Gary Lineker Leaves The BBC

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

And me, Richard Osman.

Hello, Marina.

Hello, Richard.

We're not together.

We're a long way away.

I'll have to shout.

I'm in sunny Italy.

Moving on, Richard, did you see Eurovision?

Yes, we did.

We've got a house full here of a family, one of whom is a cyber security expert.

I think we were probably about two minutes ahead of the live stream.

The tech works so well.

I thought Italy was robbed not because I'm in Italy, but I love the Bowie McWonson vibes of the Italy song.

Okay, it was really funny, but I have to say, I loved Sweden so much.

It had, for me, it had everything.

It was catchy.

It had the meta-humour and obviously a subject matter, saunas, which is very close to our

national ideal picture of the nation itself.

Tell you what, Marina, it's like a sauna out here in Tuscany.

Is it now?

Is it now?

Well,

I should say I'm not here for much longer, and I've got to do a lot of book events while I'm here, so it's not really a holiday.

What are we actually going to talk about today?

We are talking about P.

Diddy, the ongoing trial of P.

Diddy, and why there seem to be so many toxic men.

in our culture and whether there's anything we can do about that.

We're talking about Tim Davey made a very big speech, the Director General of the BBC, BBC, about the future of the BBC launching their pitch for charter renewal.

We're going to think about the future of the BBC and how that could play out.

And also, I think we will cover the departure of Gary Lineker from the BBC.

I have heard of the guy.

Yes.

Tell me he's not leaving Goldhanger.

Well, anyway, we'll get to it all.

We'll get to it all in that item.

And finally,

I have queued for a laboo boo.

If you know what a laboo boo is, you'll be very sympathetic to my experience.

And if you don't, you're going to find out at some length, but not the remorseless length of the queue that I was in.

Diddy, Lineker, and Labooboo.

Absolute classic textbook versus entertainment.

Exactly.

Now, listen, we're going to start with the trial of Diddy, the sort of rap music mogul currently on trial in New York for a charge.

He's charged with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, transportation to engage in prostitution.

Most of last week was taken up with his former girlfriend, Cassie Ventura, taking the stand, although various other people who I'm sure we'll get to,

and talking about these freak offs, these kind of crazed sex and drug-fueled sort of marathon she says she was coerced into taking part in for many, many years.

Anyway, it's, you know, everyone will be familiar with the details of the trial because it's sort of a kind of news sensation.

But I suppose I'm what I'm particularly interested in is the people in a way who weren't Cassie Ventura, who we saw last week and the week before, and we'll be be seeing this week.

It's sort of extraordinary to me just how many people

know and are involved in allowing an alleged criminal enterprise like this to continue.

And obviously, we've seen this, and we'll get to them.

Many other, you know, powerful men,

just the sheer sort of number of lawyers and assistants and bodyguards, and spokespeople, and doctors, and yeah, and all of these people who know,

who've seen things happen.

You know, I'm just one assistant who said, you know, I saw him beat her.

The endless NDAs, I mean, we've done a whole special on the NDAs before, and obviously the proliferation of this document and how easily it can be handed out and how binding people feel it absolutely must be.

I sort of feel like entourage is too nice a word for this sort of massive apparatus.

It's I think I've thought about it before and I've sort of thought of the sort of sex case industrial complex.

It's a whole kind of concerted group of people sort of conducted, I suppose, by the alleged criminal themselves.

Well, it's extraordinary, isn't it?

Because if you've got someone like Diddy, the second he starts making an awful lot of money for record companies or for investors in his own record company, they turn a blind eye to what he's doing or don't want to hear about what he's doing, which is, you know, more to the point.

Oh, no, yeah, listen, that's Diddy.

Everyone underneath is then thinking, well, everyone seems to think this is okay.

Everyone seems to have given this, the say-so, and I'm on the payroll as well.

And then you get people who tangentially get themselves involved with him, as you say, security guards, people like that.

And he can sit in a chair and give out a wad of dollars to them to keep quiet.

All the ones who didn't keep quiet, and there's plenty of them, I'm glad to say, are not listened to or not believed.

And it's such an extraordinary story that we see time and time again of people who are able to protect themselves and who are able to keep what they're doing quiet.

But the story seems to happen in the same way every single time.

I was thinking, you know, in New York in the 1980s, they had that broken windows policy, which is the best way to stop crime is from the absolutely, from the bottom up.

The second you see any antisocial behavior, a broken window was the case they used.

You fix that and then the next thing gets fixed and the next thing gets fixed.

And it's almost like we need to intervene in people's careers at a very, very, very early stage.

Because none of these people are coming out out of a clear blue sky.

They're really not.

You know, there's high-profile examples in the UK.

None of them were free of rumor at any point.

And we've spoken before, I think, when we talked about Greg Wallace, that legally you have to report somebody.

Legally, you have to make a report about anyone's behavior.

And legally, that person has to be talked to about that.

Lots of people listening to this will work in different industries and will understand the issues they have in those industries

with powerful people.

But we can only really speak of the industry we know.

And it's very, very easy in a big organization to, in the same way that students make a report on their teachers each year and are allowed to say whatever they want.

And that feedback gets given back to a teacher.

And anyone who works in the public sector will tell you how often they're sort of appraised and

the feedback that they're having to be given.

And I just think it would be lovely, you know, when I think back to myself as a...

researcher and all sorts of things, some of the bullies you come across.

My first ever job, there was a guy there who was such a bully.

And of course, that was 1992.

So you're thinking, well, there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.

And, you know, that's not the environment we were brought up in.

But the ability just once every six months to say, who do you have an issue with?

Can you tell us about any particular behavior?

That gets brought up with that person.

I mean, it's something, isn't it?

I mean, whether that stops the diddies and Jimmy Savils of the world, I don't know.

But at least we have a culture where people who are making money out of somebody have a responsibility and a duty to be completely transparent about that person's behavior and about complaints that have been made about that person because this doesn't come out of a clear blue sky.

No, I mean, and I suddenly think, like, perhaps within record companies and things like that, you could institute this sort of thing.

Here's the little detail I find so fascinating: is that video that was shown to the jury and was shown in the courtroom, which is from the Intercontinental Hotel in LA, and it's from 2016.

It's a public area near a lift in which Cassie walks into it, and then sort of chasing her is Diddy in a towel and he throws her to the floor and he kicks her repeatedly and then he drags her body presumably back to the hotel room she had left.

Now that was in 2016.

That video finally saw the light of day.

It was published by CNN last year in 2024.

Now please tell me how many people you think would have had to have known about that video.

This is a major international hotel chain.

I would like to hear so much more more from the Intercontinental on what I think we'll have to euphemize as their internal processes.

And what's very interesting is that in the final moments almost of Cassie's testimony, Diddy's defence revealed that she had taken a $10 million payout from the Intercontinental.

It was presented as a sort of flourish of the defence, as in, you see, you've taken money from these people.

And, you know, and I sort of felt like, yeah, I mean, I should think so.

I should think so.

But it's funny it's been covered as a sort of really clever move by the defense which makes me slightly despair about what we actually think we're changing here she said this and she was never believed and only when she launched this lawsuit eventually and he failed legally shut this down in time so it became public and that's what that's what's caused this whole thing this whole thing to actually get to court it's the one thing that he's explicitly said oh yeah but i i admit i did that yeah oh you admit the the only thing that was caught on camera i admit i did that but that's not me yeah in any way whatsoever So as you say, firstly, he's clearly

a hugely toxic human being.

So he is going to lie.

That's what Diddy is going to do.

His whole career,

he's going to lie.

So, you know, you have to sort of put him to one side and go, okay, you've got a guy here who's making...

billions of pounds for you, but he lies all the time.

You know, Diddy is having his time in court and hopefully will serve time for some of the things he's done.

But the people around him, the people who supported him, the people who are supporting people even now, there'll be record industry executives or or various people or movie executives listening to this going, oh, actually, yes, that story I heard about X.

And I've slightly tried to brush it under the carpet because I just hope it won't happen again.

Because actually, we've got the new movie coming out.

And that's going to do big numbers.

Those people, you think at some point, this is going to end up in a court of law.

And at some point, your children are going to read that you didn't do anything about it.

Yeah.

I mean,

we should say that this is as old as the entertainment industry.

You know, if you think of all the cover-ups at MGM, just as in right in the older golden golden ages of Hollywood, what they had to do to the stars, people like Judy Garland, how they were sort of, I don't know, given drugs and to wake them up and given drugs to make them go to sleep and all of these things and crimes covered up, crimes by stars, you know, all the way up to sort of murder and things like that.

The people who know and don't say anything, particularly who have power.

I thought it was interesting.

I remember at the time when everything came out about Harvey Weinstein, everybody, of course, didn't know anything.

Quentin Tarantino said, I knew enough to do more than than I did, which I think is a pretty good way of putting it.

And I think when you look at someone like Epstein and you look at, you know, Trump even making a speech saying he likes his girls on the young side, you know, he said it out loud.

But you don't think that sort of someone like Bill Clinton noticed certain behaviours.

I mean, I do.

I think he did.

And the former, it's interesting, the former telephone engineer.

on Epstein's private island said, you tell yourself that you didn't know for sure and that you never really saw anything, but that is all just rationalization.

Jeffrey Epstein, he was a guy who concealed his deviance very well, but he didn't conceal it that well.

And I agree because when we talk about these people, we always say they ran a sophisticated operation.

Well, in the case of Epstein, you know, if your island is known locally as Pedo Island, how sophisticated is it really?

If people call your plane the Lolita Express, in the case of, you know, Diddy, when there were just so many people involved, you can see it's like a sort of, you know, army of people.

How sophisticated is this operation really?

When you are a serial abuser, one of the things you do is you make everyone complicit.

You make anyone who comes into your orbit complicit with you.

So you can see when Diddy had his white parties, which were the huge parties he used to have in the Hamptons, and you know, it was the hottest ticket in town.

And those white parties, of course, every tale you ever hear of them, they are, you know, wildly excessive and you know, all sorts of things going on.

The culture was there.

The culture was evident.

And of course, there were, you know, legal freak-offs during those.

There were, you know,

you push the envelope as far as you can without anyone, you know, ever doing anything illegal.

And so everyone that goes to that, the capios of this world, you know, all of these people had been to these parties and gone, oh my god, it's crazy.

He's a crazy guy.

What an amazing time we had.

And then when something comes out that's slightly beyond the pale, they go, do you know what?

We were all at his parties and we just, we just thought it was a bit fall of Rome.

So I sort of get, you know, that, you know, perhaps Diddy in his private life, he's the same.

He's a bit crazy.

And the further and further it gets, the more and more, the deeper and deeper you're in.

We're all human beings, okay?

Security guards, pot stars, everyone.

We're flawed.

It's quite hard to navigate one's way through the world.

It's quite hard when you're put into an environment where there's a huge power struggle and huge power structures above you.

It's difficult.

It's very difficult to be the first person to say something.

It's particularly difficult to be the first person to say something if you're on a wage and you're junior and you're not going to be believed.

the easiest way it is to say something is if you're someone's boss or if you're the record company executive.

Those are the people who can actually say, Do you know what?

This guy made us 800 million last year, but we're getting rid of him.

We're taking all of our money out of his record label, all of those things.

But

they're going, you know what, why don't we wait five years for the lawsuit and then we'll cut our ties with him?

You know, there's all sorts of sponsors you think, you knew.

There's people, you know, people know, people know and they don't know, as you so beautifully pointed out there.

It's the same with people like Mohammed Fayed and Harrods and all of that.

His whole stewardship, his whole sort of imperium at Harrods was rotten all the way down.

It was really interesting when, of course, he, as I say, you know, he ran his race and he got away with it.

But when all of that stuff came out, you thought the sheer number of people, again, so you're talking about spokesmen and security and lawyers who I always think are like mob lawyers, because if you bat away the same type of accusation that many times, then please don't think you work in some some esteemed part of the legal profession.

You're like a mob lawyer, you really are.

And it was interesting.

I mean, God, there were doctors who did purity tests on these young women.

I mean, just absolutely horrific, the whole Harrod story.

But I was reading something by Henry Porter, who wrote in The Guardian about some sort of investigative runs.

This is right back in the day.

This is, you know, many, many, many years, decades ago, about dealing with FyEd's people at the time.

And he said he'd been left with the eerie sense that we'd been dealing with a foreign power, a fiefdom, which, despite its real location in Knightsbridge, operated quite independently from the rest of Britain, with a security service of its own, an armed police force, and a tyrant in command.

Well, couldn't that read across to the Diddy case, to all of these things?

And it is the sort of professional classes involved in that, as I say, the sort of lawyers and the doctors, and the same in the case of Diddy.

And as you say, the people who can count as some form of peer or even superior have an absolute obligation to say something no matter how much money is being made.

I would say it's tricky because doctors and lawyers,

again, if you're a serial abuser, then you're very good at working out who will abet you.

And there are doctors and lawyers who are not nice people and who are amoral and will gladly help you.

Genuinely, I'm sure that Muhammad Al-Faid's doctor is not going home every night, you know, kind of going, oh, should I, shouldn't I?

Oh, I don't know, did I do something bad?

It's not something that crosses her mind.

You know, she's doing a job that she's squared off with herself and she's absolutely fine with it.

Same with lawyers.

You know, the people who shouldn't have that amorality are the people bankrolling these things, especially stars early in their career.

Look, Diddy got to the stage where he's bankrolling himself and, you know, his record company is his own record company.

He does not have a boss.

He does not have a superior.

All he actually has

when you get to that stage are

sponsors.

And Diageo, he teamed up with to make some sort of alcohol, which is an original move for a celebrity.

You will always find support staff.

You will always find people who are as amoral as you in your gang.

And

they're not going to take a moral stance on what you do.

But the people who are making the money very, very early on, I think it's beholden on them to say what they see and to discuss with people what they see.

And for everyone, just to say out loud, can I just say, I saw this at the weekend.

I saw Diddy do this at the weekend.

What do we all think as a company about that?

I'm not going to keep this a secret because I saw it.

What do we all think as a company?

If everyone goes, oh, that's fine, that's just diddy being diddy.

Great, we move on.

If two or three people on your staff are going, do you know what?

I'm not sure about that, then maybe we have a lot of think about it and make someone else a pop star.

I mean, there's plenty of people who want to be it, and there's plenty of people who won't abuse people who want to be movie stars and pop stars.

There's plenty of people out there who will make you money, plenty of people out there with great ideas, who will make the world a better place and who will make you a load of money as well.

And the idea that this behavior is sort of correlated with talent and artistry is the most sort of insidious of all.

And of course, it isn't.

It's very important that that particular sort of link is broken to think that, oh, you know, a certain amount of abuse is always permissible.

But that's how, you know, it's just the way they think.

They think differently.

The rules don't apply to them.

Creative rules and the rules of society that don't apply.

You think, you know, who do the rules of society apply to?

Everybody.

And people who break them tend to be pricks.

I think you're quite right, Richard.

So I think we sort of both violently agree on that.

But I would say one interesting little thing, just

which is a sort of complete sidebar to this, but did you see that T V network Law and Crime in the US did an AI reconstruction of the trial, which I think is really interesting because obviously we weren't allowed cameras in this courtroom, not all US camera courts allow cameras, and they sort of managed to completely get around this by basically restaging the trial entirely with AI and so they're sort of animated, but you know, quite detailed versions of the people and the the entire testimony has been put into their mouths.

We've had reconstructions of like really sensational trials and Sky News have done various ones.

I can't remember which ones they did in the past but I've seen every now and then you get a big thing and someone will sort of do a reconstruction of it.

But I think that has just opened the floodgates.

It wasn't glitchy, but it was a bit weird.

But you can see that in six months, it'll be far better and they'll do it for all of it.

They have to make that illegal, surely.

People sort of have a similarity to who they're supposed to look like.

And it gets over supposedly all of these issues.

they'll have to work quite quickly to make it illegal because i think that is just going to be the very start of it anyway so that that trial continues we've seen the story happen often enough now anyone who works in any organization there's people we have we have trouble with who are difficult who bully a bit stuff like that we're not talking about that we're talking about someone you know for a fact is doing bad things and is going to do worse things and as industries i just think that there must be a reporting procedure that we can put into place but the main people it's beholden on are the people who are making all of the money it's the heads of the record companies It's the heads of the TV companies.

It's the heads of the movie companies.

And the managers of the hotels and the various ones like that.

Agents, you know, all sorts of things, all sorts of people.

But come on, come on.

We need to normalize reporting people in...

in that way.

Not accusing people, just reporting people and having an open process where everyone can put their side.

I'm just making that completely normal from the start of people's careers.

Well, now we've taken care of that.

Shall we proceed to a break?

After which we are going to talk about the BBC, including Gary Lineker, and Laboo-Boos.

What are they?

Join us after the break to find out.

This episode is brought to you by Sky, where you can watch the brand new series of the award-winning A Last of Us.

So we've both been watching the new season, which once more does not hold back.

If you thought the first series was dark and had twists and turns, I'd say this one's darkerer and more twisty-turner.

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The infected are obviously terrifying, but the real danger arguably now comes from the living, Richard.

The first season, for people who watch that end of year to watch the second season, you know exactly what you're going to expect here, but this time I would say there are even more rug pulls and even more extraordinary moments where you go, okay, I didn't see that coming.

Beneath the horror, I suppose it's about the fragile ties that bind people together.

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Now, the new characters, Abby and Dina, they have taken it off in a whole different direction which is as you would expect and without giving anything away for those yet to watch it does just keep delivering those moments where you think what I can't believe they just did that.

Watch the brand new season of the award-winning The Last of Us available now on Sky.

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Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-litre jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

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You were made to outdo your holidays.

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Expedia, made to travel.

Welcome back, everybody.

Now, we are going to talk about the BBC.

We worry a lot about the future of terrestrial television.

We talked about a lot of the jobs involved.

And Tim Tavey made a speech last week about the future of the BBC, which

I thought was very, very impressive.

We want to talk about some of the things he talked about and whether they're achievable.

But then, also at the weekend, the news that Gary Lineker is leaving his BBC contract early, we thought, well, let's shall we add those two things together and see where we are with the state of the BBC.

Well, yeah, it's very interesting.

The speech is the Tim Davies' speech, the Director General's speech is the kind of kicking off of the charter renewal process.

And he centered the whole thing on trust.

And I mean, you know, I don't need to tell everybody that we live in a polarized world.

And it's interesting.

I mean, people, three quarters of people now say that the UK is divided and six in ten say they feel exhausted by these divisions.

So he sort of reminded people that the BBC,

you know, trust is absolutely central to what the BBC does and that we need that more than ever in a world where sort of things are falling away.

I thought it was quite interesting how he linked it to growth and how

the sort of discussion of the fact that countries where a sense of distrust is most prevalent don't do as well.

Erosion of social capital, you know, kind of anti-growth in lots of ways.

I mean, if any of us look at America now and think that its best days are almost definitely ahead of them,

I certainly don't see it that way.

It's really interesting how quickly that kind of

what's been built over 100 years can be eroded in 100 days in terms of soft power.

And I think that the BBC and our creative industries in general are such a huge instrument of soft power.

As I've said before, but you know, we kind of export three things in this country, three really big things: financial services, weapons, and the creative industry.

And you and I are involved in only two of those.

Yeah, I'm exactly.

Let's keep everybody guessing, but yeah.

Different two for both of us as well.

Yeah, different.

But

the UK is the third largest exporter of creative industries in the world.

So things you might not be aware of if you believe everything you read, the trust in the BBC actually went up in 2024.

It's used regularly.

The iPlayer grew faster in the UK than all other streamers.

And

it's sort of interesting how they want to continue and how much I think and agree that we need the BBC.

Like you'd really try and invent it in countries which are fracturing, but we're lucky enough to have it.

In a world of disinformation and misinformation, and whatever we think about the political events of any particular day,

that's the great fault line.

that's going to define the next century.

Can we believe anything we see?

Can we believe anything we hear?

And it's very, very easy to build an army of people who don't believe anything because

the simplest way to make a stupid person feel clever is to give them the arsenal that says nothing is true and be cynical about everything.

And no one is trying their best, and no one has your best interest at heart, and no one is running a business, or no one is running any sort of enterprise for anything other than their own good.

So that's a very easy way to look at the world and a very prevalent way of looking at the world at the moment.

And those people have been mobilized and those people also tend to

be very radical about their beliefs you cannot believe anything and the way they've been sold is everyone is lying to you all the time and that's the battleground of the next century and as you say a place that we can find that does have trust that a majority of the public can trust and trust for information and trust to tell the truth and trust to look for facts and where you can trust to have two different people from different perspectives arguing with each other and not screaming at each other seems to be a very useful thing to have in the middle of our culture.

At the moment, the whole of our culture, the online side of our culture is so hugely leveraged so that actually everything that happens now feels like it is run by people who are trying to tell you that, you know, nothing is true and you mustn't believe anything.

But actually, most of culture is not that.

We do still have a majority of people in this country who think roughly the same thing and who understand the world is incredibly complicated and who understand there are people out there who are trying to do their best, but they're going to be delused sometime soon.

So, anything we can do to keep the fight to say, no, actually, as human beings, we're smarter than we're being told we are at the moment.

Yeah, I mean, in this country, we have the world's most trusted global news provider.

94% of people of UK adults use the BBC monthly, 75% use the BBC News weekly.

Okay, even young people in the top five, it's the only UK service that is in the top five most used for young people.

Okay, so it's really worth it.

Can I say, by the way, but this is not a the BBC is great because also the BBC, one thing that's fostered in this country is we have a number of incredibly powerful and smart news organisations.

And, you know, IGN News and Sky News, you know, we actually have a very, very healthy news industry in this country.

And I think a lot of that is because we have the BBC in the background.

But we're not just saying, just watch the BBC.

We're saying we have a healthy news culture in our country.

The bits of it aren't, of course, but we do have a healthy news culture and the BBC is an example of that.

Yes, in large part we're talking about the other public service broadcasters.

In fact, Tim Davies said, you know, we need a charter which allows the BBC to extend our partnerships with other public service broadcasters and enables the BBC and other players to build scale together.

What do you think he sort of meant by that?

I think that

we are going to get to the stage.

We all know how much the industry is changing.

We all grew up with television being a certain thing.

And at some point, we're going to have to face the unfortunate thing that they're all going to have to team up, you know, and that whatever branding they might have-BBC, ITV, Channel 4, they're all going to slightly have to become the same thing.

They're all going to have to share resources on streaming.

So, everything's going to have to, you know,

the iPlayer, which came along way before a lot of other streaming services, is so blue-chip, it would be crazy not to use that as

the streaming service.

But ITV and Channel 4,

they're all going going to have to team up and have one streaming service i think in order to compete to explain why okay um the commercial public service broadcasters um so that's itv channel four and channel five their business model is advertising all right now what drives success in advertising is reach it is a reach-based business uh but who ironically has the most reach and yet doesn't do advertising is the bbc because you know iPlayer as you've said is this hugely successful thing they've spent 15 years making it big, it's best.

It's the fastest, it grew far faster in the UK than any other streaming service last year, including Netflix.

And but what the BBC care about, because they're much more like Netflix in some ways, they are a subscription service.

They want people to feel okay about paying the license fee.

They want people to feel that there's value there and there's value for all.

So if you put them together and

ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 shows were available on iPlayer, then what you're doing by getting them in in is you're giving them reach because they're getting the reach of iPlayer, which is incomparable and you couldn't possibly build a new brand now.

Why would you bother?

You've got this amazing thing.

And what they're getting,

you're giving them reach and then you're getting value because people are seeing all these things on iPlayer on a service, as it were.

So it's a sort of win-win.

And of course, you would still have ads in ITV or Channel 4, whatever shows.

People understand this, okay?

In within the iPlayer, you wouldn't have ads in BBC shows because that's how that works.

But we've lived with the linear EPG or whatever it is for a long time.

And people understand that when they flick between channels, you get different things.

And sometimes the programmes will have ads and sometimes they won't.

I totally agree with you.

I think that then everyone would win from that particular situation.

I think everyone, listen,

there will be holdouts and certainly people would like, you know, those organizations need to negotiate in their own way.

But I think everyone understands that.

I think everyone at the BBC, ITV, 5, less so five maybe, but Channel 4 certainly understands at some point they're all going to have to come under the same umbrella.

They tried to do it a number of years ago with Project Kangaroo, which

was 10 years ahead of its time.

At that point, everyone goes, no, this is crazy.

Why on earth would you do that?

And we find ourselves now in the situation we're in with the streaming services and the collapse in funding for lots of terrestrial TV.

We find ourselves now in a position where we go, now it makes sense.

Now it makes a lot of sense for everyone.

Everyone can keep their independence, but they share an awful lot of backroom stuff and and they share a streaming platform.

I don't see a way in five years that there isn't a streamer which has all of those BBC terrestrial, although it has all of those terrestrial broadcasters in the same place.

I agree with you.

And it's obvious that it should be iPlayer because it's already built.

The one thing I would say is...

By the way, they will call it something else, but you will use the infrastructure of iPlayer.

I would have thought they were called as something else.

Why would you try and build a new brand in this?

It just makes you mad.

You're the one that's already the fastest growing.

Yeah.

But there's ego involved, of course, and I don't mean that in a bad way.

We're all human beings.

But if you're ITV or your Channel 4, you don't want to see it as being subsumed into BBC iPlayer.

You want it to be a joint venture where it says we're all different.

We all have completely different skills.

We need to call it something.

There's no way they're going to say, no, we're going to call it iPlayer.

No way in a million years.

Well, they should say they're going to call it iPlay.

That's an act of madness.

And

I don't care about the individual people's ego because actually what's far more important is the future of public service broadcasting.

However,

speaking of which, the Media Act, he was really pushing the government to kind of get on with the Media Act.

I think these are...

Tim Davey.

Yeah, Tim Davey was.

But it's interesting.

I know I've talked about this before, but you know, they've left out remote controls of this act.

You know, when you get a telly in this country, and because of clever lobbying and whatever, you've got a Netflix button, you've got a YouTube button on your remote control, right?

Why don't you have an iPlayer button or a 3D button or whatever, which is the collaboration between them?

But they've left it out.

And it's either because Ofcom or the government have either ducked it or forgotten about it or whatever.

I was talking to someone in Netflix.

80% of Netflix journeys start with the Netflix button on the remote control.

Okay.

It's such an unbelievable that that type of prominence.

And we've talked before about prominence in news.

You know, like when you buy a phone, if it's got Apple News or Update or whatever it is, lots of people sort of carry on with that.

The BBC has spent a really long time trying to build BBC News and it's actually become bigger than that.

But before then, most people just have what's on their, have what's on their remote control, have what's on their phone, smart speakers, all those sorts of things, pre-programmed stuff in cars, all of that really matters.

So in a way, we already need a kind of a media act too.

But that's another interesting thing that we haven't talked about on the podcast, what people are saying about the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, which,

I mean, I think is a real mess.

And what I'm reading now, and what I keep hearing from people is that they're thinking of breaking it up.

And so they're going to put it, break up the whole department and split it between treasury and education and business.

And that seems to me like a really would be very bad.

It's a huge mistake.

I think culture needs a seat at the cabinet table specifically.

I don't know what's going to happen to Lisa Nandi because there's constant talks about what's going to happen to her.

And people are saying, oh, maybe Peter Kyle would go in.

He, again, seems to me someone who is, I saw Elson John call him a complete moron on Laura Kumbersberg's show yesterday, which was, I wouldn't necessarily say he's a first-class mind, but I do think

captured by the tech companies is a lot of people's opinion about him.

So

I do think they're in a quite a dangerous situation.

And you really need a culture department that is willing to drive forward that media act

and actually

add more to it, as I've discussed on things like...

remote controls or whatever it is like that.

Yes, I think if government has a role and government roles have changed many times over many years, we live, we've talked about this on the podcast a number of times, we live in an era where the march of technology feels inevitable.

Okay, it feels absolutely inevitable.

Like, you know, AI, the search engines, all of these big companies, it feels like they're so powerful, there is sort of nothing we can do about it.

And we can, you know, raise our voices every now and again and shake our fist every now and again, but the future is going to be the future.

And actually, the role of a government is to say, I wonder if we could define the future in our own way.

In the same way that the setting up of the BBC, they didn't have to do that.

They just chose as a society to do it.

In the same way, we didn't have to set up the welfare state after the war.

We chose as a society to do it.

There are times where you can choose to do something.

And I would say, now, with the march of AI into so many industries and into all of our lives, now is a time for a government to say, as a country,

the point of being a government.

A government is there to say, who do we want to be as a country?

Who do we want to be as a people?

Are there big giant bullies that we want to see off?

That's the job of a government.

And culture is such an easy place to start with that because it's so ever-present all the time.

And and it's so popular and everybody everybody consumes it all the time.

So I would have thought that a few very well-aimed cultural blows to some of the big tech giants and to the future of AI wouldn't be a bad way to start the next part of this century.

Absolutely.

I really think that it's worth boosting something that other countries would invent if they could.

Yes.

If only there are examples of polarized and fractured media landscapes for us to look at right now and see what the political result is.

Yeah, and also, by the way, some people want that because

we all know people who thrive on chaos and that's, you know,

that's how they want the country to go.

But those of us who don't, you know, we can put our foot down.

I thought also, Tim Davey talked very smartly about, you know, how the future of the BBC is also,

you know, on social media.

And, you know, I think BBC is already the biggest news brand on Instagram, which is an achievement that shouldn't be overlooked.

And talking about going to TikTok and YouTube and all of those things.

And again, if if anyone's sitting at home thinking oh god i this we don't need to be trendy we don't need to do this that the other you do i mean i'm afraid that's where the audience is i mean there's there's there's no point saying why don't you just commission more challenging programs on bbc one and beef up the news because yeah

that that's not where the audience is they're not going to see it and this audience is real this audience has a hunger for information and intelligence and don't forget if you're in a generation that grows up in an age of disinformation and you're smart which an awful lot of this generation are,

you're looking for something.

You are looking for someone to give you something.

You know, you cannot roll over and just let the algorithm give you everything.

There is a group of people hungry for things, hungry for information, hungry for news.

And I felt, having listened to Tim Davies' speech, that that's something that he at least

understands and will hopefully drag the BBC towards.

Absolutely.

And as you say, the remit of all these people is public service.

It's not public service as we've always known it, half-hour, one-hour programmes or news in a particular style.

It doesn't have to be any of those things.

It just has to be public service.

And so, as you say, to go where the audience is and to do all sorts of different things is part of the future.

And we also have to be grown up and understand that the BBC is not going to be perfect and that there are always going to be issues and problems and difficult people who work there.

And, you know, I'm compromised.

I work, you know, I do a show there.

I mean, it's not, it's a small part of what I do, but I definitely do work there.

So you can take everything I've said with a pinch of thought.

I couldn't absolutely be in the pocket of big BBC.

I'm not.

I think we have a fight for our culture ahead of us.

So it's hard for me to talk about the BBC.

My husband works at the BBC.

I feel, you know, passionately pro-it in every way.

But yes, of course, we have to talk about it.

And I,

you know, it is difficult.

And another thing we have to talk about is this speech, which I'm afraid was a bit overshadowed by an Instagram repost by Gary.

And it's difficult.

he's now leaving match of the day and he's not going to host um the World Cup coverage it's interesting I was thinking this morning and thinking you know that saying all political careers end in failure I have to say that all stellar be all stellar BBC careers can often end badly or sadly in one way or another and it's just one it's just there's something about the organization there are so many idiosyncratic things about the BBC the way it reports on itself all the time all of those things we know about them and in some ways these things are sort sort of slightly irresistible, as it were.

But I do think when a speech is all about trust and when the future is all about trust, I know that what Gary, I haven't certainly haven't spoken to him about this, but I've read what he said saying, you know, I think that the situation in Gaza is more important than BBC.

You know, of course, of course, but I think that's a false binary.

I think many, many things are more important than the BBC.

But what is absolutely vital is the free and fair and trusted reporting of those things being brought to the world.

And it always has been.

And if in any way you are undermining that trust, then you are

undermining something much sort of more important about those things, however well-meaning, however well-meaning, however compassionate.

And I should, you know, I think that's really important to say.

And I do slightly feel that

in lots of ways, and I understand how so many people feel they can't do anything apart from say things on social media at this this time.

And we live in an era where people feel like, you know, if you don't say something on social media, then perhaps you don't mind about it, which isn't necessarily the case.

But I do think that when so many posts on Instagram and Twitter and whatever are helping two very specific situations, and those are the situations of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

The more we know about these platforms and the more we understand how they, you know, monetize discord and how they monetize anger and how they monetize people staying on the platform, i sometimes think that all of us have the potential to be working for those people for free in a way that actually doesn't sort of help anything particularly yeah culturally it's it's fascinating because if if you if you do care a great deal about something you have two choices if you have a social media following and that is

to say something or to not say something

and People mustn't think that if someone is not saying something, then that is them not caring.

There is a choice you can make to think, think, if I say something, is it going to advance the cause that I believe in?

Is it going to make the end of the situation I want to end quicker?

Or if I don't say something, is that going to actually advance the cause?

Or if I say something, is it going to actually work in the opposite direction?

I think the way our culture works at the moment, there are arguments for both of those things.

So I absolutely understand why some people use their platform in that way.

And I understand why some people don't.

But I also understand.

And by the way, I think Gary understands and Tim Davey understands that there comes a point where the place the BBC needs to go and the place Gary Lineke needs to go are different places.

And that's okay, because

they are different.

And I think probably

they all shook hands together rather happily.

You know, you get people who've worked at the BBC for a really, really long time and they genuinely care passionately about it and who then leave and you talk to them and they just go, I can wake up in the morning and I don't have to panic that, you know, suddenly I'm going to to be on the front pages of something.

I don't have to panic about every single word of every single thing I say, you know, being picked over.

I agree.

That thing of being picked over, but it's who's doing the picking over sometimes.

And I think that those people are often the BBC's enemies.

And it does make me laugh somewhat mirthlessly when I read the shim amount of coverage of something Gary Lineker said in like the Times or the Sunday Times.

And I think, oh, well, I mean, I wonder who's been more of a poison to this world.

Is it Gary Lineker or is it Rupert Murdoch, who's, I mean, whose own, whose own presenters in America we saw undermining American democracy, something we all took for granted until quite recently and now no longer do.

The amount of poison dripped into that body politic by Rupert Murdoch, and yet you'll never read about that in the Times or the Sunday Times.

So when I see them making endless hail out of it, you know, we wish them all well, but it's just a reminder that we are all in the gutter.

And please, please remember that.

And we're all in the gutter.

Some of us are looking at the stars, but one star we're we're not going to be looking at for much longer on the BBC is Gary Dennicer.

Thank you for winding that up so neatly.

That's what we call a button in the business.

We sewed a button on the end of it.

So we talked about Diddy and the BBC, but now we are going to talk about the biggest news of the week, which is what you did last Thursday.

You were in a long queue for a disappointing reason.

It's never much of a happy reason, is it being in a long queue?

But I was in the queue for a laboo-boo.

Let me briefly describe this thing.

It is a little key ring, about I'm about this big.

It is half monster, half fluffy thing.

It's a sort of bag charm, I guess.

Rihanna's popularised them.

Lisa from Blackpink.

Anyway, this sort of became a thing last year.

They cost £17.50 at retail price.

Anyhow, I promised my daughter one for

a reason.

She worked very hard on something that I'd slightly dropped the ball on, and we had to do it quite quickly.

She said, Can I have one?

And I said, yes.

Obviously, I thought you'd be able to buy it on Amazon, like every other thing that comes into my house.

It's just a constant river of money flowing one way towards Jeff Bezos.

And also, to be fair, towards Lauren Sanchez.

And towards Lauren Sanchez.

Which you resent far less.

I'm happy to.

I'm happy.

If anything, if I just want to buy, I'm going to leave here and buy some more stuff.

Anyhow, so I said, I'll go on Thursday.

Or you have to go on Thursday because they have drops of the new merchandise of this stuff.

And I said, okay, but I'll go on Thursday because like everyone's at school, right?

So there's not going to be a queue.

Okay, I got to Westfield White City, which any regular listeners of this podcast will know I believe to be an accursed space.

And I got there 45 minutes before the shop opened.

The queue, I thought, was about 250 people, but I hadn't actually realized it went round a corner.

It was about 400 people long at that time.

By the way, they're not mothers like me buying them for their children.

They are, you know, in their 20s buying them for them, okay?

And it's...

It was a very respectful queue.

It's really depressing, though.

Everyone was just on their phones.

No one spoke.

There was no camaraderie.

It's not like Prime, where, you know, as our producer Joey mentioned, you just punch someone in Asda and then you can get a bottle.

That's not like that, not that particular craze.

I had three and a half hours in this queue.

Three and a half hours.

Yes.

And when I got 10 people from the front, the very nice people who work in the shop came out.

And I've discovered during this queue, by the way, that I wasn't even queuing for the toy.

I was queuing for a ticket for the toy that I would come back later before 9 p.m.

to get the toy.

Okay, so once I'd got over that, I'm 10 from the front, and they come out and and say, I'm so sorry, we have now sold all our stock.

I know.

Wow.

So I thought, I'm certainly getting a podcast item out of this.

In fact, that's what I was thinking about.

So in the queue, I was thinking about this is one of these toys.

It's like lots, there's been a proliferation of these types of toy crazes over the past few years.

For me,

it used to be sort of generational.

Obviously, you go right the way back to when I was a child.

There was cabbage patch kids and then, you know, there were beanie babies and things like that.

It's almost generational, it's kind of once every 10 years, or whatever it is.

It's not now almost now, so many toys come like this.

They come in drops, there's scarcity.

Well, I'll get on to this in a minute, but it reminds me a lot about how de beers controlled the diamond market, which we'll get to.

Very similar.

Well, actually, do you know how I used to buy diamonds?

In fact, they still do this.

De Beers, they completely controlled the diamond supply.

That was what was crucial, okay?

So, they had rough diamonds, and they had to constantly create the exactly right and calibrate the illusion of scarcity and they have something called the central selling organization which is a effectively a cartel if you were a buyer you were called what was called a site holder and you were summoned to London 10 times a year and you go to the central selling organization and there is a private room with a chair this is genuinely how it happens there's a chair and a table and they distributed you one cardboard box like a shoebox it was a blind box rather like these laboo-boos have can i say which you don't know what you're buying you it's a blind box you don't know what's inside.

And they distribute you one cardboard box, like a shoebox, and it was an assortment of rough diamonds.

They chose for you.

You were a diamond cutting factory.

They chose for you.

They gave you what you thought you needed, or what they thought was appropriate for the world diamond market.

And that was it.

It could be a million dollars worth, or it could be $30 million worth.

You got what you got, as my daughters teachers used to say, you get what you get, and you don't get upset.

And that's it.

And you pay cash.

They never ever reduce their prices.

This is just like laboo boo, right?

But what they do is they cut back supply.

So they can create that kind of world within the market.

So blind boxes is very interesting.

And

I love the idea that your version of a blind box is diamonds because my version of a blind box would be something different.

So when you buy a lububoo,

as you say, you literally get a sealed box.

You do not know which version of the labuboo you're going to get because there's all sorts of different versions.

You know,

but you don't know what dole within that version.

Yes.

Yes, exactly.

So you don't know exactly what you're getting and some are scarcer than others.

And so you could open the box and get one that's worth a lot of money or you could open the box and get one that everyone else has got.

And there are online marketplaces where you can swap and all those sorts of things.

So it's a market.

So it's almost a form of gambling.

Agreed.

Agreed.

What it's exactly like is Panini football stickers.

Yeah.

So Panini football stickers,

you have no idea which six or five stickers you're going to get in your thing.

You open them up.

Some of them you've been waiting for ages for.

You go into the playground and you can swap them.

It's that.

But every single one of them, as you say, costs costs a lot of money.

And most of the people who are collecting them are in their 20s.

So

it's a weird sort of older online marketplace.

Funny enough, Labubu, there's an obsession, of course, with Japanese and Korean culture at the moment.

And it's interesting that Labubu really, really took off when Lisa from Blackpink had one hanging off a bag.

And Lisa from Blackpink is virtually the biggest star in the whole world.

Younger podcast listeners will know her from Black Pink and from her own solo career.

Older podcast listeners will know her as Mook from White Lotus.

She started that.

She bestrides the whole of our culture like a colossus.

So she has.

The US is not the cultural center of our world anymore.

You really realize this when you go into the shop.

They're sold via a retailer called Potmart.

And it's all just,

it's Korean media.

But that's the interesting thing is, because Korea and Japan have ever got a stranglehold on our popular culture.

And China have

been going, hold hold on, why don't we have a stranglehold on popular culture?

And actually Lububu is Chinese, so Pop Mart is a Chinese company.

I think it's not the sort of thing that the Chinese government were thinking this is the thing we want to spread Chinese culture worldwide.

I think the 70-year-old men who

run China think this might be a bit trite for them.

They prefer Nurja, the big movie they loved, and Wukong, the video game releasings that are based on kind of ancient Chinese law.

So I think that Labubu was not the thing they were looking really to break Chinese culture abroad.

But this is the first big Chinese entry into the market, which has been dominated by Korea and Japan.

But yeah, anyone in their teens and 20s, the whole cultural axis of the world has shifted, right?

We were obsessed with America.

They are obsessed with

Japan and Korea.

And that's why you're queuing up for three and a half hours.

So you didn't get anything?

No, but no, I didn't.

But they're also obsessed, I think, or they don't know any better than, which is my old voice talking, the gamification of the buying process and I've you know I've seen some people say oh it's called gamblification or whatever it is but that kind of blind box culture where the kind of risk and uncertainty and weirdly like actually disappointment is is part of the appeal like I know someone whose daughter got two boxes for her grandmother for Christmas and they were the same.

That seems to me just so rotten, you know, because it's so hard to get them.

And rather like gamblers are actually addicted.

And when people people understand gambling addiction, they understand that gambling addiction is an addiction really till losing, because that is actually what you know most of the time, and that it's a form of complicated and difficult form of self-loathing and all sorts of things like that.

But weirdly, just the things that they like, disappointment is part of the appeal.

And almost thinking of buying things and consumerism as a game of chance, a spin of the wheel.

But the interesting thing is, you know, if blind boxes are banned in China, so you know, for children, the Chinese government understands that's a, that's a form of gambling.

So, you know, you, you, you are not able to buy blind boxes if you're a child in China.

Is it sad?

I don't think it's new.

I think, I think, I think Panini football stickers were always this.

I guess they were a little cheap.

Yes, but that's for children.

I realized I was trying to buy this for

a 10-year-old girl.

But in general, as I said, I was a freak.

I was the freak in the queue.

I was not the 20-to-28-year-old person who's buying it for themselves.

And the thing itself, you know, people call it like, okay, so let's think about the thing itself, this fluffy little cutie, slight little monster thing.

There is a sort of infantilization to all of these things, to sort of wanting something like that, I think, in your 20s.

And I, you know, this is not, I'm not saying this is a judgment.

I've talked before about cosplay and how that sprung up in Japan after the 1990 financial crisis.

That retreat.

in a world that's basically failed young people and i i really do believe it has the retreat into childlike things and

to comforting things and little treat in the absence of being able to sort of have any wider purchase on society, I think is linked.

And also people do talk about that thing,

the lipstick index, you know, that sort of economic indicator that sales of affordable luxury items, which I think you'd class this as, increase in economic downturns.

And people think that actually it's a sort of canary in the coal mine.

And if you see these things happening, then what's around the corner is a significant economic downturn because, the kind of market knows before you.

Don't take investment advice from me.

I thought after talking about Diddy and the Gary Lineke thing, I thought this would be a

lovely light end to the show.

And

you're saying this is a precursor to economic Armageddon.

I'm not saying it definitely is.

Listen,

I don't know, but there's something odd that has happened to consumerism where that is tolerated as part of the process.

The blind thing, that came from, oh, what were those dreadful little tramps?

I hated them.

The LOLs.

Okay, you don't know what those are.

The LOL surprise or a little goal?

Dreadful little things.

No.

And now, those LOL surprises, those were blind boxes.

And that was a sort of, and you know, you see the whole, the whole unboxing culture of all of it, but you don't know what's in it.

The idea that sort of risk and disappointment is a welcomed part of the consumer experience.

I mean, I was...

Honestly, I love it.

You love it.

Yeah, I love that sort of thing.

But I do, but I enjoy that sort of thing.

You know, you go to a shopper, it just makes shopping more fun.

I don't care about shopping, right?

It doesn't interest me in any way whatsoever.

What I do like is a

little gamble.

Is a ring quest?

You like a ring quest to get a key ring, right?

Okay.

Yeah, that did be fine.

But now, what did your daughter say when you came home without your Lubabu?

She was

massively disappointed.

I'm sorry, Laboo Boo.

She was massively disappointed.

And I tried to explain that I cleaned for three and a half hours and hadn't done actually any of my work, which I was very worried about.

It didn't cut any mustard.

Then somebody told me that down the back of the street,

the address of a shop where you can buy one for yes, 38 pounds.

So basically double, right?

And there's no queue.

You just walk in.

And this is so the people buying all the sets are going and then reselling them in shops for, and I'm actually quite surprised they only do 100% markup because honestly, after, so I'm afraid I spent an absolutely disgusting amount on it.

My husband kept texting me saying, I'm so surprised you're doing this.

Not the spending up of the markup.

I don't think he was surprised about that, but I can't believe you're in the queue.

I'm so surprised you're doing this.

I'm honestly surprised.

You're really surprising me now.

Leave the queue.

And I was like, I can't.

I'm getting closer.

But that's it.

You see, you were hooked.

They've got you hooked immediately.

Honestly, but that's bad.

Do you think?

You're going to be hooked on something.

You might as well be queuing up for

I don't need to be hooked on keyring queues.

I can't be.

I'll tell you what I did think was quite interesting in a slightly more positive thing is that lots of cinemas have started doing like those, you know, like, oh, it's a surprise screening.

So you don't know what you're going to get.

And Netflix has that thing, doesn't it?

You know, play me something or whatever it's called, where you can see.

And there are various things that people are feeling, perhaps people feel like they've been able to curate and decide and whatever too much.

So maybe there's an element of that where an element of chance coming into it is kind of fun and surprising.

But yes, I mean, it's not for me, but you know, I'm 104, so why would I have enjoyed the queue?

But Laboo Boo, they're available in your local state.

Actually, probably not available in your local street.

They're not available.

Please don't tell anyone they're again, don't take labo boo advice from me.

I'll tell you what, you didn't used to get when we were growing up, or even in our 20s and 30s.

You didn't used to walk down a high street and suddenly, for absolutely no reason, see a queue of 49 teenagers outside a random shop.

Yeah, and now every time you go anywhere, you think, oh, it's an enormous queue for people who are just the shop.

Either it's for like bell buns or it's for trainers or it's, you know, a model railway shop.

You think, okay, that's interesting.

They love queuing.

Yeah, or there's been a drop.

It's the gamification of all of it.

I'm going to end on a negative if I carry on much longer.

I'm wrapping up here, Richard.

I love, I see, I love it.

My whole career has been a gamification of something or other.

I disagree that I don't see that as a reading of your career at all.

And I think your career has been something much more

open to me.

You would know more about my career than me.

I know, I wouldn't, but I don't have that reading of it of it.

I don't feel that you've tried to rip people off and create hyperlinks.

Oh, no, definitely not that.

I don't think gamification is that.

I think gamification is just making something more fun.

It's having quests is achieving things.

That's what I like.

So let's end on your incorrect opinion then.

Have you any recommendations?

That's a hell of a catchphrase, by the way.

No, all my recommendations, I'm afraid, would be watching the Zero Ed d'Atalia with Italian commentary, which I'm absolutely obsessed with.

Is it coming past the house?

It is, yeah.

So we're not going to be able to get out of the house tomorrow.

But I love listening to foreign language commentary on something because I have no idea what they're saying at any point.

They do not stop talking at any point, but the rhythms of it are so familiar to me.

And I know when they're doing a gag, I know when they're doing banter, I know when they're talking about someone being disappointing.

The whole thing, uh, I've

loved watching, but I know that doesn't count as a recommendation.

I apologise for that.

It sounds like being with me on this podcast, but anyway, we have a questions and answers episode coming up, uh, as usual on Thursday.

And for our members, if you want to join, it's therestersentertainment.com.

We have a bonus episode about Pixar, the whole story of Pixar, which is a really interesting one.

Can I say, because I know people worry that Liesl and Lottie are being well looked after.

There's people living in the house looking after Liesel and Lottie.

You mustn't worry.

Well, we're in Italy,

they're being loved and fed.

Thank you so much for that.

And I look very much forward to seeing you on Thursday.

CB Didden on some good news.

See you on Thursday.

See you on Thursday.

Well, that brings us to the end of another episode of The Wrestlers Entertainment, brought to you by our friends at Sky.

I have been catching up on The Last of Us recently, such a gripping watch.

Absolutely right.

The critics are fairly unanimous.

It's dark and intense, brilliantly done, they're all saying, especially on your sky glass with its high-quality screen.

Yeah, even those very low-lit scenes, every flicker, every detail, it really pulls you in.

One minute, you'll be stretched out on the sofa, the next you'll be gripping the cushion, and that is not a euphemism.

The picture quality really just brings everything to life from the comfort of your living room.

It feels properly cinematic, like the room fades away, and you're in the thick of it.

Until the clickers show up, then it feels a bit too real.

Well, that's when you reach for the blanket.

The perfect night in.

Couldn't agree more.

So, for anyone wanting to upgrade this screen time, head to sky.com and check out Sky TV.