Mushroom Murders: True Crime Wars

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Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde.

And me, Richard Osman.

Hello, listen.

Hello, Marina.

Hello, Richard.

How are you?

Yeah, I'm alright.

It's still too hot.

Yeah.

Come on, man.

We're not built for this.

I like it.

It's not city weather.

Yeah, is this entertainment news?

I don't know, but it is hot.

What are we talking about this week?

I have some thoughts on Google VO, Google Flow, this new AI filmmaking tool.

We've obviously moved from the era of the AI image to AI video, and I'd like you to tell you what that means.

I will say just as a headline, I will say this, the revolution has already happened.

I will say that.

We're going to talk it through.

I've come to a number of conclusions and I'd love your take on them and I would love our listeners' take on them as well.

It's a brave new world.

It is.

We'll have to be brave about it.

We are also going to talk about documentaries and podcasts and all the sort of stuff that comes out of true crime off the back of the mushroom poisoner case, which sort of set the world on fire.

The sort of rush for content.

Anytime there's a Wagatha Christie or a mushroom poisoner, the kind of 15 different people all of whom pitch projects at the same time.

Shall we start with Google VO?

Which, as you say, it's you remember when ChatGPT sort of came out of the blocks 18 months ago and everyone went, oh, this changes sort of writing forever.

Well, that's happened.

I think this week that has happened with video.

For a long time now, people have shown me all sorts of short form videos that they've used for sort of pitch documents and things like that.

And it's always been sort of great, but has limitations.

I could, you know, see how it's used.

This week, somebody showed me something that he put together in a matter of hours.

It's like a three-minute animation, perfectly synced, beautifully acted, looked amazing, looked consistent.

And it was absolutely extraordinary.

And the reason he's able to do it this week is because Google VO issued an update.

And this sounds nerdy.

but stay with me because this is where the revolution begins.

You can do eight seconds at a time on these video things,

but it now has an update where you can take a screen grab of the end of what you are doing and that can go straight into your next thing.

So you can now sync sound, you can sync dialogue across clips, and you can also make your characters look and sound completely consistent, which was always the big issue with these things.

So you can now build and build and build.

So you've got a big, strong narrative.

So I saw this thing and I thought, well, okay,

that is the end of part of entertainment history and the beginning of part of entertainment history.

Can I talk you through some of the conclusions I've come to and we can

discuss them because

I'm still not entirely sure what I think about it.

We should say that the video tool is called Flow, which is this thing built on.

Yes, that's sort of it, yeah, like an official name for it.

And at the moment, it costs you 200 quid a month to use it.

Is that more or less expensive than making television in a traditional fashion, Richard?

These days, it's about the same.

£200 a month.

So what do we think is going to happen?

Well, firstly, in the short term, the short-term content, you know, TikTok, ads, trailers, anything like that, I will say would be majority AI-assisted by 2027.

I mean, really, almost immediately.

There is absolutely nothing standing in the way now of any ad agency, anyone making a little 10-second, eight-second clip.

They've just completely taken over.

I've seen lots of, because I was sort of looking for them, because I knew we were going to talk about them.

I've seen so many fake videos created with this that have got, honestly, in 24 hours, like 150 million hits.

They're absolutely massive.

There's a lot.

I did actually notice there was one genre which is fat grandmas.

Fat grandma collapses a glass bridge.

I don't know what that says about our culture.

I don't think it's great.

But

there was a whole sort of trend of those things.

But there were so many of them.

The proliferation is extraordinary.

Yes, it's the ease with which you can now do this.

You can literally sit in your bedroom at home and do it.

And of course, it means that the first thing we're going to see is an awful lot of slop.

And the first reaction is going to be, oh my god, AI is taking over and AI just does all the work.

And my positive spin on that would be firstly, there will be a huge amount of AI slop, which is just fed into a machine.

But

secondly, anything that's not AI made immediately now has a premium.

I mean,

you go, oh, this is actually made by human beings.

So that suddenly means something.

But secondly, the people I know who are the most excited about VO and all of these different, by the way, this will be superseded so quickly by other

video creation AI software.

The people who are most excited are creatives, are people who sit down with a blank piece of paper and a pen.

And the key thing about any creative is you want the least path of resistance between you having an idea and people seeing that idea.

That's the thing.

You want to wake up in the morning, have a great idea, and you get excited.

You go, I want everyone to see this.

Now, you can do that in a matter of minutes.

And I think it's going to unlock an incredible wave of creativity, an incredible democratization of creativity.

You know, when I remember when I was 22, 23, and your creativity was, I'm going to think of a TV idea, and then we're going to go in and pitch it, and then we're going to sell it.

And 18 months later, it's going to be on.

You know, now I'm just going to do it.

I'm going to do it this morning at home.

And that is not AI as a crutch.

That is not AI as, please give me an idea, AI.

That is...

genuine creative ideas driven people thinking I now have no gatekeeper between me and the public.

I can have an idea idea this morning and the public can see it that afternoon and it's going to create some unbelievably great content and it's going to create some stars of

writing and acting and all those types of things.

So I think that around about 2027 you're going to start seeing huge stars emerge from this who would not have had a way of emerging without it because they're not able to go into a studio.

They're not able to afford a traditional way of making media.

So they can write a script.

If you're an actor, you and four friends can sit around.

You can act a script and it can be out in front of the public that afternoon.

So, if you bother having humans, but that's, I think, is going to be the premium.

It is going to create opportunities for very funny, very smart people to spread things very, very quickly, is what I think.

Okay.

Would you disagree with that?

No, I wouldn't disagree with that, but I think it's interesting that you think that there would even be the idea that they would even feel the need to use actual humans.

I mean, some of the stuff I've been seeing is, I mean, actually, they're incredibly weird.

You know, they've kind of created all these stand-up comics who are are talking about

being prompts, just being the subject of prompts.

I saw quite anguished scenes of people, not real people at all, begging for you not to write the prompt for the next awful thing that's going to happen to them, you know, in horror.

So you could, you're, you could, this, they could, you could easily see, you could easily come up with a sort of 90-minute horror movie, and it can happen to unreal people, even though they seemed completely real.

There was no longer that kind of uncanny thing.

If the script was good, I would never notice.

Which, by the way, is the key.

If the prompts are good and the script is good, that's the key.

Maybe some writers will still work.

That's the problem.

See, and that's the problem.

So all the way through, I'm going to try and balance the fact.

We will get to job losses and where it leaves people.

But so point two, I would say, is it does it invents a whole new industry for creative people, which is writers first even get their work seen much more quickly than they could have done.

previously.

I mean, much more quickly.

There will be huge jobs, and it sounds like an awful job, but actually, when you start looking at these things

for prompt creators, this is the way I try and look at it.

As a TV producer, I think, what was it that I was doing all of that time?

And by and large, it was prompt creating.

That's what I was doing.

I think that's right.

It's just a different word for it.

You were asking the right questions.

Exactly that.

What happens next?

What would happen if?

How would it look like if?

That's what you're doing all the way through.

The only difference being, I then wait 18 months.

Whereas now you go, oh, I'll see what happens if.

So that's if I was 22.

I think there are an awful lot of jobs out there for prompt creators because AI is nothing.

AI isn't anything.

AI is like a camera, right?

A camera isn't anything until you put a camera operator or a photographer behind it.

Okay, a camera is not anything.

It's a piece of technology.

And AI is not anything.

This clip I saw this week created by a friend of mine.

It was created by a series of very, very, very funny smart prompts.

Funny smart prompts that would not have been on.

television for a year if it hadn't been for this technology.

So

that is a huge thing.

AI used by brilliant people is going to create brilliant things.

So put aside the slop.

We will deal with all of that nonsense.

But there will be amazing works of art created with this that would not have been created without it.

If you take other jobs, so take the job of an editor.

People are saying this can be hard to be an editor in the world of AI.

But there's two bits to being an editor.

And one bit of being an editor is you do an assembly, which you take every single bit of footage that's been filmed in a TV studio or in a movie or something like that.

And your job is to go through it painstakingly and assemble it together in the correct order and find particular shots and put them where they're supposed to be.

Now that is a job that can be done by AI.

That job can be done by AI in the same way that when I started out editors were cutting bits of tape with razor blades and suddenly a computer was able to do that bit for them.

Which is why you suddenly got so many montages.

Yes, exactly.

Doing the montage at the end of Wonders or something used to be like the most painstaking job.

And then it was like, oh, let's have three a day because that's so easy.

Yeah, get out the elbow C D, and

we will sort this out.

But the real job of an editor, as anyone who works in the industry knows, is to have an eye and have a heart, right?

Because anyone can assemble those things in the right order if they're told to.

But an editor is somebody, if you've got a great editor, you'll walk in and they will, all the way through, they'll be thinking, yeah, but what is the audience thinking at this moment?

And if this shot was a second longer, would they be thinking differently?

And actually, if I had that reaction shot, would it change the story?

And so editors, editing is an enormously, enormously, a large part of it is grunt work, which is the stuff that can be done by AI.

But the great bit about being a great editor or a great grader or anyone in post-production is the heart and the eye.

And that is something that AI is never, ever, ever going to have.

It doesn't matter how great AI gets.

It's never going to have it.

You'll always need that humanity to it.

And most of the, I've spoke to a few AI production houses.

That's a thing now.

And they're all employing editors now.

All of them, because they understand that AI will do a certain thing.

But first, you need a a great producer or a writer to prompt it, and then you need great post-production to make it amazing.

So, there are jobs that are new jobs that are going to be made within this world, and there's not an edit suite now that's not incorporating AI into what it is that

they do.

So, new jobs are going to be created.

Old jobs are going to be lost.

We know that.

I would say, one piece of good news: they're probably not going to be lost in the next five years because there are enough people who are over 45 in our country to keep a fairly healthy television industry.

But I would would say below that, any entry-level people, you better get on board with what AI does in the same way that you had to get on board with digital media

25, 30 years ago.

You can't be a holdout anymore.

It can't be done.

But I do think the traditional media industry has got a while left in it.

And one of the reasons, by the way, I think this slightly extends the traditional media industry is there will be a huge cohort.

There'll be people listening now who are like, I do not want anything to do with AI.

I want human-made things.

And that, I suspect, adds a good five, ten years onto our traditional media industry.

Just the backlash against what is going on, what we're about to see.

Sure.

I do think we're in a situation at the moment in the entertainment industry, particularly.

I've been feeling this more and more, where you haven't really got, particularly in somewhere like Hollywood, you don't really have like a middle class as an industry, an industry middle class anymore.

You've got lots and lots of people at the bottom who are kind of badly paid and are actually struggling to find work and suddenly struggling to find work with anything like the consistency that they did before and then you've got the people at the top who are still to some extent like that the cartoon character who's run over the cliff but is still earning a huge amount of money

and then obviously in societies where the middle class gets completely screwed over they tend to have like revolutions I'm not sure that's the case with industries and I don't think having thought you know I'm afraid people just become sort of obsolete looking at this stuff it's completely different.

And honestly, stuff that you could have laughed at two months ago, three months ago,

suddenly you're like, this is ridiculous.

A project I'm working on, a project I'm developing, is

it's a comedy and there isn't much money for comedy, but the trouble is the location of this comedy is very, very specific and you can't really do it anywhere else.

To some extent, people have always cheated things like that.

And of course, and you build sets and they shot carry on, follow that camel in Canberra Sands.

But there's a degree to which you can't.

Funnily enough, I went on a walk with my friend Stephen Freyers, who who is in his 80s and has made lots of brilliant films, is continuing to make amazing films.

And I said, What can I do about this?

Is there a way of like using original footage from this location?

And he said, Oh, no, you've just got to find someone who's brilliant at matching.

And people used to do that.

And even John Ford used to do it in West.

It's just about where you make the cut and how you do all of that.

Or for that complicated, sort of very, very expensive location stuff.

I mean, I was watching people, I don't know where it was, it looked like a war zone, banging down a door, shooting a sort of SWAT team going going in.

None of this was real, but it was so completely real that it wasn't like, honestly, three months ago, I'd have said, yeah, I mean, I've just got this weird vibe that it's not real.

I didn't, I'm afraid to say

you'd have to convince me that it wasn't.

It is now real, and that's the horns of the dilemma right there.

And that one decision you've got to make, because if you're 22, you know what you do, which is, of course,

not even going to question it.

I just fake the location.

Well, I want my thing to be made.

And you can't make it without the location.

So am I going to, you know,

that already i feel yeah but i imagine you will push back a little and we'll see if we can get because this stuff is still going to get made and premium stuff is still going to get made and human stuff is still going to get made but i if i could say one thing above all else it is going to start to be a struggle to win that argument now it already is at what they're spending on comedies now compared to what they were before and you know you're having very very different by the way

brilliant pieces, but they are of a type because they're small and they're not expensive.

It's creatively limiting.

It's not sometimes a necessity is the mother of invention as we've discussed many times.

In that particular genre, which is almost people love to watch, but it's almost dying.

And everything is becoming so much cheaper in that, to the point where lots of things just couldn't be made.

Yeah, and lots of things are about to be able to be made.

Well,

and that's where we are.

Listen,

I feel very, very uncomfortable talking about it because

it takes the heart out of an industry that I love and that I've worked in for my whole life.

And on one side, I absolutely get the exciting creative side of it.

But on the other side, you do think, what does this mean

for an industry?

Here's a concrete example.

This is another of my points.

That

very, very soon, and you see the first deals being done now, actors are going to start licensing themselves and writers are going to start licensing their products in a way that makes things not the wild west.

Take severance, right?

No, severance are not doing this, but imagine that you created severance now and you've just had this big hit and it's sort of all set set in a fairly, you know, white environment and you've got a small cast of actors.

Say every single one of those actors has signed a contract that allows an AI use of their image within the world of severance.

Not outside of that, but within the world of severance.

And say you say to the writers, we'd love you to write on it.

You know, the showrunner has signed this thing.

He needs all the work of Severance to be inside this gated wall of severance AI.

Now, if you have all of those things, and that's a fairly easy thing to do, for the rest of time, Severance fans can create their own episodes of Severance.

Okay, they've got Adam Scott's likeness, they've got his voice, they have all the scripts, they have every single set they could want.

They can write scripts that will, within six hours, can create a five-minute piece of Severance content, which can then go straight back to the Severance people, which can be shown to Severance fandoms,

which...

if it's monetizable, Severance can make money out of.

But it allows people to constantly remix their favorite television programs and allows those programs to keep some of the money from that.

In the same way that video games have these incredible mods that kind of change the games, that I think will definitely happen.

And in the same way that we've said delebs that dead celebrities have allowed their live series.

But when I saw that just a couple of weeks ago,

my beloved Finn Diesel was announcing the final fast film and it's going to be back in Los Angeles and it's going to have Paul Walker in it.

Yeah.

So then how do you think they're doing that?

And it's definitely not with like they have obviously have permission from the family and all that, but they're not going to be using bits of fan footage from the other things and parsing them together.

He's going to be in it in some way.

Well, that's it.

If you're if you're Doctor Who or something like that, Doctor Who is slightly harder because so many people are sit-on residuals and things like that, but there are groups of people who aren't.

If you're Doctor Who and you can get a core cast of people, all of whom would agree to be in the new Doctor Who AI universe, then Doctor Who can run forever with, you know, we get fan fiction now all the time.

It's a hugely popular.

Now you get fan videos, you get fan episodes.

You know, that is definitely, definitely coming.

If you have something that's already a big piece of IP, if you have something that's already got a big fandom, then that will now live forever through various people remixing what it is that you have done.

I think that definitively is something that is going to happen.

And as a slight adjunct to that, I think we're going to find ourselves in a world where

everything that was created before the last couple of weeks suddenly has a premium.

because people know that it was created without AI.

So if you've got any movie, any music, any TV program that was from the pre-AI era, that is going to be a holy relic, like Beethoven or Mozart or something like that.

That is going to be the canon.

And those are the things that we'll constantly return to time and time and time again and do our own new versions of it.

And there'll be versions of Friends in 200 years' time that someone has remixed and it's on some streaming service somewhere in the same way that we would go to the Royal Abbott Hall to watch, you know, Mozart being played in a slightly different way by slightly different people.

It's going to be a huge boom time if you are already a famous actor.

That is for sure.

Because

you will not have to leave your house if you choose to get on board with this.

And you can choose to get on board with it in two ways, of course, which is someone that offers you loads of money or some great director or some young buck who's 23 who just send you a video and you just go, well, that's incredible.

Says, I need your likeness.

And you go.

In the same way, I might take a chance with an indie filmmaker 20 years ago.

Okay, kid, let's see what you can do with that.

And that is going going to grow and grow and grow, I think.

And what will you do all day if you're the actor?

Will you just be like Mark Wahlberg and like pray and work out and have showers?

Yeah, you go to the gym.

But also, they can really, you know, like Mark Wahlberg and let himself go.

He can finally go, do you know what?

I put so much work into making myself look like that for like a two-month period, and now I can be like that forever and ever and ever.

People will go nuts in the age of authenticity if that happens.

And they see some paparazzi pictures of Mark Wahlberg being sort of beached in Hawaii somewhere.

And then they're like, what?

I'm so sorry.

I've just paid for him to be in daddy's home for, and I just don't accept that he looks like this, or Mel Gibson.

But, you know,

films are weird.

The stuff in films doesn't really happen.

You know, those actors are not, I mean, they're just human beings pretending to be someone.

You know, it's the whole thing is an artifice.

It has been for the whole, you know, the whole point about the craft of movies and TV is to make you believe something that isn't real is real.

That's the

job.

I think it's not too unsettling for people.

No.

I think it would be unsettling for people for about two years, and then it won't be.

And then it'll become used to it.

Well, because and also it will just it just won't look any different to people.

The whole TV schedule just be AI stuff.

I think TV schedule is different because TV schedule, well, this is that's something that I will get onto, which is this premium of human-made content.

I don't think we can stop the slop, okay?

I don't think in the world of advertising, I don't think in the world of TikTok, we I I think the landslide is already coming down the hill.

We just, you know, you you have to get out of the way.

In TV, I think there is still a way to and this is what we have to do to harness this premium on on on human-made stuff and if you're the bbc or itv or channel 4 it's beholden on them i think i think they have to use ai in interesting ways they do there's no point having a blanket bound on it you know they've talked about having kind of tutors that stay with kids from the kind of birth through to 18 that kind of learn how they learn and you know and that's that's a useful use of ai something that would be unimaginably expensive to do in a in a in a human way But I do think they probably have to put an awful lot in place about programs being human-made.

If you're going to fake a drone shot on a daytime show that you would not be able to afford otherwise, maybe you can do that.

Start the drone shot.

You know my feeling about that.

Stop the drone shot.

Stop every single American documentary starting with a water tower with the name of the town on it.

I think that

there has to be sort of a gold

standard of human-made programming.

And I think that the big channels have something to do with that.

I also think if you're Netflix or Amazon it's beholden on you to do that as well because I know that you're purely commercial organizations but you've got big by backing creators and you've got big by backing camera operators and lighting people and sound people you know that's that's how you made all of your money and you've got to give some of that back now you have got to say there is a premium here everyone's going to experiment everyone's going to do interesting things but you have to support the industry you know because the industry supported you and without it no there's there's none of your money so i think I think that everyone has to get together and find a way of keeping as many people in jobs as possible.

One of the things about all of these AI things is, you know, they say, oh, you know, it's amazing you can do like all these different camera shots and this, that, or the other.

Very specifically about camera operators.

I think someone who I work with called Nigel Saunders, right?

So, Nigel's worked in the BBC forever and ever and ever, right?

And a lot of the shots you see on TV is he's one of the first people ever to do them, right?

They're problem solvers.

But again, camera operating is not a non-creative job.

It is not pointing a camera.

It is absolutely fixing problems working out different ways to shoot things

and if i was an ai company those are the people i would be looking to employ right now as consultants people who've been there done it all who've worked with the worst technology with the best technology i tell you now that nigel in his head will have 50 shots that he thinks imagine the technology where i could do that You know,

any camera operator, any sound guy, anyone, they're all thinking about new technology all the time.

And what does that mean that I can do?

So if I was an AI company, you think, great, Nigel, come in and talk to us about the ways that you could use a camera if there were absolutely no physical restrictions, right?

And that's a guy who'd be able to tell you.

And there's loads of people in the TV industry who've got all that experience.

And if I worked in AI, I'd be bringing them in on a fat wage as consultants to tell me exactly how to light something, exactly how something should sound, and just all the ideas these people have got in their head.

For a bit, you would.

And then you wouldn't need them anymore.

Yeah, but if for someone to get paid an absolute load, then you know, and also that creates a new job, which is, you know, AI camera operator, which is is a, that's a thing.

I'm really trying to be hopeful that I'm trying to find ways through it where we protect as many jobs as possible and we protect as much creativity as possible.

So I think it's beholden on

all of our broadcasters to say that there's a premium on human-made product.

That is why it's very, very important that traditional broadcast media has some sort of system where

we keep studios open, we keep people employed, we keep a premium on human-made products products because

it's not like how do we fight back.

It's the fight has already been had.

It's how do we regrow?

How do we

retrench?

But certainly, if I was Lisa and Andy listening to this, and I'd worry slightly less about some of the smaller things that you're worrying about and just go, this is an entire industry that needs looking after, and that there are ways that we can legislate.

Well, we know the BPC are thinking about this enormously, and they are comparing the sort of tens of billions that's being put in by the US companies into this.

And if the government's talking about tiny, tiny amounts, a billion or less to put into developing a kind of AIs that

they might be able to regulate and that they might be able to use the powers for good, then they're just not even in the same universe as any of this.

And I'm sorry this has been unfocused.

And I hope people take it in the spirit in which it's intended, which is, you know, I do, I think we all have to come to terms with it very quickly.

And I'd be fascinated.

I know so many people who listen to this work in lots of different areas of the industry, with some of which we wouldn't have even thought about in this.

So anything you do have,

any notes you do have or ideas you do have, it would be absolutely lovely to hear them.

But I definitively from this week, I think the game has changed.

We're in an entirely new era of content.

creation.

I do think some of that is going to be amazing, but we do need to protect as much of what we've got as we possibly can.

I completely agree with you.

It's changed so much.

I mean, I remember when Sora first came out, everyone's like, oh, look at this.

I mean, that looks just like something antediluvian.

Now it's ridiculous.

And you look at these things and you think, I just can't tell that that's not real.

Yeah.

And again, I think my absolute key is if I was 22, this would be the thing that I'd be using.

And I would be insane not to.

And we have to come to terms with that.

It also means, of course, live experiences will be a huge thing.

I mean, they've been growing and growing and growing, but the kind of stuff that you can't fake.

You know, going to see Oasis live is a much bigger deal than Oasis releasing a new album.

I mean, much, much, much bigger.

And, you know, experiential things.

And, you know, the growth of podcasts and all this stuff, stuff that is so obviously human, it cannot be faked.

You know, that is a huge growth.

Yeah, I said to you before, I think podcasts are massively vulnerable to AI.

And anyone listening at home, do if you have an insight into your particular side of the industry and things where it might be useful that we haven't thought of, and particularly areas where it is definitively not going to be useful that we haven't thought of as well, it would be fascinating to start that conversation.

Yes.

The email is theresters entertainment at goalhanger.com and we always look forward to hearing from you.

Yeah, and a real human being will read your emails.

And that's what we've got five years left.

That's promised.

Five years left of that, maybe.

Yeah.

Shall we now go to a break?

Oh, yeah, I'm shattered.

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Welcome back, everyone.

Should we spread a bit of joy with the Taylor Poison Mushrooms?

Well, yes.

I mean,

the mushroom poisoner, Erin Patterson, who was found guilty in Australia for poisoning various members of her extended family.

And to me, it's very interesting because it was held.

I don't know if you know about this, but it was held in a sort of tiny courtroom

in rural Australia, and yet it grabbed everybody's attention.

In Australia, the podcast Top 10 had three network-backed podcasts in it all about the mushroom poisonings.

I think even The Guardian did one as well.

So there were basically four.

There was Mushroom Case Daily.

That was the ABC one.

There was the Mushroom Murder Trial.

There was the Mushroom Cook.

Already, there's been a documentary that they've already had ready to go, Channel 9 in Australia, Murder by Mushroom.

They've announced a scripted drama for the ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Toxic.

And by the way, we haven't even got onto Netflix, which as we know is the global TV channel.

And people will be watching this in many, many iterations on Netflix.

And to go sort of back and on pick it, lots of the aspects of this and how it sort of blew up were very interesting to me because obviously it is a sort of, obviously, it's a sensational story.

Give us the bare bones of this story.

Right.

Erin Patterson,

who I have to say was a true crime obsessive herself, she invited family members, well, extended family members, members of her husband's family, really, who's a strange farm, including him, to a meal at her house in rural Victoria in 2023.

And she served a beef Wellington, which was laced with death cat mushrooms.

She had a different colour plate to everyone else.

And despite turning up at the hospital saying, oh, I'm feeling really bad, they found nothing wrong with it.

Well, it was a cover story.

Do you know what?

My

bad worked that out.

My copper's nose.

Yeah,

nothing cats passed.

The advice of police officer goes, but she felt really bad as well.

So there's no way she did it.

Yeah.

So three of the relatives died.

One only barely survived.

And so she has been now found guilty of murdering her parents-in-law, Don and Gail Patterson, Gail's sister, Heather Wilkinson, and attempting to murder Gail, uh, Heather's husband, who was Ian Wilkinson.

Um, and only, as I say, her husband only managed to survive, I think, because he decided not to attend the meal.

And it just sort of is one of those things that sort of caught fire.

And I suppose the story is fascinating, and you can't quite believe it all.

I think what's interesting is how you see news organizations have all pivoted to this.

So, while things like this are happening, what we used to call a newspaper, a news outlet, whatever, is already doing ongoing podcasts about this in the same way that they might have done about the Lucy Lettby trial in the UK or whatever.

And then they are, so they're kind of constantly repackaging essentially the same stuff.

Their journalists are already being picked up as talking heads for future documentaries.

But what's interesting to me is you're getting much, much closer to the actual event in terms of, in the old days, it would take a long time, you know, it would have been years before someone did a documentary about this.

You've just seen the court case, that would have, would have been regarded as enough.

Yeah.

And 10 years later, you might go, oh, do you remember that?

The mushrooms.

Someone would do a deep dive in it.

Order, it would be really interesting.

Okay.

Now,

that courtroom at the end, there were so many people from podcasts, from, you know, television, effectively streaming executives working.

There are going to be so many competing documentaries about this.

The first time people really realized this was happening

was in with the Fire Festival ones.

Now, remember the fire festival, it's like going to be this kind of gorgeous influencer party on a tropical island.

Anyway, it all went wrong.

They had to be in sort of disaster tents, and they had really bad food and polystyrene things, and there weren't any influencers there, and it was a disaster.

Anyway, by 2019, which is quite is incredibly long compared to what you'd expect now.

That's like ancient.

Both Netflix and Hulu had one.

It's quite interesting.

Already in that, we can start to see some of the things.

We're thinking, they each had ethical issues with each other.

One of them said, well, you've paid Billy McFarlane.

He's obviously a criminal.

He was the guy who sort of was essentially the figurehead of it.

You've paid him and he's obviously a criminal or whatever.

Another one,

sorry, the

swearing alert, the festival's original marketing firm were called Fuck Jerry.

No.

Yeah, that was their name.

And they'd taken a lot of footage, you know, to run up, to do the adverts for it, stuff that they could put all over Instagram.

So they had all that footage.

That'd be all AI these days.

Yeah, exactly.

So they thought, oh, we want to get access to this footage.

So they partnered with them and therefore, consequently, in that document, you can't remember which of the two it was, they got an easier ride.

So what's quite interesting is that already people are becoming

much more media literate.

And they start thinking about the whole process of documentary making as opposed to just like sitting back and allowing it all to wash over you.

So people are starting to think of like choices, methodology, and things like that.

I, again, I've said this before, but in the wake of the Wagatha Christie court case,

Rebecca Vardy and Colleen Rooney, four people, four different

production companies asked me if I would write a sort of, you know, I guess a comedy drama script about it.

That's just fiction.

Yeah.

There were obviously lots of documentaries.

There's such a race to get this stuff out here.

But news, so news has become IP.

News has become IP and it's become IP really quickly.

And here's what I think has now happened.

You know, like I just said to you, Firefest was supposed to be be in 2017 and they got the stuff out in 2019.

Okay.

It's reduced so dramatically in recent years.

This is roughly where I would put it now.

Podcast daily during the trial of whatever it is, the news event.

TV special docudrama a week or a month afterwards.

That's called sort of docujournalism.

That's a new whole strand.

The streaming series, the proper,

you know, the sort of big Netflix thing on the, I don't know, like that murder guy in the US or whoever it is, one of those cases,

three months, 12 months is now the outside, isn't it?

You would be, I mean, how do you think, how long do you think it's going to take Netflix to get their mushroom on that?

Not as long as 12 months.

And season two as well

of

what happens when it becomes a media sensation.

So Monster Family, so that's a series too.

Well, scripted drama is one to three years, I would say.

And I mean, so what you're doing is, in order how to make these things, you've got to make it during the trial.

You're just in that way that we talked about a little bit earlier, about how easy it is to do montages and things like that.

Now in the trial, on people's downtime, you're interviewing journalists as talking head.

You're building the framework for either verdict.

If she'd got off, which I suppose she could have, you're building the case, then it becomes something like, I can't believe she got away with it.

Or you're building the framework for, tell me what happened.

Now, there's lots of different things about this.

First of all, I do wonder, and I was thinking about this, sorry, when we were talking just earlier, what are we actually learning from any of this?

We're stuck in this weird thing where we're essentially just rehashing things that happened 10 minutes ago.

I don't think we're learning anything at all.

I don't think we're going in any more depth.

You couldn't go into any more depth than you did during the trial, really.

And I think that dystopian fictions, they're always set sort of 10 minutes into the future.

A lot of our culture is set 10 minutes into the past now.

There's so many things that we're just sort of, we can't move on in some weird way.

We are sort of continually rehashing the very, very recent present.

And I don't think really learning anything.

But it's like when you're a kid at school, which is, you know, if you've got maths after lunch, you're talking about it.

Do you remember what the thing did to have at a lunch?

Do you remember when you said that to me?

Do you remember what I said that?

it's that, isn't it?

Just non-stop.

It's completely odd.

And we're not really, and you're just sort of revisiting the incredibly recent past.

Okay.

But what I really want to talk about as well is the whole ethical issues, which I think have come into much sharper focus about this purely because there are so many of these and they're so splashy.

You know, when that mushroom things comes out, believe me, it's going to be in the Netflix top 10, even though we've just been through it.

And

there's a woman, her name is Margie Ratcliffe.

She is a participant in the documentary, The Staircase.

Her mother, her mother,

and she had two step-siblings, was found dead at the bottom of the staircase in North Carolina.

And her father, her stepfather, in fact, but the other children's father, was charged with murder.

Now, he invited, this is ages ago, he invited a French documentary crew, thinking the more people who see this, you know, and the subsequent documentary was shown in those kind of previous, like real documentary spaces, you know, like Canal Plus, BBC4.

But it was a sort of cult thing because it was fascinating.

And these children who'd just been through this awful tragedy were filmed all the time.

Anyway, but a lot of people thought that changed documentary making, particularly documentary making around crime.

And this is before things like serial and all of those things, which were podcasts.

But they thought that was really interesting.

You could really delve deep in.

Anyway, and they had all this footage.

Now, Netflix bought that in 2018.

Now, of course, that becomes a whole thing,

it becomes a huge thing.

And then by that point, he was almost getting out.

And so they then added two extra episodes.

It's resold again.

It's streamed in 200 countries.

HBO made a dramatized version with Colin Firth, and she was played by Sophie Turner.

I mean, I should say she's never had a penny for any of this, but she feels her life has been completely commodified, completely.

So she's actually started something called the Documentary Participants Empowerment Alliance because she wrote this incredible article, which I strongly recommend you read in Time magazine, saying, I was sitting on a plane and I, you know, just because I was in the mood to chat, I talked to the person next to me and said, you know, what are you going to watch?

She was on a long haul flight or whatever.

And this woman said to Margie, oh, yeah, no, I love true crime.

Her hackles are already up because she's thinking so many people come up to her in the street already and say, so do you think your father did it?

I mean, it's horrific.

And

she says, I love that one about the staircase, you know, about that man who got away with murder, the person sitting next to her on the plane.

And she's sitting there thinking

this is so she does say i feel very sorry for the children involved in all of this this woman just doesn't recognize her feel sorry for all the children about that and she said yeah no i didn't really think about that and it's so interesting because so many people people just like us people who listen to podcasts whoever think very carefully i think these days about you know their fashion choices and the ethics of their food choices.

But the ethics of sort of content choices are something we don't really think about hardly at all in lots of ways.

And anyway, she teamed up with some people, a documentary maker, including one who used to work at the FT, and thought, this is so weird because, you know, in a traditional news media setting, you've got your relationship with your sources.

And

even if they're participants in the story, you know, there's a whole way of dealing with it.

You've got an editor.

Whereas documentaries are sort of the wild west and anyone can do anything and it depends who's brought up who.

And people can say sort of what they like about you, especially in the US.

Well,

that's just to give people an idea of the process.

If people are making these sorts of documentaries, there's a number of ways of doing it.

So ITN, for example, has a very, very fast turnaround documentary unit now,

and it does amazing things.

But their job anyway is to take all footage of everything.

So they've got a lot of footage that they're taking in their daily life.

And they've got all sorts of interviews of people, exclusive things, and they can put that together and put it out as a documentary.

Or you can, as you say, you can be in the court and say the mushroom case, well, there are relatives who you could say, can we buy your story?

And you can tell the story via that person.

And that, you know, or there might be the police officer who was involved and maybe he's retired.

And you say, can we buy your story?

And you can tell the story via the police officer.

So so long as you've got your angle in, which is, I already have all the footage anyway.

or I bought the story and the rights of someone who has some footage no one's ever seen before or the police officer who has a view on it that we've never heard before you can do that or you can do a very very super cheap here are some talking heads here are some shots we just got from the news media put them together.

Oh, do you remember?

And then she said this and then she did that, which has no insight.

But you can do all four of those things.

And people do do all four of those things.

And yeah, the first thing they're thinking is not, how do I be respectful to the people in here?

By the way, lots of these documentary makers are, some aren't.

But they are thinking, what's my angle?

Do I have the footage?

Do I have the participants that I can turn this around in two weeks and sell it?

Absolutely.

And the other thing that's changed, obviously, in a digital era, is that lots of times people would make documentaries that I suppose you might have originally categorised as true crime.

But I think how hard it was to find those things.

Now, everything's just clicking away, and the algorithm will continue to serve you long ago library stuff as long as you like.

So you can never really escape this.

And it's interesting.

So Marguerite participated in this documentary, which I recommend watching as well.

It's called Subject.

And there's a really quite compelling moment where she sits in front of the camera and she says, I know what I am signing up for by being in this documentary and says what it is.

And yeah, it's a lot what you're signing up for.

And people obviously have no idea.

And some of the people who've been subject of these documentaries, there's another one in this particular documentary.

It was the siblings who were sort of kept captive for 14 years.

And it's the so-called wolf pack.

And one of those.

children who is now an adult who I mean again whose life has been completely commodified in this way and will be completely thrown up by the algorithm to anyone who's interested in this sort of stuff forever you can never really escape it also participates and says the same thing and I I do think that the ease with which it's being able to be done the sheer scale of it and the sheer number of it the proliferation and the way in which they constantly get served back to people that you have to push for but much better ethical frameworks with these things now because erin patterson has two children and they won't necessarily understand what they're signing up for and it's not at all clear well there's that there's that absolute blurring of the lines between and so you can see how all these things come about you know we have drama then we have documentary then we have drama documentary, then we have things like the Kardashians, which are documentary, but clearly bits of it are scripted.

So you start to think that anyone involved in any sort of area of the public eye, and a criminal trial is an area of the public eye,

are fair game or are part of, you know, just some chess pieces that can be moved around.

And no one's thinking that consciously, by the way.

But subconsciously, I think we're thinking, no, we're very used to seeing everyone's private lives on screen.

And you forget that if you're a Kardashian, you choose to be in that story.

If you are the daughter of a murderer,

it is not a story you chose to be part of.

And you own, you know,

you're the Kardashians.

You own everything.

You control everything.

You have final edits there.

You have all of this stuff, which you don't if you're one of those people.

And just the thought of people just coming up to her for her whole life in the street saying, so did your father do it?

It's sort of unimaginable.

And yet it will be visited upon participants in this case and survivors and all of these things.

And it is a real Wild West area of programming at the moment because there is just so much of it.

There's so much of it.

You've got on Paramount, there's series after series of cold case things, some with reconstructions, some talking to victims or families of victims.

And there's so much.

My favorite is American Detective with Joe Kender,

because

it is possible to do these things in a

respectful way.

And it's possible to do these things with the involvement of families and it's possible to tell interesting stories that tell us about our world and and teach us something about our world.

That are ethically produced.

That are ethically produced.

But it is easier and probably cheaper

to do it in a different way.

And by the way, when you see cases like that case of Nicola Bully who went into the river and just they had they had to literally put a cordon around the town because so many

citizen journalists of some type or another came and were making content.

And as you say, none of those people are thinking of the ethical issues at all.

All they're thinking is, I'm cleverer than everyone else.

Yeah.

And there is no framework whatsoever.

And victims, survivors, people who are just tangentially related are constantly being sort of falling victim to this wild west.

And there has never been more of this stuff.

It is such a like, it's just the tiger economy true crime of everything in broadcast.

People can't watch enough of it.

And I really think that there would have to be much, much more stringent sort of

I'd love to see there would be more stringent frameworks around it because you could see with this that this tiny town, which is already tiny, as you can see, it couldn't support the structures couldn't support the massive interest.

And there certainly won't be any sort of off after event care for any of the people involved in that.

Yeah, if I can listen again,

it seems a very weird place to be recommending things.

But we've spoken before about Lost Stop Laramie, the story of an australian murder it's possible to make great art with great humanity yes about tragic stories it really really is and lost stop laramie is is is is certainly that yeah it it's very very difficult and it's the ease of again it's the ease of which these things can be made that in the old days was completely different it was really hard to make documentaries and also they were pushed into, as I say, no disrespect to BBC4, which I love, or Canal Plus or whatever, but it's really different from being number one on the global Netflix chart for a week.

I love Canal Plus.

There, I've said it.

But it is obviously different.

And I think that something

it's becoming more and more obvious.

And as I said earlier, people are becoming more literate to the choices that are made by these documentaries.

And whilst people may sort of carry on now, not really thinking about the ethics of where their content is coming from, sometime there will be a reckoning at some point and it could be a horrid one.

Yeah.

That said, I did enjoy Trainwreck poop cruise on Netflix.

That was cruise where the toilet stopped working and it suddenly becomes Lord of the Flies very, very quickly.

Well, everyone in that is so enjoying talking about it.

Yeah, yeah, that's it.

Everyone in that is loving it.

They're standing around a little cocktail table going, and then

you never guess what happened.

Oh my god, they loved it.

And then they opened the bar.

Yeah, there was quite low stakes to some extent.

I mean, I would not have liked to have been involved in that, but it's not really the same.

No one died on the poop cruise.

Yeah.

When they came up with the title poop cruise, they must have gone, okay, I think we've got a hot one here.

I think that's us about done for the day.

Do you have any recommendations before we go?

I most certainly do.

I finally caved to my children and I watched K-pop Demon Hunters, which is really good.

I don't know if you've seen this.

It's really torn up the charts, the film charts on Netflix.

And it's been really...

I've seen the title many times and been intrigued.

Okay, but actually,

me too.

Like, oh, my God.

I watched it.

It's really funny.

The music's really cool.

It's very, very knowing.

It reminds me so much.

It's it's made by sony actually and it it's it reminds me so much of those uh spider-verse the spider-verse trilogy of things it's really good uh i i recommend k-pop demon

with with kids or just or oh yeah yeah it's it's good but you don't you don't have to watch it with kids it's but it's it's completely geared towards yeah you know tween and teenager kids um but it but it's it's very knowing and it is funny and it's sort of very well done and the story is good

I'm going to combine our two stories this week and give another shout-out for human endeavor in television.

Just 24 Hours in Police Custody is back on Channel 4, and it only comes out very rarely because we've spoken before about

they have to wait for the end of trials before they're going to have things.

The two that have currently come out, one of the, I mean, listen, is very trigger warning-y, but you know, take a look at what it is.

But it's so brilliantly made,

made by humans, and made with humanity.

and it is just you know it's been going for so many years now 24 hours on police custody but every time you you kind of think well surely they haven't come up with another story and there's one about a lodger who lives with a with an older woman that you just think god every time you watch this there's like a different aspect of humanity is shown so anyway it's brilliantly made but i'm also on channel 4 um Stuart and Scarlett Douglas have done can't sell must sell which is just which is a house renovation show people who who literally can't sell their house you know it's been on the market for ages and they just do it up.

And I, you know, I love a home makeover show.

Those are the types of shows that are not going to die.

They're really, really not.

There's such a market for those things for the next 10, 20 years.

There's such a market for that mid-level stuff.

So we must support it, must keep watching those things because

it's just, you know, it's a industry I'm incredibly proud of.

And there's something about human shows made by humans that will never, ever, ever die.

Thank you.

I really need to watch that.

Now, we have a bonus, speaking of shows that were all made by humans, we have a bonus episode this week about sitcoms.

Yes, we are going to, with you, the listeners, work out the greatest British sitcom of all time.

We're doing it in decades.

This week, we are talking about

the sitcoms from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s, giving you the runners and riders for you to vote on.

There's little behind-the-scenes stories about the greatest British sitcoms of all time.

There's some gripping polling for more in common, I must say, as well.

So that, if you want to join the club it's therestersenttertainment.com.

Otherwise we will see you as always for our questions and answers edition on Thursday.

On Thursday.

See you everyone.

Bye.

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