone call saying he's. The cars come. Some cars are coming out. Because he's an experienced photographer, he knows that the first car will contain the police officers and the second car will also have police officers. But will the security officers. But will have the target in this case Andrew the principal. So therefore he doesn't take anything in the first car. He gets six shots, all of which are out of focus, apart from that one which is incredible. Which, you know, I hardly need to describe to everyone because it's already iconic of him leaning back. The red eye somehow makes it even better.
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A
But isn't that. It's like you just think, oh, that's annoying. Red eye on this. If that came back from Boots in the day, it would have a little sticker on it.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it would. Exactly. Do you want to not tell us to tell you what you want to do? Yeah, I know what I did wrong, but. Well, it's. And it's great. And I've already seen things comparing it to so many sort of great historical paintings. For me it is very like the Francis Bacon, the Pope. But there are many other work. Yeah. That really like dark and you know, I spent a lot of. I'VE worked at the sun at the start of my career and I did used to do deal with the pictures for a little bit. And it's so interesting talking to those kind of photographers who in those days it was really hard. Remember, it was all negatives. And so if they missed it in any other way, there was a community, as there always is, with packs of anything, whether it's the lobby or the sports press or whatever. And they used to say to each other, give us a neg. Because you'd be in so much trouble if you miss. Not if you miss that shot. That's too difficult. And you're like, fine. You picked the right police patient. You're amazing. Well done. And you'd be lionized for that, of course. And we already know what the photograph of the year is. So anyway, so they. You have to get the shot at the time. And you'll see sometimes one of the things you'll see snappers do when someone say someone's been convicted of some awful crime that everyone has talked about, you'll see them just holding the camera right above their head in order to get it into the prison van. Because those prison van was the Black
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Panther have those high windows.
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If you have the ultra flash on you, sometimes just by pure luck of getting your camera against you might get something inside. And you might. And there were certain famous ones, sort of child murderers and things which they managed to get inside. That shot interested me while I was away last week and I was saying to my children, ooh. Cause it's head on. That's hard. Think about getting the head on shot. I have spoken to a lot of photographers who've been carried on the bonnets of cars before because you're literally hanging onto a wing mirror and just clicking through the front window and hoping some of it's usable. To me. It's fascinating this. Because what he must. You wouldn't do that. I don't think actually even now, given how far he's fallen, you're still not gonna be doing that. And people don't necessarily behave in that same way as they used to. And it's not the 80s or the 90s anymore, but people did do that.
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A
He's got highly trained security operatives with him.
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B
Yeah. And who knows what's going to happen to you. So. But he would have reached across because you can see the angle of the picture. The angle of the picture is not from the side of the road. The angle of the picture is sticking your hand right out. It's really. I mean, it's amazing. He got the shot. It's one of the great ones. And I love that.
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Also fascinating. He's had so much attention because you could clearly see from inside the car that there was some. There was a photographer there. The whole shot is made by the fact that Andrew. That Andrew is. Is like kind of just scooching down in his seat so he can't be seen too late. And. And it just makes him look. It was perfect. It's a perfect encapsulation of what we think of him and a perfect encapsulation of him being caught in this. And as you say, the red eye adds to it as well. The. The only thing I saw about Phil Noble I thought was extra interesting. Russell T. Davis was saying that. I think Russell T. Davis used to produce why don't you, you know, the Kids Saturday Morning, the Kids, you know, summer TV program. And Phil Noble was one of the kids on why don't yout. That Russell T. Davies cast.
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B
Oh, my God, that's so cool.
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And look at him now.
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Look at him.
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Well, why don't you.
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Yeah.
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Take a photograph.
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B
And there is something painterly and epic when you see an image like that. And the reason that everyone said, like, oh, it's like a Francis Bacon, where it's like, you know, Kronos eating his choice. You know, there's so many things that people say it looks like the Scream or whatever it is is because it immediately becomes, in the truest sense of the word, iconic. It's an.
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A
Is there good money in that for Phil Noble or that. Would that be covered by.
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I hope there's a good bonus in it for him.
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But he wouldn't. Ordinarily he'd be covered by his Reuters contract.
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B
Yes. I don't know the details and people have different types of contracts and sometimes there's a sort of commission thing on the top of it. I wouldn't know the details of that, but in general it's because the reason it was instantly everywhere. Two reasons. In this day and age, it's quite hard for things not to be. But if you do scrape things, they will come after you and say, you've done this, you've broken our copyright and you will get the money eventually. But. But that sense that you can have an exclusive and hang on to it, but it's come because it's come from a news agency. You expect to get a significant number of the pictures used in your news publication on any given day from Reuters or the Associated Press or whatever it is.
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A
I think there's also the idea of. We talked about, weirdly, Pokemon cards on Tuesday's show. That idea of scarcity. Because ordinarily, if someone's been driven out of a prison or a trial or something like that, there's 50 photographers and everyone gets slightly different angles of the same thing. But one is the best. But this is. He is literally the only person there.
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You're trying to be where the wall is going to land rather than where it's.
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Which happens so rarely these days.
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B
Yeah, people keep saying it's the biggest crisis since the abdication, which, as you know, I think that's when they all went wrong with the abdication. But we won't go over that old ground.
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A
No, go on, let's do. Let's. Let's do a tight 10 round.
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B
No, it all went wrong in the abdication when they allowed. They should. He should never have abdicated. However, it's interesting in that the same sorts of things are happening. People say it doesn't repeat itself history, but it rhymes. Okay, everyone. Ordinary people loved the abdication. Sorry, everybody. But they did. They thought it was a huge amount of art. The people in the creative. And we know this because we have lots and lots of diaries to rely on at the time. People in what we've now called the creative industries. But I don't think Virginia Woolf referred to herself as being in them or Noel Cowardly.
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A
She was a content creator.
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B
She was a content creator. She was an influencer. Yeah, she did. Feels like live streaming a lot of what she did anyway for them, they said, oh, it's like melodrama. Better than a novel original. Said, oh, it was an electric atmosphere. The people who. They began in mass observation when they started like recording the voices of ordinary people. Nella Last, they started doing it just after the war, but she was able, you know, that's Housewife 49, Nella last swore, is a really good book if you've never read it, which is the stories of all her kind of memories of things. And Victoria Wood played her on television as well in a thing called Housewife 49.
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Tell me more about her.
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Nella Last was just one of the people who was, you know, chosen to be part of mass observation, which was recording the voices of ordinary people and what they felt about all sorts of things. And it's an amazing project and so we know much more. People after us will always tell you that, you know, like the application was a huge crisis and whatever. It's like, I don't know. She. Nella Larse was one of Those people who thought, of course, and this was a very popular sort of working class view at the time, that he'd done it all for love. He was really popular. Edward viii, he'd done it all for love. Bear in mind, this is before he tottered into the embrace of the Nazis. Afterwards, you know, so. But there's so what we're dealing with now. And by the way, and all the elite diaries of the time, the sort of Chips Channers, Howard Nicholson or whatever, thought it was all dreadful for the monarchy. And they, because they. And even someone like Cecil Beaton, the great photographer, who was a terrible sort of snob, thought, oh, this is all so vulgar. It's disgusting, it's blah, blah, blah, which is actually very similar to what's happening now. You'll hear all these elite people saying, oh, this is dreadful. It was a crisis of monarchy. But honestly, lots of ordinary people are really enjoying this. I appreciate that. This isn't like someone's done something for love. This is a much less savory story, although not as unsavoury as Nazis. So it's interesting. And watching all the politicians jump on the bandwagon, I find amazing. This is exactly what happened in the abdication. Exactly the same thing. I saw Tom Dugenhart, I mean, God, rushing towards the camera to say, well, we might have to reopen all of the 700-year-old treason law. There should be a special committee. It's like, oh, and you'll be on it. I bet he's gonna see the committee loving it. Stanley Baldwin, the great political survivor, was drunk on the abdication. Okay, There's a thing he. He grabs Harold Nicholson because Harold Nicholson puts this into his diary. He's an MP who writes diaries at the time. And he grabs Harold Nicholson after he's done the abdication address in the House of Commons, saying that he's. The King is going to abdicate, saying, I had success, my dear Nicholson, at the moment I most needed it. And Howard Nicholson says, no man had dominated the House as Baldwin did tonight, and he knows it. Now. All the politicians that you hear now are hoping for something similar. You don't think if it goes wrong for Kemi Badenoch in the May elections, spoiler it's going to. That Tom Tugenhart isn't going to have yet another crack at the leadership. You know, they're all jockey, they're all using this thing because it's. It's the same as it always.
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A
Like the Royal Family for politicians are like the Beckhams are for us.
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B
Yes, but the Queen chose a way to be. She chose to create, you know, she was the original person of a documentary where she's the executive producer of it all. That's what they did with that documentary where she decided to turn it into a sort of family show and to allow the children, you know, unscripted, whatever, unscripted drama. And it actually has of course become a soap opera where they've got a no contact son, they've got dirty and dodgy uncle, allegedly, who knows? But he's difficult. And actually in lots of ways it's become something much more like that. But the Royals were the original executive producers of their own documentaries and it doesn't always work well.
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A
Yeah, but whenever I see, oh, this is a nightmare for the Royals and this is. It feels like Andrew exists in a slightly different sphere, which is he's found himself in a different group of people. He's not seen as part of that kind of, you know, he's seen as like a. A weird adjunct. But number one on Amazon all week, I'm delighted to say, is Virginia Duffrey's biography and talking about her life and how great that all. Just seeing him again and again and again and again is sending people to that and hearing her truth and hearing her story, you know, the whole thing, there's something hopefully cleansing about the thing. There's something in the news media that feels quite cleansing. But yeah, I'm with you. I don't.
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B
Can I also say though, I think something that's interesting because since we're to return to the sort of entertainment related
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aspect of it, we're really not answering Steve Zoe's question here. We have done that. We have done that.
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B
We have done that.
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A
So now we're answering everyone else's question.
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B
The insta documentaries that are already being announced, you know, Channel 5 announced one. I can't remember who else. IGV announced one. They're all doing again. This is something that I feel it speaks to the sort of ridiculous churn of our culture. Don't forget there were two documentaries, sorry, two dramas about the documentary itself. One based on the Booker's book and one based on Emily Maitlis. But I have to say it's always better to wait. I hope we're Only on Act 2 of this with this development in the story. And I think there could still be an Act 3. We don't know. But everyone goes so early nowadays. This never used to happen. And I've also talked a lot about, on the podcast about the erosion of the very Idea of documentary, wherein essentially it's just become a very quick kind of cuts job. There's never any real form of perspective to lots of these documentaries. They're made to order and they're kind of instant. There is something to be said for not doing it at the exact moment of requirement and waiting a bit, because it becomes something much more interesting if you can allow the story to develop in a certain way and of course we'll have it all over again. But there's something about waiting a little bit. But nothing on our culture wants to wait. So you're going to have, you know, 10 mushroom poisoning documentaries, or you're going to have lots of documentaries about. And there'll be lots of documentaries about this, even though there's very little extra we can say. And you've seen it all just now on the news. I do think there's something worth waiting for, both drama and documentary and thinking, hang on a second, what about if the interview's just the end of Act 1?
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A
One of the fascinating things, though, I
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think that when I'm talking about the interview, I'm talking about the News Night interview. Sorry, I should have made that clear.
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A
One of the interesting things I think is this, which is. Although, of course you cannot. You can't talk directly about the allegations and about the investigation, all those things. What this being on our sort of new cycle for 24 hours a day means is you can start talking to people who worked with Andrew or worked for Andrew or have been in his orbit and they can tell their stories about their personal view of him. No, which is the absolute. I know, but there's a point before someone is arrested where actually you can't. You sort of feel it's a disloyalty or that people won't believe you or anything like that. And actually now the floodgates have opened and you see a whole group of people. There's that amount. Amazing clip of the guy on Australian TV who is saying, oh, yeah, but I mean, we did have a nickname for him. And again. What, what, what was the nickname? And he goes, well, he had a code name with the Secret Service and he was like, purple 51 or something. I said, oh, no. But you said he had a nickname as well. I said, I don't. I sort of. I can't really say. You wouldn't be able to broadcast it. And they're going to just tell us. Couldn't have done this before. This was all on the news because. And could tell us. Tell us. He goes, well, we used to Call him the co. They just think that is something you could not have put on the news. And that is one of those things we talked about open secrets before you talk to anyone in the last five, 10, 20 years who'd worked for him and they would give you stories like that. But it's not something. There's not a place for that in the middle of our culture. It's not. There's not a sort of place to tell that story. Lots of people have sort of, you know, done kind of blogs or tweeted about it, but you can't. It can't be reported. Whereas now all of that stuff, the stuff that is not subdued to see, the stuff that is not to do with a, you know, a court case or an investigation, everyone can tell you their stories about it.
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B
Yes. But I would say that this is also a failure of the UK media. And I really do think that, because I can assure you, I can't remember how long I've been doing this story for, but it's a long time now, like a decade, decade and a half. And nobody really bothered very much with it at all. Not. It was not the stories, the multiples of stories about Meghan compared to multiples of stories about this after he had been pictured with Epstein after all of these things, which was ages and ages ago. And they all knew, off the sort of record and what people said about him. And yet the obsession was still with Meghan. And I, you know, I remember doing this in 2019 and just thinking, this is absolutely bizarre. They're obsessed with the fact that Meghan and Harry have gone on a private jet to Ibiza. Look the other way. Why is the Queen just driven to Balmoral for this incredibly presentational event? So it was to church at Balmoral with him sitting next to her in the car. But they wouldn't say anything. The media is part of the establishment and the establishment has now decided that cutting him loose is a more protective stance than doing what they did before, which was not properly interrogating at all. And the media is part of that to some extent. Not all. I can't, you know, characterize the whole media as one thing. I wouldn't begin to. But I will say that as someone who wrote about this for a very long time, there was a long, long period when they were far more interested in covering Meghan than looking into any of this stuff, even though large aspects of it were in the public domain.
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A
Love it.
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B
And there is one journalist I would absolutely love to give a big shout out to because She. I have followed her for such a long time and that's Julie K. Brown who worked for the Miami Herald and who did the original, who eventually went back and was able to piece together the whole Epstein as much as possible of it because so much of it had been sealed by this dreadful bargain he made back in 2008 or 2009. And she was able to piece together so many of the stories of the victims and police talking to her off the record. That is an absolutely stellar piece of journalism and I think they've made a sort of dedicated area on their website where you can go and have a look at it. She's called Julia K. Brown and she is really an absolute kind of linchpin in this whole story.
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A
And we've covered so many different questions that people wrote in there. No, because lots of people did ask things. There's. We'll leave it to next week. Someone asked a question about Sarah Ferguson's book sales which I have some information about. We'll do that next week. We'll do this. Enough. Andrew Mattbatten wins there. Now shall we go to some adverts and some non Andrew related questions after that?
- [21:22]
B
Yes, we will do.
- [21:29]
C
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- [21:58]
B
Close your eyes, exhale, feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry
- [22:07]
C
that I wouldn't get my new contacts
- [22:08]
B
in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast.
- [22:13]
A
And breathe.
- [22:14]
C
Oh, sorry.
- [22:15]
B
I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste.
- [22:22]
C
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- [22:26]
B
1-800-contacts. Welcome back. Welcome back, everybody. The Winter Olympics is tragically over, but was brilliant. I've got a question about the ice skating from Catherine who says with the Winter Olympics in Milan, figure skating feels more pop and camp than ever. With Madonna, Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, medleys everywhere. How does the music actually work? Do skaters need to license these tracks? And how are the medleys cleared and Edited.
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A
Well, it's interesting with Winter Olympics because we only see it once every four years, and so sometimes there'll be seismic changes in sports and we don't know. So I think a lot of people were slightly taken aback when they're watching the ice dancing. And more people watch ice dancing this year because of Lila Fear and Lewis Gibson. We had. We had British contenders in it, so I think a lot. A lot of people watched it. And yeah, we are very, very used to watching figure skating, to classical music, essentially. And that's because until 2014, in fact. So there's been a couple of Winter Olympics till 2014, you couldn't dance to anything that had words in it. So you had to have. Which is largely why people just dance to classical music also, because you don't have to get any. You know, all of that stuff is out of copyright. You can just play whatever you want. 2014, they said, no, let's. We're going to modernize our sport a little bit. You can now dance to tracks with. With words in it, which of course opens up a huge can of worms, because you are. Then everyone wants to dance to pop music because everyone wants to dance to something that's going to get everyone in the stands interested. And, you know, it just. It gives certainly more energy to your performance. You know, it has different beats and this, that or the other. But, yeah, they absolutely have to get the permission of the artist. There was a big story just before the Winter Olympics. The Spanish skater was dancing to a medley from Minions, and he realized just before the Olympics started that that had not been cleared and the process was taking quite a long time. In the end, sort of went online, did a big social media campaign, and Sony were made aware of it and sped it up. And so it was fine in the end. So, yeah, it's completely changed. So Lyla, Theo and Lu Bruce Gibson danced to a Spice Girls Italian dance to a Backstreet Boys medley. Because my wife Ingrid was an ice skater in her youth, like a really, really.
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B
How did I not know this?
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A
And so she was like, oh, my God, they're dancing. Like, honestly, ice dance and Backstreet Boys at the same time. She was like, suddenly, oh, sport, okay, count me in. She was excited by that. There was Lenny Kravitz, you know, there's Madonna, as Chris said, Ricky Martin. Three different countries dance to Ricky Martin. Sweden, and. And one of the Spanish bears danced to Ricky Martin. So, yeah, it is. It's. It's completely changed. You can dance to whatever you want. You do Definitely have to get permission. There are also, of course, competitions between the dancer to get songs that they want. You know, when Torvin and did Bolero, you know, there was not a lot of competition for that. But the big new thing now, because if you want to, you know, if you can't get permission and you know you want to do classical music and this is what the Czech Republic did, or Czechia is AI music. And so Czechia danced to an AI version. Sort of sounded like acdc, but wasn't acdc because they didn't have the rights to do that. It sort of had some samples from New Radicals as well, which they didn't have the rights to. So you can now what's happened?
- [25:54]
B
Are they in trouble for it?
- [25:55]
A
No, no, no. Everyone seems fine. It's the Winter Olympics, isn't it? I mean, you know, we've moved on
- [26:02]
B
in the world cinema classic Blades of Glory, where they're obviously not. They're not competing. They're not competing at Winter Olympics because it's so heavily copyrighted. I don't think you can even say Winter Games. It's called I can't remember what the competition they're competing at. But they do everything to things with lyrics. Will Arnett and Amy Polo, who were still married at the time, who play the Fairchilds. Von Fairchilds. They do one. There's one point where they're doing something to like urban music. That is I strongly.
- [26:29]
A
Blades are great. Also, have you listened to the episode of Smartless where Amy Poehler comes on? Because, you know, often on that show they don't know. Sometimes they know who the person is. But Will Arnett is certainly surprised that his ex wife is the. Is the guest that week. So, yeah, you can absolutely see why they've done it. It makes ice skating much, much more kind of modern and current. But it is a can of worms. But, yeah, that. You know, when I was looking into all the different stories in it, the AI thing, the Czechia finished 17 in the end, so it didn't do them a huge amount of good. But yeah, that's, I think, the first AI Winter Olympic story.
- [27:06]
B
Yeah.
- [27:06]
A
I've seen.
- [27:07]
B
Well, I obviously think everyone should just green light everything for years because it's so funny to see what they do with it.
- [27:12]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [27:13]
B
Come on. I mean, it's not gonna like. It's not gonna ruin the Minions as a property.
- [27:16]
A
Yeah. I mean, when you wrote Take the money and shut up in your bedroom, you weren't thinking you're gonna have two, you know, Latvians doing triple axles to it.
- [27:26]
B
But just also maybe don't do the whole routine and just then be waiting for some horrible Hollywood lawyer to clear it for you. Because I just. Because they clear first.
- [27:35]
A
Yeah. Marina, George Griffey has a question. He says you recently answered a question about how writers get things like scientific accuracy in books by speaking to professionals in that field. That lovely Hannah Fry. Yes, answered that for us. George has a more specific question. How do writers get such in depth information about illegal activity? For example, in something like Breaking Bad it feels so specific. I can't imagine the writers just Google that sort of info. So how do we find out about illegal things?
- [28:00]
B
Writers do want to get that right. And they just all mostly as you've said, I think before, they want the thing that they want to happen to be made right in some way by an expert. But Breaking Bad is particularly interesting because obviously it is quite technical in terms of the chemistry of cooking crystal meth. And tell me about it. Well, funnily enough they, Vince Gilligan, when they started that you obviously don't know that it's going to become like one of the biggest TV series of all time. And you don't. They didn't have a huge budget at the start and they got a lot of the first series off Google as. But he then, because it became a huge thing pretty quickly, he did an interview, I can't remember where it's like some literally like an entertainment magazine saying I'd actually really welcome some input from the chemistry community. And a woman who later became chair of the American Chemical Society, who's eminent sort of chemistry professor Donna Nelson read this and thought well I would like to help.
- [29:01]
A
Fancy a bit of this?
- [29:02]
B
Yeah. So she kind of managed to get in touch with the magazine and said can you just put my, give my details to him? And they did actually pass it all on and she became the science advisor on Breaking Bad. They were always very careful because they never, although you can look up on the Internet how to cook meth from start to finish, they didn't ever want to provide an exact sort of manual of how to do it. And so they would always omit key steps. But they taught the actors exactly how to do it so that they always knew what they would be doing at any one time. And there are certain things that are not accurate. Like if you know he has his famous product, his blue meth, that's really amazing and it's really sort of extra pure because it's got this sort of ethereal color. They actually Got, I think from a sweet shop somewhere in Albuquerque. It's probably just from sherbet or something, but if it were that color, it would be impure. So there were certain things like that that aren't strictly accurate anyway. Donna Nelson then began to properly consult. And it becomes very technical. She always knew that scientists get annoyed if people get things wrong, as all people who are experts in their field do if they think telly gets it wrong. But she was stunned by the whole kind of breakout community of novice scientists talking about the show in a really, really essentially chemical way. And she really loved it. So she thought, gosh, level of depth and the, whatever. They also, in terms of the crime stuff on that, they did have dea, you know, Drug Enforcement Agency representatives advising them because they want to say, okay, when you raid a lab, what do they look like inside? What are the, you know, they. That doesn't. They don't have pictures of real life meth labs normally online or maybe they'd have a few more now, but they certainly didn't back when Vince Gilligan was writing this. And so they would say, okay, how does it actually look? How would you run a raid? And so they're able to say all of those things because. And they had a guy from a DEA lab in Dallas, a guy called Victor Bravenick, and he advised them on that sort of thing and also how to handle the equipment, which was very, very important because they thought if all of it was really. It's a little bit like the Wire or something. Well, David Simon did the Wire because he'd been a crime reporter for how long? So he knew about how all these things happened, how you got a wire going, all the sort of permits you need to make it happen. If you're doing an actual crime procedural or something like Breaking Bad, which isn't. But it procedural elements to it, you really do need specialist advice on things like that to make it part of the world.
- [31:30]
A
The interesting thing about, if we're talking strictly about illegal things, so we're talking about, you know, do you have, you know, because you will. Lots of crime writers will talk to police officers. Lots of crime writers will talk to people in the security services. So the question is, do lots of crime writers talk to criminals? I would say it's much less common. I mean, there are plenty of people around who will, you know, who've done things in the past and who are available to talk to. But the truth, truth is if you have good contacts with the police, say, or, you know, the serious, you know, the fraud office or whatever it is. They tend to know what criminals do
- [32:04]
B
and they love to talk, by the way, off the record.
- [32:06]
A
But in the same way that they will tell you about how to investigate something, they'll also say, oh yeah, we arrested this guy and this is what he had done. And this is the techniques they use. This, these are the things they do that make them almost impossible to catch. These are the ways that you, you know, that they. So weirdly, the context you would have to talk about investigating, talk about police work would be the same context you would be able to tell you about the illigat. So there'll always be a bit of colour you'll get from someone who's, you know, done dodgy things. But actually law enforcement knows both sides of the coin in the same way
- [32:38]
B
that actually, unless Donna Nelson, who understood fully about how you would cook mess, she had no idea what one of the labs looked like when it was raided. And you have to go to law enforcement for that.
- [32:45]
A
Yeah, exactly. But Donna Nelson would, you know, she'd go, she's a bright woman. She'd go, oh, okay. And if I were to do that, this is the way that I would do it. This is the way I would streamline that. This is the way I would, you know, I know for a fact that the lab would really have to be kept cool. So this is how I would air condition all of that stuff. Once you get people on either side of that, they can pretty much tell you everyone's job.
- [33:08]
B
Well, here's a question I've been dying to ask. It's about your mum, Richard. Michelle Muldoon says, I've just finished reading when the Cranes Fly south, which I loved. Richard, does your mum have any other reading recommendations? Recommendations?
- [33:20]
A
That was, that was my mum's recommendation, which I recommended to you good listeners and everybody seems to have loved. She just got sent through a poster by the publishers of that for like a Mother's Day things and, and it says, as recommended by Richard Osman's mum. And you're like, she was delighted by
- [33:38]
B
that, I can imagine.
- [33:39]
A
Yeah, she loved that. So funny if I saw her this weekend. I had a family weekend, went to see my brother's band, as we've discussed before, and went to see Brenda. And I said, mum, they're asking on the podcast about any other book recommendations. I was always, I always forget with my mum, I always say, oh, I don't. Is that I don't want to be too so busy and you know, would you really want to sort of say something on you know, for the podcast, she's like, oh, my God. Yes, yes, brilliant. Okay, let me tell you. So I asked to do two things. Three favorite books ever, and then a book that we haven't heard of, which she absolutely loves. Her three. Three favorite book books ever, she said Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, which would be in my top three books ever as well. I think. I love that. She said A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving. She said, no one else likes it, but I do. So you take that on advisement. And Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. The three books, she says her three favorite books of all time. So say, give me a book that people don't know. And this is a great recommendation. I think Elizabeth George, who writes, she's best known for writing the Inspector Linley mysteries. An amazing crime writer, but also a sort of social writer like you. You get lots of information about the world. She said one of her books, it's one of the Lindley, but it's funny enough, she said, I think this will be taught in schools in 20 years time. Just showing us how the world was like, what the world was like. So this is her recommendation of a book you have not heard of. It's got a great name as well. So there's a Elizabeth George. What Came Before He Shot Her.
- [35:09]
B
Oh, okay.
- [35:10]
A
What Came Before He Shot her by Elizabeth George. It's a Linley novel, but it's. Yeah, it's. It's about class. It's about all sorts of different things. But that's her. That's her lock of the week. That's Brenda's lock of the week. What Came Before He Soto by Elizabeth George.
- [35:25]
B
That's. We should. You should interview her on your series.
- [35:29]
A
She would be unbearable. Honestly, I couldn't do it. I could not do it. There's only so much power you can give Brenda.
- [35:39]
B
You've given her just enough with that, have you? Just.
- [35:42]
A
She is. You know what? She's absolutely good as gold up to a certain level. There would come a point where I think she'd become uncontrollable. That's what I think about my mum. And I listen, I love her, but, you know, you have to know your family, right? That's what I think about her.
- [35:58]
B
I now so want it to happen even more than I did two minutes ago.
- [36:01]
A
She needs to be contained.
- [36:03]
B
Why?
- [36:03]
A
That's all I think.
- [36:04]
B
I don't want her to be contained.
- [36:05]
A
No, I know you don't want her to be contained.
- [36:07]
B
I tell you what, it's different. It's different.
- [36:08]
A
I'll tell you what we'll do. I will interview her for bookworms. If I can interview any member of your family.
- [36:15]
B
Who I choose mommy on your podcast. I don't know. I don't know. I'd like to. Oh yeah, you're right. It's tricky, isn't it? Yeah. But I'd love.
- [36:26]
A
So I tell you mommy to get the best people in the world. The best people in the world are other people's minds.
- [36:30]
B
Yeah, quite right. Let's agree on that.
- [36:33]
A
Always delightful.
- [36:34]
B
And with that, Richard.
- [36:36]
A
Yeah. Thank you, Brenda.
- [36:38]
B
Thank you so much. Brenda. I would like to hear more from you. Tomorrow we will be doing for our members. Top gun is 40 years old. Amazed we've managed to get this down into anything less than a 10 part series. But okay if you want to join for ad free listening and so on it and these bonus episodes it's thereesticentertainment.com but otherwise.
- [37:00]
A
See you next Tuesday.
- [37:00]
B
See you next Tuesday.