Is Taylor Swift Punching Down?

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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 how are you i'm all right yeah i'm not too bad how are you very well now

the big news uh-oh gone is the internet broken again because taylor swift just released a new album taylor swift who i've been googling her She's a singer.

Our first item is going to be about two people who dominated the internet.

Taylor Swift who wanted to and Nicole Kibman who didn't want to so we're talking about how to break it uh and how you can break it without wanting to yes we are also going to talk about musicals are some people think musicals are becoming completely unviable on Broadway that has a big blowback onto our West End so we're going to look at those trend trends in theatre land trends in theater we're also going to talk about live experiences which which are only on the up and I've got lots of theories to as to why and I know you have too yeah exactly theatre has essentially made so much money from musicals over the last 50 years but only three since the pandemic have made a profit on Broadway.

And we're also going to talk about

I'm going to listen.

I've got a type four days on Mel Gibson.

He has started filming The Resurrection of the Christ, the long-awaited follow-up to the passion of the Christ from two decade, more than two decades ago.

Mel Gibson has started filming it.

It's going to be bigger, more outlandish than the original, and we're going to do a deep dive on that.

Superb.

Now, shall we talk about Taylor Swift?

That's.

So how do you become the person who everyone talks about in any given week?

Taylor Swift and Nicole Kibman have managed it this week.

Taylor Swift's new album came out on Friday, The Life of a Showgirl.

I'm going to come off the fence and saying I think it's amazing.

And, you know, one of the secrets behind Taylor Swift's success is she keeps releasing really, really good music and she releases quite a lot of it.

But the way that she dominates the conversation is so extraordinary.

I mean, it's almost impossible to think of somebody who everybody, apart from maybe my mum, has an opinion on.

And even my mom, if I went to say to my mum, do you know Taylor Swift?

She go, oh, yeah, I know Taylor Swift.

I'd say, tell me about her.

And she'd say,

I just know I've heard of her.

Did a tour.

She's a singer.

I think she's a singer.

This album is, I think it's rather wonderful.

She's gone back to Max Martin.

He's written the second most amount of US number ones of anyone in history.

Behind...

Paul McCartney.

Paul McCartney, yeah, but it listen, there's still time.

And I'm sure I've recommended this before, but The Song Machine Inside the Hit Factory is an amazing book which is all about Max Martin and Dennis Popp and that generation of Swedish writers and who discovered Acer Bass and all that.

It's just a really good kind of oral history of all of that stuff if you are interested.

Now Max Martin is the great unsung, it's not even unsung these days, the great unsung songwriter of the last 30 years.

Like so many incredible songwriters, he's Swedish.

He can knock out he did lots of backstreet boy stuff he's done lots of Britney

and he did three albums with her he did and Shelbeck who is his slightly younger collaborator so together they did red they did 1989 they did reputation which were her big pop albums so she'd come from being a country star she wants to be a pop star calls on Max Martin they knock out those albums

since then she's done a few slightly more tortured albums, a bit more kind of introspective, a bit more indie.

And now, I think while she was on the tour last year, so while everyone, again, this is the secret, while everyone's saying, God, isn't it amazing the money she's making on this tour and the publicity she's getting?

She's going, yeah, but by the way, I'm also like going to Sweden to record this incredible album.

I've also written a load of songs and I'm now going to record them.

So the second this finishes, I've got something else to come out.

And that's how you dominate, I think.

But this album is absolutely wonderful.

Have you spent any time listening to it?

I have listened to it.

I have listened to it.

Yes.

I don't think it's as good as those earlier ones.

No.

But I find it so fascinating.

I mean, it's almost, I have to say that lyrically, she always delivers.

Some of the music I'm not, I wasn't so crazy about, but I have to say that

it's,

I don't want to say it's bigger than music because what should be bigger than music or art or anything, but as a concept, the her of it all is so fascinating to me.

I think things can be bigger than music.

Yeah, I think it's a big thing.

Things can be bigger than TV, yeah.

Yes, I mean, she's such a phenomenon phenomenon now.

I think of her now as someone who's created their own universe where there are all these interconnecting pieces of folklore and

Easter eggs and like a hyper-engaged fandom.

And I realised actually when I was listening to it that the thing she reminded me most of, actually the only other entertainment property she's remotely like is Harry Potter.

It's this but but but you know what I mean?

It's this huge thing with hyper-engaged fans.

So lots of stuff where you're trying to read into things and see what might come next.

The idea of people making their own stuff and kind of fanning out for it in this huge kind of diaspora of fandom.

And I

think of her as something like that, even though she is a single person, which is quite difficult.

But well, funnily enough, if you think about the singularity of this album, and by the way, lots of people don't like Teddy Swiss music.

So listen, that's absolutely fine.

I do like it, but it is definitely not for everyone.

But I do think she's interesting to talk about.

And one of the main things she's interesting to talk about is that album, really, it's like any album would have been in 1975 or 1981 it's 12 tracks yeah you know on the vinyl it's six tracks on each side so this is what we've been dealing with for almost the whole of music history it's just all it is is 12 songs well the last one was incredibly long yes i mean she she she did that but to take that and to branch that out into

dominating culture.

So the movie which released in cinemas over the weekend and blew every single traditional Hollywood movie absolutely out of the park and people are

paying to go and see that.

As you say, she puts all sorts of cryptic things into her songs.

Is actually romantic about Charlie XEX.

I ask you, I think it is, but I could be wrong.

Well, that's interesting, isn't it?

Is she someone who is so who bestroys literally everything?

Can she punch down?

She's threaded that needle very carefully before.

This is too crass to say she's sort of presented a victim narrative, but she has always felt really relatable and like bad things happen to her, even though she's the most famous person in the world and the least relatable in lots of ways.

Having a go at Charlie XEX, does it still feel like you're, I'm wondering if she can punch down in that way?

So she's in a position there.

She was, you know, she was with Travis Kelsey.

She's doing that big eras tour, which was absolutely massive.

And she, you know, she says, I was just in a great place and I wanted to make a big pop album.

That's the thing that I wanted to do.

She wants to make a representation of who she is at any given time, which is why the Max Martin thing is fascinating.

So Max Martin, because he's Swedish.

He always said, I grew up listening to American music, but I didn't know what the words were.

So I just heard the sounds of the words.

And that's always, you know, hit me baby one more time.

That's Max Martin, because he didn't know that didn't mean ring me up again.

He just said he just he just thought it sounded good.

And Robin, who's one of the other great pop stars that we work with, he said the thing about Max Martin, he says, it's all about cracking a code.

It's all about being as efficient as possible.

So if you're Taylor Swift, who, by the way, does write her own stuff but is smart enough to then collaborate with people who can make it different or make it better.

and you are in a great mood and you are not particularly wanting to make something that is deeply introspective or is about the state of the world but is just about you know who you are in any given time then that's whose door you knock on.

I think the first time they ever worked together, there's a tail, I don't know if it's apocryphal, but um, Max Martin is there just before Taylor gets there, and a guy knocks on the door and says, Oh, I'm an old friend of Taylor's.

Can I come in and wait?

And Max Martin's his first day.

He goes, Um, um,

yeah, I guess, I guess you can come in.

So he comes in anyway.

Taylor comes in, and it's clear he's not an old friend.

It's clear he's a friend of an ex-boyfriend of hers, and they have to get rid of him.

Uh, anyway, Max Martin is his first day working, so he's incredibly apologetic.

And he's like, I'm so sorry, I shouldn't have done that.

I didn't, I sort of, of because it's not my first language and i just i just got nervous i'm sorry she's like don't worry about it at all and he says well tell me about this ex-boyfriend so she's talking about him and then and then she says and but you know what max we are never ever ever getting back together and that was the start of their uh their collaboration i love that yeah i don't want it to be apocryphal but so i think you know if you want a great pop album it is a great pop album but the way that she is a always on which we've talked about as i say she was doing this massive tour which is already always on and at the same time she was really taking care of business.

In between shows, she was flying over to Sweden.

She's flying over to Sweden to work with Schellbeck and Max Martin and write this stuff.

She knew when it was coming out.

It's only a year since Tortured Poets Department.

Pop stars, way back when, would have waited three or four years before they had to release the next thing.

But she's aware she has to be ever-present.

She's aware she constantly has to feed the machine.

She's aware that the fans will do all the money.

She almost is the machine now.

Nobody is really keeping pace with her.

And she has adapted so kind of seamlessly to all the different platforms as they've come along, whether it be Insta or TikTok.

What I find interesting about her is that, for all of that, she's such a digital native, and so many of these things are actually people at home feeling connected to some wider whole, as music has always been, as people sitting at home listening in their bedrooms.

But she does also massively understand the communal experience that is live.

So, at the same time as doing the tour, to do the launch party in the cinemas, if she's ever at risk of seeming someone who just knows how to break the internet and just fully understands how to manipulate the internet in her favour, then she will, then there are always these live things and these moments where people can come together.

She's quite unplayable.

Yes, she is.

She's absolutely unplayable.

Which is why I wonder whether she can punch down anymore.

There's certain people who...

it seems fine to go back and do a drive-by on.

I mean, I think Kim and Kanye can just have it forever as far as I'm concerned.

I don't know.

Maybe Charlie X isn't very nice.

Who knows?

Who knows?

Maybe something unpleasant happened there.

We can't speculate.

I have just, but

I have just, Richard.

Yeah, and that's the thing with, you know, even with the live tour.

So she's doing something which is a common little experience, but she's making sure every gig there's a different acoustic song, which means that that can be filmed and taped.

And then that can be on TikTok and that can be on Instagram.

Because it's a new thing.

Yeah, but it just, it just...

shows you how old-fashioned so much of the rest of the industry still is.

She worked out 10 years ago that this was a thing and has just put her foot down and has, you know, overtaken everybody and it's just miles ahead of everyone.

And the generation coming up understand it.

And that she'd sell directly into movie theatre chains,

not go to a studio and say to Disney, would you mind putting out my concert film or anything like that?

All of that.

She's eliminated lots of people from the supply chain.

But talking of old school, Nicole Kibmen has also been in the papers this week.

So she's divorced from her partner, Keith Urban, which is a very sad story.

But it seems to have been on the front page of everything if we still have front pages.

It's really interesting.

I'm interested as to white, because it hasn't imploded in some kind of dramatic way.

Like he's been pictured with, you know, someone completely different.

Yeah.

And there's some great big,

you know, dramatic gotcha.

There's none of them.

Who knows?

But

there's not some sort of gotcha moment.

And it's really interesting if you look how obsessed people are.

I think people I think what she represents in the sort of culture, she's...

There is something very mysterious about her, even though she is very much always on.

I mean, she works more than she works unbelievably hard.

She does things back-to-back all the time, which is driven in quite an odd way.

But she's had in many ways a really sad time of it because she's estranged from those two children that she adopted with Tom Cruise, which is desperately sad.

And that relationship will always echo down the years for her because I think people feel that

something odd happened there.

Well, clearly, it did.

I mean, he is, Tom Cruise is estranged from his other child who went with Katie Holmes.

And so I suppose people thought Def Shortchi had had her happy ending with Keith Urban.

But what I will say about all of this, never mind speculating on it, is that it's so interesting.

Yet again, we're talking about how people report this and the way it's covered.

I mean, the sheer number of like body language experts and whatever I've seen crawl out of the woodwork this week to discuss it all.

You know, OSINT, open source intelligence.

I do not know OSINT.

You know, you know what OSINT, but OSINT is open source intelligence.

So there are people like Bellingcat who look at things and think, now, how can we prove that the Russians brought down that Malaysian airline plane?

And there are people who will go through all these publicly available things and they manage to prove extraordinary things and they're really kind of pining.

And they find war criminals because they did like one public photo and there's a bit of graffiti in the bank and they discover exactly where that was.

Yeah, like an army of investigative journalists.

Half the people who now obsessively follow Showbiz, and I'm talking about people who follow Taylor Swift, people who follow these stories, basically work in OSINT, okay?

Instead of saying, now,

how can we prove the Russians down that plane?

They're like, now, how can we discover when Keith stopped wearing his wedding ring?

Let's go back into all these.

I believe that MI6 should recruit this wine-time army,

this army of people.

If only they could be harnessed in the national interest.

Or the other way around, I would say, what if we actually get some of the gang at MI6 to properly look into this stuff?

Because they'd have access to stuff that we don't have access to.

I feel like they are quite busy.

Yeah, I know, but listen, we're all busy.

Yeah, we're all okay.

But good, good for PR if they go, we have finally found the moment that keeps

unfollowed Nicole's hairdresser on Instagram.

Because someone sitting with a box of rose at home in front of a computer at 5.30 on a Friday evening will do it for you.

You've got an army.

They don't even have to be paid.

It's amazing.

It's like spare capacity.

Yeah.

And, you know, whenever you find that in a market.

Well, it's the only part of the British state in which we actually have capacity left.

Yeah.

We need capacity.

We've got this army of people.

And they're global, actually.

It's a real shame that Labour's conference just finished because this feels to me like it could have been a big announcement.

Why don't they talk to us?

But you know what I mean?

Why is Starmer not constantly on the phone to us saying, What can I announce?

What have we got?

We go, I tell you what, we've got we've got a surfeit of people with time on their hands.

He's afraid my ideas are too good.

Yeah,

yeah,

he'd be terrified.

You know what?

You'd spend half an hour with Starmer.

He'd go, I am actually gonna quit.

Why don't you take over?

Because otherwise, it's just gonna be you telling me to do stuff just for the next four years.

But stay with me because the army of people who will study tiny open source things, not about the downing of Russian planes or the war criminals or whatever, but about things that happen in the world of showbiz is now vast, absolutely vast.

I mean think of every Taylor Swift album that comes out.

Within hours people have unpicked every reference.

They've got like timelines.

They've got everything.

It's extraordinary.

Actually that's something I noticed on the morning that it came out.

These incredibly detailed timelines of the feud or or where they think the genesis of as of a feud between Taylor and Charlie XEX is is, has already been unraveled by people, by fans, I should say, and in Reddit threads and things like that.

God, it's enormously impressive, isn't it?

But it reminds me, it's like supporting a football team.

I mean, anyone who supports a football team will be very, very aware of how this all works.

You know, whoever your third-choice striker is, and he's on loan at Macclesfield, but some the Macclesfield manager won't play him for some reason.

So it's all, oh, I know why that will be.

And, but yeah, it's like, it's like that.

But for, we should get a few of them on staff, don't you think?

Yeah, they're entirely.

Open source intelligence.

Yeah.

Open source gossip.

Yeah,

Oscos.

Oscos.

Oscos.

I love it.

Oh, my God.

Open source gossip.

Oscos.

Lovely.

I'm going to set up

the Oscos office.

Nobody is going out and

doing journalism in the same way that they used to by trying to, I don't know, talk to doorman or

make up people and try and get them on the payroll and try and get stories funneled out that way.

They're just watching what happens in people's digital footprints and trying to make sense of it.

Well, funny enough, yeah, they used to go through your bins, but now we display the contents of our bins online at almost all times.

Quite right.

These people are phenomenal for investigators.

People are phenomenal investigators.

They are working in OSINT whether or not they realise it.

It's just that they're doing it with...

They're working in Oscos.

And also, if we don't weaponise them,

I tell you who will.

Is it Russia?

Yeah.

But of course he will.

You know, that's probably what they're up to at the moment.

You know, he's probably even, he's probably on a Potato Swift message board recruiting people.

So we probably should absolutely we should recruit all these people at oscos uh i'm gonna i want people in the office three days a week because i think it just it i think it fosters like an environment where people collaborate

you know what i say you have an open plan and people are chatting and people can talk through their methods and things like that two days a week you're at home and absolutely just head down uh and we'll have like a bar on the top floor like you know spotify and netflix and all those people just have a nice bar bit of rosé anyone who fancies it let us know sus Susso Putin.

As so often in our culture, it is either Goalhanger Productions or Vladimir Putin.

He takes your pick.

But they were in love, Keith Urban and Nicole Kibman.

But in conclusion, I'm sorry, Nicole, but I just think...

I don't think she's listening.

You don't think Nicole is listening to this?

Oh my goodness.

You're very wrong.

But in a world of trouble and AI and bad news, I just think for the time being, at the very least, Taylor Swift does good things and does them well.

And her new album, If You Like That Sort of Thing, You're Really, Really Going to Like It and how nice to talk about something like that.

Life of a Showgirl out right now.

It's weird that thing, isn't it?

You can't go to the shops and be, I mean, some people go to the shops and buy it, but you just listen to it somewhere.

But it's terrific.

I'd strongly recommend it.

Should we go to some adverts?

And after that, we can talk about Mel Gibson.

Let's do that now.

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Welcome back, everyone.

Before we talk about Mel Gibson, exciting bonus episode news.

We have a free bonus episode this week.

We had to make it free.

So it's for members, but also for non-members as well.

If I tell you when it's coming out, you might guess what it's about.

It will be coming out on Wednesday evening

and it will be coming out one minute after the end of the first episode of the new Celebrity Traitors.

we will be live reacting to celebrity traitors that first episode i i am so excited it's enormous it's huge this is huge richard it's huge it's huge i don't even need to put a cherry on this this is enormous that will be coming as i as we say i think about 12 minutes past 10 on the on the on that Wednesday night.

Yeah.

We will dive straight into that opening show.

Yeah.

So it'll be spoilers are plenty.

So do not listen to it until you've watched that first episode.

But if you have watched that first episode, then please join us on Wednesday for that special bonus.

Mel Gibson.

Mel Gibson,

talk us through.

Oh, you know I will because filming is now underway on the resurrection of the Christ, which is the...

going to be the long-awaited follow-up to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

Christ 2, The Resurrection of the Christ.

Currently shooting it at Cinecitta Studios in Rome, and they're going to shoot the locations in southern Italy.

You get some pretty great tax credits.

Let's go back to the OG, The Passion of the Christ, which came out in 2004.

Now that was self-financed by Mel Gibson for $30 million, which was massive, a massive amount of money at the time.

And a lot of money now.

It's quite a lot of money.

It's nothing on what they're spending on this.

Everybody

thought he'd lost his mind.

Okay, jury's still out.

Everyone thought he'd lost his mind because he was doing it in Aramaic, Hebrew and Latin.

And they just thought Mel has completely lost his mind and he's self-financing.

It became the highest-grossing indie film of all time.

It took 600 million worldwide in cinemas, which is 20 years ago is absolutely enormous.

For a long time, it was the highest-grossing R-rated film.

And R-rated is sort of R-equivalent of a 15.

A lot of people thought it was anti-Semitic.

And Frank Rich, who was at the time the sort of big, you know, the New York Times critics, brought up the fact that Mel Gibson's father was a Holocaust denier.

Mel Gibson's quote about that was, I want to kill him, I want his intestines on a stick, I want to kill his dog.

Frank Rich or his dad?

Frank Rich.

No, Harten Gibson, I think Mel always revered.

Well, so far so, Jesus.

So he wanted his intestines on a stick.

So when you hear that quote, you're probably thinking to yourself, how to put this, is Mel quite well?

And the answer, Richard, as we discovered alongside the Pacific Coast Highway two years later, was, I don't know.

I mean, not to clinicalize it, because he said some stuff and I don't know if it is a medical condition.

Bear in mind his wife, he always said really cheerfully in interviews, it's so sad.

My wife's so wonderful, but no, I do believe she's going to hell because she's an Episcopalian.

So yeah, anyway.

Yeah, the day after that incident, they separated.

And

I mean, I think he felt very sort of judged, even in his own church, because he's got his own church.

Has he?

He's got his own church up in the hills in Malibu, which although he lost his house in the recent fuzz, he didn't lose the church.

The last time they looked, this church had $42 million dollars worth of assets i wouldn't say he immediately got himself back on an even keel but you know what eventually mal gebson did enough to redeem himself in that i don't know quite what yeah what in nice what did he do so unclear he got sober um

he he did some light sausing i i i don't think it was he was very sorry yeah i think that people tried to get him back into what jodie foster who he is with in maverick with she put him in a film where he played a depressed alcoholic too much of elite for audiences didn't do well.

He directed Hacksaw Ridge.

He got a best director, Oscar nomination for that.

Oh, so sorry, everyone could do everything now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He settled with his wife.

I think that was the biggest divorce in Hollywood history at the time.

With his wife.

I think that was regarded.

He settled with his wife.

Yeah, I think that was factored beyond repair.

So what do we know about this film?

Because, I mean, it's slightly nuts.

It's not really nuts because the first one made a lot of money.

Can I say my absolutely favourite thing about this new film?

Which genuinely I think is amazing.

So he split it into two parts.

Oh, yeah, of course.

Right.

And that's

a Resurrection of the Christ.

It's split into two parts.

And the first part is being released on Good Friday.

This is 2027.

Then the next part is being released 40 days later on Ascension Day.

That feels like good marketing, right?

He's writing it with his brother and someone called Randall Wallace.

He revealed the title on Joe Rogan.

Jim Caviesel, who played Jesus's back.

Now, during the original one,

he was scourged twice.

Scourging is whipping, which i did never yeah he was accidentally scourged twice he's still got the scars no no he probably was he was also struck by lightning read nothing into it richard um

he was struck by lightning how on earth did mel gibson's church not catch fire it's incredible isn't it because it's the resurrection he said he says there's a lot of super supernatural stuff it's a non-linear narrative um he said it's like an acid trip wow there's some sort of rumors that he might be going into the like the dante's inferno and doing all that sort of stuff he says you he says well you you have to go to hell.

You have to go down to hell.

You have to have the fall of the angels and then you have to go right to the death of the last apostle.

As I said, he is a very specific type of Catholic and it's not clear what parts of the Bible will end up in this, whether you get apocryphal or whatever.

He's a very specific type of Catholic.

He rejects the authority of all popes since the Second Vatican Council.

Does he?

Yeah.

Does he?

Which was 1965.

So everyone pre-1965 is okay with afterwards.

Yeah, he's not going to be able to do that.

Afterwards, so he currently believes that the Holy See is vacant.

Recently,

some letter leaked recently to somebody else, and he'd written to this person saying, I see you've been excommunicated.

Well, I'd like to be excommunicated.

I'm paraphrasing.

I'd be quite happy to be excommunicated because, you know, I don't even recognise these people.

But it's not even the big, only Big Jesus movie coming out next March.

And both are being distributed by Lionsgate.

So luckily they haven't got a really bad cash because our old friends at The Chosen are releasing the last episode of season six, which is the crucifixion, and the first episode of season seven, which is going to deal with a resurrection, and they're releasing a double bill, so it will be movie-length.

And they're releasing it.

Now, as the bigger kind of resurrection fish, I guess.

So we've got a resurrection off.

Yeah,

we've got a Barbenheimer.

We've got a Cho's Erection.

I don't think you can call it that.

I just don't think they will.

Well, no, certainly.

I'm not going to call it that.

Is there a reason they're both coming at the same time?

It's not like an anniversary or something.

It is quite a popular date.

It's quite an important date in the calendar.

So they want it near that, you know, Good Friday.

No, no, but why in the same year?

Let's get onto it because the market for this, for what we call faith-based, I don't know why we call it faith-based, because what we mean is Christian, don't we?

We don't mean any other faith.

Faith-based filming, Richard.

Faith-based films, the market is so much better than when Mel released that original film.

And organising and the marketing for these things has become so much bigger.

There are about 12 of these kind of faith-based films which get big releases each year.

And so there's been a huge increase over the past decade in that in that kind of stuff and they've widened out so you have things like sound of freedom that's sort of inspirational and that are clearly faith-based in some ways but they're not necessarily specific bible stories this is the big one this is the big one jesus was yeah maybe he was maybe he was the first influencer Let's just clip, but can we literally just clip that?

Yeah.

And take it out of context and just put it all over our socials, Jess Marina saying, perhaps Jesus was the first influencer.

Okay, but listen, he's selling a lifestyle.

Yes.

It's aspirational.

Yeah.

But he he gets cancelled.

You know, you're right.

And then he did a deal with the college and lit people.

That's too facetious.

Don't put that bit on.

Churches are much more involved at a grassroots level.

We're saying to people, watch the chosen, go out and watch these pay-it-forward ticket schemes where you can buy tickets for people to see it.

That might be harder for Mel, right, if you are in one of those churches, because you do now have

the chosen is slightly more the approved version of this.

And I guess when

people will go for this.

But when the Passion of the Christ came out, that was sort of the only thing that you could go and see in the theatre if you wanted to see some representation uh whereas now you do you are going to have a choice yeah but there's a market for it

you'll have a choice but you'll do both he will do a publicity tour which will be of interest and any chance of him imploding between now and then he's sort of pre-imploded

but he's kind of already it's it's like it's a week ago actually somebody told me who's actually listening to this podcast i saw i'm so sorry but somebody um a well-known figure in la was having the sort of a british person was having sort of thinking they were going to have a relapse thinking they're going to have a relapse and then said, I've just got to call my sponsor.

And this tiny little electric car tootled up to this mansion.

And who should emerge from the electric car but Mel Gibson?

He was this person's sober sponsor.

I mean, to dial Mel as your calm-me-down person, but you know,

this is the world we live in.

Oh, you know, I have to stop eventually with that.

At some point, I mean, look,

we'll come back to him.

Oh, yeah, we will.

We'll return.

Now, can we talk about musicals and live events?

Andrew Lloyd-Weber says Broadway isn't a business business anymore.

Yeah, literally, everyone is saying you can't make any money making musicals on Broadway.

And musicals have traditionally been the way that theatres have made, you know, they make billions.

And if you ever hit musical, I mean,

you never have to work again.

All you got to do is look at Tim Rice's house.

And you know what musicals can do.

I keep trying to, but I'm being moved on all the time.

Exactly.

Yeah, I can't.

Looks like I'm peeking over the wall.

Since the pandemic, been 46 new musicals have opened on Broadway.

Three of them have made a profit.

43 out of 46 have failed.

Okay, but some of those are taking a million a week now and they will eventually recoup.

But that's how much money, that's how much money is going across the tills.

And the fact that they still haven't broken even at all is extraordinary.

They cost so much more than they used to cost.

I was looking at something about 10 years ago, Something Rotten, which was a big musical on Broadway.

It cost $14 million, which, I mean, that sounds like a lot of money.

And a very similar musical in terms of your cast members and so on.

Death Becomes her, which opened last year, $31.5 million.

In terms of cast, in terms of materials and all of these things, I mean, they are incredibly expensive.

If you want to put on a play, and by the way, plays are doing okay on Broadway, sometimes you've got three or four actors.

It might have already been written.

You want to put on a musical.

Usually, you'll have a big cast, a big ensemble cast, a big chorus.

You will have an orchestra.

It's enormously costly.

The sets are enormously costly.

The materials are very expensive, but the unionisation, some would say, prohibitive costs.

We don't have that same unionisation, which is very odd.

American show business, we always discuss, it's incredibly unionised and it makes it very, very expensive, which is why, to a large extent, people have gone to make things elsewhere, which is part of the reason why Trump's talking about his tariffs or whatever.

It becomes very, very expensive under their labor rules.

Yeah, but mainly what's happening is is people are still going to musicals, but they're going to musicals that they've already seen and they're going to legacy musicals because Hamilton is rammed every night.

Wicked is rammed every night.

So is Mamma Mia.

Hamilton, they just put the price of their most expensive ticket.

Used to be $1,200

for one ticket.

It is now going up to $1,500

for one ticket.

So if you can crack it, I mean, it's worth it.

And it's really interesting when you read the when you read the American articles, because

they so accept this, they say prices have remained flat.

It's like,

I mean, I guess it's since the pandemic, it's like, it's sort of flat, isn't it?

And so the reason this is an issue for British musicals is you can run a British musical at a slight loss or a break-even, knowing that if you do have a hit on your hands, that can go to Broadway.

And 10, 20 years ago, it was really going to start raking in the money because you've done all your costs.

You know, it's all up and running.

And suddenly you're getting this huge money from Broadway.

And now that's not going to happen.

So actually you need to make your money in the UK, which is an awful lot harder, if not fairly impossible.

Even more people are trying to test over here because it's becoming so difficult to start over there.

So it can crowd out original things, different things, plays, because they have come with quite a lot of funding.

And as I say, lots of UK theatres have lost Arts Council funding.

And so

it's a marriage that is disrupting the ecosystem a bit.

I did a book event the other day up in Derbyshire.

And the guy who was the tech guy from it, who is great, him and his husband were literally just flying off to New York the day after because they are the guys behind the Gwyneth Paltrow skiing trial musical, which had done really well at Edinburgh.

And that was a ski masker trial.

Yeah, exactly.

That.

And they were literally flying out to Broadway the next day to go and do that.

So

I hope that's gone unbelievably well for them.

They were two lovely fellas.

I do think live things, like things that take place in theatres.

Yeah, theatres have a very, very, very healthy future.

The other week I was at

the South Bank at the Royal Festival Hall to launch.

Goal Hanger are taking over the Royal Festival Hall for a whole weekend.

And there's going to be, we're all going to do events.

There's going to be crossover events.

I was talking to someone there who they programme lots and lots of live things and they have authors and all sorts of that.

And I have noticed myself doing live things.

I believe that live stages are the last places you can say anything like outrageous and interesting I've said things that I couldn't possibly say doing live events recently I've said things I couldn't possibly say on this podcast certainly in any kind of interview stuff about me yeah it's like you're in a club and it's like a place where celebrities can't say things in interviews for fear of them being clipped I mean you really can't anymore you do you talk to anyone you talk to radio times you talk to anyone you just you know people think interviews are boring it's because you it's you just can't say there's no point saying anything I mean you can't you could say stuff, but then you've got like a week of people saying, dear, didn't you say this?

Didn't you say that?

He said, well, no.

I sort of said, someone said something.

I kind of nodded.

I'm not even going to say where this was because otherwise, like reporters will be sent to sit in this live event last year.

But Tony, who runs Goal Hanger, told me something quite extraordinary that was revealed on the stage recently.

That would have been a Sunday time splash for two weeks.

It did not get up.

There were thousands of people there and it didn't get up.

It's so interesting.

The communal experience is incredibly important it's only going to get more and more and more important people crave it people really really crave it people crave laughing with each other being interested with each other it's one of the fascinating things in theatres now is the amount of shows which are just

somebody

like a professor or someone from the television just talking or doing an interview i've got a big old list all these people all these people are out on tour so these are not stand-ups Okay, these are not plays.

There's not anything like that.

This is a whole new industry.

We talk a bit about podcasts doing live shows, but this is people just going out there and doing interviews, often to promote a book or whatever it is.

But theatres up and down the country, selling out 1,1500, 2,000-seater venues.

Michael Portillo, Stuart Broad, Harry Rednat, Davina McCall, Sandy Toxvig, Tony Robinson, Jonathan Agnew, Richard Coles, Rory Bremner, Dawn French, Harry Enfield, Jacinda Ardern, fair enough.

Gareth Southgate, Mary Beard, Nigela Lawson, Miriam Margulies, Nigel Planer, Freddie Flintoff, Mark Ronson, Francis Rossi, Grayson Perry doing 22 Nights.

So everywhere you have.

Harry Katona and Jordan are doing one as well.

They're doing a a double.

That's what you're doing.

I've been following that.

All of these places up and down the country, and this is a fairly new industry.

There's always been the odd thing, like question of sport would go out on tour, or you'd have the odd interview thing.

But this is the industrialized version of that, people going on these big tours.

And they are incredibly popular.

They sell out wherever they go.

The fascinating thing about them is there's a really interesting, this is a complete sidebar.

And I don't have an answer to this.

I just mention it.

That you talk to, if a stand-up plays a 2,000-seater venue, a stand-up knows exactly what you get paid.

They know those numbers.

If you are an author or a television academic or something like that, you have always done events, but you've done them at literary festivals or you've done them to launch books and you don't get paid anything.

I was talking to a stand-up player.

You're like a child with no frame of reference.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, because you do an event because you want to talk to readers or, you know, and it's nice.

It's symbiotic.

You'll get an independent

bookshop out the front selling books.

And so, you know, everyone's a winner.

But I was talking to a stand-up the other day.

He was was at a theater, talking to someone, someone, you know, like a TV person, and the TV person said, No, it's it's it's it's amazing because they've they've given me X pounds to do this, it's great because normally I would do it for free.

And the stand-up said the number that they said was a tenth of what they should be getting paid for selling out that theater.

Okay, literally a tenth.

And because they're used to not being paid at all, so they don't understand.

Well, publishing doesn't run this, does it?

Because other people have inserted themselves into that particular

I suppose promoter role or

organizer yeah and

yeah I mean

I can't do a full sidebar on the way publishing has been run over decades but it's interesting that they have allowed that to happen and they've allowed it to happen to their authors when

as you say the book buying streams are not drying up but they're certainly depleting.

There's a weird wild west out there.

Because I don't think theatre is...

Because I always say somebody is making fun of money.

And if it isn't talent, as it were.

But I always say to you, then that's intriguing.

Recommendations?

This is obvious, but I loved one battle after another.

Oh, did you?

Yeah,

which is 100% a film to see in cinemas.

The sound was so important, but also the way it's shot in Vistavision.

It's so beautiful.

It's about lots.

It's very funny.

It's about lots of big ideas.

But it is also about a sort of big film about things that are happening now in America.

And it's obviously only become more current since Paul Thomas Anderson, the director, came up with it.

It's quite unusual in some ways to see films that are about things that are happening now in some ways.

Isn't it?

I finally managed to see Spinal Tap 2, which seems to be on a very, very small amount of cinemas.

And I will just say this over the closing credits is, I think, might be my favourite joke in cinema history.

There's just a one-liner from Davis and Hubbins, which

we were both sitting there and just

absolutely go forward.

Just an amazingly stupid joke.

So I recommend that.

But also just because we mustn't forget things just because they're old.

There's a new series of grand designs and it remains absolutely peerless television.

And Kevin McLeod remains an absolutely peerless presenter.

And that production team are peerless in what they do as well.

So Grand Designs.

is back and strongly recommended.

Don't forget, we got that Celebrity Traitors bonus episode coming up directly after the first episode on Wednesday.

We will be chatting about our reactions to that episode.

QA episode on Thursday as well.

So we'll see everyone either on Wednesday or Thursday.

Wednesday or Thursday.

Bye-bye.

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