EP.224 - FENTON BAILEY

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 Adam Buxton.

I'm a man.

I want you to enjoy this.

That's the plan.

Hey,

how are you doing, Podcats?

It's Adam Buxton here.

I'm taking a walk with my best dog friend, Rosie.

She's a whip at Poodle Cross, and she's 13.

So she's getting grey in the head, like her human mum and dad.

Also, like her human mum and dad.

She's plodding on.

Aren't you, Doglegs?

Don't patronize me.

Sorry.

She's trotting along beside me, I'm happy to say, out here in the fields of Norfolk on rather an overcast, cold and windy day towards the end of March 2024.

How are you doing though, podcats?

Hope you're alright, wherever you are.

Whoa!

Gap in the hedge opened up here on the side of this field.

Got a bit of a chilly blast.

Hey, look, I just wanted to say thank you very much to everybody who came along to the show that I did at the Palladium last week, the live podcast show at the London Palladium.

It was the first of this year's run of live podcast shows and it was a wonderful evening.

Very good audience, I have to say,

very warm and supportive and understanding about some of the rougher edges because this was our first outing doing that kind of show.

My son Frank came along again to help me out as he did at the Royal Festival Hall just before Christmas playing a couple of live jingles.

Turns out we need a bit more practice before we do that again.

We rehearsed quite a bit in the afternoon trying to get the harmonies.

He was playing guitar, I was playing the Omnicord.

But then when we got on stage,

Suddenly you realized oh shit, I can't hear what the other person's doing.

So we fell out of time.

And then,

as for my harmonies, forget about it.

Anyway, the audience were nice about it.

I'll have to rethink my live jingle strategy for the next show.

And in the end, my guest on the night, the audience didn't know who the guest was, and the audiences won't know who the guest is for these upcoming live shows.

But last week at the Palladium, my guest was friend of the podcast, Richard Iawade.

And if you listened to the last episode with Jessica Napitt

and you heard me ringing up Richard to reschedule a meeting,

that is what we were meeting to discuss, the live podcast.

Anyway, Richard joined me on stage at the palladium.

We waffled about films and music, especially our love of the Pixies.

And in the second half of the show, we were joined on stage by none other than Pixies front man,

Frank Black.

He was in town playing playing some Pixie's shows and was kind enough to come along to the palladium and play a few numbers, including a couple of Pixie's classics, Hey and Where is My Mind, that Richard played lead guitar on.

And on the night last week at the Palladium, I said to the audience, please don't film the show, don't record the show, which I generally say.

But I did say to them, there'll be a bit towards the end of the show that you can record and I was was thinking of Richard and Frank Black duetting, but in all the excitement, I forgot to say to the audience, okay, film away for this bit.

So I felt a bit bad about that, that people weren't able to come away with a video souvenir if they wanted one.

So anyway, I've uploaded a couple of short clips of Richard and Frank rehearsing earlier in the day.

It's not quite the same as the live performance with the audience who sang along with Where Is My Mind.

We changed the

bit to

to customize it for the podcast.

And the audience is very good at that.

But anyway, you can get a sense of the magic that was happening between Richard Aywade and Frank Black.

from these short rehearsal clips.

There's a link in the description.

Oh, it's getting windy.

Richard said that he was worried he would be shamed for missing a few notes on those rehearsals.

But I told him not to worry.

Reminded him that people on the internet are very understanding and slow to judge.

As far as putting out the audio recording of the Palladium show, I'm not sure exactly how that's going to work because I'm trying to make these live podcast shows quite visual.

So there's video bits and a certain amount of interaction with the screen.

So, not all of it is ideally suited to being edited for the podcast,

but I will probably

put out some edited highlights at some point later this year.

Anyway, I wanted to say thank you very much for coming along.

As I speak, there are still a few tickets left for Vicar Street in Dublin on the 21st of May and the Aventim Apollo Hammersmith in London on June the 9th.

There are links for tickets in the description along with a link for the Crossed Wires Festival where I will be appearing on June the 2nd.

I'll be talking to musician and actor Self-Esteem.

Hope you can make it.

But right now let me tell you a bit about today's podcast number 224 which features a conversation with an old friend and a returning guest to the podcast, British-born producer and director Fenton Bailey, who, along with his American partner Randy Barbato, set up the production company World of Wonder in 1991.

Throughout the 90s, World of Wonder produced a dizzying variety of shows, including New York public access compendium Manhattan Cable, John Ronson's Secret Rulers of the World, and the Adam and Joe Show, in which two men in their late 20s used camcorders to make a TV show about pop culture hosted from a room in Brixton.

Towards the end of the 90s World of Wonder also produced a chat show with drag artist RuPaul, a friend that Fenton and Randy had met in their New York clubbing days in the 1980s when Fenton and Randy used to perform as the musical duo the Pop-Tarts or the fabulous Pop-Tarts as at least Fenton thought of them.

In the 2010s, RuPaul would become the cornerstone of the World of Wonder empire with the phenomenally successful RuPaul's Drag Race.

But in the meantime, World of Wonder continued to produce TV reality shows and feature documentaries on subjects like Britney Spears, the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, Monica Lewinsky, and American televangelist Tammy Faye Baker.

Fenton wrote a book, Screen Age, How TV Shaped Our Reality from Tammy Faye to RuPaul's Drag Race, and that was published in 2022.

It's the story of World of Wonders' journey from the fringes of popular culture to the mainstream and their part in pioneering, for better or worse, the genre of reality TV while championing and celebrating LGBTQ voices and topics along the way.

My conversation with Fenton was recorded in mid-January of this year 2024 at the vast XL exhibition and convention centre in East London in the Docklands area.

Fenton was there for RuPaul's DragCon, the Met Gala of Drag, providing a focus for the world's largest gathering of drag race queens and fans.

While we recorded our conversation in one of the meeting rooms that run alongside the giant hangar space where DragCon was taking place, drag artists and their helpers were busy setting up stalls and stages and sound checking for the three-day convention.

If you've never been to the XL before,

it's really very big.

It's like a mid-sized airport.

And at various points in the recording, you will also notice that it sounds like an airport too.

It was great to see Fenton.

If you want to hear me and Fenton chatting more about how the Adam and Joe show came about, incidentally, you can do so by listening to episode 72

of this podcast.

But my conversation with Fenton for this episode began with us comparing notes on how we are reconciling the aging process with our respective vanities.

We also talked about reality TV and disagreed about the extent to which it can be blamed for everything bad in society.

Guess which side I was on in that part of the conversation.

Back at the end for a few related recommendations and a bit more waffle.

But right now, with Fenton Bailey, here we go.

Ramble chat, let's have a ramble chat.

We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that.

Come on, let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat.

Post on your conversation, hope to find your talking hat.

How are you enjoying getting older?

May I say, Fenton, I hope this isn't too gauche, that you are looking non-old.

Oh, you're so.

What's your secret?

What are you doing?

Well, you know, it's Botox and fillers.

And I'm pure Hollywood.

You know, I'm like, if there's anything I can do to look younger,

I'll do it.

And there'll probably come a moment where my face will fall off or something.

Have you had surgery?

Do you mind me asking?

Oh, surgery, I have had surgery I have had is I got my eyelids done.

Oh.

Because I was beginning to look a little heavy-lidded.

And the doctor said, oh, I could sort that out for you.

And you did.

And actually,

I was really glad of it.

How long was the recovery?

They said it would be like six weeks before your face looked normal-ish.

Because you're dealing with swelling and bruising, are are you?

Oh, well, that's like that's like 10 days.

Okay.

Swelling and bruising.

But until it settles in, they said six weeks.

In reality, it's more like six months.

Oh, really?

When was it?

It was like 2015.

Oh, because Hillary Clinton was campaigning.

And I went to this event where, you know, you got to get your picture of Hillary Clinton, which should have been the most exciting thing.

But actually, I was looking at the photo and I was like, oh my God, I look so freakish.

Because

it was less than six months since I had the the eyes done.

But by the time Trump was in, you were looking 10 years younger.

It's fabulous, looking on point, yes.

The other thing I should confess to is, does it count?

I got my teeth done.

I got veneers.

Oh.

And I

was so happy about it.

Yeah.

Because I just had yellow, misshapen, Victorian graveyard teeth, you know,

going this way and that way.

And I noticed.

It's not like Bowie used to be.

You remember when Bowie had an extraordinary set of teeth?

I think these days it really shows up because everybody these days has white teeth.

Yeah,

by whatever they use, those strips or whatever they do, they have white teeth.

So suddenly you're like, oh my God,

what happened to Bowie's teeth?

Yeah, it was weird.

I mean, he had the, they were quite big and very, very even and very white.

So it was very noticeable with him.

Oh, but before he got them done, they were horrendous.

Yeah, they were mad.

They were absolutely mad.

But it did give him a lot of character, though.

Yes, there are some pictures, there are some unfortunate pictures of him where you do think, whoa, what's happened in your mouth?

But other times, I never used to think about it, you know, because the Americans are always teasing the English for how bad their teeth are.

And it was not something I was ever aware of until I watched things like Family Guy, where they would do that, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

And then I realised, like, oh, yeah,

I suppose British people do do have bad teeth in a noticeable way but is it much worse than anywhere else in the world do you think yeah

why is it why is it well I guess Americans have been fixing them for longer I mean right they have races and because the average American diet isn't necessarily much healthier is it no no but they just deal with it they fix it right

you know it's like I think in LA people's cars are a lot cleaner than in the UK.

I'm always like, oh my God, they come here And I'm like, wash your car.

I think you're probably right.

I mean, I would count myself as nearly royal.

And our car is horrible.

There's a tip.

Inside and out.

Yeah, but it's so depressing.

I mean, it's partly because we live in the country.

So the outside of the car is always caked in mud.

And it's not really practical to carry on washing it because we'd live down a long muddy drive.

Yeah.

So I don't mind that really.

But inside, it is depressing to get in there.

And I am going to blame the members of my family for that.

Get out the vacuum.

Because I'm

insane about it if my kids leave a wrapper in the car.

Really?

I just can't drive the car until it's removed.

I wish you would come and stay with us for a while.

I'll bring my vacuum left down.

I have a little minivac.

We've got the minivac.

We've got all of that gear.

There's absolutely no excuse.

I don't want to start naming names because I'm talking about people who work very hard, who have busy schedules, educational schedules, sporting schedules.

My beautiful wife works unbelievably hard, shoulders the lion's share of all the driving duties that have to be done so I can do whatever bullshit I do in my days.

Like this.

Like this.

But

so your veneers, though, your teeth veneers, if we could return to those are very good because they're not too white, if you don't mind me saying.

I, of course, like when he was doing them, I was like, I want...

He was like, what what color do you you know has it has a little um pantone thing and he's like what what colour and i was like that one he said no no no you do not want that and i was like well i kind of do i want sort of barbie teeth or just you know yeah teeth that say i'm new and

yes but he actually put his foot down so i won't i'm not gonna let you so we reached a compromise slightly whiter than he would have recommended but not so white because every time i open my mouth i want people to be blinded Yeah.

Did you ever touch up photographs of yourself back in the day?

I guess I did.

Are you kidding?

I used to do that as well.

As soon as I got Photoshop.

Right.

When you're a master of Photoshop, I could never figure it out because of those layers and things.

And then actually, more recently, speaking of getting old, I just stopped posting photos of myself.

I was like,

this has to stop.

It's not going to...

Really?

Yeah.

Why?

So what are you not liking about your photos?

I'm here to tell you, Fenton, that you are looking great and you should post more photos no thank you i met someone who has hair implants quite a well-known personality

and i was surprised when he told me that he did because i was

well they looked really good you know i said how come you're older than i am how come you've got such a good head of hair he said they're implants and i was like wow that's quite good and then he i asked him to send me the details of the person who did them you know like I was sort of thinking well maybe maybe I'll just look into it super painful process is it yeah apparently yeah

but did he did

he nameless it was a he it was a he but they um

sent me the details I didn't follow up on I made one inquiry and then I just thought I don't know if I go down that road I mean, there's so much else that I would change.

Well, you know, I think the best thing with hair is a wig, you know.

My favourite Andy Warhol thing was that fright wig he wore for years.

It wasn't a pretense that that's my natural hair.

It was just a shock on his head.

And I thought it was just a fabulous look.

Yeah.

You're right.

That was a brilliant thing.

But that's in keeping with everything he did, though, isn't it?

I don't know if I'd be able to get away with the Warhol wig.

My version of that is just a beanie cap or

a docker cap.

It works.

I've changed hat styles in the last couple of years.

I used to always favour a baseball cap.

Did you ever wear it backwards, though?

For a short time.

But it was a bit kind of douchey, right?

It is douchey.

Beyond a certain age.

I think you're right, it is douchey.

And one time towards the beginning of the 90s, which was key backwards baseball cap years for me, and I really thought I looked quite great, actually.

But then I went out for a drink, and this slightly older guy who worked at the ICA, I remember, and he was quite a snarky bloke.

And he just said, What do you think you look like

with your cap on backwards?

And I was like, What do you mean?

He's like, I mean, you look like a prat.

I mean, the thing is that it's annoying with people like that because I do think he was right.

But on the other hand, what a twat.

Exactly.

You know, the twat calls out prat.

I mean, which is worse.

But I like this cap you've got now.

It's good because it doesn't have a peak.

Yeah.

So you're not.

It's chic, actually.

Thank you.

I mean the worst worry I have about it is that it's appropriating working class fashion aesthetics.

I could be cancelled because it is called a docker cap.

I'm wearing again not sponsored listeners.

I'm wearing the Stetson Docker cap

and it's in sort of canvas green.

So I suppose part of the allure on some subconscious level is that part of me must think it makes me look a bit like a kind of rufty-tufty, outdoorsy manual labourer.

I wouldn't go that far.

Louis Theroux, who actually, as I speak, early 2024, has been dealing with alopecia

in the last few months.

I always remember having a huge bush of exuberant hair.

Yeah, everyone loves Louis Bush.

But, and forever I've had hair envy of Louis.

I still do, in fact, fact, even though he is struggling with this condition which has made patches of hair come out.

Like Jada Smith.

Yes, exactly, yeah, yeah.

And

like Will Smith, I would slap anyone at a ceremony who impugned or made light of Louis' alopecia.

But Lou found that he was getting...

quite a lot of congrats from people online for being so open about it and just talking about it very matter-of-factly.

his eyebrow, like one of his eyebrows fell out first of all, and then he just sort of shaved the other one off.

So I don't know, I haven't seen him for a few weeks, but I don't know how it's going at the moment.

But Lou always was one of those people who had the best hair that just looked good, whatever he'd done with it.

And even when it, even when he was a bit older and it was getting a bit more wiry and grey, it just, yeah, it looked right.

Yeah.

It always looked right.

It always looks right, I should say.

And I'm sure even if he lost all of it, or even if he shaved it off, or whatever, he would look great still.

But when he's got hair, it looks good.

And I always envied it because mine never really had one haircut in when we were doing the Adam and Joe show,

and it was series two, I think.

So that would have been 98 or thereabouts.

And it was just one of those haircuts, and it was just like, whoa, look at me with my new haircut.

This is who I am, finally.

Yes, I mean, you need to have hair to do things with it.

Yeah.

Yeah, but I mean, I've always had sort of okay length of hair, but it just sits there.

It doesn't do anything.

Well, I've always liked that combination of very short, sort of buzz cutty, and then a big sort of bit of colour.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

David Lynch.

Yes, right, exactly.

The massive, great, sort of whipped ice cream thing that he's got going on.

Genius.

And who's the other, the playwright,

you know, waiting for Godot?

Samuel Becker.

Yeah.

Didn't he have mad kind of ice cream hair as well?

He did, yeah.

He looked really good with that.

Einstein had hair.

Yeah, that was good hair.

Signature hair.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm trying to pivot to make this what some people might think as a fairly self-absorbed, superficial line of questioning from me, to make it more relevant to where we are and what we're doing.

But obviously, you know, fashion, the way people look.

How are drag queens, Fenton?

Here's a very great segment.

Here's a segment.

Yeah.

How do drag queens generally deal with aging and what role does that play in the art?

Oh, that's a good question.

Because, you know, I think really the longer a queen has been around, the more dark arts they perfect.

So it's a combination of many things.

It could be a little knit and tuck.

It could be some abrasion, you know, it could be, but also that the makeup and of course lighting, you know,

just blast you with light.

Yes.

You know, Rue would always say, all I want to see are two nostrils and some red lips

and like bring this light closer, you know.

And you're born naked and the rest is drag.

And I think that's the truth that, you know, everything

we put on, more or less considered, it's some kind of statement about who we think we are or how we want to be seen

or a fantasy version of ourselves.

And that's very much, I think, the time we live in, where

I guess it's good that, you know, in the Western world, we're not generally, you know,

we're able to think about those things and play with those things.

I suppose the criticism would be, though, isn't it, that it's a symptom of a excessively superficial age.

Oh, it could be.

That could be.

I mean, but I do think that, I tell you what, I think that is the print-based supremist point of view that has an inherent hostility, understandably, to a visual culture.

Because if we're in a visual culture, who's reading books?

And I think print's always been very quick to be

almost

have a sort of Puritan outlook.

Where do you think that comes from there?

What's the logic of it?

It's hundreds of years old.

Oh, it is.

but do you i mean that i i would think that the justification from someone like malcolm mugridge back in the day who was

railing against uh tv yes uh he i think because my dad agreed with him that's why i reference him you know what i mean because he was the kind of person that my dad got a lot of his opinions from

And I think he would think that TV is a passive medium, that it's washing over you.

It doesn't require much from you as a viewer.

And that print is necessarily more interactive.

You have to engage with it, you have to make an effort to read those words and process them in your mind.

And that is somehow going to have a more long-lasting value to it than the more sort of sit-back, passive experience of watching TV.

I agree with everything you've said, except that why does one medium have to be better than the other?

You know, and why was

sort of print so threatened that it had to create this,

I think, residual negative idea about screens and T V?

You know, I remember as a kid, like, my parents are like, don't sit too close to the color television set, it will make you go blind, which is sort of analogous to that thing of like, don't masturbate because you'll go blind.

And so there's these sort of

hangover values that are simply not real, but that we kind of grow up under the shadow with and sort of internalize and carry with us.

But we're in a visual culture, and I think both things are really profoundly necessary.

But it isn't about one being better than the other.

Actually, that's kind of why I wrote the book, because

many of my friends in LA are like, well, why are you writing a book?

I don't read books.

And I just felt like, well.

Don't worry, there'll be an audio book.

Right, I did say that, as a matter of fact,

Right.

But I also felt like, well, if I grew up and I had this education and I should deliver on it in some respects by explaining why I think TV is actually this profoundly revolutionary medium for good and ill, but I'm just personally tired of working in a medium where it's always getting slagged off.

You know, as a younger person, it was like TV is a bad thing.

And then it was like, even as TV just demonstrated, it wasn't going anywhere.

You know, it wasn't like, oh, okay, yes, TV is bad.

We'll just stop it right now.

You know, channels exploded.

Instead of four channels, 500 channels.

And then the new demon was reality TV.

That's the new evil.

And now there's this idea that there's premium TV and that that's okay because premium TV is kind of more like movies.

You know, it's all it's all bullshit.

I don't know.

I agree agree with quite a lot of that.

As far as reality TV goes though, I mean it's hard to deny that that has played a role in getting us to the Trump years.

Don't you know?

No, no, no, no, no.

Trump is not

a reality TV president.

That is not...

This is not the truth about Trump.

Trump is a profoundly corrupting, evil figure who has tainted everything he has touched.

Not just TV, real estate.

Trump stakes.

Everything he has done is gross and disgusting.

He's got some good ideas.

This is not about.

Don't blame reality TV for that.

Reality TV, though, was the platform that enabled him to get into our lives to an even greater degree.

Before then, he was only really bothering the super-rich who were staying in his hotels.

No, not really, because, I mean,

his ability is to lie and to deceive.

And

the lies he is told are so beguiling, he would have found some other way.

You reckon?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But reality TV just handed it to him on a plate.

Well, you could say, I mean, Hitler, you know, Hitler was smart and understood that in the age of radio and the emergent era of TV, if you could control the medium,

you could rise to power.

I guess you could say that Trump's insight was that you don't have to control it.

You don't have to shut everything else out.

But if you can tell

bold enough untruths and repeat them endlessly and somehow keep yourself in the media, then you'll succeed.

And Celebrity Apprentice, which, by the way, I do not like and did not like, so I'm not defending that show.

But that ended a long, long time ago.

So how has Trump been able to...

He's been able to succeed because he's been able to keep his name on the radio, on TV, on Twitter.

Every yeah, but that show was the thing that first crystallized the myth.

No, what came first was Trump, the evil.

I think you're right that reality TV didn't create Donald Trump, but it did give him the tools to do the damage that he did.

I don't blame the camera for

I do.

Did you ever read that piece by Patrick Rad and Keith about Mark Burnett, who produced

it?

Yeah, that's a really good one.

I'll put a link in the description of this podcast.

But that is a really chilling.

You know, if anything, you come away from it thinking that, as you say, there's always going to be someone like Trump stalking around waiting for some way to get through and via reality TV or whatever other medium.

But actually, it's in a way people like Mark Burnett who look at someone like Trump and think, oh yeah,

that

shoulder perhaps as much blame, you know, and who don't feel any sense of responsibility when they see what they're dealing with and then continue to give him the tools he needs to succeed when he starts getting political ambitions.

And I don't think that Mark Burnett ended up actually supporting Trump.

I think he was more of a Democrat.

But you do, reading this piece, you do think like, what, Mark Burnett, have a think about who you're dealing with here.

Don't you reckon, like,

don't give this guy the oxygen of publicity.

Yeah, full disclosure, though,

in the 80s, before Randy and I started World of Wonder, before we'd made any TV shows,

you know, it was that sort of era of sort of Wall Street go-go.

You know, it was a sort of, it was the first time, I suppose, that money was trending, which is a ridiculous thing to say, but there was just this sense of Madonna, material girl.

Yeah, the 80s in their consumerist glory and sort of embracing that.

And Trump was definitely the poster child of that.

So he was already up to his tricks because the guy was not a self-made business genius like he presented.

He was living off daddy's money and lying his way, and it was all

unexamined lies and PR fodder that oftentimes he was putting out.

Like he would often call the gossip columnists and give them the scoop as if he was his publicist, you know.

But in that era and when the Art of the Deal, his bestseller, came out, we actually wrote a letter to him saying, oh, you know, it'd be fabulous to make a documentary about you, thinking that he was this sort of expression of the of the zeitgeist.

And we did actually get a reply to the letter.

His secretary wrote back saying, Mr.

Trump has no interest in being on television.

Telling, huh?

Yeah, wait a few more years, though.

But back then, you felt like in pre-internet days,

all of that just felt like it couldn't possibly have any impact on the real world.

It still felt like you were an outsider and that the establishment was still in place and would always be,

and that the nerds would never win.

And, you know.

Oh, and also that the crazy conspiracy theorists would never really get out of their box.

I mean that was you know when we made crazy rulers of the world and secret rulers of the world with John Ronson.

Yeah,

like I'm not going to speak for John but I was like compelled by these crazy behold a pale horse and the Illuminati and all this kind of bonkers nonsense that to me was interesting because it was so crazy.

And I was like how do you get these ideas and how do they spread and just so sort of baroque and deranged and a complete absence of any real evidence or factual basis for any of it to me that was all fascinating but had no idea that

someone like Alex Jones who was actually in one of the series and took John to Bohemian Grove where there was supposed to be satanic rituals and sacrificing babies and what what have you.

No belief that that would be what would enable someone like Trump.

You know, just this sort of complete

psychotic break with reality and truth.

That was like...

Even I remember in the months leading up to Trump's election when

the fact that he was friends with Alex Jones was a story and I think was put about by anti-Trump people as like, you know, look who he's hanging out with.

Do you want to elect a guy who hangs out with Alex Jones?

And I remember thinking, oh, yeah, well, that probably is going to put the kibosh on it because it does put things into perspective.

But of course, it didn't.

It just sort of galvanized the whole thing.

Trump was in no way apologetic or felt that he needed to be.

But even John Ronson, I remember being curious about, like, why would you ever talk to Alex Jones or someone like that?

You know, but that was obviously back in the day before he'd done things like deny the Sandy sandy hook killings and things like that which are so beyond the pale

i think what fascinated us all was this

and john said this so i'm i'm probably going to paraphrase it poorly but

why is it that the most conservative people

seem to embrace the craziest ideas what is that kind of how does that work because you would have thought that the most conservative people would be the most down to earth

recently has the idea of sort of Republicans become, oh, you know, they're just barking crazy.

Going back 20, 30 years, there was a sense in which they were sort of traditionalists and wanted to hold on to things as opposed to embracing delusions.

I still can't personally completely figure it out.

But I do know reality TV is not to blame.

But you remember something I discovered literally two days ago.

Do you remember an artist, Nam Joom Pike?

I love Nam Joom Pike.

He was an inspiration to me throughout art school.

Yeah, video artists.

Of course he was.

Of course he was.

Because

I always was a bit like,

can you make a crucifix out of TVs?

It's a little bit...

I was more in on Keith Ehring, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

But Nam June Pike was at the same sort of time in New York.

And there's a documentary that's come out about him.

Moon is the oldest TV.

Yeah.

Have you seen it?

Yeah, I loved it.

It's great.

I was like, oh my God.

And there's this moment in the film where, and I didn't know this, where they credited him with the information superhighway, with coining that phrase.

I think he called it the electronic highway, right?

And then at one point in the film, someone's talking and they explained, no, he called me in the middle of the night and said, you know what?

It's not the electronic highway.

We're in a boat in the ocean and we're looking for the shore.

And I'm like, that just blew my mind because I do think in the sort of tsunami of media, we have become

lost.

And that's not a judgment.

It doesn't mean that this is a bad thing.

It's just that it has, all the easy to hold on to

so-called grounding things that we believed in have just been sort of picked up and thrown into

disarray by this new media atmosphere.

And the sheer availability of unexpected connections afforded by the technology, the fact that you are suddenly being confronted by all these things which

30, 40 years ago

you would never have been.

So so many of your preconceptions and prejudices would have remained unchallenged.

Exactly.

And so in a way it's a good thing that they are being challenged, but then in another way it's completely devastating.

It's disorienting, I think.

And it requires more of us.

But,

and I should say,

Adam and Joe show, in my mind, was a reality show.

Uh-huh.

Because I think the genius of so-called reality TV, which is a label used for a lot of different things,

is essentially that...

everyone can have a chance or that everyone can be on TV.

I think that's what the great promise of reality TV was.

Well, I suppose, you know, the concept of reality or truth or whatever, that's what everyone is shooting for in one way or another.

Whether you're making a drama or whatever it might happen to be, you judge it, consciously or not, on how close it gets to some recognizable truth.

So with reality TV, in theory, it's being ladled out to you, yum, yum, yum.

And when you see like crazy moments that are supposedly true, it is an absolute thrill.

And I've had many, many happy experiences watching shows like I'm a Celebrity.

You know, there was one year that I always wang on about where they had Peter Andre

and Jordan and John Lydon was in the jungle and he got chucked out for saying cunt too many times.

And Janet Street Porter, I think.

Anyway, it was like the best lineup they ever had in the jungle.

And I watched every single second of that loving it.

And there was also an amazing celebrity Big Brother that had Michael Barrymore in there.

Right.

Oh, yes, yes.

And that was the one as well where they had put someone who wasn't famous in there and pretended to everyone that she was.

She was called Chantel.

And so the joke was like, she's not even famous, but they're all just treating her like, oh, right.

So what are you doing?

She's like, oh, yeah, I'm a pop star.

And they're like, okay, cool.

And they just carried on treating her like she was famous.

And she really wasn't.

But then, of course,

she became famous.

She ended up marrying one of the guys in there, Preston, from this band the ordinary boys

and it was it was shakespearean i'm going to shakespearean

here's the thing like i just want to go back to this trump thing because yeah yeah you're saying you know reality tv enabled trump well not everyone who goes on these shows becomes president or prime minister i mean look at Nigel Farage, right?

He went on I'm a celebrity.

It was a complete disaster.

Yeah, but the jury, I don't know.

I think it's too early to say with someone like him.

Yeah, he's the kind of guy that bounces back just when you've written him off.

He's troublesome like that.

But yeah, I mean, it does seem encouraging that no one really seemed to give a shit about him being in the jungle.

Exactly.

Yeah, but I know, you know, there's that phrase, a platform can also be a gallows.

And you definitely can unmask and show the true nature of people on TV in a way that is ultimately useful in demonstrating that they are not to be trusted.

You know, I think every time a camera comes into play, every time you pick up a camera, you're telling a story.

And so this,

again, I thought like this sort of preoccupation with what's real and what's not, and the idea of rushing to judgment that reality TV isn't real.

Well, of course it's not real.

It's storytelling, like any other thing you watch, is telling a story.

Maybe everyone assumes that.

nowadays in 2024, but they never used to.

If you called something a reality TV show, then most people had a vague preconception that it was real and they didn't really understand how it was just structured.

Yeah.

And it was a bit of a shock the first time I heard in the 90s of what would come to be called directed reality or scripted reality or structured reality.

Yeah, whatever these kind of weasly terms that they use to basically say that they told everyone what to do in this thing and passed it off as if it was real.

But the language is always changing.

And I think, you know, people say that that Ruple's drag race is a reality show, but I would never say it's a reality show.

To me, it's like a variety show.

You know, you have acting challenges, you have fashion challenges, run, you like, have all this different, it's like a variety show, and Rue is like the host of the old-fashioned variety show.

And also something else Rue says that I think about, I mean, I think about a lot of what he says all the time, actually.

But he's like, drag doesn't disguise who you are, it reveals who are.

Because it's kind of creating an extended self.

And so, at some point, this idea of trying to decide what is real and what is not, we have to have a more nuanced, complex

understanding that it's the many and varied thing.

Yes,

yes, please.

Yep.

Yes.

How is it as a program maker, the modern TV landscape?

Because all I ever hear from my friends in British TV is that they're in trouble.

And especially in comedy, it's very, very hard to get anything off the ground

because

everything now is just working off a fairly rigid business model.

You've got to be making shows that are going to be repeatable.

they have to be easily sellable in other territories, all this kind of stuff.

So, a show like The Adam and Joe Show, I don't think it would have been made.

I mean, probably it wouldn't have been made in the last 20 years anyway, but I think everything's pretty unique to its window in time.

Yeah.

And

I mean, you're right.

Like, it

just sounds like an old fart.

But, you know, it used to be that you could go into Channel 4 and say, I got this idea.

And you would come out with a commission, not necessarily straight to series, but a pilot or presentation.

And that's kind of like how the Adam and Joe show came.

Because it was out of TakeOver TV, right?

Yeah.

Your tape was on this pile of rejects, I might add.

And I don't know why I like telling that story.

I suppose because it's sort of self-aggrandizing.

It was directed by Dave, wasn't it?

I don't think it was Dave, no.

It was someone who didn't get to work on the show.

No, someone was fired.

I think it was.

But actually, we should thank them because their post-it note said, much too clever for its own good.

Oh,

look, let's have a look at that.

Let's pop that in.

Things that are much too clever for their own good.

And it was lovely because you were sitting on the loo with an aerial on your head.

Yes.

I remember it well.

No, I suppose it felt like there was more of a sense of people just making things for the sake of it,

in the way that an artist would make work.

Yeah.

Rather than now you feel like, well, you have to deal with the financial realities of it.

You have to consider whether anyone's actually going to watch it.

Otherwise.

Well, when you're pitching, they're always saying it needs to be returnable, it needs to be repeatable, it needs to have broad appeal.

Returnable, as in

season two, three, four, five, six, and reach a broad audience, like appeal to everyone internationally.

But that isn't how shows are made, really.

And even though they adopt this language and create this filter

South Park didn't come about that way Squid Game didn't come about that way

everything

that's big kind of happens in spite of itself or in spite of the commissioning brief the commissioning brief is like how is it that you pay people to

almost deliberately think of the way not to make a hit show

do you know like yeah it's a weird perverse thing to take all the jagged jagged edges off.

Yeah.

Yeah, because

no one would ever have imagined that a show like RuPaul's Drag Race would have turned into what it has become.

Never.

And so we were so lucky that it was on Logo, which was Viacom's kind of gay channel initiative, which really not many people were watching.

And there wasn't a lot of, you know, we were almost too small to cancel for the first few seasons, I think.

And so we had a chance that you just wouldn't have had if it had been on a network or a bigger channel.

Yeah.

I was trying to think as I was walking to meet you today through Excel

to the drag con

hall.

Do you have a drag name?

I do, actually.

Fentanyl.

Of course.

I come to Slay.

You never did drag?

Yeah,

Randy and I did once at Wigstock in the back and he is

90s.

We were like, because when we had the Pop-Tarts, we'd, you know.

Pop-Tarts was your band.

It was, yeah.

I was talking to Graham Norton,

and he's, oh, tell me about, asked some question about what we did in the 80s.

And I was like, oh, we're in a band called the Fabulous Pop-Tarts.

And he said, well, no one called you that.

I just love it.

You were just the Pop-Tarts, I guess.

Exactly.

Speaking of drag, don't you think, what's the name?

In

Rosamond Pike.

Yeah.

Is the draggiest, most fabulous, delicious thing?

In Saltburn.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Did you enjoy that movie?

I'm really fascinated by the way everyone's talking about it.

You know,

and some people love it, some people hate it, but everyone can't not talk about it.

And I read a review, I think, in Variety, that said, the problem with this movie is it's the memeification of movies.

Memes, not scenes.

And I thought, you know, that's kind of cool.

Because there are several scenes in that that you cannot unsee and that give the film this like, oh my God, you've got to see it.

That's true.

Yeah, yeah.

You have to tell people about them.

And they're not really spoilers, so you can.

You know what I mean?

Having said that, I wouldn't tell.

You can't, really.

I wouldn't say that.

Don't you think it's a spoiler?

I think, yeah.

What, the plughole?

Yeah.

Is it a spoiler?

I suppose it is a spoiler.

Well, yeah, because once you've told them,

yeah.

I mean, because there isn't a great deal of point to the movie, ultimately.

That's why I thought the review about the memeification, it's a collection of these sort of viral things.

Yeah.

And

then the review was like negative, saying, well, it's not really a movie because of that.

But I, who's to say what a movie is?

Who cares?

Like, if it's a bunch of memes, great.

I did feel like when the plughole happened, I did think, whoa, this is suddenly a different film, isn't it?

And then I'd heard about the grave.

Okay.

So I was ready for that.

But I did think, hmm, I don't know, maybe I'm with the memeification guy.

But I liked Murder on the Dance Floor.

And I liked his floppy cock flopping around.

See, by that point, I'd just had enough cake.

I was like, I've just had too many slices, and I am done.

And can they wrap it up?

Because I want to go home.

Because that dance scene goes on a long time.

For ages.

Like a lot of other scenes in a movie go on a long time.

Whereas I could have watched a whole movie with just Rosamond Pike and Richard E.

Grant just being

and hay feverish and Noel Cowardian.

Maybe they'll get their own spin-off show.

They should.

Okay, how about though, did you get wrapped up in the whole Depp versus Heard

court case?

No, it didn't really.

I preferred the Gwyneth Paltrow ski accident contest.

That was my favourite.

And I'm excited to hear.

I think either there's a movie or a musical or both coming.

Of the Paltrow ski thing, yeah.

That was fun because it was, no one got hurt, right?

I mean, someone got mildly hurt, but not life-threatening or life-changing injuries.

And so it was all quite up-tempo.

Whereas Depp v.

Heard, by stark contrast, was just...

Yeah.

I mean, I'm reading a book about it now.

Oh, wow.

And having not really followed the court case and not really known much about it, oh my god, it's bleak.

It's just so horrible.

The extent to which he has a cult, a protective cult around him, Johnny Depp.

I'm not suggesting that it's all on him.

I don't know the

intricacies of who was to blame for what.

It seems like both of them did some pretty weird things.

But...

I mean, Trump's a cult.

Not that this was that moment but when

grab them by the pussy tape came out yeah you were like in any other presidential campaign that would have been the end of that campaign and i definitely i mean you thought it was the end when he was associating with alex jones i was convinced this was the end

but ever since that moment i think that that idea has just broken.

And whether he stands in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoots someone, or whether he goes on TV and says, I never said that,

it's sort of, we're in a different space.

But you see, that's where someone like me would go back to pointing the finger at reality TV, having shifted people's expectations of what constitutes normal behaviour or acceptable behaviour.

It's the kind of thing that you might see in an episode of your favourite reality show and go, oh, well, that's just them.

You know, you're sort of lapping it up in a way, and it's disconnected from reality.

All sorts of scandals and that sort of behavior has been lionized in the media long before reality TV.

It sold newspapers.

So it's actually,

I'm not going to let you get away with this.

I just don't think you can inflame reality TV.

I insist.

You have a bad actor here, you know, who was savvy at manipulating that opportunity to his evil ends.

I agree.

Yeah, I agree.

He says, not really agree at all.

No, I agree with you that he was going to do what he wanted to do regardless, and that

he wasn't invented by reality TV.

Okay.

But I think the worst aspect of reality TV is that it does maintain the mental conditions for people to tolerate and even embrace the occasional Trump, you know what I mean?

Because they feel like, they feel ultimately non-threatening because you think, oh, I've seen worse people on a reality show.

I don't think it's complete cause and effect.

Yeah.

I mean, Shakespeare's plays feature incredibly toxic people,

and we don't blame the play, do we?

We don't be like, well.

Actually, Puritans would.

In fact, they hated the theatre, didn't they?

They wanted to shut it down because they didn't believe people should pretend to be who they weren't and play parts and go on the stage.

And they thought that

A, women couldn't do that.

Men had to dress as women and go on stage, which some people say is where the idea of drag comes from, dressed as a girl.

But because if they did, they were, if women did that, they were prostitutes and whores.

You know, so

I think there is centuries of

what's the word?

Institutional.

Like these ideas are so deeply embedded in us.

Yeah, that's true.

They were certainly embedded in my parents.

Yeah, and mine too.

I mean, I think they were appalled by what I decided to do.

Yeah.

Are your folks still around?

No.

No.

Did they ever sort of give you a pat on the back in the end, one that was meaningful?

Oh, my dad once left me a lovely voicemail message,

but he wasn't one to generally.

It wasn't, you know, parents didn't say, oh, I love you that much.

They weren't bad at all.

They were lovely and amazing, but it just wasn't a culture where you gave that much positive affirmation.

And I generally was not what I was doing and who I was,

like being gay, for example, was not talked about.

Yeah.

You know.

And you never got to that point with them where you felt you were sort of getting some closure or resolution.

No, but

I mean, I love my mum very, very much, and she died pretty quickly.

And there was a sense of never really.

There was nothing to close.

In fact, you know, we were just, we were good.

You know what I mean?

My dad, it was much more complex, as I understand it often is, between fathers and sons, you know.

And

my

I have this weird idea that,

yeah, my dad obviously knew I was gay, and

I hadn't sort of put it together in the years since, but

he wanted to, after the war, he wanted to go to Hollywood and be a set designer, and he never did because he had, he was married, he had kids.

And I thought, I wonder if

my going to Hollywood on the one hand he was proud of it but I wonder if on the other hand he was kind of pissed off about it you know

and I also wonder if there wasn't something pretty gay about my dad too

you know

towards the end of his life he would talk a lot

about his cabin mate in the Navy in the war.

He was on the Arctic convoys, which I think were incredible.

I could not imagine having the courage.

I just couldn't imagine doing that.

So it must have been a highly intense

thinking you were going to die in the ice-cold waters at any moment and be blown up by a U-boat.

You know,

I can't imagine that.

So maybe that's why he talked about his cabin mate.

But me, being me,

thought, oh, I wonder.

It's just interesting.

It's just odd that towards the end of his life, that was the thing he talked about about a lot.

Hmm.

So, God bless him, and um,

yeah, you know, it's

so in terms of like putting a bow on it, no,

it doesn't torture you, no, it's not the main subject of your therapy sessions, no, okay, no, instead, I've got salt-burned demons to try and work through.

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Continue.

Hey, welcome back podcats.

That was Fenton Bailey.

I was talking to there.

Lovely to see Fenton again.

There's a link to his book, Screen Age, in the description of today's podcast, along with a load of other links to stuff we talked about.

There is a link to the trailer for Moon is the oldest TV, the documentary about the Korean video artist Nam Joon Paik.

which I really recommend whether you're familiar with his work or not.

He was someone who was very much ahead of his time and made a lot of striking and beautiful work.

Anyway, I recommend that documentary directed by Amanda Kim

telling the story of Pike's meteoric rise in the New York art scene and his Nostradamus-like vision of a future in which everybody will have their own TV channel.

I've also put a link to the article I mentioned, How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success by Patrick Radden-Keefe.

That's on the New Yorker website.

Patrick Radden-Keefe, another former podcast guest, wrote the brilliant book about Northern Ireland, Say Nothing, and Empire of Pain about the Sackler family and the opioid crisis, which I talked to him about on the podcast.

I also wanted to

give another shout out.

I think I've mentioned these films before, probably many times, but they're two of my favourite films when it comes to thinking about TV and the portrayal of reality on TV, particularly where the news is concerned.

The first one is the documentary from 1992, Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and the Media,

directed by Peter Wintonik and Mark Akbar.

And that documentary is like a whole media studies course in one film.

Noam Chomsky, linguist, political commentator, writer, philosopher I suppose.

Fascinating character with some

very insightful ideas about the way that TV and news media work.

And it's very compellingly and entertainingly put together.

As I speak there is a copy of it, pretty good copy, on YouTube that someone has uploaded.

There's a link in the description.

And the other film that made a big impression on me when I first saw it in my 20s and have seen several times since then, the most recent being last week when I watched it with my 19-year-old son, Nat.

And it is Network from 1976.

directed by Sidney Lumet and written by Paddy Chaewski.

Both men worked in American TV for many years and Network is their satire of the way television was heading in the mid-70s in the US.

A time when you could argue the world was in many ways even more crazy and frightening than it is now.

And Network is all about the arrival of giant corporations buying up TV stations, putting pressure on TV news

to deliver ratings by leaning on sensationalist footage and unhinged personalities, one of whom is a news anchor called Howard Beale, played by the Australian actor Peter Finch,

not Peter Finch,

who is being forced to retire because his ratings are falling.

So, on a live TV news broadcast, he announces that he's going to kill himself live on air the following week,

and the film unfolds from that point.

And there are so many great performances in Network.

Faye Dunaway plays Diane Christensen,

the brilliant but cynical TV executive who realizes that Howard, the news anchor who may or may not be having a breakdown, can be the ranting star of a new reality news show with a live audience that also features footage of real kidnappings and bank heists shot by extremists and revolutionary groups.

We've also got Robert Duval, he plays a corporate executive and he brings the same sort of manic energy that he does as Kilgore in Apocalypse Now with his I Love the Smell of Napalm in the Morning speech which probably would have been shot within a few months of Filming Network in fact.

William Holden plays Max, the aging head of the news division, struggling to come to terms with mortality and professional irrelevance.

It's all the big themes you've got in network.

Max's long-suffering and stoical wife is played by Beatrice Strait

and she won an Oscar as best supporting actress in network.

She only has a couple of scenes, but she smashes them and you would recognize Beatrice Strait if you're a fan of Poltergeist that she was in a few years later.

She played the head of the little group group of paranormal investigators that take up residence in the Freeling household in Quest of Airday after Carol Ann gets sucked into the television.

See, they had problems with screens back then as well, didn't they?

The other big performance in network is from Peter Finch as Howard Beale, the news anchor, who becomes a sensation when he tells viewers that he's just run out of bullshit.

And from now on, he's only going to tell the real truth about how fucked the world is,

and in so doing, channel the rage and the anxiety of ordinary people.

Remind you of anyone?

Angry, messianic political and cultural commentators on YouTube, perhaps?

Anton Deck, maybe?

No, not Anton Deck.

Howard Beale's catchphrase, I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore, comes in one of a series of set-piece speeches throughout the film

which I'm aware for some viewers can be a bit much.

It's a lot of speeches, a lot of shouting and network, but watching it the other night with my son, those Paddy Chaevsky linguistic special effects are still completely electrifying.

Maybe one day I'll do a film club.

My book club didn't get very far, did it?

It was only one episode with Richard Iowadi and Sarah Pascoe talking about Catcher in the Ride, but it'd be fun to do some more.

It'd be great to do one about network because there is a lot of waffle fodder in there and room for a variety of interpretations.

Anyway, if you haven't already seen it, give it a go.

Also in the links,

there's the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard book that I mentioned.

Depp v.

Heard,

written by Nick Wallace.

He also wrote the excellent book on the post office scandal.

That was published in 2021.

Nick ended up being an advisor, I think, on Mr.

Jones vs.

the post office

earlier this year.

Oh, it's the windy stretch again now.

What else can I tell you before I say goodbye?

Oh yes,

my episode of Travel Man.

with Joe Lysett that we filmed, I think it was one year ago that we filmed it.

Anyway, we went to Prague

for 48 hours of fun and that is finally airing on the 5th of April on Channel 4 at 8.30 p.m.

A family slot.

Okay dog legs, let's head back.

and get this edited.

This will be the last podcast that I put out

for a few months now, I think.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to concentrate on trying to do some more writing for my book

and also

getting myself together for those other live podcast shows in May and June.

Hope to see some of you then and then hope towards the middle of the summer I'll put out a few more episodes of the podcast.

Thanks to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his invaluable production support.

Oh, there's a beautiful rainbow.

I'm going to take a picture of this rainbow.

Oh,

it's a double rainbow.

Oh, double rainbow.

Oh, the way.

Thanks very much indeed to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his invaluable production support and conversation editing and all his help last week at the Palladium.

He came along from New York.

and was standing there in the wings.

It was great to have him there.

Thanks to Helen Green.

She does the artwork for the podcast.

Thank you to everyone at ACAST for all their hard work keeping the show on the road.

But thanks most of all to you for coming back, for being kind and supportive.

I really appreciate it.

I'm not going to say anything funny.

This is just sincere.

All right?

Deal with the hot discomfort of my sincerity.

And lean in for a hug.

Now hey, how are you doing?

Good to see you.

Look after yourselves.

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

please go carefully.

It's very odd out there.

And for what it's worth, I love you.

Bye.

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