EP.233 - MARINA HYDE

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin.

Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening.

I took my microphone and found some human folk.

Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke.

My name is Ad Buxton, I'm a man.

I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

Hey, how you doing, podcats?

This is Adam Buxton here, taking a walk with my best dog friend, Rosie.

How are you doing, Rosie?

Cold.

Well, yes, it is cold.

Two degrees Celsius, as I speak.

But the sun's out, the sky is blue, the light is very clear and beautiful.

I'm glad that Rosie's come along.

I don't know if she's that excited to be here.

I think being curled up by the fire in the office of my wife was probably a bit nicer.

But we'll get back there soon.

Don't worry, Rose.

We've got to get out and get some exercise, though.

Lunch on some of that delicious vitamin D.

How are you doing, podcats?

I hope things are not too bad for you wherever you are.

I'm doing all right.

Try not to get too stressed on the Christmas ramp.

You know how it is.

Still working on my book.

Not quite finished.

But all in all, can't complain.

So let me tell you a bit about podcast number 233.

This one features a rambling conversation with English journalist and screenwriter Marina Hyde.

She's been a columnist at the Guardian newspaper since the year 2000.

And she still produces three articles each week for the paper's comments section where she writes about current affairs, celebrities and sports.

Her sports writing has earned her her numerous prestigious awards, including the Sports Journalist of the Year award at the British Sports Journalism Awards in 2020.

She was the first woman

ever to win in that category.

Her first book, Celebrity, How Entertainers Took Over the World and Why We Need an Exit Strategy, was published in 2009.

And in 2022, a compilation of Marina's best Guardian columns was published under the title, What Just Happened.

Wow, look at this, some big ice chunks here.

Oh, glassy.

Whoa,

nice ice foley.

In 2023, Marina and media behemoth Richard Osman started hosting The Rest is Entertainment, another podcast from Gary Lineker's company Goal Hanger, that has in recent years cornered the market for enjoyably informed waffle with other The Rest Is podcasts, including The Rest Is Politics and The Rest Is History, of course.

Marina was also on the writing team of the HBO series The Franchise.

We can see it on now and Sky TV, I think.

and it follows the crew of an unloved franchise movie fighting for their place in a savage and unruly cinematic universe.

Haven't seen it yet.

Looking forward to checking it out.

My conversation with Marina was recorded face-to-face in London back in early April of this year, 2024.

And we talked about the state of modern TV and movies.

We talked about why multiple versions of the same stories keep getting told.

When I saw Marina, I had just watched Scoop on Netflix, billed as an insider account of how the women of Newsnight secured Prince Andrew's infamous 2019 interview about his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

And Scoop focused on the personalities of Newsnight guest producer Sam McAllister, played by Billy Piper, and presenter Emily Maitless, played by Gillian Anderson, who, of course, played Mrs.

Thatcher in the Crown very effectively a couple of years back.

A few months ago, as I speak, in September, another dramatization of the Prince Andrew interview story came out on Amazon Prime this time.

That one was called A Very Royal Scandal.

And that one was more from the point of view of Emily Maitlis, that time played by Ruth Wilson.

Here's Ruth Wilson's Emily Maitlis.

Your Royal Highness,

we've come to Buckingham Palace in highly unusual circumstances.

That's Ruth Wilson.

She really throws herself into it.

Quite accurate, though, I thought.

Here it is the maitless of Gillian Anderson.

Your Royal Highness,

we've come to Buckingham Palace in

highly unusual circumstances.

Maybe a bit more drama there from Gillian.

Anyway, I didn't only talk to Marina about Emily Maitlis dramas.

Marina also told me why having children turned out to be good for her career, how much of an alpha Richard Osman really is, and why I need to revive my brilliant idea for a low-budget sci-fi film.

Back at the end with more uplifting movie recommendations from Friends of the Podcast, but right now with Marina Hyde, here we go.

Have you heard the podcast before?

Yes, I've heard the podcast.

So it's

huge amount.

I love the podcast.

Oh, that's very I'm most honoured to be on the podcast.

Let me just say that, Frank, because I'd probably say that

the podcast.

I was delighted when you said that you would.

I couldn't believe I was being asked.

It was so grand.

I was by far the most exciting place I've ever appeared.

Let me assure you of that.

But I do appear on places like the Guardian comment pages.

So

it's not maybe.

Well, I hope this will be less stressful than the Guardian comment pages.

Yeah, I mean, I find it quite low-maintenance, my work with the Guardian Comment pages.

Oh, you do?

But yes, because I just send it in and there it goes.

But, you know.

Well, I wanted to start by asking you like what are your stress levels like you seem to be at a point in your career where you're incredibly busy is this like Pete Marina

I'm sure many people would hope that it's Pete Marina I don't know I am quite busy at this exact period that we're talking I must say because I have my normal guardian work and I'm also doing a podcast but I'm also filming a TV show that I write on so it is a particularly busy time at this moment, but it will become less busy, hopefully, soon.

Although I have other things that I think I better get started on when it becomes less busy, but yes.

Whoa.

That was a ramble.

No, that's good.

Sorry.

Don't worry.

This is a very informal podcast, Marina.

We accommodate any

sidebars, incidental action.

Marina is frantically texting like a character

from a Netflix drama about a busy journalist who is doing a podcast.

No, okay.

Sorry, I I was just liaising with The Guardian.

Comment desk on my headline for my comment.

I could hardly call something that's incredibly facetious about The Rock.

Not a

lump of mineral, but the former pro-the legend, the former pro wrestler.

Is he still the future president?

Who knows?

He is not still the world's number one paid actor, is he?

He goes up and down, but I think, I have to say, I think that time has slightly, I think that moment has passed.

I listened to you and Richard the other day discussing who were the top paid actors, and I've forgotten who it was at number one.

Well, hang on, let me think who is at number one.

It was someone unexpectedly going back.

It's Adam Sandler, and he barely gets the actual release.

Yeah, it's interesting.

People who are in franchises, although interestingly, not particularly Marvel franchises, things like that, get...

But if you've got a returning thing, and basically, if you're a darling of the streamers, it's slightly shifted from theatres to streaming because Adam Sandler is number one.

First of all, have you seen the new Adam Sandler, one of his art house efforts?

Yeah, Spaceman.

No, I haven't.

I feel I've seen quite a lot of sad men in space, but look, I've always got room for another.

And when I become slightly less busy, yeah, I'm going to be a completist on sad men in space.

But I have seen quite a few sad men in space.

Which are the other sad men in space?

Well, Matt Damon's been sad in space, hasn't he?

He was resourceful, though.

That was inspiring.

He inspired you'd be sad if you got marooned on mars and everything blew up

adam might be gutted yeah but yeah no i think there's there's a sort of general genre and uh we must see it and i will see it i will see adam sander doing this because sad men in space i didn't realize it but it might be my favorite genre yeah i think it well it speaks to the times in some weird way i'm not quite sure what way but you perhaps you've got a better idea it speaks to the times i think it speaks to something peculiarly male as well and if i was being down on myself and my guys i would say that it is because i i tried to write a thing years ago that was a lonely man in space thing oh did you yeah and it in my mind it was about the experience of being a parent of young children and feeling that i wasn't really up to the job and feeling that I just wanted to go backwards.

I just wanted to have the romance of the sci-fi world.

I wanted to be in space.

I wanted to be doing a job in space, looking after my family on Earth, without actually having to be with my family.

You know what I mean?

Is this making any sense?

Yeah, no, it really is.

I mean, I now want you to revive your Sad Man in Space thing.

Or you could take it on as a comedy term.

Maybe you could try and clash it with some other genre.

I've always felt like, you know, if you clashed a number of the male genres, I feel the happy-go-lucky chance, the golf movie,

if only that could be melded with the Sad Men in Space genre, you could have perhaps the most powerful entertainment product happy Gilmore in space, zero-g golf with everything just floating around, the fools floating around.

Tinker, you know, all of,

I've got a weakness for those.

Tinker.

Tinker.

That's Kevin.

Have you not seen Carpov?

That's Cosner.

That's a classic Cosner.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, that sort of sense of, yeah, the underdog thought that that sort of underdog spaceman, something could be made to work there.

Yeah, because, you know, the quintessential lonely sad man in space was Zain Vidbowie and Space Oddity was all about

tell you what else has been sad in space.

Gillian Murphy's been sad in space.

Oh yeah, what was that one?

That was called Sunshine.

That was Danny Boyle.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, he was sad as I mean in a way he was almost ecstatically sad again.

Yeah, but he was a bit crazy in space.

That's a slightly different going crazy in space doesn't really count.

I think he plays tricks on the mind.

I think we'd all go crazy in space.

Sure.

But I liked a film called Dark Star.

Oh, yeah.

Directed by John Carpenter when he was still a little bit more.

Yeah, I love John Carpenter.

Yeah.

I have not seen that in many, many years.

I love John Carpenter, so I will like it.

It's very good.

Have you seen?

Now, you have to tell me at some point I'm going to step on Richard Osmond's toes, and there will be things that I want to talk to you about that you have earmarked for the podcast.

We never earmarked anything till about, you know, no, we haven't earmarked anything, so I'm sure there won't be.

Okay.

Ask me.

What about Scoop?

Have you seen Scoop?

Yes, I have seen Scoop.

It's interesting, this, isn't it?

To me, it epitomizes

that thing that you have nowadays where you see the real life thing, and then there's a book about it, then there's a documentary about it, then there's a rival documentary about it, and then eventually they make a Netflix adaptation of it.

In this case, there's going to be two versions of that interview.

So we should explain.

We should say this is one of them is written by Sam McAllister, who was the booker at Newsnight, who sort of did a lot to get that interview.

And the other, but I don't think emily mate which emily mitis obviously did the interview i think emily maitlis will be more

more of a story of her kind of career she wrote a really good book called their head so i think it may not be specifically duelling about the same thing they always call dueling documentaries aren't they in the sort of tabloid parlance of our times but i don't think they'll be about the same exactly the same i did sort of feel i was detecting a slight backlash this past week since it's been out what maybe people are just starting to find

that we're living so close to these events that are then being

had the books and then the and then them being dramatized that I wonder whether people are starting to think whether or not they can entirely support the weight of what is being put on them constantly to have events that we've almost just seen and which were pretty entertaining/slash eye-popping at the time.

I liked the scene in Scoop with Prince Andrew getting annoyed with the maid for putting one of his toys in the wrong place on the bed.

I mean, and I said to my wife, Do I was like, come on, did that happen?

And she said, Probably he really cares about his stuffed toys.

That was my wife's verdict.

I mean,

you think quite possibly, quite possibly.

He's told off the maid, and he says he gets really shirty.

I think he's a very shirty man and a very infantilized man.

I mean, it's not a sort of

the trouble is that all along, you know, these people, people tell the royal family that, and it's really quite hard not to think that you're an absolute genius.

When he was a trade envoy, trade envoy, I'm just, which is, I think, a job just invented to excuse the fact he was basically being flown around various golf courses on military helicopters.

And I think he thought he did really, really well for the country and that he was like a really just a massive asset of self-power.

The queen, rest her soul.

She thought he was the best.

Yes, well, yes,

yes.

But do you know Emily Maitlis yourself?

I do.

She's absolutely terrific.

And do you know what she thinks of Scoop?

Does she think?

I haven't asked her.

I was actually going to be in touch with her this weekend as to what she thought of it.

Right.

What did you think of the portrayal of her in that thing?

Did you think that was realistic?

She's not very.

You know, no disrespect to Gillian Anderson, who is, you know, a fine actress, but I don't think of Emily Maitlis as sort of wintry and,

you know, Thatcher-like.

Yeah, yeah, she was Thatcher-like.

And it's hard to shed once you've played Thatcher.

You sort of need to go into a decompression chamber for about six months and like not be thatcher.

And obviously, I think from the crown, you know, you're still carrying quite a lot of thatch with you.

You just sort of need to dethatch.

And no one's really successful.

You know, it happened to Patricia Hodge.

It happened to a lot of people.

You know, Meryl, I mean, it can happen to the best of us.

You've got to dethatch.

And I'm not sure whether

anyone has totally successfully worked out the formula.

The quick antidote.

She just, it was, it was such thick thatch as well when she did it in the crown.

Oh, Margaret.

I know.

She actually was doing late-stage thatch, strangely, in a, in a, in a kind of mid-stage thatch, but

again, it's not a documentary.

Well, it does have that same sort of feel about it, doesn't it, Scoop?

Um, that crowning.

Well,

I suppose we're doing a lot of, as I say, there's a sort of trend, isn't there?

We're doing a lot of events that we've either all lived through or can, even closer, can remember very quite well now.

So, and sometimes the events have happened really very, very recently.

So, did you watch the final series of the Crown?

Speaking of which?

I mean, I feel alone with my views on the crown.

I find it absolutely hysterical.

I mean, I can't, sorry,

I find it a huge hoot.

Great to see Princess Die's Ghost get a runner.

She was there.

I haven't seen it.

I watched the first two.

I mean, you can't believe it's happening.

It's like,

really saying, like,

Prince Charles, that he looked really good looking in the mortuary when he was identifying her body.

I thought, I can't.

Is this.

Is this prestige TV?

I mean, I love it.

What was that scene?

Her ghost

says to Prince Charles that he looked really sort of good in the mortuary, I think, when he was identifying.

I don't know why I'm laughing.

I mean, I can't.

I mean, they have made it, in my view, slightly humorous by.

Yeah.

Yeah, the appearance of Princess Di's ghost was to me very special.

Wow.

So who would play you?

Nobody would play me.

In the Hyde production.

At some point,

if you carry on on your current trajectory, you carry on getting more and more successful.

At some point, you will implode.

You'll do it spectacularly.

And then they'll do the drama.

Yeah.

And then he's going to play you.

Well, I guess it depends what I get cancelled for, doesn't it?

What's the sort of...

Can you get decancelled and sort of put back into the bloodstream quite quickly these days?

Because there's a lot of the guys now where I'm like, did he, was there a, and then you look it up and like, no, I mean, they're back on the circuit.

There was some stuff.

It didn't really go anywhere.

Really?

I don't get that impression.

There's always a taint thereafter, isn't there?

There's always going to be people who go, no, no, you stink.

I think to get cancelled, you have to, at a certain point in your life, get kind of radicalised by something.

Don't you get radicalized by yourself and your sense of your your own importance?

I think that's probably

what connects most of them.

Yes.

Oh, I see on causes you can.

Oh, I mean the sexual cancelling.

Yeah, well, there's less.

Who's of course been radicalised by their sense of self, haven't they?

Yeah, there's the Weinstein-style cancellations where you're a monster.

Yeah.

And then I'm thinking lower down,

you get radicalised, you get...

Yeah, maybe those can maybe you can get cancelled on those things.

You start making pronouncements.

You can probably do that in an afternoon.

I could definitely carve out a few months off this.

You start recommending books that you're not supposed to recommend.

Maybe haven't even read.

I think people who are supposedly cancelling people, kind of online mobs, all these sorts of things in lots of ways, I think those people have so little power in the economic system in which they're required to live, but not really have given any stake in when until they're really quite old, if at all.

I think there's a whole generation of people who have just been sort of shut out of capitalism and are still expected to sort of love it.

Whereas, someone like Thatcher understood that if you want people to support capitalism, it's probably better if they have a stake in it.

Now, wherever you stand on people being able to buy their own house or whatever it is, you can't deny that a lot of young people these days would also like that thing.

And I think if you're just totally shut out of capitalism and you have no economic power at all,

then what little power you have, you might exercise it in any way you can.

It's a sort of cry of rage, isn't it?

Really?

It's a sort of form of like very, very, very, very mild terrorism, which is also pretty sort of, I don't know, illiberal and puritanical and all those sort of funny things.

And I'm not saying that calling out people for whatever their perceived bad behavior is is the same as terrorism, literally, but it is a, there's a, there's a sort of metaphorical commonality there.

And I do think that if people have no stake in the market that dominates everything, then they are going to try and lash out in one way or another.

Yeah, because as well as the things that they have that people have every right to get indignant about are a whole bunch of other much more minor infractions.

I mean how do you feel about YouTube?

How much time do you spend on YouTube?

Because that seems to be driven more and more by tapping into the worst impulses of all of us really.

What the algorithm and the way it pushes you and the desire to see people fail, the desire to see people judged and humbled and humiliated one way or another, and a weird strain of, I mean, it might just be the way my algorithm is serving me up stuff, yeah.

But a weird strain of

amateur sleuths, like people doing investigations on celebrities.

I think it's a lot of TikTok as well.

But yeah,

there's a lot of, I mean, I think something very odd about, you know, that tragic case last year of that woman who fell into the river, the Labulle, and the fact that the police had to sort of issue orders to clear the village because there were so many people who've gone up with their cameras and thinking they're doing an investigation.

That absolutely blows my mind.

Something really toxic has happened, and they have no sense of humanity or what people might actually want to happen when a member of their family is missing in that absolutely horrific way.

Yeah, that really worries me.

That sense of,

I suppose, it's like we talk about that thing where we say about the sense of an online mob, you know, no snowflake, that saying no snowflake thinks it's part of an avalanche.

Oh, yeah.

But really,

it's funny that people have sort of lost the ability and they sort of disconnected and they can't see that they're part of a bad thing and that doing that is bad.

Lots of investigative journalists and journalists covering crimes in the past have made plenty of mistakes.

And there'd be many people who would say that they didn't behave any better, but there were definitely fewer of them, which helps.

Yeah, because I suppose they feel that they're doing something kind of noble, and in their minds, they're sort of like crusading journalists.

They're going out and

I just think they're doing it for clicks and clout, actually.

I think people, what people will do for clicks,

I, you know, you see people leave up, I don't know, tweets or whatever posts that are inaccurate, and they've had someone explain to them it's inaccurate, but they're probably thinking, yeah, but that's the only time I've ever had like 48,000 views on my thing so yeah yeah gonna leave it up yeah I don't watch that I mean I watch I am forever mining for old clips of this and that and documentaries and things on YouTube I mainly watch the YouTube my children watch so I watch a lot of things like MrBeast and I think those people are sort of incredible and the things they do

are quite amazing really and that type of creator I mean for a long time I thought oh yeah but the production values are so rubbish but

they're not really now, are they?

The things that Mr.

Beast does are so unbelievably enormous and cost so much money.

They cost more than a sort of network TV show, I imagine.

Yeah.

And I think those sort of people are interesting.

So those types of creators, but it's funny how far the phrase creator goes.

There's a lot of people who are called creators who I would not describe as particularly creative.

I wanted to give you, Marina, a practical tip, which seems obvious, but didn't occur to me until a week ago, which was to download a plug-in from the Chrome store.

I use Google Chrome.

Other browsers are available, but it enables you to block the YouTube sidebar.

Why didn't I do that?

We both know that I am going to have to get a child to do this for me.

I'm essentially someone who types on a spinning journey.

It's not really like the tech revolution didn't happen.

It's like the industrial one didn't happen for me.

It's really easy.

It's literally like, do you use Google?

I get that a lot.

It's really easy.

And then it's like, can one of you come downstairs and do this for me, please?

Well, the kids could definitely do that.

Yeah, it's great.

I mean, I have three technicians.

May I ask what browser you favor?

Chrome.

Yeah, there you go.

So this would work.

I'll send you the link.

I think that, okay, brilliant.

If you send me the link,

oh, I can click on something, Adam.

Yeah.

I'm pretty sure I can take care of that.

Is this something that you would use, or do you like to be available to everything that the algorithm throws?

Honestly, I'm not on it that often because I'm mostly going in for something specific.

So I'm trying to find a particular

documentary.

And then you don't find yourself getting distracted by it.

Generally not.

Oh my god, this is why you're successful.

No,

no, I can get distracted by other stuff.

I'm trying to think what the other things are, but I try generally

at the moment, I mean, in general, I'm on really tight time schedules for the things I'm doing, so I try not to get distracted.

But actually, you know, funnily enough, having children was the biggest anything good I've ever done, I've done after I've had children.

And I think the reason for that is that, first of all, I became incredibly efficient at working and I thought I, and I really wanted to like pick them up from things and be, you know, and just be

very present as much as I could be.

And because I had the sort of job that I could technically sort of make that happen, I

became incredibly efficient.

Wow.

And I didn't even have my first child until I was 36.

So

it really made me very efficient.

That's impressive.

And funnily enough, I met a, I think that Natalie Massaner who used to started Neta Porte, she used to really like to hire pregnant women.

And I met somebody else, a TV producer, who said, oh, no, I only hire pregnant women.

They're really efficient.

And they're like really, you know, and then once they've had the child, then they really want to come back to work, but they're really, really efficient with their time.

And they're just very, very good at getting things done.

So are you shaming women who are overwhelmed by having children and who don't have the children?

God, no.

You will never find me shame a mother.

No way.

No way.

I'm not at all.

I'm just saying that it's something that people don't often hear because I suppose when I was younger, you hear an awful lot of people saying, oh, right, well, when you have children,

you can't do your job, you can't do all of these things.

I'm just putting an alternative view, my view, that actually

has been helpful to me professionally, which is really weird.

I just became a much more efficient writer and a much quicker writer.

That's very nice to hear.

It is one of the things that used to bug me.

I'm not personally a woman.

I haven't given birth.

What?

I only go on women's podcasts.

I don't understand.

No, I am.

Sorry.

Have I been misled?

I am entirely a cis male cis het fuck boy.

Right, yeah, okay, of course, yeah.

Says that on the doorbell, actually.

Yeah.

But, you know, I am ashamed to say that I felt beleaguered and had that sense of, you know, the pram in the hallway.

Who was it that said that?

Cyril Connolly or something like that.

Yeah.

Said, you're never going to get anything done if you got a feeling he was a complete fucker.

But yeah, hence sad man in space.

Sad man in space, exactly.

It was all.

I bet he'd be so unproductive, sad man in space.

Like he would maybe grow some seedlings.

That's why he's in space.

Yeah.

Because he feels like he's doing a job, but he's not.

He's just drifting around feeling sorry for himself, feeling all disconnected, and listening to a lot of radiohead.

Yeah.

And

but he's not writing radiohead songs.

I don't think he's creating.

I just don't think he's creating.

Well, in my idea, the guy was like an intergalactic cable guy.

So he's flying around and he's hooking people up with internet and satellite services, like the

space version thereof.

So he will, yeah, just fly around.

People will phone him up, they'll see that he's in their sector, and then he goes up, he connects them to all the streaming services they need on their spaceship, then he buggers off.

So, you know, he's connecting people, but it's in that way that the internet connects people while simultaneously isolating them, atomizing them, yeah.

Making them lonelier.

I mean, this is as I'm describing it to you, I'm thinking, better get that dust down that side.

Why didn't I finish that off?

I like it.

I really like it.

Scooped up a lot of awards for that one.

Yeah.

And it would be funny.

It wouldn't be all sad.

No, no, I get that.

It's obviously like, I know that you would leaven that with comedy.

Yes, I do.

That would be funny.

Get it back out.

But it would be poignant as fuck.

Yeah, of course.

I don't even want to think of the last episode.

People just going, wow, what did I just watch online?

There would be pushback, obviously.

People would go, why do we need to see another cishet fuckboy moaning about how lonely he is?

A poor me, I'm out in space not doing my duty to my family.

But

the Adam Sandler fans would like it.

And as we've established, there's quite a lot of them.

Exactly.

Biscuits.

I am in love with you.

I'll dip you in my tea.

But pull you out

I've written too much down.

Sometimes I'm underprepared.

With you, there was so much I wanted to waffle with you about because I thought, ah, you know what?

I bet Marina would have an opinion on this.

By the way, opinions for her.

Yeah, no, I've got a lot of opinions.

I honestly don't think I hold them.

If a column I would write at 10 in the morning might be completely different by supper, really.

They're passing through my transom, the opinions, and then moving along.

I've had some this morning.

What am I having an opinion on now?

Here's what I've written.

Why is watching films so much less rewarding than it used to be?

Am I just getting old?

That's part of it.

Yes, tastes have moved on without me, but I also blame postmodernism I've written here.

Everyone wants to deconstruct.

Everyone wants to be meta.

The art of a straightforward thriller, which personally in the 90s was my favourite genre.

something that hits satisfying beats and is just tight and solid, that seems to have totally gone.

And from listening to the film, I mean, thrillers have become

10-part thrillers, 10-1Rs.

And so

that sort of tight 1R50 of a thriller,

you don't see that really theatrically, do you, anymore in terms of cinemas?

I mean, what are some good examples of that genre?

Like films like that that really worked and were just fun and

rollicked along i mean i quite like even though it's not very short i liked things like um the firm oh yeah tom cruise yes air force one patriot games i do the old ford ones i'm talking about harrison obviously not john sure what else um i mean you know those kind of yeah thrillers of those type even the fugitive has done a couple uh yeah the oh the fugitive again ford yeah uh terrific yeah jagged edge Yeah.

Oh yes.

Yeah.

Jagged Edge is good.

Is it just an economic thing that they don't get made anymore every day?

Well it's interesting.

I mean I suppose that that kind of mid-budget movie, as we say mid-budget, you know, but a movie between sort of 60 and 100 million in today's money, it's pretty hard to get made.

And it's sort of gone away that it's the money's been in television and people have gone there and also people have liked being told that they can take a long time to tell a story.

But the economics of that, you know, getting out to people out to cinema, cinema is in a lot of trouble, as your listeners will already know, but and it's in even more trouble than it was in last year.

I thought the lots of the I thought Barbie saved cinema.

Well, no, it didn't, I'm afraid.

It was a deceptive year last year.

And obviously, a lot of people had seen two, at least two of the movies on that 10-movie best picture list.

So they'd seen Barbie and they'd seen Oppenheimer.

And that was, that's actually quite unusual because really what happens is that the movies that people go to the cinema to see have been over over the last few years superhero franchises, which with the one weird exception of Black Panther, which was never going to win Best Picture, but was nominated for it in a 10-10 movie list.

So there's been a big disconnect between what people will go and watch.

But honestly, you know, The Godfather now would be a niche film and very few people would see it.

They would not go out and see it.

The tastes have changed.

I don't think for the better.

And I'm kind of with someone like Martin Sulcesi or Coppola who say, you know, I don't recognise these superhero movies as cinema at all.

I mean, they're more like a thrill ride.

They're a huge drag in terms of length.

Because I'm working on a show that's to do with a malfunctioning superhero franchise movie, I have watched all the superhero franchise movies, and many of them are like three and a quarter hours.

It's an absolute joke.

And, you know, it's just...

You're just, they're just fighting over an energy source for three and a half hours and then doing some really bad quips.

And it's really not apocalypse now no it's not but the fans get very upset when you say that because fuckham it's such fuck really grow up didn't someone like your movie about you know the grown-ups in in their tights who saved the world but but don't have sex it's a very densely tell me about this woven intricate you know the narrative oh yeah the easter eggs yeah tell me about it

themes but you know let me tell you what the what's the big missing theme okay let me tell you something in this movie there is no romanticism.

There is no love.

There's like very, very few.

There's no instances of sex.

I think really early in one of the Iron Man, you kind of are meant to think that Tony Stark has maybe just had sex.

And then in the Eternals, like really right down the other end of the kind of when they're getting like Chloe Zhao to come in on off her Oscar and

direct a Marvel movie.

The one guy who has sex in that,

yeah.

I mean, and it is bad.

The one guy who has sex in that has to like be immediately fired into the sun about 15 minutes later.

These are sexless, aromantic universes.

And funnily enough, I was talking to Adam Curtis about

a while ago about this sort of thing.

And at the time, he was looking into cosplay a bit.

And he said,

cosplay really took off in Japan after the Japanese financial crisis,

which was obviously in early, very early 90s, 1990.

And it was a sort of sense of a retreat from the real world.

And institutions at the WC failed, but it was allied with, and that people are dressing up as kind of

bland and whatever, but it was very simple.

It was manaque and good and evil, and allied to a huge aromanticism, an asexual, you know, a sexlessness.

And that's what I find really weird in those, in all superhero franchise movies, really, is that no one ever does anything.

You've removed one of the main reasons people do things in movies, which is for love or lust or whatever.

They don't, so they've kind of just got revenge.

They've got, they don't do things for money because they all seem to have, you know, money is not a motivation in these movies.

So money, revenge, and sex.

They've only got one left.

They've got revenge, basically.

And they'll sit there and Kevin Feigu, who runs Marvel, will tell you, oh, you know, we've got all the genres.

We've got a legal drama with She-Hulk.

We've got...

No, no, no, you've got superhero genre, okay?

You have made one of your superheroes a lawyer.

That's fine, but you haven't got a legal drama, okay?

You've got a superhero show.

And it's actually incredibly flattening and deadening.

And the idea that you can tell all of the stories through these same kind of slightly weird prism of movies that to some extent, like grown-ups, what are you doing?

It's fun.

I listen, I love a lot of silly things, and I love action movies, and I love all of this other stuff.

But the idea that this genre has sort of eaten cinema, and now they've killed cinema, and now that everyone's a bit worried because there's a sort of fatigue with that genre, and cinemas are collapsing and becoming like climbing walls and soft play areas, and no one quite knows what's going to fill them.

And there's no chance, you think, that it'll swing back, that there will be a response against all that, and people will start investing in films that are led more by good old emotions listen i i really loved what court jeffson said he wrote the screenplay for um american fiction and directed it and i really like what he said in his speech which was you know it's a risk making a 200 million dollar movie is it or more is a risk why don't you make 10 movies for 20 million or 20 movies for 10 million dollars because i doubt his movie costs very much to make and maybe we can get something going again but it seems to me very limiting that that that has been our whole culture, our cinematic culture, and that other things have found it very difficult to get in around the edge of that.

I hope horror does well still.

Horror really does well theatrically still, and people will go and watch it, and young people will go and watch it.

and they make them for very little money and that's kind of exciting to me.

So yeah, it's not dead, but you've really got to look after any shoots that there are.

Yes.

Yes, please.

Yep.

Yes.

I read a Vogue interview with you from 2022.

Oh my god, I did a Vogue interview when my book came out.

Yeah.

And I was dressed in clothes.

Yes, you were.

You were styled.

And I went to a photo shoot.

It was absolutely hilarious.

And I was like, these earrings are so nice.

Where are they from?

And they were like, oh, right.

And I said, because I was thinking they'd be about like 100 quid or something, like expensive, but like maybe if my book did well, I'd treat myself.

And then there was this like guy, they were in a sort of locked away.

I was like, oh, I see.

They're like actual diamonds.

I thought they were quite sparkly.

They took them off and took them away.

Was this in the US?

No, it was here in London.

Oh, right, okay.

In London.

Not too far from here somewhere.

I can't quite remember.

Anyway, yes, I was in a...

I was in a Vogue interview.

You looked good.

I mean, you know, as I can say, it just took like 450 people to do that to me yeah

well i mean there are a lot of people there in this interview with the journalist olivia marks she was called you are quoted as saying you've heard of a face for radio this is an accent for print

and uh yes i do think yes and now i'm doing a podcast which is so sort of i've never did

yes i do think i think they're just an option of stone rangers on the television aren't there

but aren't there i mean i do you know what i mean i just and I also think I'm a terrible broadcaster, really, and I'm not really, it's not really my thing.

But funnily enough, I have really enjoyed it.

I did, I said yes to doing a podcast because I felt not your podcast, but to doing the one I do, which was, I said yes because I thought when I made a transition to also doing screenwriting, I was really.

When did that happen, by the way?

God, I'm trying to remember now, like a few years ago.

And I've, what I found when I was doing it was I was much more busy for obvious reasons, but that in a weird way, it made me feel younger because I was scared again.

And I really enjoyed that feeling of like, I don't know what I'm doing.

I think I'm potentially extremely bad at this.

And I'm like scared the whole time.

And there was something about that that I'm not saying that, you know, oh, I don't, I never feel that in journalism because, of course, you know, there's millions of times you think, oh, I don't know what to do, you know.

But having said that, I've just done it a lot longer.

And so I knew what I was doing.

And so doing something that was sort of disruptive in that way, I thought found really sort of energizing and great and so I was looking for something again to think I'll always try a new thing now again that's another thing I felt since having children sorry I'm really rambling now but another thing I felt since having children is that it made me much more of a professional risk taker because I suppose you suddenly think oh I see you're by far the most important thing in my life so I mean what I do this thing it goes wrong I mean these are not important things in life so it doesn't matter So, I became someone who was more willing to think, yeah, I mean, this will probably be a disaster, but so what?

It's not, it's very far from the most important thing in life.

And I suppose that has always been the case, and I've never really taken any of my jobs particularly seriously at all, and I still definitely don't.

I just can't take any of it seriously.

But nonetheless, so I was looking to do a thing, and that's why I did the podcast really, because I thought, I don't know what this will be like.

It will not be like doing the kinds of broadcasts that I'd done before, which I didn't like at all and like actively refused to do.

I never, I had a thing written on my journalist contacts at the BBC saying I don't do any television or radio because I just I don't really like punditry.

Did you have bad experiences doing that?

No, first of all I think it takes quite a long time.

You know you've got to go there, you've got to wait and do it all and

and also it's punditry and I didn't really enjoy

either I especially didn't enjoy promoting something I'd done like my book or things like that but I did it because it would be a bit rude to say to the publishers, yeah, thanks for printing this.

I'm not actually going to do any publicity for it, it, but you know, please make sure it sells well.

So I thought, no, obviously I'm going to do it.

I'm going to bite, you know, bite back my fears and feeling of like, oh, I don't like doing this.

But I thought, oh, I'll do a podcast because I had a feeling it might be a little bit like writing newspaper columns, but just talking them out loud.

And so it has proved.

And I have really, really enjoyed it.

But a huge part of that is that I absolutely love talking to Richard Osman for however long each week.

And I find him really interesting.

And I think the things he's done are interesting.

And I will enjoy, you know, it will be a really nice kind of date every Monday morning.

How much do you prepare for that show?

Because it sounds like a lot of work goes into it.

It's an area that I have spent a huge amount of time very interested in in my life.

And so I sort of know all those things.

But it's a bit like writing newspaper columns.

What you're doing is that you're, in fact, it's very like writing newspaper columns.

You are always preparing.

You are reading all the week and you're reading all the time in general and you're reading in that area.

So when the time comes to talk about it, ideally you would be, I mean, I'm using sarcastic air quotes, quite well read on that particular issue.

And so you'd be able to chat about it as if you were at a sort of slightly industry-ish.

And do you, are you good at retaining info?

I'm good at retaining mad little bits about politicians and stuff that, you know, stupid things that they've, you know, what was their ringtone or stupid, I mean, nonsense like that.

Because I started, when I first came to The Guardian, I worked on the diary column.

And it's really helpful if you're writing a colour.

And we didn't really have stories as such.

We made a big virtue of the fact we didn't have any stories.

But we had sort of returning characters who were, those are the knee labour politicians of the age.

And if you can remember sort of funny things that people said, then it really helps with that type of writing.

So I've always had that.

But in terms of anecdotes, I mean, God, you know, sitting in writers' rooms.

The showrunner of the show I'm working on, John Brown, is absolutely incredible.

He has a fore, I mean, his memory, his mind palace is like Sherlock Holmes, but for anecdotes.

And so he can remember, he can remember tiny little things that you, tiny little anecdotes that you'd seen on a documentary about some absolutely obscure thing that was now only be available on YouTube 10 years ago.

And he can remember little emotional beats in those weird documentaries about whatever it may be.

He wrote on succession, didn't he?

Yeah, yeah.

And Tony Roach, who also wrote on succession, him and I often say to each other, like, how can John remember everything?

We can't remember the thing, we can't remember anecdotes that happened yesterday.

I can retain some information, but then people remind me of a funny thing.

I think, oh, yeah, I should have probably mentioned that in the writer's journey, because that would have been quite funny.

And sometimes I remember when I get home.

Right.

And then I have to come in in the morning and say, hi, just everyone, I would like to let you know that this was relevant to our discussion yesterday.

Sorry not to have brought it up in the moment.

How did you find the transition from being a journalist, writing a column, to screenwriting?

I mean, have you, what what lessons have you learned?

Well, I'll tell you what, the difference is, I really write very quickly for my columns in some ways, and I have, as I say, but weirdly, the quicker I wrote,

it tied in with that thing about efficiency I was saying earlier, and then they did become better at a certain time.

Maybe I was just becoming efficient at that time, and what have you.

But

I really write to length and then kind of put the handbrake on at whatever it is, 1,200 words, or sometimes it's 950, and that's sort of it.

And then, obviously, with comedy writing, you are doing, and I worked on a show with Armando Yanucci, you're doing, I mean, so many drafts and so on.

Which was the show you did with Amando?

Avenue 5.

Which was set, which speaking of

sad people in space.

Sure.

Yeah, they were sad people in space.

But that was extraordinary.

You know, when you had lots of writers and he doesn't do a writer's room, though, he does it a different way.

He's got his own process.

But you are doing masses and masses of drafts again.

And you become very on.

And I suppose there's something about the columnist, isn't there, that's so sort of wanky I mean I'm against picture bylines in general but the columnist you've got your name it's quite big you're a big byline I I mean I've never been like a big fan of all of that but this is much more you're in a group your stuff is going to get rewritten loads of times you're going to rewrite some of your comedy heroes stuff and think oh my god I can't change a single word of this this is written by someone who's written all my favourite shows but in the end you do and it's much more of a team and it actually you don't feel so much oh it's my name above the door you feel it's much more of a team for the showrunner i can't speak for that because that person has got so much on their shoulders but for everyone else you feel like if there are mistakes in this we'll all catch it together and it's really nice but it's a you know it's a long-term project what i always think about journalism is it's like this is for people with no attention span or in some ways you know it's all over by the afternoon and then you know if you've done brilliantly one day you could have an absolute shocker the next day and you know get a massive legal and something go wrong with your collar whatever it is whereas on on this was the equivalent of long-term, I used to go to the pub with all my friends who'd be working on whatever business they were in.

Long-term projects, I would say, you know, not all of their stuff was finished by the end of the day and then they had to reimagine and rebuild it all up again the next day and then it was all finished again.

So it's quite a good job for the short attention span journalism, but you need to keep a longer attention span and a bigger picture thing on other types of writing.

So again, it's been good though.

It disrupts you in a way that, you know, you can do a different thing.

And then what does a typical day look like, for example?

When I think of writing for TV, I imagine someone sitting there trying to think of a story and trying to think of characters and what will the character say to the other.

You know, I mean, it is a bit like that, but it depends how it's done and how your show is organised.

And obviously, I'm working on a US show, which is why they have, for HBO, which is why they very kindly have enough money to have a writer's room for a long time.

So the production is based in the UK, yeah.

Oh, okay, right.

Because I guess the writers are based in the UK.

Well, we have two American writers.

Yeah.

And then the same way that succession, the writing was in the UK, because Jesse is from the UK and

that's also HBO.

But US television is different and they can, in many ways, afford to have these writers' rooms.

Although the writer's strike was about, you know,

erosions of those rights to writers' rooms.

They have like 20 people in a room sometimes, do they?

Yeah.

Right.

And they have, and it goes on for many months.

But they've always done that because what they really want is they want something different to what you, you know, you think of UK TV and lots of our best comedies are like two, three seasons, and that's it.

They want to get, they always had to, I think the rule was, didn't you have to get to a hundred and something episodes, maybe like a hundred and two or something?

So maybe it's a hundred

to go into syndication.

And if you didn't, then your show was going to be, so they really needed to get there.

And they also needed you to have, I don't know 25 episodes of this thing in a season or 20 episodes of this thing in a season Whereas we had were quite happy with six half hours So that's different and that is far more labor intensive But it's it's a sort of you know, it's a question of scale and scalability and how many in in your writers room currently in ours were

Seven of us and then those two a script coordinator and a writer's assistant but you're kind of all in the gang together feels like a good number.

Yeah.

Well, it's an eight episode season, so that you see, yeah, if you go bigger at any scale, and also if you do more than a half hour, that's for a half hour comedy.

If you're doing an hour, you need many more.

And is it a bit like succession in that you divvy up the episodes and you'll say, okay, Marina and so-and-so, you can be mainly in control of number four.

And is it like that?

From what I can see, anyone who has been in Jesse Armstrong's succession room strongly wishes to replicate that working experience on their own projects.

And lots of them are in charge of their own projects now and I think lots of them think that was a really functional way of working.

You talk about the scene.

No, you don't do any writing in the writer's room apart from on the walls.

So you write all this stuff down but only at the end of the writer's room will people go off to be writing drafts of their episodes.

Oh I see.

So in the writer's room it's all just hours and hours of talking and

John, our showrunner, writing on the wall.

Yeah, God, I mean, it's great.

Georgia Prochet said to me about the succession room,

who's a fantastic comedy writer, she said, oh yeah, we'd always used to get to the end of the succession room and think, Oh, gosh, you've got to go and write it now.

Yeah, yeah.

Because we've had so many months just like crying with laughter altogether for many hours a day in a room, and then suddenly thinking, Okay, right, now we have to write it.

Yes, I think I would be good at the talking part, and I would struggle a little bit with the actual writing things down.

I think the person who is marshalling it, the showrunner, I think that's really hard.

Yeah, being one of the people who's there to talk is a lot easier than being the person trying to sort of channel the discussion and manage it.

I think that's a huge, sort of constant creative burden, and obviously, you know, a lot of writing with a whiteboard pen on the walls.

So, that's a lot of writing burden.

Yeah.

You see, the thing is that I'm thinking like about the snacks.

Oh, yeah, the snacks are great, and someone gets you lunch, and it's really nice.

Do you always have the same lunch, or do you actually know different every day?

Yeah, I mean, I really, it's a cold, cold day when you have to return to your own kitchen and think, oh, right, where was lunch?

Sorry,

are we not ordering it?

Yeah.

Now, in the, you talk about Richard and your successful relationship with him, which is a joy to

listen to.

Yeah, it's so interesting.

I mean, he knows a million things.

I just, I love it.

He does know a lot of stuff and he's very confident.

I think he is a good demonstration of the value of just not being hesitant and talking as if you are absolutely sure of

how to do things, especially in the creative world.

It's such a valuable thing because the creative world and

trying to make something from nothing is so nebulous in all sorts of ways.

And to have someone like him who goes, This is how you do it.

This is what you need.

This is what you should never do, it's so seductive.

It's like, oh, yes, tell us.

Well, equally, I think what he has is, which I think is a really great thing always in life, is that

there's a dissonance between how he looks and how he might present and actually the type of person is.

So a lot of people think, oh, I really like him.

He's the sort of, you know, but he's a kind of nerdish, he's a statistician, he's on pointless, or whatever.

He's the, but actually, Richard is a total alpha.

Oh, of course.

And so there's something, I really like that in life, where there's just a slight sort of like, oh, I see you're a surprise.

Yeah.

Yeah, he's a constant surprise, which I really like.

No, the loudest aspects of his personality for me are the alpha aspects because

I do envy that level of certainty and also a kind of reliance on stats.

But you have that as well.

Am I right in thinking that you're very good at stats, but I know a few.

But you're aware of the technical stats for, for example, your Guardian column.

I think I'm right in saying that.

Yeah, no, I'm glad of that.

You stay across that stuff.

You engage.

You have to sort of engage as a journalist with comments and opinions about your work.

And has that always come easily to you?

Or Richard said to me the other day, criticism hurts when it's right.

And if I've ever, I've felt like I've really, I can't think, it sounds quite bad, I can't think of any specific criticism that's really got to me, but it wouldn't have been for quite some time, then

it's probably it will have been probably because it's right, or I felt that thing

You know, I felt it keenly because it was raw because it was they would be they were right right about what they were saying.

In general,

I have to say, I do feel still that I work to live rather than necessarily live to work, although I really like my work.

I can't really take a lot of this super seriously.

And I find it quite embarrassing.

Maybe that's an unattractive

aspect of a certain type of Britishness, but I find aspects of really giving too much of a shit quite embarrassing about work.

And there's a certain sort of,

you know, this is why American journalism I always

find it so self-regarding.

Because you see, the difference between us and American journalists is that we know we're scum, the British journalists, they actually at some level know that scum.

Whereas Americans are always involved in this kind of higher calling.

I don't think any of my work is a higher calling at all.

It's really fun to be involved with.

But

in the end,

I can't take any of it too seriously.

How about when you look at the stats, the actual numbers that show your engagement with your readers, how does that affect what you actually write?

Oh, I don't write according to what I think will be a ideally, hopefully, my instincts are not allied with like the number one story that would trend on the Guardian website because

you can't really judge it on that anyway.

I think you've just got to sort of slightly do what you feel because it is an opinion thing.

But in general, I do mind about the numbers because I think I am, I think, columnists more than anyone else I think it is a numbers game you know I've got friends who do incredibly important work and they might cover obscure foreign conflicts or whatever it is and that is far more important than any nonsense I'm saying about the rock or whoever it is today far far more important so for them it is nothing to do with a numbers game and I really like being in a media sort of ecosystem in my paper where all of that stuff is covered and it may not do the biggest numbers but it is far more important than what I'm doing but what I would say about my thing is that it matters that it does decent numbers because otherwise what are you really there for can you think of a time

after this I'm sorry I try my best can you think of a time though when because of the stats you have thought oh I won't do that again no never because I've in general I would say my stats are

all right so you're just so if I do one that people aren't necessarily I will have normally done that because sometimes I will feel like I want to cash in my chips writing facetious things about this or that and for instance on things like the post office before I know it's great now that everyone is writing about it and by the way I'm extremely a come lately person to it myself but there was a period where I liked to cover it and others didn't cover it necessarily and but this is long before the drama and things like that and so I feel like doing those things every now and then is a good use of chips as they say.

Yeah and so in that instance you would have looked at the numbers and thought okay people are engaging with this.

Fun enough those columns did well.

I did look at the numbers because I thought oh this will go right down because people don't care about this thing or they don't understand it or they see the words computer terminals and glaze over but it was a real

I tried to write it in a way that was just like from the first paragraph, hey don't go away this is actually really important.

Sometimes you have to write about those things in a way that isn't your normal voice I think in the paper because you're saying hi you're effectively saying I'm counting on my chips or those other things but can you please pay attention to this because I think it's really important yeah so that I've tried to write about this in a specific way but people were interested funny enough and they did get shared a lot it's in it's interesting there's a lot of these things if you build it they'll come and there are plenty of other scandals a bit like that you know ITV have got one coming up about the infected blood inquiry which I think you know if you go to the post office inquiry you come out of the lift you turn right for the post office and left for infected blood which is a shot yeah in a in a drama about it anyway and it's there's lots of things the loan charge scandal, there are many, many things that I want to write more about that are

on the, you know, there's kind of slightly forgotten things to some extent that when you hear about them, you genuinely can't believe they're true.

The infective blood story, if your witnesses want to Google it, I genuinely can't believe you can't believe it happened.

And it's so shocking.

Is that your phone?

Or is that mine?

Oh, it's mine.

I apologize.

Where's mine?

Oh, it's on the table.

That's my son.

Oh.

What's he going to be saying?

What are your children?

What have you got?

I've got a 19-year-old boy who was just calling me there.

Yeah.

And a 21-year-old boy, man.

Mainly boy.

And a 15-year-old daughter.

So you've got two boys in the girl.

That's all I've got.

Oh, yeah.

That's the best.

Yeah, it's a good company.

Oldest boys and youngest girls.

Yeah, yeah.

Same as yours.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

That was quite, it worked out quite well, actually, because,

well, me talking about struggling as a young parent and wishing I was in space, that changed when our daughter came along.

And suddenly, maybe just because some time had gone by and I felt a little bit more confident and calm and was no longer tortured by the pram in the corridor and all that bullshit.

Plus the fact that it was a girl, I don't know.

I mean, for a dad,

it's a peculiar kind of relationship, I suppose.

And she just transformed everything, really.

Not to say, guys.

Boys.

You know, I love you, boys.

Don't listen to this one day and think, oh, yeah, so dad didn't really give a shit about us.

We're looking right over at pictures of you, and it's absolutely lovely.

Yeah, I know what, you know, I know what you mean.

But yeah, it was, it...

It was pretty amazing.

There's something...

Well, yeah, it was totally different energy from a little girl.

And I think they might be cleverer than boys.

I don't want to

go too deep down that rabbit hole, but yeah, it was great.

It's really nice.

How lovely.

Okay, I'm aware that we have to wrap up in order that I can take one of those children to the dentist.

So you have to go and take your son to the dentist.

Yeah, it's just the brace's dentist, so it's not a hugely long appointment, but something's broken, so it needs fix.

I've got to go to the dentist tomorrow.

I haven't been for a few years, and I can't do that.

Oh, that's stressful.

It's a little bit stressful.

Pretty sure he's going to find some terrible things.

Like, dentists can diagnose serious problems as well with the rest of your body, can't they?

Because sometimes it shows up in your mouth.

Wow.

Well, you've just laid something on me there that I'm now going to be thinking about next time again.

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Hey, welcome back, podcasts.

That was Marina Hyde talking to me there back in April of this year.

And I'm very grateful to her for making the time in her ludicrously busy schedule to come and waffle with me.

So I wanted to share a few more of the messages I got back from friends of the podcast when I asked them what their go-to uplifting movies were a couple of weeks back and the other day I was worrying about this.

As you know I like to worry about almost everything

and the worry I had the other day was that throwing a load of recommendations for uplifting movies during politically turbulent times at my listeners could be seen as promoting apathy or denial.

Oh, yeah, that's exactly how I saw it, actually.

You see, that's what Rosie thought.

But I would say that times are always turbulent, aren't they?

One way or another.

And you've got to remind yourself now and again what it's all about so you can prevent a terminal slide into the slough of Despond.

What do you think about that, Douglegs?

I've done a lot of poozing the slough of Despond.

I thought you had.

Obviously watching films isn't the only way of preventing a terminal slide into the slough of Despond.

But you know it's one thing that it's relatively easy for most of us to do.

All right Buckles, that's enough overthinking.

Just share some of the suggestions.

Alright, before I share a few recommendations from Friends of the Podcast, I wanted to share a recommendation for a documentary that I found very uplifting and inspiring and it's called Crip Camp.

It came out in 2020 directed by Nicole Newham and Jim LeBrecht

and it starts in 1971 with footage shot at a place called Camp Jeaned,

a camp for teens with disabilities

that was running at the time.

And the camp was created to be this utopian environment to bring able-bodied and physically handicapped people together to give them new and different and positive experiences and the first act of this documentary Crip Camp is made up of footage that was shot in the early 70s and it's really joyous there's just some great moments that capture the personalities of the people there and getting on with each other if you've ever been to a summer camp and had a good time because I know you can easily go to a camp and have a bad time

but if you've been lucky enough to do that kind of thing, spend a few weeks

in your teens,

suddenly off the chain, hanging out with a new group of people, and you have a very intense and memorable experience.

And that's what you see these people doing in this documentary.

It's just very

nostalgic, but also very inspiring as well to see that.

environment that's been created there.

And anyway, the second half of the documentary is more about some of the people who happened to be at that camp at Camp Jeaned and

how their lives progressed from that point, especially one of the camp counsellors was called Judy Heumann, H-E-U-M-A-N-N.

She used a wheelchair after contracting polio when she was two.

And the second half of Crip Camp shows how Judy went on to become one of the world's most prominent and respected advocates for disability rights.

And that stuff is very sobering but very inspiring.

So, anyway, I recommend that as a film that will leave you, I think, ultimately feeling positive about people.

But anyway, on to a few recommendations from friends of the podcast, beginning with one from Benga Adelakan.

Benga is a member of the band Metronomy, who I love.

And you may have heard him on episode 195 with his son Ravi, who's also going to give us a recommendation.

But here's Benga hey there Adam this may not be the most uplifting choice it's something that I watched for the first time when I was eight years old this was in the 80s it's Transformers the movie the first animated Transformers cartoon and it starts with Autobot City getting completely destroyed and Optimus Prime being killed

but it's got for me kind of the most amazing soundtrack and it's like visual comfort food and it all comes good in the end and really reminds me of a very kind of happy carefree time.

Also has what I believe was Orson Welles'

last movie credit.

He did the voice of Unicron which was a planet that ate other planets.

Benger also said he liked Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind but I thought Transformers was a bit more of a deep cut.

Now here's Benger's son Ravi with a couple of films that always hit the spot for him.

Hi Adam, this is Ravi and my uplifting films are Inside Out 2 and Trolls World Tour.

Why is that?

Because I find them very funny, interesting, and they're just fun movies to watch, especially as a family.

There we go, Ravi.

Thank you so much to Ravi and Benga for their suggestions.

Now, here is friend of the podcast, Lianla Havas, super talented singer-songwriter who was a guest on episode two

back in

1925.

No, back in 2015.

She told me about working with Prince and she played an amazing version of her song Grow.

And right now, she is out in Brazil on tour.

But she left me a short voice message to say that, as well as sideways and spirited away, there's one film that always makes her feel better about the world.

The first one that I thought of, like the actual,

as soon as I was was asked this question by you, Adam.

The first one I thought is

Sister Act 2.

I

stopped myself from watching it a lot because it makes me cry,

but that speaks to me like directly as a

vocalist.

And what a vocalist.

She is.

Thank you, Leanne, very much.

You know what?

I've never seen Sister Act 2.

Or maybe even Sister Act 1.

So it's time i sorted that out i'll add it to the list now finally here is friend of the podcast a brilliant musician who appeared on podcast number 194 who has been described by some as a british captain beef heart i don't know how pleased he would be with that comparison but anyway when i asked richard for his uplifting movie recommendations he recorded a voice message late one night after his partner and frequent musical collaborator Sally Pilkington had gone up to bed and Richard was downstairs

keeping his voice down on the sofa curled up with his cat trouble

and by way of an example for an uplifting film I had said to Richard that I always love

Midnight Run the film with Charles Grodin and Robert De Niro if you've never seen Midnight Run come on mate that's going to sort you out

one of the best comedy thrillers ever made.

Anyway, Richard is a big cinephile.

He came back with a lot of recommendations for uplifting films and here is a selection of some of those.

Hey Adam, I'm just here with Trouble.

Here she is.

That's Trouble.

My first choice of an uplifting film is, well, I was pleased with your choice of Midnight Run.

That's a great film.

and mine also stars Robert De Niro, but I think objectively probably isn't a great film.

I was trying desperately to think of something else,

but I decided to go with Honesty.

And one of my ultimate pick-me-up films of the last few years is also a bit of a guilty pleasure, and that is The Intern with Robert De Niro and Anne Hathaway.

And it's kind of

incredibly

slick,

sickly sweet, vomit-making.

But when I've had a cold or maybe if I've been hungover or something, it's a kind of hideous but soothing balm that I just sort of smear over my eyes and mind.

I can't recommend it wholeheartedly as

a movie, but

it does something for me.

You gotta park cynicism at the door.

Otherwise, it's not gonna work.

And there's probably a thousand films I would recommend that you watch before it.

But this is the truth anyway.

My ultimate pick-me-up film is The Intern.

I also wanted to mention a film by Yasujiro Uzu called Good Morning, which really is a good film.

It's a masterpiece as well as being very daft.

It's also really warm, the photography is absolutely beautiful and it's got the most fantastic child actors in and also a repeating fart gag throughout the film but they always just use the one fart sound effect and it's a it's a very good

very funny film and very moving

and

I'd also like to mention Buana Vista Social Club which is a very uplifting movie and I found it really inspiring as a musician especially the sort of end passages when they go and get the play Carnegie Hall.

And there's this slow-motion shot of Ibrahim Ferrer into cut with him talking about his mother and then him looking out from the stage at these people giving him a wild ovation and

that was just like wow I would

this is what dreams are made of.

And finally, just a quick mention to another go-to favourite which is Happy Gilmore.

So there you go, it all comes back to Adam Sandler, you see.

It's almost as if there's some structure in the podcast.

Thank you so much to Richard Dawson for all his recommendations there and for his honesty when it came to the intern.

I have seen the intern, but only once.

And I have to be honest that I don't remember being very uplifted.

I was disturbed by one scene

when Robert De Niro, who is playing this man who has to go back into the workforce in his later years, I can't remember exactly why, and he's in this office surrounded by groovy younger people.

And I think I'm remembering this right.

Anne Hathaway at one point gives him a massage, and he gets a bona.

That's uplifting in a way, isn't it, for his trousers.

But

no, I will go back.

I'm sure, you know, Richard, I think, was clear that he's not claiming masterpiece status for the intern.

I'll go back and give it another go.

But thanks Richard, really appreciate it man.

Beautiful recommendations.

We'll check out that Ozu film and it's been years since I saw Buena Vista Social Club so I'll see that again.

I'll put links to the trailers for some of these films in the description of today's podcast if you want to be reminded.

Okay that's it for this week.

Thanks to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his invaluable production support and conversation editing.

Thanks to Helen Green, she does the artwork for this podcast.

She's just done a new illustration of my older face for the cover of the book, which I've just seen.

And it's good.

I guess it'll be the face for the podcast as well next year after the book comes out.

Thanks to all at ACAST for all their hard work liaising with my sponsors, but thanks especially to you for listening right to the end.

Come on.

You are going to get a hug off this middle-aged guy.

So, if that sounds appalling, switch off now.

Come here.

It's good to see you.

And until next time, we share the same sonic space.

Please go carefully.

I love you.

Bye.

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