Is Social Media Dead?

This episode is brought to you by our good friends at Sky.

Now, whether it's Scorsese and De Niro, Brits and a Q, or Glenn Powell and a slow-motion entrance into frame, some things are just better together.

And Sky and Netflix do just that.

Two heavyweight storytellers side by side on the Sky Essential TV package for just £15 a month, all in one place and on one bill.

Call it the full ensemble.

Sky Originals bringing gangs of London and the Day of the Jackal.

Netflix delivering global obsessions like Squid Game and Wednesday.

Add Sky Atlantic, Discovery Plus, and more than 90 other channels to that list, and you've got the kind of lineup that bends the week around it, turning ordinary evenings into events.

Sky and Netflix together for £15 a month.

Premium shows, endless choice, and a lineup that feels complete, all in one place.

Visit Sky.com to start, requires relevant Sky TV and third-party subscriptions.

Sky Essential TV includes a selection of Sky channels, 18 Plus, UK Channel Islands, and Isle of Man only.

This podcast is brought to you by Carvana.

Carvana makes car selling fast and easy from start to finish.

Enter your license plate or VIN and get a real offer in seconds, down to the penny.

If you accept, Carvana will come pick up your car from your driveway, or you can drop it off at one of our car vending machines.

Either way, you get paid instantly.

It's fast, transparent, and 100% online.

Car selling that saves your time.

That's Carvana.

Carvana.

Pickup fees may apply.

Fall's finally here, and Nordstrom is your go-to for the best of fall fashion and the hottest trends of the season.

Discover new arrivals from brands you love, like Reformation, Free People, Mango, Addicted, Princess Polly, Madewell, and more.

Perfect for refreshing your closet without overthinking your budget.

And with free shipping, free returns, and easy in-store pickup, shopping's never been easier.

So go ahead, shop in stores on Nordstrom.com or download the Nordstrom app today.

Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Resters Entertainment with me, Marina High.

And me, Richard Osman.

Hello, Marina.

Hello, Richard.

How are you?

I'm okay.

I just got back from a country you might have heard of called the United States of America, where I did a lovely book tour.

And I met lots and lots of people out there.

So hello to all of you who listened to the podcast.

A man in St.

Louis said, please say to Marina that she's right about everything.

I said, my friend, she already knows.

I would have liked to have come along on your tour.

Some of the places sounded absolutely wonderful, fascinating.

It was great.

Honestly, I loved it.

I loved going out and doing book talks over there.

Yeah, so it was really, really lovely.

But I'm amazed at how many people listen to the podcast as well, which is great.

You just think, I mean, I mean, we talk about Last of the Summer Wine.

Is that interesting to you?

I guess.

I mean, a lot of the Sioux Pollard talk must go over their head, surely.

Well, during the really mad Brexit years when I was writing, you know, and it was the sort of really intricate machinations and dysfunction of our politics.

I used to get emails every single week from people in America who'd say I don't know who any of these people are I just enjoy the story

what are we talking about this week right we're talking there have been many many

you might have seen lots of stuff recently sort of either declaring the death of social media or hedging the bet and asking is it dead so we're going to talk about that where it's going what's happened to it from where it just started out as a way to connect with your friends yes and it's become something very very different i came home on saturday evening and watched a bit of saturday night tv and there are a number of shows on Saturday Night TV this week that I thought were told an interesting story about where we are in mass entertainment.

There's a couple of particular shows I want to talk about.

So I'm dying for that.

An audit of Saturday Night Television.

I'm dying for that.

I have various questions to ask you.

And we're also going to talk about diss tracks.

Taylor Swift dropped a diss track, widely believed to be about Charlie XEX in The Life of a Showgirl.

And also, the Drake's case against Kendrick Lamar for sort of defamation has been thrown out.

Do you remember they had their mad week and

lasted longer of kind of retaliatory diss tracks?

Drake has been mopped up as a pool of water on the floor.

I'm also going to tell my favourite ever diss track story during that section.

They're a lot older than you think.

They are a lot older than you think and some of them very funny.

Shall we talk about social media?

Now when we talk about social media I think what we're talking about is this idea of in the same way that when people say reality TV, they mean a certain thing which is what reality TV was when they first heard of it and social media I think Twitter is Facebook it's that thing where we collect a group of friends we then start collecting a group of strangers we have interactions we can all talk about strictly together a community of people a community of people that we choose to follow that we curate and a world that kind of brings people together.

What we're really asking is is that dead?

Is the thing that social media was dead?

That's not what we think of anymore of social media.

I think we that it starts as

friend feeds, then it became sort of famous feeds.

Yeah.

Then it became the council wars and then it's AI sludge.

So Meta this week, which is Facebook, Instagram and all of that,

there's a finding in American court.

There's various kind of legal things.

But in the submissions of Meta, Meta have argued that they do not have a social media monopoly because, and this is Meta, this is Facebook, because they are not a social media company.

That is not what they are.

And they give all sorts of evidence in this filings.

This is not the stuff they say publicly.

This is the stuff that's in the legal filings.

17% of Facebook interactions are people consuming content from friends.

17%.

So 83%

is consuming content from unconnected people that we have not asked to follow.

On Instagram, it is 7%.

We knew a few years ago that Meta essentially changing every single one of their algorithms, Twitter changing every single one of their algorithms to try and be TikTok, to try and essentially just be a place where you are engagement farmed.

It was a sort of a dream, you know.

Lots of people who got work through it, lots of people who met people through it.

My first ever interaction with Ingrid was on Twitter.

You know, all of these stories that are coming about.

Like Wallace got two wives of it?

Exactly.

He got two wives.

He got more.

One asked a question about asparagus and one about rhubarb.

Is that right?

Yes.

Wow.

that's amazing.

Main course and dessert.

Yeah.

We're trying to hark back to that time still I think and trying to recreate it.

So it could be threads, could it be blue sky?

This idea that this utopia has been taken from us by the money men, I would say this, which is the money men were funding the whole thing in the first place and allowing us to do all of these things and eventually they had to cash in.

Can I start with a stat of my own because not of my own but because I think it's quite useful and we're doing it in descending order because you might as well the most popular as right where we are now yeah still the most popular social network is Facebook then YouTube then Instagram WhatsApp is now the same size as Insta yeah TikTok then we've got WeChat, Telegram, Facebook Messenger and Snapchat.

Snapchat's still growing.

I don't need to tell you that TikTok's growing.

LinkedIn, it's obviously so much smaller, but it is growing and it seems to have grown in significance because of the die-off of what people enjoyed about the other, lots of the other networks.

So yeah, again, it has a curation rather than an algorithm, which

essentially sort of sends you videos of people who work in other businesses.

64% of the world's population now uses social media.

And the new platforms that are...

Certainly sounds dead.

Yeah.

So Sora 2 is

the latest version of OpenAI's visual version of something like Chat GPT, where you can type in a prompt and it can create a video.

It's unbelievable.

It's unbelievable.

By the way, Sora 1 came out 10 months ago.

I mean, there's anything you can possibly think of.

I saw, you know, of course, immediately it's degraded into like someone who's got actual female Olympians in the Olympic stadiums somewhere competing to bring men beers, washing up.

It's like, oh, okay.

I know.

It's like

that joke again.

Oh, yeah, that joke.

In a new era, okay.

Yeah.

So Sora 2 is a social network.

It's a form of social media and it's a sharing site.

This is what OpenAI really want to be.

They want to be your sort of default homepage in a way that Facebook was for a period.

You know, you can already buy things within it.

You can already do, there's all sorts of things.

As with all of these social networks, their ultimate goal is that you never have to leave the platform.

Subscribe to the FT.

John Byrne Murdoch is always brilliant with data and he did a good one saying that showing how sort of 2022 was kind of the peak of what you're talking about of that type of social media.

And then, funny enough, young people cut down first on on the time they spent on the platforms, become less social, I guess.

It's much more mindless, time-filling, really.

Well, he includes, and John Burmurdock, as you say, is always

worth following.

He always takes interesting angles on things.

But he shares a chart that I think takes social media from 2014 to 2024.

And roughly when we start 2014, he identifies five areas that we use social media for.

To meet new people, to keep up with friends, these are the things we're talking about.

To share my opinion, to follow celebrities, and to fill spare time.

Those are the kind of five things.

In 2014, they are in similar places, those five things.

Three of them have collapsed almost entirely.

To share my opinion has collapsed almost entirely.

To meet new people has collapsed.

completely, which I guess because, you know, we recognise that we can't do it.

And to keep up with friends has absolutely collapsed.

Two things have gone up.

To follow celebrities has gone up enormously.

And, and this is the key thing, to fill spare time has gone up enormously and this thing social media which actually was when it started an attempt to broaden the world an attempt to connect attempt to make our world slightly bigger has genuinely become a vehicle to fill time I never believe I look at that you look at Zuckerberg I mean I like who is it is it Jimmy Kimmel who said he looks now dresses like a Chechen molly dealer which I love uh but back when he didn't and he was in the pool slides or whatever okay that guy I know our intake.

Yeah.

They all knew.

We didn't know.

And also, we failed to understand other things.

We failed to understand, in lots of ways, people failed to understand, but we spent a very long time saying with Musk that buying Twitter was, oh, like, oh, look, he's halving the value.

It doesn't really matter.

By the way, if you're that, Rachel, it doesn't really matter.

44 billion isn't very much.

It was a political project, which got him what he wanted.

I would say the jury's out on the medium term of that project for him and whether it got him what it wanted, but it may turn out down the line that it has been the greatest 44 billion yes bad.

And listen, he's still the second richest man in the world, so he hasn't gone completely mad.

So I think it's one of those things where we have to forget it even existed.

And we just go internet forums.

When you start usernet forums and things like that, people will always tell you, oh, this always happens in online communities.

The same process of kind of social degradation, internecine, civil war, et cetera, happens.

And it always happened.

And it happened when I was on a tiny, not me, a notional I was on a tiny group about, you know, ZX spectrums, restoring them right back in the early days of the internet or something like that.

They were talking, you know, they'd say, and actually it was brilliant.

And I had this amazing community.

And then it degraded completely.

Oh, but what?

And this is the journey.

Except if you were on 4chan a long time ago, and then you think, and it ended up with, we now control the whole free world.

Yeah.

So sometimes it works.

Yeah.

Yeah.

To me, it almost occupies the same psychological space as a commute.

It's a sort of thing you have to do each day.

It's annoying.

It might involve diversions and delays.

Do you have to do it?

You're constantly asking yourself, do you have to do it?

Is there another world?

I really do think we have moved into this stage where literally everyone knows it's harmful.

And just because they can't, just because they're not logging off, doesn't mean that they don't know that they should.

And it's like other forms of harmful and addictive behavior in all of our lives.

I think people are getting down on themselves for not being able to.

quit it because they really understand it isn't what it was but there's still that little kernel that they can just chase every now and again and i think you're right i think with these things literally been made to be addictive it's been made for dopamine we know all of this stuff so if you are still in that position of just going oh my god i'm wasting all this time on my phone just let it die off just slowly let it die in that time it has massively changed in such a short space of time in two decades it's changed absolutely embedded things about our society our culture and human the human psyche in lots of ways i really remember honestly it would have now been about i i never have been on i've never been on facebook or instagram And the reason I wasn't, and I realize I'm old, the reason I wasn't was because I thought I would not like to put things about my life online.

And I felt I was very private and I didn't like the idea of it.

And I remember reading all these things about what young people valued most.

And you could just see year on year, privacy just trending so quick.

I mean, dropping like a stone out of the top 10.

They didn't value privacy and staying connected was like rocketing up in the other direction, whatever that means.

And actually, I don't think anybody now would say, even, you know, really would say,

oh, people have realised, but belatedly, the idea of mystery and privacy and things like that have come back.

And people are much more interested in being in

semi-closed chats, at semi-closed kind of groups where they feel, and they also have seen, we've lived with the real world consequences about this.

People have not got jobs because of something they said online or lost jobs because they something they said online they can see how harmful it's been to their children they have lived with you know they have been the testing for that they're the long studies we've lived the long studies we sort of said it at the time but you know in 30 40 50 100 years time when the historians look on this era it will be a blip but it's amazing it takes a good 10 15 years for us all to go oh okay this was this this wasn't anything and now now we can see it for what it is which is an advertisement never went on a lot of the most creative and hugely successful creative people who people would get who I know have never been on it and they must be feeling smug now well yeah some of them have you know like Instagrams that are run by their record label or whatever it may be but in general people thought oh I don't like that and I'm really surprised by how many people thought oh I realized very early on before they even became properly involved thought oh this is a huge time suck and you think you're being productive but you're not every time I would hear people like Elon Musk interviewed on the radio or on TV or whatever, you'd hear them.

And they were always treated as these kind of slight wizard-like figures, not in the same way that you treat a politician, which

I mean, the degree to which they are more powerful than politicians can't really even be overstated.

Zuckerberg, the same thing happened with him.

And they're kind of treated as odd, slightly eccentric geniuses.

And it's really interesting to hear what they might have to say about the world.

By the way, I mean, you know, these people have zero cultural hinterland, zero zero cultural hinterland, and they have nothing to say.

I like that side of it.

I found it in your column about Sam Altman.

I liked how you described his favorite books.

I mean, his favourite, okay, that is the business philosophy section of the airport bookstore.

No one said to him, he keeps releasing his reading list.

It's like, you know, I've also heard of Thinking Fast and So, just go into a bookshop and look at it.

It's on the table.

I mean, come on.

What's your favourite Jane Austen, Sam?

They don't have this kind of a world.

And again, started off people saying, oh, he's the real genius.

And look, you know, oh dear, he's been ousted by the board.

Now they're going to let him back.

Oh, I mean, you know, he wants to make this technology available for everyone.

It's like, oh, now he doesn't.

Now he wants to be a trillion.

Now he does a trillion dollar deal every week.

Unless you say now he wants open AI to be a network.

Now he wants everyone sort of.

Well they want them to be the front page of the internet.

Sora is

will grow and grow as a social media.

I mean Sora too,

this is a sidebar, but this is literally insane what what it can do.

Look at it in the States.

I mean, it is unbelievable.

You can't see it here.

It's the stuff that you can fake now.

And Hollywood has finally gone, oh, no, hold on, this seems a bit much.

You go, oh, yeah, sorry, did we?

Because we kept saying that they're going to be able to recreate everything in real time and like incredible quality.

Hollywood has finally sort of put their foot down and said, this doesn't feel appropriate.

We're watching endless videos of, you know, Robert De Niro in a film that he wasn't in.

All the stuff that we said was going to happen is almost like the kind of the Uber app.

I don't mean the Uber app as in an app for the car, Uber.

I mean Uber as in above all app that transcends everything.

It's the final end game, which is just an endless supply of slop created by machines and pumped into your phone, which is a machine, by another machine, which is the AI algorithm.

But yeah, because the shock of the new has completely worn off.

The novelty has gone years and years and years ago on social media.

But it's interesting that the growth thing, some of the growth stuff, a market for the brain rot, the AI brain rot,

because for years, the one thing that Twitter and all these things had to rely on was people actually using their thing and creating stuff and creating their own content.

for them.

For many, many years, the content on Twitter and Facebook was user-generated and you relied on a small amount of users who pumped out a lot of content that people enjoyed.

Now you're even cutting them out of the equation because the machine itself can just pump out endless content.

It's so jaded and awful.

It's like, oh, I want to see like Wednesday Adams as a trad wife or something like that.

And it's just because you can't.

I remember when I was younger, I knew this guy and he, like, he always used to take acid at Alton Tower's.

And it's like, I mean, like,

Alton Tower should be good enough, right, without doing acid.

On top of it, I'm not saying, you know, well, I, okay, kids, I am saying don't do acid.

Oh, my God.

I don't even know what I'm saying.

I'm not saying

kids, don't do acid at Alton Tower.

God forbid I would say that.

I'm just saying Alton Towns should be good enough without doing acid, but now people are so sort of jaded.

And you know, like, it's that like, it's like some sort of sexual perversion that becomes so baroque and disgusting in the end.

Like, if you're a Hollywood studio megalit, you can have anything.

In the end, the things you're asking for are just beyond the realms.

And this isn't, people can't even, you know, it's like, oh, Wednesday's not good enough for me.

I need to watch Wednesday in some kind of really kind of horrible Franken AI video.

I find it very, I do think that people's brains are the next thing to become slop I mean or in fact they already have become slopes and it's degraded IQ it is degraded literacy it's degraded everything

so where do we go is the question what happens

so well I mean that's the question isn't it so the people who wanted to make money out of it have made money out of it and continue to make money out of it and a huge amount of it there's two worries on this social media as it is now is what is it doing to me

and what is it doing to people?

Okay, what is it doing to our society?

And there's only one of those things we can do anything about.

I think social media has given us a sight illusion of power that actually maybe I could just say the one thing that would turn everything around.

Well, the government could regulate all sorts of

I mean Trump is not going to regulate any of this stuff, but also leaving it up to schools to have to try and deal with these things is very, very difficult.

You know, if you look at a school in the US and what's increasingly being people are constantly suggesting, you know, the teachers should effectively usher in AI regulation, social media regulation.

They should also be marksmen and snipers because in case someone tries to shoot them out, we should arm teachers.

It's like, my God, I mean, it seemed to me like teacher's got quite a big job on its own.

Can I read you something?

There's an amazing substack talking about this idea of, you know, the post-literate society and how we've all got dummy.

And it's from a professor just talking about some students he's dealing with, a guy called Paul Musgrave, and that the substack is called Systematic Hatreds.

And the whole thing is brilliant, but I'll just read you this one bit from it.

He says, I will add one more observation that is pertinent, but not directly linked to this line of argumentation.

When people say that it is the job of college professors to keep students engaged, but that we can also not ban devices.

I want to say performatively, how exactly am I supposed to keep them hooked when Hollywood can't keep them hooked?

Even on my very best days, which are very good, I'm just not able to supply the methadone equivalent to salve nervous systems addicted to endless novelty and engagement.

And denying that we're facing a planetary crisis of concentration while expecting us to soldier on stoically is not helping.

I love him.

Yeah.

Okay, great.

Yeah, I mean,

the one thing that people are aware of, but the enemy has become so powerful.

People like Mark Zuckerberg have become so powerful.

Another thing that actually was in, maybe it will, I assume it's the same court filing, was people, was that they said, we can't really even select, the Meta's, Meta's counsel said, we can't really even select a jury because you see, we can't find anyone hardly in America who doesn't hate Mark Zuckerberg.

In fact, what he did, he sought in court, Metter's own lawyer, again, it's their own lawyer saying these things, cited a Pew Research study that said 67% of Americans have an unfavorable view of Mark Zuckerberg.

I mean, you know, I know he still thinks he's connecting people.

And in many ways, he is.

He's connected 67% of America, which couldn't agree on anything, to agree on that.

That's ahead of a WhatsApp group.

Yeah.

67% of America, because we hate Mark.

Yeah.

The guy who invented, who makes you feel like he invented friendship and connection, clearly has absolutely none.

That's why you had to pay them all at the start.

There's a really good book called The Boy Kings about, sorry, with a digression, about the early years of Facebook.

It's written by this girl called Catherine Loss.

And she's like employee 43 at Facebook.

And he really quickly buys a beach house or rents a beach house where everyone has to go at the weekend.

And everyone just has to stay there.

And everyone has to add themselves to each other's feet.

And

you never leave.

It reminds me of

that line in Goodfellows where Karen says, I mean, there were never any outsiders ever.

And after a while, it got to feel normal.

They never want you to leave any of those people at Significant Valley.

They never want people to leave the office because it's the first time they've had friends.

The thing I will say is you do have friendships.

There are ways of doing those without giving money to people.

You are addicted to scrolling on your phone, but that can be dealt with.

Don't be hard on yourself.

And

you have the power.

to go out into communities and to make real life friendships and things like that.

It's the only power you have is control over yourself and control over the way that you consume the media.

Everyone else, we have to just hope that they make the same decision that we do.

But I do think it's worth noting that this thing, this era where we had social media and it meant a certain thing, and we know the thing that it meant, which is connection with strangers, is strange opportunities, being entertained by strangers, sharing strictly with people.

That, I think, is dead.

Yeah.

I mean, there's another theory that the entire internet is dying and that all of it, the dead internet theory, and that it's smart devices talking to the network, huge amounts of information.

A few years ago, it was like 60% with smart devices.

So there'll be a podcast in 20 years' time, two devices talking to each other.

20 years.

I used to love it when it was just

to love it when it was just fridges talking to soda streams.

And now it's like, this is all AI, isn't it?

It's a shame.

The Alistair and Rory of devices.

And as AI Rory and AI Alistair would say, shall we go to some adverts?

Yes, we're going to be talking about Saturday night TV after this, which I'm dying for.

This episode is brought to you by Sky, where you can watch our missible shows, including the brand new original thriller, The Iris Affair.

The Iris Affair is a sun-drenched chase thriller from Neil Cross, who is the creator of Luther.

I love Luther, a deadly pursuit across Italy.

I love Italy, with fewer postcards and piazzas, and more shadows than sunshine.

At the heart is Iris Nixon, equal parts puzzle addict, charming genius, and serial imposter, stealing code tied to quantum technology that could tilt the balance of power.

I love puzzles.

I love charming geniuses as well.

On her tail is Cameron, wealthy, ruthless, and very well-resourced.

Not the man you want chasing you through Sardinia.

The stakes aren't just personal, they're global.

This isn't sightseeing, it's shadows and apparal firmly off the menu.

Some people collect stamps, others dismantle the fabric of modern life before breakfast.

Everyone needs a hobby.

Starring Niamh Alger from The Virtues, alongside Tom Hollander from The White Lotus and the Night Manager, the Iris Affair is the thriller that wastes no time and shows no mercy.

It's Italy with teeth.

Glamour, genius, and portrayal played out on the coast.

The Aris Affair begins 16th of October on Sky.

So good, so good, so good.

Just then, thousands of winter arrivals at your Nordstrom rack store save up to 70% on coats, slippers, and cashmere from Cates Bay, New York, Vince, Ugg, Levi's, and more.

Check out these boots.

They've got the best gifts.

My holiday shopping hack, join the Nordy Club.

Get an extra 5% off every rack purchase with your Nordstrom credit card.

Plus, buy it online and pick it up in store the same day for for free.

Big gifts, big perks.

That's why you rack.

Hello, Philly.

Did you think our story was over?

It's the crab.

This Friday, you're dead.

Dead is just a word.

Credits are saying Ethan Hornock is pure nightmare fuel.

Discover the secret behind the mask.

What do you think happens when you die?

It's time to find out.

Rack Film 2.

only in theaters Friday.

Read it R.

Under 17, not admit it without parents.

Welcome back, everybody.

Marina, Diss Tracks.

It has been a busy week in diss tracks.

Drake and Kendrick Lamar are both on Universal, the record label, and they had a dueling volley of diss tracks about each other, which grew progressively more unpleasant.

And not like us, which was the sort of sit-down one.

Listen, it felt like a sort of fair fight at the beginning, Drake versus Kendrick.

But yeah, Not Like Us was just probably the greatest blow ever landed by one human being on another human being, the biggest track in the world.

Well, if you can say those things, so let me okay.

So, yeah, it's the biggest track in the world.

Drake's position is that he was defamed by this track.

Now, bear in mind it contains underage sex accusations, suggested people should turn

vigilante to get justice against Drake, put an aerial of his house

on the artwork.

I have to say, if he had sued in our courts, he would have had a much more pleasant time.

A judge in the US has thrown it out

and Universal have said, you know, bear in mind, they are both on the same label.

This should never have been brought because it hampers kind of creative freedom.

I must say that maybe he would not have wished to sue in our courts because, you know, it can open a can of worms.

Let me just say that, Richard.

And so he might not have wanted to go through the whole court case, Drake.

Let me just move on to Charlie Xyx, because as we know, in Life of a Showgirl, Taylor Swift has put a diss track on that for Definite, which most people think is about Charlie XEX, although she's tried to sort of slightly fudge it, Taylor Swift.

I have to say, I went and saw the official release party, official launch party of a showgirl in cinemas.

The stuff when she's singing that song, because it's obviously not a proper video and it's really her just looking into the camera.

That question that we asked the week before, you know, is she punching down?

I think it's impossible for it not to be reviewed.

She's punching down that.

It's really like, okay, I think it was a little bit much.

Yes, and it's fascinating because

it comes from Charlie XCX did a song on her, on the Brat album, which Taylor took to be about her.

In fact, there's two tracks on that album, both of which seem to take aim at somebody.

One is about Taylor and one is about Lorde.

Both of them are sort of more sort of Charlie XCX already.

To turn in on herself.

And so two ways to react to that.

There's what Taylor has done, which is she's

reacted in kind and done this song.

What Lorde did, the thing about um the the the lorde song the charlie xcx album is is about female friendship and about feeling uncomfortable around people and lorde literally heard that song rang her said

i had no idea you felt like this said but thank you for saying it she then immediately recorded her own verse for that song they did a collaborative song which is incredibly like lyrically fascinating and about female friendship and stuff like that and created this new piece of art and a firm friends which is the way to react to that.

Now Taylor, who, as we've said before, rarely puts her foot wrong, seems to have gone the opposite way, which is despite being the most powerful, I would say, musical megastar on the planet, has decided to respond in kind, which

possibly she shouldn't have done.

And that's all I have to say about that.

It's not cool, is it?

It's not been cool.

But she does, yeah, she rarely puts her foot wrong.

So she will have her reasons, that's for sure.

But when you look at what Lorde did, you think, oh, that's interesting.

There are different ways of dealing with it.

The term diss track was first coined as a term in hip-hop in like the 80s.

They were called answer songs and right back in the 30s there are answer records, response songs.

Jimmy Rogers and Louis Armstrong had a sort of duel.

There was You Ain't Talking to Me and You Rascal You.

Paul Williams, a Hucklebuck, so many people did answer songs to that and said you've stolen that you've stolen his riffs.

I mean all of these things that seem very modern were not.

Hank Thompson, country singer in the 40s, did one called The Wild Side of Life in which he sort of blamed women for leading men astray.

And Kitty Wells recorded a kind of response track to that.

It wasn't God who made honky-tonk angels, saying, calling out sort of misogyny in country, all of this sort of thing.

Lots of people answered Elvis songs, did answer songs to Elvis tracks.

Actually, you know, and sometimes people would even be sued, which suggests to you that there was always money in this type of beef, which we also didn't call it back then.

That literally just meant meat.

And then, so 60s, there were songs, you know, Dylan positively 4th Street, Bob Dylan.

That is, I mean, that really goes for a friend or a critic, we don't know.

Uh, The Birds did that, um, So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star, which is all about people like the monkeys, that kind of the trend for manufactured groups at the time.

Leonard Skinner's Sweet Home, Alabama, is a direct response to Neil Young's Alabama.

Yeah, I mean, the world of music is quite small, and people are constantly listening to their contemporaries.

And if their contemporary does something, they're like, and everyone's always listening, you know, thinking of an idea for a song, and everyone's always resentful of every other act who are around at any given time selling any records at all.

So it's it's a febrile atmosphere.

Yes.

And I mean the biggest one, the 70s, John Lennon, how do you sleep about Paul McCarthy?

But there were lots of sort of funk and soul answer songs.

People, it is a way of kind of getting the creative juice flowing.

It's like you've been given a no.

It's like, okay, I'm going to kick back at the critics.

It's like an old version of having a podcast.

Yeah.

Hip-hop rap take it to a whole new level.

I mean, we've talked about this actually when we were talking about rap beef in the past, but the whole Roxanne wars amazing.

The real Roxanne and Roxanne Shantae.

Yeah.

I mean, there are about a hundred songs, tracks,

just going back and forth.

And in the end, there was a definitive track of people just saying, okay, that's it.

No one's going to talk about this anymore.

We've got to put an end to it, we've got to bury this.

And also, and by the way, almost all hip-hop battles, 90% of them are just very funny and done incredibly tongue-in-cheek.

And 10% of them end in gunfire.

And it's difficult right at the beginning to work out which is going to be which.

But they sold huge amounts of records.

I read one stat that said like almost the second

track in The Roxanne Wars, so really early on in that, sold 250,000 copies in the New York area alone.

That's amazing.

But then there were also things in the 80s like Carly Simon, You're So Vain.

I mean, that's a Warren Beatty diss track.

I think she says it's different verses are about different versions.

It's about Warren Beatty or September.

Well, because the second verse is literally talking about someone in an apricot scarf with it with his like a hat just tipped beneath his eye you think well I mean that you are literally describing Warren Beatty it does become much more commercialized but it has returned to pop so now you know Taylor's done them obviously Memi Olivia Rodrigo Miley Saras lots of people it's big in k-pop but it tends to be I was talking to someone who's much more of an expert in k-pop music than me saying it feels like it's absolutely right for it and it's a bit more nervous there's not they tend not to do like whole diss tracks but there are lines in songs so it's much more that kind of Easter egg-ish, like we've talked about a lot before, the kind of detective stuff.

The tater stuff, yeah.

But some, you know, some of those are like a whole song about a thing, whereas there's little lines that are like, oh, hang on, that's an oblique aside to whatever.

Oh, if you kind of cross-reference it to this, you know, the whole detective work.

Hold on, are you referring to stray kids?

Yeah, the detective work of the modern fandom.

Yeah, is it rewards that?

It's true that statistically there are many more now, even accounting for those kind of hip-hop things than there were before.

And I like this, there's there's certain people who've been the subject of very much more than one diss track, which I always think is quite interesting.

Axel Rose has been the subject of a number of diss tracks.

Nikki Six from Motley Cruise

has

been the subject of a number as well.

The Clash have The Clash did a diss track, sort of did a diss trace.

Nikki Six has been the subject of a number of

Clash did one about the Jam, the Jam did one about the Clash, the Mecons did one about the Clash as well.

The

person who I can find the most diss tracks about

in history,

I'm going to give you the names of some songs, and they are all about the same person so Violet Bruce by Babes in Toyland Too Cool Queenie by Stone Temple Pilots Stacked Actors by Foo Fighters I'll Stick Around by Foo Fighters Star Fuckers Inc by Nine Inch Nails and Hollowback Girl by Gwen Stefani are all about the same person.

Who?

Courtney Love.

Every single one of those songs

is about Courtney Love and Hollowback Girl being the very much the biggest of all of those.

Courtney Love once said that Gwen Stefani was like a cheerleader and that she was one of the cool kids you know, behind the bike sheds.

And Gwen Stefani then go, right, I'm going to write a song.

I've never been a cheerleader, so I'm going to write a song as if I am a cheerleader and it's going to be about you and I'm going to make a billion dollars out of it, which is exactly what she did.

So that's a lot of songs

about the same person.

Now, Nine Inch Nails

there as well.

My favourite ever diss track story is Trent Resno from Nine Inch Nails.

did a sort of diss track about Limp Biscuit, Fred Durst and Limp Biscuit.

And Trent Resno is a great deal cooler than Fred Durst.

I mean, they both sold a lot of records, you know, both very, very successful.

But he wrote this thing, and Fred Durst thinks, right, I'm going to reply in kind.

So he does a diss track about Trent Reznor at Nine Inch Nails called Hot Dog.

And

like you were talking about K-pop there, in order to really make people understand that this song is about...

Trent Reznor and how much disrespect he has for Trent, he includes lots of names of Nine Inch Nails songs, lyrics from Closer, all sorts of things, just so you're under absolutely no illusions that Fred Durst is really getting one over.

So on the album Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavoured Water, the song Hot Dog, which is all about Trent Reznor,

but it includes so many lyrics and song titles from Nine Inch Nails that he is then forced to make Trent Reznor a co-writer on that song.

And that album became, I mean, the biggest selling new metal album of all time.

I mean, multi-multi, multi-multi-million seller back at a time when writing a song on a multi, multi, multi-million seller made you an awful lot of money.

So Trent made a huge amount of money from Fred Durst's diss track.

It has obviously been hugely helped by something we talked about a little further up in the episode, by social media, because they're kind of designed to go viral.

Yeah.

And they want people to kind of share and take sides and be team this and team that.

There is obviously no barrier to release now.

In the old days, you were actually going to have to go and record this and put it on a record and put it out.

You know, as I often have to to remind myself, if only you'd counted 10, if you're just having a frenzied to and fro over the weekend and just laying down a track and putting it out.

Which starts, by the way, with the sort of rock sound wars and all that, the hip-hop in the early 80s where they could just go and record stuff very, very quickly, stick it out on a cassette and

then distribute it that way.

But there's even less barriers.

You don't have to get clearance from the label.

You don't have to have anything.

Everyone has a direct link to fans via some form of social media.

There is no barrier to distribution and you can get it out there incredibly quickly.

And it's that that sort of, you know, that meme about someone being wrong on the internet.

And

that's what really happened over that weekend.

I was thinking, oh my god, I mean, if only if only you weren't so incredibly rich, both of you would actually have some stuff to do.

You'd just have to do the big shop.

You'd have to do, and you'd just have a chance to get out there in the world.

But because they didn't, because Drake didn't have to do the big shop, eventually he goaded Kendrick into

one of the greatest tracks and one of the most successful tracks

of all time.

Because of that, they don't have the cultural purchase and hooks that they used to have, these tracks.

In the same way that people became media literate and they started being able to spot staged paparazzi shots, which for a long time they couldn't at all.

But people then very quickly thought, oh, I can see that.

They've set that up, blah, blah.

Now people just think, this is so commercialized.

You're kind of milking us.

There's a sense that it really does grind people's gears now.

And I don't think when anyone saw that Taylor Swift thing, they were thinking, oh, great, you know, more conflict.

I can't wait.

You know, just thinking slightly like, yeah, do you have to?

Can you not ring her up?

As we've always talked about, any way that you can get people to talk about your stuff where you don't have to take out any form of advert is what you need to survive in modern entertainment media.

And Taylor's album is the biggest selling first week of her entire career.

So, you know.

Right.

Now, can we please talk about Saturday night television?

Yes.

I returned from America in time for Saturday Night TV.

And of course, in America, they don't have a history of it, a tradition of it at all.

And so I'm sat there slightly jet-lagged and watching it and there are a number of shows on Saturday which all of which I take a slightly different thing from I want to talk about

strictly I want to talk about the 1% club I want to talk about a show called win-win and I want to talk about a show called the inner circle all of which were on Saturday night television and all of which tell us a story about what Saturday night television used to be and what it might become.

I've forced you to watch all of these as well.

Which what are you beginning with?

So Saturday night TV is traditionally that thing again.

We have it in the UK.

we don't really have it in many other countries.

Europe they don't really have it, America they certainly don't have it.

But for us, it's when the family get together, all watch something together.

You know, you get a takeaway or something, everyone sits around, you've got something that kids can watch, parents can watch, grandparents can watch.

That's traditionally what Saturday Night TV has become, and it has fallen away a lot in recent years.

You know, ratings go down and down and down, but we still see the existence of that folk memory, at least, in Strictly.

So, Strictly is getting six and a half, seven and above million viewers.

Live, not on catch.

Live.

And so there is still an appetite there, I think, for Saturday night television.

And Strictly, year after year after year, we have the traditional thing of, oh, God, look at this cast.

I don't know any of them.

And you sit and watch it, and you think this is absolute perfect family viewing.

I mean, it's on for a long time.

Yes.

It was,

I think this one's almost two and a half hours.

Yeah.

I think largely because Cynthia Arrivo was there as as well, so they had to have her opinion on

every single thing.

It shows that there is still a heartland out there, and there's still an appetite for that sort of appointment to view.

As you know,

that switch comments on newspaper websites, and I always notice that whenever the Times writes, quite often we'll write a negative story about Strictly, but the commenters beneath, the Times commenters always are like, nobody watches this anymore.

This should just be rested.

It's so tired.

It's like, do you even know that it is by

the most popular show on British television and that people really like it?

It's so odd.

Well, there's that dissonance.

There is a group of people who have been told now that nobody is woke.

And so anything that seems like it has a kindness to it,

it literally doesn't compute in any way that it could still be popular.

Because if your feed has been telling you time and time and time again that this turns people off and no one's interested in this, no one's interested in inclusion, no one's interested in,

and suddenly this happens, it's like, well, one of two things can have happened here.

One, everything I've been looking at for the last five years is a lie, or this is a lie.

So I'm guessing this must be, no one's really watching it.

And it's enormous.

People hate this.

No one watches it.

Really, it's the most popular show on British television.

Thanks.

I don't know any of these people.

I mean, they don't know you.

You know, it's okay.

I think I saw some of the comments, which I love, for celebrity traders.

I think I recognised two of these people.

Okay, well, I'm really sorry.

I mean, that's bad.

So Strictly is huge.

Shows there's an audience there that will sit around a television set on a Saturday night in the same way that Eurovision is so huge in the UK because we put it on Saturday night and Saturday night TV is a big deal for us.

The big question is can you grow Saturday night?

Can you put other stuff on Saturday night that you know appeals to the same audience?

Now what you have with Strictly in the same way that ITV have with Britain Scott Talent is you have a thing that we that used to be huge on Saturday night which is you would have like a protective umbrella so you could put something before it which people would watch because you'd always you you know, see the TV on 10 minutes before or your pizza turns up a bit early.

So you're watching the show before,

or after it, you can put something on as well and build an audience

for a new show.

And that seems to be dying a little bit, I would say.

The one show that really has broken out and the shows you can do it, because Strickley is old, is the 1% Club.

And the 1% Club is on ITV, the Lee Mac quiz show.

We've spoken about it before.

Really, really neat format, which is sort of general knowledge, but isn't so everyone can play along, kids can play along, all this stuff.

It's IQ, really, isn't it?

Yeah, and what

the 1% Club is very good at, and we're going to get onto a show called The Inner Circle, which the BBC launched this week.

What the 1%

Club is very good at is it doesn't muck around.

You are very quickly into questions, you're very quickly onto the next question.

And the in-between bit of the questions is not someone explaining rules or someone saying, where are you from?

it is a comedian doing crowd work

with lots and lots and lots of people so there's a hundred contestants we should say and you know we know something about all of them so Lee can talk to four of them and you know you'll pick the best two bits so you're either being asked a question or you're being made to laugh all the way through that show it's massively done there is no spare seconds so the BBC launched a quiz show called the inner circle and there was a second episode um tonight now well can i say that this is quite unusual right because they've all they've launched the daily daily in the week and they've gone straight to a Saturday night celebrity version.

Is that quite it used to take a while for that to happen.

This whole thing comes from a

you what the Americans would call a bake-off.

We would call a tender.

So the BBC two years ago said okay we're gonna launch a tender for a new daytime quiz show and a day and daytime is an amazing place to grow formats for the BBC.

It's where

Repair Shop came from, Pointness, all of these things that you can turn them into primetime.

You can turn them into Prime Time.

Things like Bridge of Lies came out of a previous tender.

So anyway, they've got this two-year tender.

45 companies all tried to create quiz shows.

So this is the thing.

And it's a long, long process.

Lots of companies putting a lot of money into it.

Now, the process I think is a good one, because what the BBC is saying is we want to

really extend the field of people who can pitch us quiz shows because it is it's the usual suspects making quizzes because it's quite a specialized industry.

So they're saying, no, we want to open this field out.

So we want everyone to be on an equal playing field.

And we particularly want to hear from people making shows in the nations and regions, places where

we over the last few years, the BBC have built up really, really big production bases.

And so people who work there and live there can they don't have to move to London.

But it's a big opportunity.

And they are saying, We want something that's going to blow our socks off.

We want something new.

We want something different.

And this show, the inner circle, the people watched it.

What was your take on it in term in in terms of this being the big new thing?

Well, the big new thing, oh, well, I thought that

it was very derivative.

I thought that there were huge gaps in it in terms of things not really happening.

Again, there was a huge amount of explaining of rules and what was happening.

You've said to me before, just like get on with it and people will pick it up.

You know, there's that Reagan quote about politics.

If you're explaining, you're losing.

There's a quiz element of it.

And then it goes to an end game, you know, split or steal, split or shaft, split or steal, share or shaft.

I'm using all the different terminologies because they literally come from other formats.

I didn't like the fact that how much you run in the quiz section of the show, it can all just, the whole thing is completely pointless for this one final decision.

That, to me, is so flawed as an idea that I've got to sit through whatever, however many minutes of something that I know is going to end up being potentially, you know, basically completely pointless because it can all be overturned in the final little bit of the end game.

Yeah, which, by the way, could be a positive.

Could be a positive.

So, yeah, so you've got this end game, which is which is split or steal, which is the old prisoner's dilemma of, let's say, this £5,000 in the bank.

If we both decide to split it, we get £2,500 each.

If I decide to steal and you decide to split, I, as the stealer, get all of the money.

However, if we both decide to steal, no one gets anything.

It's neat.

And it's so neat.

We've used that a number of times.

On Golden Balls, we used it.

The bank job, we used it.

Shafted with Robert Kilroy Silver.

Always say you it's presentable.

Yeah,

we used it as well.

So it is, as you say, a very, very, very traditional end game.

I would say you can't use it if you've spent two years on a process saying, we're going to come up with a new thing.

I think then you cannot.

This is, listen, no one is set out to make a bad show.

No one ever does.

I don't think you, I think that's unacceptable.

I think it's definitely unacceptable to use it on a show where there's very, very little money involved.

It doesn't work.

Golden balls at the bottom.

That was big money.

£100,000.

Unbelievable.

£300,000.

But also, you have to accept that it is quite divisive.

It's not feel-good split or steel.

So you have to be making a certain sort of show in order for that to be okay.

And this is not that show.

And by the way, you don't have Amanda Holden presenting that show because Amanda Holden is so likable.

Yeah.

You want her with Alan Carr doing up a house.

You want her doing something incredibly warm.

And you cannot do a warm show that has a split or steel ending.

You just can't do it.

More importantly, you cannot do it when there's no money involved, really.

So the maximum you can make on this show is like nine grand or something, which I know is a lot of money, but in terms of if you're jeopardy when you're watching as a brand new one.

Well, I certainly haven't seen it happen in the episodes I've watched so far.

They haven't got anywhere near that.

They don't know how much money each other has got.

There are very small variations in the money that the people could have.

So a show that's about strategy,

there is no strategy that you can use in this show.

And anyone who is a quizzer watching that understands that.

And anyone who is not a quizzer watching it just feels it because they kind of know, like, no one, you can't, you can't, you sort of can lie, but not really.

It doesn't do you much good if you do.

A two-year process, and lots of people pitch for it, and a lot of companies watching that are like, say, well, I don't really understand what we were pitching for.

This is the show you would put together.

And by the way, I look at the names on the thing, and there's lots of good people on it who I think have been drafted in last minute to try and get it onto

the producers

and what have you.

But this is the show.

If you had given me 72 hours to say, we've got to put a show on on Saturday, we have no format, you would put this together.

You go, okay, let's have the voting off element from the weakest think.

Let's have the where's the money from Chase the Case, which is another BBC daytime show, and let's have Split or Steel.

So these are all.

I wonder what AI would suggest for quiz shows.

I mean,

it would be this.

It would literally be this.

And as I say, made by good people, and no one's making a bad show.

And the names and the credits, you think, yeah, listen, I know what you all, I know what you're doing here.

I know what's happening.

But that will happen sometimes.

Certainly happened in the old days when there was lots of pilots and lots of things.

But for this to be the end of a two-year process that is set out to say, let's find something new, something distinctive, in a world where the younger generation are watching television in completely different ways.

And we still have a show that's, oh, this is the show where.

Let's meet our players.

We've still got what would you do with the money.

This is one of the few shows where you could have that because you say, what would you do with the money before the share or...

shaft.

You could sort of do that because that gives it some jeopardy.

They don't even do that.

They do it after the split or shaft.

So

it has that old-fashionedness to it, which it seems to me a wasted opportunity.

I will say that.

And I'm absolutely certain that everyone tried their best all the way along.

But you're not going to grow Saturday night television by doing the same thing you've done again and again and again and again and again.

You have to find a new way to do things.

You have to find a new way to present things.

You have to find a more intimate way to present things.

And as you say, they've done this celeb version of it.

And for the celeb version of it, they've just put a celebrity with each of the players with nothing to do.

And I know a few of the celebs on it, and you're like, you're thinking, this is hard yards for you because

there's nothing you can do.

There's even a round where, actually, they sort of ask quite an interesting question, and the celeb could be helping out, but they say, you've got seven seconds to answer this.

Do you think, oh, this is the one point where you could have slowed it down instead of speeding it up?

And it's the one point where you sped it up instead of sewing it down.

Speed up all the stuff that says, where are you from?

What do you do?

Speed up all the kind of, do you believe this person's telling the truth or lying?

Because the answer to that in every case is, i do not have any data to be able to tell you that or not and also the difference between them telling the truth and lying is like 500 pound so sort of meaningless uh so just all all of that stuff and all that stuff it happens we i've made a million shows like this where you just kind of go you know what we've almost got it but we haven't quite and i say okay we move on and we'll learn some lessons but i think at the end of a two-year process

you probably you probably have to be presenting something that has a bit more to it, that is a bit more unusual, that's trying to do something different.

And whether this was a last-minute panic, which is what it feels like to me, I could be absolutely wrong.

People involved in the process could tell me.

Feels like at the last minute they went, Oh my god, we just need to make this like a normal quiz show because this bits of it are not working.

It's so old-fashioned.

Look at the 1% club.

Now, the 1% club has a huge amount more money, it's a huge amount more money.

But if you're the BBC, the one thing you know is you do not have big prize money.

So, do not make a show that is about how you split the prize prize money.

But having mega prizes can also go wrong.

Because can we please talk about win-win, Richard, which is on ITV?

Yeah, which is on ITV.

It's Men and Sue from the People's Postcode Lottery.

It's actually a pretty good format.

I didn't like this format.

Did you not?

See, I like to say it's based on a big survey of people.

And again, so it's not general knowledge.

It's, you know, what's the most embarrassing thing you can do at work.

It's got that family fortunes type dynamic.

And it's, you know, you...

You rate the best bit of a Sunday roast.

You try and beat the people either side of you and you try and score points so what I what I mean by a good format is a it's inclusive b it makes absolute sense c is how it has lots and lots of moments of actual proper jeopardy as in if you get it wrong you're out if you get it right you're in which the inner circle doesn't have all of those things on saturday it gave away

1 million pounds I think the ratings were 1.5 million

you know and it's strictly so it will be but it's fascinating you give away 1.5 million which 10 20 years ago would have been a huge story to my view it's a really good show i really i thought it was well put together things i would have changed a bit of course but it's a it's a well put together show it's giving away a million pounds but there is not that audience anymore that will default to watching something on a saturday it's against strictly anyway so strictly we have the example of there is still an audience for saturday night tv one percent club we have this example that if you do the right thing in the right place you will get an audience of four million people to come and watch that which is a which is a huge audience.

From nothing, you've created

grow it.

It is possible on Saturday Night TV to do a show and gave away a million pounds with a perfectly decent show and nobody to watch, which tells us something about the softness of what Saturday night is.

And then you have this opportunity of a show just before Strictly where you could grow something.

So, you know, the weakest link with Romish Ranga Nathan, that reboot, I think, is really, really terrific.

The hit list works in that slot as well.

You know, there's stuff that's working there.

But what an opportunity to throw away as well.

You've got to be so gentle with these things and you've got to throw stuff at Saturday night TV that a newer audience will watch and understand and find a way into and that largely is understanding they watch TV in a different way.

You can't do a process that says we're coming up with the next big new thing and do something that's so generic.

You can't do it.

It's not, it's not fair on everybody.

I've made so much generic TV in my time.

If you need someone to make a generic television program, I'm the one to come.

So I'm not preaching in any way whatsoever.

I've made these shows a hundred times, but not at the end of this process.

Not when you're putting it on Saturday night before strictly.

Not when you've had 45 companies, all of whom are furious.

All of whom have put all this work and effort into it.

I just think it's...

It's not a great look, and I think it's a slightly wasted opportunity.

I'd love the next tender process.

to come up with a show that isn't welcome to the show where let's meet our players what would you do with the money let's do something completely different let's do a quiz that's completely different i'm not entirely sure they will do they will do another tender after this but uh if they were to do it i certainly don't think many companies would take part in it if they were but it is it's a good thing to do you need to do tenders because you do want new voices and new companies making these things but it's got to come up with something that isn't this and i know i know everyone knows that so forgive me everybody but uh you know it ain't right recommendations marina there's something that's beautiful and it's always there which is the story of ill strand on bbt4 and there's so many great documentaries on that.

And I just chanced to watch The Librarians, which is about librarians in the US dealing with people who want to ban various books.

It's so good, and it just makes me think, oh, gosh, why don't I just make time for Storyville every single week?

It's so good.

So that's BBC4,

and you can watch it on iPlay.

I will recommend Partridge is Back and Partridge is Good.

How Are You?, which is Partridge's examination of mental health, except it isn't.

It's just a series of sketches.

I would say it picks up and picks up and picks up.

The first one I think is the weakest, but it just, there's some brilliant, absolutely classic Partridge as he allows himself to go further and further away from the initial premise of his documentary about mental health.

And there's six parts of that on iPlayer.

We'll be back as usual for a questions and answers episode on Thursday.

We will indeed.

Our bonus episode will be about a very behind-the-scenes man, someone who is a guy called Mike Darnell, who is the godfather in every sense perhaps of what we the reality TV

American it he it's a fascinating story some of the shows are so beyond what we would consider the pale until Mike would just you know transgress his own norms even uh with each new show and it's some quite dark stuff emerged from that era but it's a very funny story if you want to be a member at free listening on all of that is the restas entertainment.com but otherwise we will see you all on Thursday.

See you on Thursday.

This episode was brought to you by Sky.

Skyglass is the new television from Sky, the kind that makes your old Teddy feel like a dress rehearsal.

This is the big screen premiere right there in your living room.

Because it's not just about pixels and settings, it's about the experience.

Skyglass has Auto Adjust, which cleverly adapts to whatever you're watching.

And the built-in Dolby sound makes dialogue sharper, footsteps nearer, storms louder.

Take the secret world of sound on Sky Nature.

Frogs croak like brass sections, bats click like castanets, and even the hush between feels designed for surround sound.

It's less like nature recorded, more like nature remixed.

And then there's David Attenborough, his voice warmer than central heating, turning baby caimans and prowling hyenas into Shakespearean characters.

That's when you realise Skyglass doesn't just show TV.

It was built to collaborate with it, the unsung producer behind every great scene.

Visit sky.com.

Requires relevant Sky TV subscriptions.

Broadband recommended minimum speed, 30 megabits per second.

18 plus, UK, Channel Islands and Isle of Man only.

This episode is brought to you by 20th Century Studios' new film, Springsteen, Deliver Me from Nowhere.

Starring Golden Globe winner Jeremy Allen White and Academy Award nominee Jeremy Strong.

Scott Cooper, the director of the Academy Award-winning movie Crazy Heart, brings you the story of the most pivotal chapter in the life of an icon, Springsteen.

Deliver me from nowhere.

Only in theaters October 24th.

Get your tickets now.