Noel Edmonds And The Apocalypse

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

Hi.

And me, Richard Osman.

Hi, Marina.

Hello, Richard.

How are you?

Yeah, I'm very well.

It's very nice to see you.

Listen, everyone, there was going to come a point in this podcast.

It was always going to happen where our attention was going to have to turn to Noel Edmonds.

It was fated.

Yeah, and today is the day his documentary is out on ITV.

So we are going to be chatting a little bit about Noel, what he means.

A documentary about him, I wouldn't necessarily describe it, comes off as his documentary, but

buckle up everybody because we're going in.

We are going in.

We're also going to talk about this amazing new world of micro-dramas, which has become very quickly become a billion-dollar industry and a tiny new way of making and watching television, which a lot of people haven't yet heard of, but everyone is about to hear of.

it's totally fascinating and it's fascinating for the industry and it's it's a really interesting thing so it's either the best thing that's ever happened or the worst thing that's ever happened yeah i'm i haven't called it yet yes perhaps while we're talking i'll make it make the decision okay shall we get into noel's kiwi adventure yes shall we it's a three-part documentary about noel edmonds airing on itv um i would say my top-line review is it of it is bring back philips gofield but let's not get too deeply into that because i think we should, for our younger listeners, you might want to say, who is Noel Edmonds?

He sort of bestrode the world of light entertainment for a long while.

There were many, many short colossus, very short colossus.

Yes, he was the Radio One Breakfast DJ in the 70s, in the early days of the swap shop and breakfast show and Noel's house party.

He was zany.

He would do pranks, the gotchas on house party.

The gotchas on the Lord of Miss Rule.

A Lord of Miss Rule, exactly that.

And he bestrode Saturday night TV like a colossus.

He was the big one.

He's as famous as it's possible to be.

He was the most famous presenter.

He went on that journey, which is, you know, you start on kids' TV, then he went to prime time.

Then there was a hiatus, which we'll talk about.

And then he came into your orbit, your direct orbit, didn't he, Richard?

He did.

So he'd done late-date breakfast show, Noel's house party.

There had been a few years where we hadn't seen Noel on screen.

And then we were looking for a presenter for a show which we were certain wasn't going to work called Deal or No Deal.

He came in, we cast him in that, and he re-entered the public consciousness for lots and lots of reasons.

Then, again, when that ended, there was another dip, and now we're in the sort of third act of the Edmonds career.

What he's done, we should say what he's done.

He's moved, he has Noel Edmonds, has moved to New Zealand, he's moved to a place on the South Island called Natamoti, and he's bought 800 acres of land, something like $30 million worth of property, which he's rechristened Riverhaven.

And part of that, there's a business on it,

the Bugger Inn, which is a pub.

There's a vineyard.

Obviously, it being Noel Edmonds, there's a significant spiritual dimension to the estate.

There's a crystal room, his house.

There's an energy garden, I think.

They're trying to build an energy garden.

And so what we're looking at here really is one of those

new sort of new life, new business, relocation type of documentaries.

A famous person goes to a beautiful place and does something interesting is essentially that.

It's sort of like, you know, can I TV recreate Clarkson's farm?

Can they do a thing with someone who everybody knows doing something intriguing with a band of people working for him?

Civilians.

Civilians working for him.

Not everything goes to plan, and not everything that doesn't go to plan is included in the documentary either.

I think it's fair to say there's quite a long backstory

before this documentary starts about his life in New Zealand.

Yes, I think there is.

I mean, if you see this place, by the way, it's so beautiful.

So beautiful.

It's really like it is Middle-earth, but it's the Shire bit of Middle-earth rather than

any of the sites of the Great Battles in Lord of the Rings.

But you are praying for Orcs throughout.

I was anyway.

I mean, he is quite insufferable.

And we'll dive deep.

It's a psychiatric portrait of him as much as anything else.

And and actually, I did think, you know, all those tech bros have got those bunkers in New Zealand.

And you do think, oh, it's so annoying, you know, because it's them who will cause the apocalypse.

You know, it with some quantum computing.

And they'll get to go to Spanish.

And they'll get to go and fly there.

But I feel so much better about that now that I know that Noel Edmonds will be waiting for them.

So there will be

a hell of sorts awaiting them.

So I feel a lot more relaxed about the apocalypse and their exit strategy for it.

But anyway, let's continue.

So he, so he.

Why does he go to New Zealand in the first place?

It's a very interesting

and disputed thing as well.

So Noel, after Deal I No Deal came off air on Channel 4,

it had a long run and a very, very, very successful run.

It got to the point where it's too expensive for the ratings it was getting, as with all shows.

Noel had a few attempts to reinvent himself.

He did Noel's HQ on Sky, which is an extraordinary channel.

I really want to talk about that.

Watch.

He did Cheap, Cheap, Cheap on Channel 4, which is one of the most extraordinary game shows history with him and a series of young improvisers

by know who now we know from ghosts and loads of things he's he's sort of a sidekick on there and i've spoken to people who are on that production and it was quite a ride i think it's this is your watergate this particular item i have to say

you know what a lot of people on a lot of productions my favorite thing about doing this podcast is i get to think about things you know so i love it the few you know we decide what we're going to talk about you know i could spend a few days think about what i think about stuff talking to people this This is the most intense one I've had to do, I have to say, talking to people.

You're too close to it.

Yes, I am too close to it.

And I have a lot of opinions, which I will get on to.

Spoiler alert, I retain a fondness for Noel.

Okay, so we will get to that.

So he did cheap, cheap, cheap.

Again, that didn't trouble the scorers particularly.

Then he goes on, I'm a celebrity.

This is the big sort of roll of the dice.

Goes on, I'm a celebrity, goes in late, gets not deliberately late.

He was the highest paid celeb on ever at that time.

He guessed he got about 600 grand.

And how he's been beaten by people like Colleen since, but he was the biggest one at the time.

600 grand, goes in, is made emperor of the camp,

gets voted out first, gets voted out first.

And it's not even we vote out the person we like least.

You vote for your most popular person.

He got the least votes.

And I think, like for anyone,

that would be harmful to one's ego.

I think after that, there were various talks about maybe he could do a show with Harry Redknapp because there was a relationship they sort of had in camp.

None of it comes off.

He then, and it may be coincidence, the next year decides he's going to emigrate to New Zealand.

We should say that before all this, this is, and the reason that we're kind of weaving in all these kind of looking forwards and backwards parts to this story is because he epitomises so many particular things, I think, about British light entertainment.

And that's why he's interesting in other ways to talk about.

There was that incredible bitterness about leaving the BBC originally before he even did deal or no deal.

And there are a lot lot of people who were like that, but he, I think, went further and further than criticising anyway.

There was a point where he was even saying, I'm working with the consortium and we're going to buy the BBC.

How?

How are you doing that?

Where did you begin?

He said, I no longer pay my license fee because, you know, we're no longer represented.

And

people said to the BBC, surely you should prosecute him.

And they said, oh, no, we've checked our records.

He does pay his license fee.

But I can't stand all these guys.

There's so many of these guys who had, and by the way, they were all men, who had these incredible sort of of 30-year careers in primetime or whatever it was.

And when eventually they have to bring some new people through, instead of thinking, thank you very much, you made me very rich doing what I loved.

They are, I mean, not to sound like J.D.

Vance, they're so bitter, but, you know, did you even say thank you?

Did you even say thank you, Noel?

But he was so angry about being sort of let go, as he put it by the BBC.

No, they just didn't give you another decade's worth of prime time show.

And that bitterness is a huge part of the character.

You see it a lot in this documentary, despite the fact his relentless insistence that he is only about positivity.

There is such a sort of Partridgeian, if I may use that, which is why Alan Partridge, we'll have to talk about him as well, is such a brilliant archetype.

There is such a level of bitterness that he cannot expand.

There's such a needless to say, I had the last laugh

energy going on.

Noel's great tragedy, I think, is that he's actually incredibly talented.

That's the big problem.

And most of the people in his generation were not.

And I have to say, of all all the presenters I have ever worked with, he is head and shoulders the best.

He's as close as you would say to a genius in light entertainment presenting.

He just is.

He's unbelievable.

And when you are a producer and you see a presenter who can produce on the floor and can make something out of nothing, you have to admire it.

He's brilliant.

He's brilliant at what he did.

He was brilliant on Swap Shop.

He was brilliant on Knowles House Party.

He was brilliant on the Radio One breakfast show.

He was brilliant on Deal on No Deal.

The first time we ever did a run-through,

walked straight into this thing,

just absolutely hit the ground running, nailed it throughout series after series of Deal on O'Deal.

He did a genuinely unbelievable job.

Like, he's incredibly good.

How do you think he fares in the documentary format, which of course is different to being the presenter of a light entertainment format?

Well, the interesting thing about being the presenter or a producer of a...

light entertainment format is it's actually rather useful if you like to control your environment, if you like to control a narrative,

if you are able to see what's coming and channel it in a certain direction, that's the real situation.

He's one of the most controversial, I think watching this documentary, he's one of the most controlling people you can possibly imagine outside of people like magicians and in my view butchers, but that's just a butchers.

Yeah.

I think there's a level of control there that I find quite interesting.

Gosh, this is, I wish we weren't talking about Noel because I'd like to explore that.

Well, that's one for the future.

I don't think we'll have time.

Anyhow.

But his brilliance at being a TV presenter is that ability to control his surroundings, to be a ringmaster, in the same way that a circus runs if you have an amazing ringmaster, right?

That's how a TV format runs.

And you know, you've got to get from A all the way through to Z, and he will take you there in just a brilliant way and make it a better show than it would have been before.

He's brilliant at it.

That skill is not useful in daily life.

That skill is an incredibly bad one to have in daily life, the ability to control your environment and be a ringmaster for your environment.

If it's great for you, Of course it is, because you can avoid pain, you can avoid vulnerability, you can avoid anything inconvenient.

It's not brilliant for people around you because in the real world there's a thing called truth and if you are always controlling your environment then truth tends to bump up against you.

And I've always felt with Noel that his life would be so easy if he just accepted who he was, what he does, the skills that he have, which are many and varied.

I've seen him be enormously generous to an enormous amount of people.

He has inside him such a

kindness and such a skill that his life should be the easiest life that anyone has ever had because he's really good at what he does and the thing that he does is really really lucrative you can get paid an awful lot but at some point he keeps reminding us as he keeps reminding us but this documentary is is interesting because you see him you see that out in the real world well you see him trying actually what i think and not to get too meta about it you see him trying to control the documentary yeah that lots of things happen in the documentary that you think slight as this happens slightly sometimes with people who write lifestyle columns and you think why are you doing this oh i see because you're going to get a column out of it There's a bit where he's got, he's think he's found some scientific paper.

I will have to come to his the type of science he believes in in a minute.

But he hears that he's read some paper from decades and decades ago: that if you play music to plants, they grow better, or whatever it is.

And so, to the vines in the vineyard, he gets a sort of piano on the back of a low loader, and he is going around, you know, and you think, I see why you've done this.

What you've done is that you think, oh, well, that will fill, they'll like this for the documentary.

And he's trying to control, And actually, all you can think about, because it's very, very difficult to escape the format.

All you can think about is you're doing this for the documentary.

And

he can't control the environment fully.

I have to say that the Rob Bryden voiceover is a masterclass.

You know what?

I found the documentary very interesting because it doesn't...

hang him out to dry, it doesn't show him as a figure of fun, it doesn't,

it's sort of all things to all people.

I thought it walked across a very interesting tightrope.

The glossary touch of Rob Ryden.

That voiceover is really difficult to do

when you see the images that you're having and the scenes that you're having to sort of gloss.

And then, listen, at the end of the documentary, you'll also see to speak to your point just then, you will see in a documentary, like you don't have a credit, we know what the documentary is, it's about you.

At the end, it says serious consultant and featuring Noel Edmonds.

Is what it says?

It doesn't say featuring anyone else.

It says serious consultant and featuring Noel Edmonds.

He would have fought tooth and nail for that particular credit that no one else would care about.

Yeah, he says at the end, and this is the key to all of it, he says, I hope people will watch this and maybe come out with a different opinion of me.

And Noel is always trying to make people have a different opinion of him.

You know, that's the thing.

You know, I think people, I think people disappoint Noel quite a lot.

You know, I think that...

People of the collective.

People, the collective, and individual people, and councils, and anyone he comes up against tend to disappoint him.

Noel has many times in his life been the smartest person in the room.

He's very, very, very bright, Noel.

He's a very smart guy, but he's not always the smartest person in the room.

I think sometimes he lacks the vision to see sometimes.

He's always worked brilliantly when he's with a great producer.

Okay, so when he's with Michael Hurl in his early bit of his career, Glenn Hugel on Deal on No Deal, you know, people who could, you know, pull him up on stuff and make him better.

And in the same way that Clarkson's farm works brilliantly, and all of Clarkson's stuff works brilliantly because he's got Andy Willman with him.

And

Clarkson knows that Willman is as smart as him and his instincts

are razor sharp.

And when Noel loses that and it's just Noel, I think people warm to him less is the truth.

And that's the opposite of what he wants.

But not to know yourself and to accept yourself is the great tragedy of,

and actually, weirdly, the great tragedy, particularly, of many people and definitely many people in that particular generation of light entertainment.

And let's just be grateful that he's gone to New Zealand because a huge number of those people of that generation.

Still with us but still with us or they ended up in a panorama in that that was their documentation

in the files of Operation Utrey so there's none of that with Noel Edmonds well there really isn't any of that with with with Noel that that is not his issue and he was it's interesting because there was a time when he was the most famous person in Britain right yeah and sort of nationalized zaniness really wasn't it yeah but that's heady and it was a time where where culture wasn't was wasn't quite so atomized so if you were famous you were like properly famous like everybody loved you and also you didn't really hear about the people who didn't like you in those days.

Because when are you going to hear it?

People might write into the BBC, but no one's showing you the letters where people don't like you.

So you're able to be famous with everyone and only hear nice things about yourself.

And that, by the way, is not Noel's fault.

And that's the culture in which he is raised.

And, you know, whatever his personality type is, that was the thing that it all filtered through.

Now, you come back to his comeback on Deal on No Deal and so on, and I think more particularly post-Dealer No Deal.

We now live in a culture where we don't live in a monoculture.

So there's lots and lots of different things to watch.

So his fame is not exactly what it was before.

So he gets this great fame and did on a deal as a huge hit and there's a cultural touchstone.

But it is never going to be what Knowles House Party is because we don't live in that world anymore.

Also,

you get so much more feedback now and lots of people are saying they don't like you.

Because whoever you are, if you're, you know, being watched by half the country, there are millions of people who don't like you.

It doesn't matter, you know, you can be David Attenborough and there'll be load, you go to a pub, you'll find someone who goes, Attenborough, no, not for me.

You know, a bit smug, I always think.

You know, there will always be people who don't like you.

And if you've grown up in an environment where none of that touches you,

I think it can be very difficult.

And I think it can knock you off course if you're someone who's prone to being knocked off course.

Yeah.

Anyway, if you're someone who needs to...

Frickle and obsessive.

Listen, your words, not mine.

If you are someone who needs to control the emotions of people around you,

it is a difficult culture to live in now because you can't do that.

It is impossible.

And it was possible to do that in the 70s and 80s.

Now you cannot.

And

there are certain characters who that could send mad.

Let's talk a little bit about some of the features of the property river haven.

Yes.

The bugger in, obviously.

I mean, he's desperately trying to sort of

assert parity.

There's a point where he says, I quite fancy the bugger in taking on Diddley Squat in a pub quiz.

We'd wipe them out.

And you're just thinking, oh, it's so so obvious.

I mean, it's so, no voiceover from Rob Iden at that point, because why do you need to say anything?

Yeah, the beers are cool, things like tits up and old.

Noel Evans is very much one of those people who still uses the phrase with the word methinks, which come my revolution, as you know, we see you immediately shot, not even against a wall.

Out across the property, he's got various things.

Now, probably the most notable is Guardian.

Now, one of the things we didn't mention is that Noel had a long battle with Lloyd over some sort of financial impropriety.

I think, listen, I'll leave it to him to tell the story.

But if you do want to find out the story, he's mounted it on a sort of weatherproof plinth behind the vast statue of a knight, which he calls Guardian, who is on the property.

And he says, as he says, it's become a place of pilgrimage for local people for all the right reasons.

Again, there's no one there when the cameras are there, but I make no comment.

Now, this is a very, very big statue of a sort of kneeling knight, Guardian.

It's made by the prop studio who did lots of things for avatar and and lord of the rings obviously you know that's just one of the very very odd things that's there i have to say you know you're always dying for liz his wife to come on screen she's she they met as a makeup makeup artist all the clocks are set to something like 1106 in the house the moment they met the moment they met you know they've got the all the kind of ridiculous boring cliches the live love loves and the only positivity here and these sort of signs around the house which are always by the way red flags if you're in any company and you walk into any executive's office and they have only positivity here, because you know they're the person who's in the middle of the year.

You'll be giving you your P45 in about three seconds.

They are going to be the person who makes your life a nightmare.

Anyway, but he says, as you can see, our messaging is very clear.

I mean, who talks about interiors in this way?

As you can see, my messaging is very clear.

We have to quickly just get into the whole grasp of science.

He's got a very, very distinct new age, I don't know, whatever you want to call it.

It's a bit like Dave St.

Hubbins in Spinal Attack.

All sorts of bits of Eastern philosophy have drifted across his transom.

He gave a number of interviews and he said things like you know i see my parents that all the time they're two balls of light that follow me around he was clearly imbibing a huge amount of uh he talks about he talks about cosmic ordering which is you ask the universe for something and it delivers and he said oh you know what and actually it delivered deal on no deal to me and this is why listen people feel free to believe in cosmic ordering but the reason noel got deal on no deal is not cosmic ordering is the fact that he was massively famous he auditioned to do countdown on channel four

um And Kevin Ligo, who was head of Channel 4 at the time, said, I'm not sure he's quite right for that.

You know, but is there something else?

So we said, look, we've got this thing, dude, on no deal, so maybe we'll try him.

He came in and he was brilliant at it, and that's why he got it.

No other, he didn't call it into being.

It could have been someone else's show.

He was just ready at that point.

You have no idea what a porn of the planets you are, Richard.

And I'm afraid you were being manipulated by forces far, far beyond your ken.

But anyhow, I will say that he, yeah, he, of course, like many people, believes in reincarnation.

he can't actually quite deal with the fact that one of the other people who works for him on the on the estate also believes in reincarnation and he he's a bit worried that the guy might be slightly senior to him in part in the past life in which they previously met and no really has spent quite a long time trying to discover his rank but in a very sort of trying to be really relaxed about it and failing he keeps trying to say i've got a bit of a power complex don't worry you don't need to say Liz is hilarious.

Liz says, she's talking about the frequencies that they have on these kind of, they've got a crystal room and all these sort of things.

She says, they're apparently healing frequencies.

Now, if you listen very carefully, I rewound that clip about six times, I think you can hear a slight parenthesis round, apparently.

That's a frequency that only the very, the cynical ear can hear.

But Noel doesn't hear it, I don't think.

In the same way that he is incredibly talented as a...

TV presenter and that you just think, just do that.

He also, he looks unbelievable for 76 years old.

He does look good.

I mean, he looks incredible.

The hair's ridiculous.

You haven't seen that.

The hair has never changed.

And I don't know how he gets the lift in it and the crystal tips and all of it.

I mean, you know, he'll tell you that he drinks only structured water, which makes a little vortex in the water.

And then he says it doesn't have to go through your kidneys or liver.

Very interesting.

There's a bit where he's got a life two rafts that he wants to do whitewater rafting down his local river.

He's trying to explain to the guy, his sort of head groundsman or wherever he is, there's all these people who have to work for him and just absorb it all.

When we took out the uninflated raft, it was so much heavier and now it's so much lighter.

Do you know why that is?

And the guy just doesn't say, well, I mean, you know, because obviously when you carry something like this, it's much more dense.

And then it's now the larger surface area.

So it feels lighter.

It's actually, actually, Richard, scientifically, it's actually something to do with the weight of our spirit and the weight of air.

And therefore, when we die, our bodies become much lighter.

And that actually is the lesson of that.

that raft inflation.

You couldn't possibly argue with him about any of these things.

There are certain things that are unarguable because they're true, and there are certain things that are unarguable because you're like, well,

where do I begin to argue with that?

There isn't, I can't even, I can't even start.

And he likes those things.

He likes to have the esoteric information that he can then impart, which is another form of controlling behavior, I think.

Yeah, and listen, he wants his Caleb and

the kind of stars of Clarkson's Farmer.

You know, you could see him all the time trying to promote various members of his staff, but

he can't let their personality be the thing.

It has to be his version of their personality.

It has to sort of be filtered through him.

Because they're all just straight men.

They're given these tiny walk-ons in scenes

where the message is always a kind of sledgehammer.

Noel is wacky.

Noel has so many ideas.

How are we going to do all those amazing ideas?

But you know what?

He's a genius and he has vision.

And

anyway.

How many years?

That's the problem.

I wouldn't say

estate management, but

perhaps at night entertainment formats.

I'm not qualified to say.

In that way, I really felt like he epitomises that lifestyle, you know, like it's egg, larvae, pupa, moth.

It is, isn't it?

It's like kids' TV, prime time, bitterness, ironic documentary subject.

That is actually, well, that's one of the light entertainment lifestyles.

We've discussed the U-tree version earlier, but there is a darkness to those people.

There is a darkness to some of those men.

Not the darkness that

we keep alluding to, but there is a sort of weirdness.

There's something about it.

Listen, all of us in our 20s and 30s have something wrong with us.

By and large, we'll address it.

We'll have loads of things wrong with us.

Yeah, exactly.

But we'll have the big thing that comes from our childhood or whatever it is.

And we'll either go to therapy or we'll marry someone who understands us and sorts it out for us.

Or, you know, you go through things and you sort it out because...

Life becomes unlivable after a certain point if you are difficult.

Whereas if you have been as famous as that generation of presenters were, same with rock stars.

You know, there is nobody to pick you up on your bullshit.

No one's going to do it.

And this is not to say that these people are uniquely bullshitting.

They're not.

Everyone has bullshit.

Most people have it picked up on at some point.

But if you are a rock star or if you're a TV presenter of the 80s or if you're a tech bro now, you are surrounded by people who do not pick you up on your bullshit.

It doesn't happen.

And if that lasts through to your 50s, it's slightly too late, actually, to become the person you were supposed to be.

So you're stuck with this character who you were when you were 23, probably, and you never did the work on yourself.

You were never able to be called out on it to the extent where you go actually do you know what that's right i'm i'm going to become a real boy now you are forever stuck in the person you were in your 20s and if you are that person but you find yourself in 2025 it's really really difficult because what do you do because it's an entirely different world and you keep butting up against reality and either you are wrong or reality is wrong only one of those two things can be right

i know which is wrong in noel's case well if you if you've gone through your whole life knowing for a fact that you are not wrong then of course it's reality that's wrong and of course you know you start looking at you know all sorts of different things that would make sense of the gap between you and reality that seems to have opened up so i'm not saying that about noel necessarily but i'm saying that about that generation if you're the same person you were 30 years ago the world is a is a is a very odd place and and the way that you deal with that comes out in your personality i agree and i do think he but i do think it's really weird i was i think i i think i was talking to chris morris about this he hit on something with that Knowles HQ show, which was this very weird show he did on Sky.

It was genuinely 2008 to 2009.

It seemed completely bizarre.

He was railing against, I don't know, I suppose to some extent he was railing against elites.

And elites could even be members of the local council.

He was railing against a world that didn't work, a form of broken Britain, okay?

And it seemed to...

kind of liberals like me in our ivory tower like what are you know this is so ridiculous it's but he was attuned to something that, in fact, completely defined the next decade from certainly from 2016 onwards when we became powerfully aware that actually maybe Norse HQ wasn't such a nutty show after all.

But it was really early.

I mean, it's a long time ago.

And it's so mad.

But you honestly now you look at it and you it could be could have been made yesterday.

It's very, very 2025.

It's very light.

Lots of those kind of things that become very successful, GB News, all of those sort of things, people railing in quite a lo-fi environment about a world that doesn't work anymore.

And actually, he was ahead of his time on that, I have to say.

I mean, listen,

as we discussed, he has much to commend him.

I would really recommend watching this document.

It's really well made.

It's really entertaining, however you want to take it.

If you like him, it's entertaining.

If you're not a fan of him, it's entertaining.

You know, there's stuff to be taken away.

But, you know, as you say, he keeps telling you who he is, which you were able to do in the 70s and 80s.

You were able to say, this is me, this is my brand, this is what I do, this is how it's controlled.

And you were able to be that.

You can't be that anymore.

You cannot tell people who you are.

You have to show people who you are.

And so Noel is telling you who he is all the way through this documentary.

But what he's really doing, of course, is showing you who he is.

It's up to you as a viewer to decide who you think that is.

He wants you to see him differently.

You may well do after this documentary, one way or another.

But that's the central thing of it is we watch television very differently now.

We will make our own mind up.

And the more you try and tell us what the truth is, the more we think, huh?

Well, I wonder if there's something something behind that.

I genuinely found it fascinating.

And I do, as I say, I've thought a lot about this over the last few days because, you know, I worked with Noel for a while.

Glenn Huguenot and Richard Haig did most of the Deal on No Deal, but I was there at the beginning.

And he was extraordinary, extraordinarily brilliant, great in meetings,

just a fascinating human being

in many, many ways.

And as I say, I do retain a fondness for him.

And he made that show a bigger hit than it would have been if we hadn't had him.

But being a great light entertainment television presenter,

it's not really anything.

You know, it's lovely to be able to do it and it's lucrative and it's great and it brings joy to millions.

Being right about how to present a TV show and being right about how a TV show makes people feel does not mean you're going to be right about other things as well.

In the same way that you can build an electric car company or a space company and not be right about how democracy should run.

You know, skills are not necessarily transferable.

So in my world, the world that I'm from, that I'm very, very protective of, the world of light entertainment and the world of bringing that entertainment into homes.

I genuinely will always have my absolute admiration and respect.

He always will do.

This, I do think, you have to take him at his word and say,

see what you think of me.

And it's an amazing character piece, this documentary.

You will definitely have thoughts after watching it, don't you think?

Yes, absolutely.

I mean, absolutely.

And there are so many things that have changed how we see television in that way, actually.

And I think, obviously, things like the documentaries of Louis Theroux, which ushered in that sort of need for people to show themselves and not

tell themselves anymore but also it's it's so it's so extraordinary the creation of Alan Partridge is one of the most

it is so prescient that Alan Partridge obviously who sort of has this brief firework of a light entertainment career and then we just sort of exist in his bitterness in the for the last few decades which I love he struck so clearly on something about those guys yeah he was he was very much based on on on the Noel Ebbons generation definitely and people who are less successful than Noel, but you know, you can see bits of all of them in there.

It's really completely fascinating how that particular streak of bitterness and that particular kind of

way of talking about a lost country and all sorts of things.

Partridge epitomised those things sort of before they happened, or before you picked up on them, in lots of ways that he satirised the future.

And so, as these people have become more and more, as I say, moving in that life cycle from moving away from prime time and then they have their bitter period where they keep telling telling the newspapers this or that and then they become subject of these ironic or otherwise documentaries with that ironic distance.

Yes.

This felt post-ironic, this documentary.

Yes, I think so.

I mean you just had to point the camera at it.

Yes, you just point the camera.

I think the programme makers were quite bright.

They just went, we don't need to over-egg anything here.

It's very light touched and you can see, yes.

Can I say one other thing about Partridge though?

Yeah.

Is one of the reasons we love Partridge so much is you also feel for him.

You also see where it comes up.

So you see him being ghastly to the people around him, all of that, but there's a bit of you that slightly roots for him because you see what he wants.

You can see the thing that he needs, which is somebody to love him.

You can just

see it.

Do you know, at the time, I remember when The Office came out, I remember someone telling me that Stephen Coogan had said, He's such an amazing creation, David Brent.

David Brent, you'd have a pint with, whereas Partridge, you wouldn't.

Partridge has mellowed.

He stayed with us because there's something about him that is slightly tragic.

Tenor, despite

Noel Edmonds' kind of relentlessly upbeat, supposedly positive, and kind of zany persona, there is something that's, as you say, very sort of Shakespearean about it all.

It really is.

I really recommend it.

If you're not interested in Noel, do not watch it.

No, no, no.

By the way, my children have no idea who on earth he was.

Of course they don't.

They were like, who, I mean, they were totally scathing about him.

Totally.

They didn't know who he was at all because obviously they haven't watched any of those things.

They were born after he was off air and most of them.

But they were completely transfixed by the character.

There's only one currency these days, and that's authenticity.

It is the only currency.

And in the old days in the 80s, you were able to fake authenticity.

And you no longer can, or if you can, it's very, very, very hard to fake authenticity.

Just be yourself.

And if you're young enough to change, be yourself.

And if you're not, then at least know.

At least kind of think, maybe.

Maybe this isn't me.

I don't know.

Whenever you meet with anyone who's involved in that world, all they want is stories about that generation of presenters.

And by the way, some of the best stories in the world are Noel Edmonds' stories.

And they're not horrible stories, but they're just stories where he's going, you are kidding me, that's unbelievable.

Because he came from that era where he was so famous and the world was at his feet and so mad stuff happened all the time.

Whenever you tell any of those anecdotes, you know, the coogans of this world are listening, I think.

When I was writing on The Guardian's Diary column, we used to make, we made him a bit of a character because he was constantly...

This was in this real, yeah, because he was in this real bitter phase.

And he would get people to come and do an interview with him and he'd be so proud about the fact that he had the largest estate in England at the time without any public right of way through it and I can't quite remember why I had to end up taking him out to dinner but we went to

this is this is new information ended up having to take him out to dinner we went to the Woolsey and it went on it went on a bit I must say and then do you know it was so funny Richard because when I got home he rang me on my home number quite a few times it was after midnight but I didn't pick up I don't know perhaps he'd perhaps I'd accidentally picked up something from the table or he'd left something I couldn't put my finger on it very strange Anyway,

those were in the years where he was searching for something, perhaps.

Oh, by the way, you know, our argument about whether Interior Design Masters was better than Citizen Kane.

I was chatting to Glenn Hugel, who was the other genius behind Deal on the Deal, the two of them.

He was talking about this amazing episode where Noel was asking people's advice about what the person should do.

That's the beauty of that show.

You could sort of jump up and down and it could take the weight.

And then he decides, literally, just on a whim, to go outside of the studio, walk out, go up onto the main road, stop a car, get in a car while the steady cam's still with him.

And Glenn was saying, you know that's what I loved working with him he said that's the closest I think I've ever been to making either citizen cane or interior design masks

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We talked for quite a long time about Noel Edmonds.

I mean, for people who don't know him, I'm so sorry, but it's I think.

It doesn't matter.

My children loved it and you don't have to know him.

You know the type.

Now,

micro dramas.

Now, what these are, they started in China, and they're essentially, they're sort of films, but they're cut into one-minute chunks.

So they are one-minute-long episodic dramas.

They're often called vertical dramas as well as microdramas because they are made to watch on your phone.

They're literally made to watch with your phone held on.

And you don't time your phone horizontal to watch.

It's a yeah.

So you can only fit about one or two people in any frame.

Exactly.

Which is quite sort of the aesthetic.

The episodes are a minute long, sometimes up to three minutes long, but usually a minute, minute and a half.

They all end with a cliffhanger.

And as I say, there's about 55, 60, 70 episodes in each one.

You watch the first few for free, and then if you are hooked, you then start either paying for them by watching adverts and earning coins, or you physically pay for them.

So that's the business model is these incredibly hooky and cliffhanger-heavy dramas, usually about werewolves or secret billionaires or

very, very slippy.

If you want to see some, by the way, there are platforms like

Short.

Real Short,

Real Short would be a big one.

And you can easily just download it and watch hundreds of them.

And you can watch the first couple, and you don't have to pay at all, but you'll get the vibe

of what they are.

They started in China not that long ago.

Within four or five years, they were worth more than the entire cinema box office of China.

Within a few years, $6.8 billion a year were being made by these microdramas.

Hollywood, California takes $9 billion, ideally, at the box office to retain its status as anything like the business it is now.

It didn't manage to get all the way there.

And if it doesn't, that industry contracts a lot.

That gives you a sense of the scale of these things.

Absolutely enormous.

Very hooky, very, very addictive, very schlocky.

But again, that thing we've often said, give people what they want.

So this is enormous in China and had stayed pretty much in China.

The Chinese government then cracked down on it because they felt that there was a vulgarity to some of them.

They liked the ones that were about ancient myths and all of those things, but other ones they felt they didn't like so much.

So these companies started looking to the States and started looking abroad essentially for their revenue.

And so Real Short was begun.

It's backed, it sounds like a plucky young startup, but it's backed by Baidu and Tencent, two of the biggest companies in China.

It's already worth billions, Real Short.

In America, yeah.

In America, in America.

So now we have all these American ones.

There's people from Hollywood working on these things.

People on their way up, people on their way down who are making these things.

There are lots of in-program purchases as well.

You can

app purchases is a big part of how limit the money is.

And you know, you can, like, there's an episode.

Real Short Alone made a billion.

Yes, Real Short Alone made a billion.

So KFC have made their own one, for example, about an ancient empress looking for a chicken leg in her kitchen and suddenly being transported into the modern world.

That's some of the high end of these dramas.

And

finding KFC.

But the interesting thing in America, firstly, the growth is exponential.

It's massive.

But they've discovered that the spend on in-app purchases in America is six times what it was in China.

Not only are they getting millions upon millions of people watching these things, those people are also spending an awful lot of money.

So suddenly we have this thing, this entirely new medium, is the truth, which is being unbelievably successful.

But you remind me of some things slightly, okay.

I'll tell you the things that I think they have a bloodline from.

And I don't know whether other people say this.

They're across, by the way.

It's across just a summary.

It's a cross between Netflix and TikTok.

So it's taking the shortness of TikTok, taking the narrative arc of a Netflix, and multiplying them together.

and it's really really really worked and is coming to a screen near you soon.

In South Korea they had those webtoons you know they had those series mobile series and people a lot of people made those because they wanted to get bought and then made in and what which has happened with lots of the big K-dramas have started as a webtoon.

Many of them have a sort of moral message.

There's a guy on YouTube, I don't know if you know him, called Dahman, and he does these, yeah, we're not just telling stories, we're changing lives and he has these trite little sort of homilies, you know, like mean girls shame a girl for her looks, or you know, mother smashes up Charles PlayStation for gaming too much.

And they all have a little moral message.

They slightly remind me of that.

The acting is sort of terrible, and

funnily enough, I've watched so many of these now, and I've never dived in and gone for all the way and paid.

So I've watched lots of the starts of them, but it was really interesting.

I saw so many actors, and I was then googling to see if that was, in fact, the girl who was the best friend on Canada Fornication and whatever it was.

And it was.

Well, because there's no work around and suddenly there's no work suddenly there's work and i actually spoke to someone this weekend because i knew we were going to talk about this and someone who said i just don't want you to say that i've done this they live in la there is no work and they have done lighting on lots of these they were telling me about what it's like to shoot one often the directors just like really don't know what they're doing but there's lots of seasoned crew there's also lots of really enthusiastic film school graduates because remember these these californian places are still producing huge numbers of people who in the old days were almost doing a vocational degree and would end up going straight into the the industry.

No, well,

literally, there's a job there.

Why wouldn't you go here?

This Real Short has got enormous studios.

They're pumping out a huge amount of content.

They need a huge amount of people.

And as you say, it tends to be people who are finding it hard to get work on traditional things plus film school graduates.

And they do.

It's totally non-union.

Yes, I've never quite understood how they get away with that.

Well,

it's a different form of.

It's non-union on YouTube.

Lots of people have complained about that in America and said that for all sorts of different reasons from safeguarding to the fact that the unions are very powerful, but then they're becoming less and less powerful because they don't have any kind of aegis over any of these areas, these new areas, anyhow.

But this person was saying to me, if you're shooting sort of high-end drama, you're not doing very many pages a day at all.

Well, this, they can do 55 episodes in four days.

I mean,

they absolutely

nail it.

Yeah, they do like minimum 20 pages a day and they really burn through it.

People don't want to say that they're doing it.

First of all, it's non-union.

I mean, I think they're awful at the moment.

At the moment, and I just have to say that if you go and watch these, you'll be like, oh my God, this is truly sort of dreadful.

It's so hard.

Yeah, it's the end of civilization.

But I wonder if you're about to say what I think.

Yeah.

Why should it be?

That's just some, someone hasn't made anything.

I think it's for a creative, and

loads and loads of creatives listen to this on both sides of the camera.

If someone says to you, look, it's one-minute episodes and there's 55 of them.

Yeah.

Go away and think about it.

Hold on.

Okay.

Okay, I can see the potential there.

Brilliant people can do something brilliant with anything.

And, you know, we said before once on this podcast when we're talking about public service broadcasting, we've got this thing in our mind that public service broadcasting has to be sort of delivered in one-hour shows or half-hour shows.

Why?

Why does it have to be?

Why can't the BBC start making these?

Why can't all sorts of people start making these?

First of all, it's great because

the barrier to, I like anything now where the barrier to kind of from where you think of it to where you can view it.

It's very short.

Because everything else that people are watching, you can do it and put it up the next day.

You can be really agile with this.

It's interesting.

I saw that there was one.

I haven't watched this one, by the way.

There's one that's clearly based on, I just read about this, based on the Luigi Mangione story.

I mean, imagine how long television would take to do the Luigi Mangioni drama.

Like, see you in the 2030s.

It would take a really long time.

And so there is something about that that allows maybe traditional broadcasters to respond in that agile way because everything else they're dealing with, like we said before on sketch shows, how can you compete with a sketch show when you've got someone who can just do a really funny sketch about that day's news and put it on TikTok?

And that's where all of the stuff is.

By the way, some of the names of them.

My Beautiful Maid is a Spy, The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband, I Married a Millionaire Stranger, Married to My Boss's Enemy, Fake Husband, Real Feelings.

There's like, you know,

they sound like YouTube titles.

I have to say, they sound like the titles of YouTube videos or TikTok videos or anything like that, but particularly YouTube videos.

The CEO who becomes my secretary.

Yeah.

The women's boons, actually.

Yeah, well, I was going to say, at the moment, it's about about 74% female skewing in terms of people who are watching.

Well it's got ties with that romantic doesn't it?

Exactly and a paying for them and you know romanticy has absolutely saved publishing.

You know this is saving you know content but

Jerry Gia and lots of other people in this space are going I I don't see why we wouldn't start making things that are more male skewing.

I don't see you know if we think certain things are male and female skewing which of course some things are you know we could make more thrillers and you know war films and all this kind of stuff.

That's what they want to do.

They have got so big real short so quickly the app you know it was it was it was outselling tick tock at one point yeah the uh the real short app um we have people coming into the industry who are going to expect different economics from that industry you would hope we would get to the point with this where the budgets are going up and certainly you know um the double life of my billionaire husband it's like three hundred thousand dollars for a film length thing but that's more than you know you're paying fifty thousand for some of these chinese ones so you know budgets can go up I think creators will be very interested in writing.

Yeah, because at the moment, the scripts are basically like porn scripts.

I mean, they're that bad.

Well, people have said

people have said, is it AI?

Yeah.

Okay.

There are AI elements to it.

Yeah.

Is this writing AI?

And Jerry Gia says, you know, in real short, we have in-house editors, we have in-house-house writers, and

I'm absolutely sure he's that's right.

I will say this: you could do it with AI.

You know, if I mean, if this hasn't been done with AI, shame on these humans.

One thing that AI can do is give you 55 cliffhangers in a row.

That's the thing that it can do.

It can't give you heart and emotion and interesting, you know, long-form stories and stuff that really, really makes you weak.

But

it can tell you what a cliffhanger is, and it can do 55 of them in a row for you.

So as I say, I'm sure they're not using AI, but they could.

I watched a few ages ago, and I've been interested in it getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

But I was interested in a kind of, oh my God, again, is this the fall of civilization?

After when you watch a few, you're not hooked into the stories particularly.

You are are definitely hooked into the medium.

Yeah, but like early cinema is crap as well.

So, you know, it's just,

it becomes an art form.

Yeah.

So it's microdramas, vertical dramas.

They'll probably come up with a slightly better name for some point.

Yeah, they need a better drama.

But it is definitively not going away.

And I do think it's going to be an interesting world for younger creators or even older creators who are thinking, you know what?

the gatekeepers have sort of shut the gates.

Here's a place without gatekeepers.

Here's stuff where I can get this funded and I can prove, you know, I can do proof proof of concept really really easily and i can make these episodes and after 10 when we start charging i will see if it's good because people will tell me if it's good because they will they will pay for it immediately that is the dream for all creatives the dream for all creatives always is the shortest possible line between the idea being in your head uh and somebody else seeing it yeah that's always the dream and this feels like a world in which it's possible you know i think the romantices will always win out but it feels like there is a market there and there's a creative opportunity there.

And if the two of those things come together, it might be quite an exciting world, the world of microdramas.

Now, I think, because we were talking beforehand, we have the same recommendation this week.

We do.

I think we are both going to recommend Shifty, which is the new series of Adam Curtis films, which has gone straight onto iPlayer at the weekend.

And it's absolutely fascinating and brilliant in the way that all his films are.

But it's really interesting.

It's a sort of, I suppose, social history of what it's felt like to live through the last 40 years in Britain and this the huge shifts that have happened to do with power and money but but done through archive done just through archive so you'll you'll be moving from something political to like incredible music to just the quirkiest thing like clips you've never seen before for certain places just tell you a story about Britain and it's it's it's mesmeric and so we in fact we both loved it so much so he's going to come in and speak to us on our Q ⁇ A on Thursday and we're doing our first ever interview yes we are we he's very easy to talk to.

Oh my god, that's going to be so bad at that.

Yeah, we'll be really terrible.

But luckily, he is very good at talking.

So please join us for that.

And otherwise, we will see you as always on Thursday.

See you on Thursday.

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