Trump Demands Rush Hour 4

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Speaker 2 Hello and welcome to this episode of The Resters Entertainment with me, Marina High.

Speaker 1 And me, Richard Osmond. Hello, everyone.
Hey, Marina.

Speaker 2 Hello, Richard.

Speaker 1 How are you? I'm all right. How has your week been since I saw you last?

Speaker 2 It's getting crazy Christmas busy.

Speaker 1 Do you know what? It's getting crazy Christmas busy.

Speaker 2 I believe somebody had a birthday, so now we're allowed to talk about Christmas.

Speaker 1 We are allowed to talk about Christmas, exactly.

Speaker 2 God, we've had permission.

Speaker 1 I am now 55 years young and Christmas ready. Yeah.
That's so old, isn't it? And talking of Christmas, who are we interviewing next week?

Speaker 2 Simon Cowell.

Speaker 1 We are indeed. So if you have any questions for Simon Cowell, and I'm sure you do, please send them to the Wrestlers Entertainment at goalhanger.com.

Speaker 1 You can ask him about anything from his long and varied career. What was he thinking with Red or Black? For example, that would just be my...

Speaker 1 Listen, I don't want to throw questions out there, but very much in the world.

Speaker 2 I've got a number of questions. Anyway, do join us for that.
Now, what are we going to be talking about this week?

Speaker 1 And occasionally a story comes along and you think, well, this has got our name written all over it. And of course that story is that they're finally making Rush Hour 4

Speaker 1 mainly because Donald Trump has personally intervened and told them to do it. So you think that's that's got a there's a lot of meat on that bone for us, I think.

Speaker 2 So let's gnaw on that.

Speaker 1 And a lot of characters in that that we have

Speaker 1 a lot to say about.

Speaker 2 A lot of our problematic faves in there. We're also going to talk about Stranger Things, which I believe crashed Netflix when it came out last week.

Speaker 2 And we're going to talk about the kind of Enormo franchise. It's almost 10 years since this first season aired.
Where does it all go now?

Speaker 2 We're also going to be talking about Tom Stoppard, the extraordinary playwright who died this weekend. I mean, he meant like everything to me.
So I feel that I just, there's so much to talk about.

Speaker 1 And in the same way I know that Tom Stoppard meant a great deal to you. I'm like that with Chris Tucker, which brings us to Rush Hour 4.

Speaker 2 Well, this is the story of Rush Hour 4, Paramount, which has been newly acquired by the world's richest man, Larry Ellison, and his son Kendall. I'm so sorry.
I mean, of course, David Ellison,

Speaker 2 has agreed to release Rush Hour 4, which hasn't yet been made, but we'll get to that. You'll remember Rush Hour, the buddy cop franchise, starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.

Speaker 1 And Chris Tucker, described by variety, and I would agree with this, as formulaic but raucously entertaining. particularly

Speaker 1 the first couple.

Speaker 2 Well, they were all directed by Brett Rattner. And I hear you saying, well, hang on a second.
Isn't Brett cancelled?

Speaker 1 Surely a cancelled man hasn't become uncancelled.

Speaker 2 Do you know there's a lot of it about?

Speaker 1 Wow. Should we retire the phrase cancelled and call people postponed?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Don't you think? Yeah.
Like a football match that's been snowed off. Hereford v.
Newcastle United has been postponed. It will now be replayed next Tuesday.
Brett Ratner has been postponed.

Speaker 1 He will be making Rush Out of 4 in a couple of years.

Speaker 2 If we can go back to the causes of his postponement, he was accused by multiple women of sexual assault in the 2017, in the first wave of MeToo.

Speaker 2 And there were a couple of legal actions. And in the end, he went to Israel and he said he was never coming back to America.
He's a big friend of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Speaker 2 There are also seem to be a number of deals in percolation with the Saudis. So he had a sort of equal opportunities Middle East strategy.

Speaker 2 But he has been desperately trying to, despite having sort of thought there was no way back, I mean, a lot of people have sensed the world has turned a little bit, and he's been desperately trying to get himself uncancelled.

Speaker 2 He pulled off a master stroke.

Speaker 2 He has directed...

Speaker 1 I mean, this is, by the way, this is, as you say, the world seemed to shift a little bit when Trump was re-elected.

Speaker 1 And an awful lot of people in an awful lot of industries, not just entertainment, are doing everything they can to try and ingratiate themselves.

Speaker 1 with Trump because they know there's an almost immediate kickback. You know, it's very transactional, his relationships with people.

Speaker 1 And Ratner is thinking, How do I get in with Donald Trump? I mean, I'm certainly someone that I know he would like, you know,

Speaker 1 I move in kind of circles that he would appreciate, but he thinks I need a master stroke to really get my feet under the table with the Trumps. And so, he

Speaker 2 really found one. You're so right, it's so cynical.

Speaker 2 He has directed a documentary about Melania, which covers the post-2024 election and the sort of transition to her second term as first lady in the White House, Amazon have paid $40 million

Speaker 2 for this documentary, which is an absolutely nuts price for a documentary. I mean, nuts, beyond.

Speaker 1 It's almost like they're paying for something else.

Speaker 1 I'm not suggesting they are.

Speaker 2 Oh my God, because I love Jeff Bezos and I know that he's a stand-up guy and would, yeah.

Speaker 1 So perhaps it's, you know what, we haven't seen it. Perhaps it's like amazing.

Speaker 2 Perhaps Bezos is in his office and someone brings in the Melania dock and he's like, yeah, listen, we could purchase a Melania dock if you can what would it be 150 grand 200 and then um he watches it and he goes i have to take this off the table for anyone else this is the greatest documentary i have ever seen in my life why don't you offer them 40 million 40 million yeah it's a real doctor evil number anyway 40 million dollar has been offered um they gave brett ratner apparently an eight bedroom house at mar-a-lago there's a load of other properties i even that little detail was like hang on a second i just really need to see an absolute aerial of this place and understand where everything goes but they gave him an eight-bedroom house at Mor-a-Lago.

Speaker 2 Apparently, Melania, who's, I mean, let's face it, never been any friend to the sisters, liked the fact that he was cancelled.

Speaker 2 Postponed. Postponed.
I'm so sorry. Liked the fact that he was postponed and sort of had been cast out temporarily.

Speaker 2 And they shot for something like 30 days. And as I say, it's about this kind of transitional period.

Speaker 2 It's going to get a brief theatrical release, which, as we know, Amazon doesn't. always do but for this obviously for this

Speaker 2 Bezos has seen listen Bezos has seen it we haven't so he's he's in a position of power we're not it's uh oh i don't think he's seen it why would you bother i don't i don't think it's about watching the documentary so in in the states definitely less so here but in the states me too is being so rolled back it's sort of extraordinary that you know harvey weinstein will obviously stay in prison because but it others it's very diff it's very difficult to say anyone is sort of permanently cancelled to give you a these kind of it's like they're captive miscreants being released back into the wild like sort of free willy but for sex cases or domestic violence cases so which we'd have to call free willie yeah which we'd have to call free willy so you've got louis ck he was the fifth highest grossing comedian in october he made 1.7 million dollars in october wow with the emphasis on grossing yeah grossing yeah uh chris brown again number one grossing super gross he's the most number he's number one great musical act in the world in october 46 million no one seven shows yeah because i mean you sell yeah nearly 300 000 tickets and you know nobody remembers that he beat up rihanna apparently apparently or even or maybe doesn't care about it.

Speaker 2 The Amazon documentary is quite interesting because almost all the top executives who are going to have to market and release this documentary are women at Amazon particularly.

Speaker 2 And I think they're generally sort of regarded to be kind of quite good eggs.

Speaker 2 They will not like this one bit.

Speaker 2 You know, anything for the Donald.

Speaker 1 It's certainly very good news that they don't release. the sort of detailed statistics as to how well things do.

Speaker 2 You can bury it in the prime data that you're never going to see. It's interesting.
The relationship between Trump and Rattner goes back quite a long time.

Speaker 2 Brett Rattner directed a film called Tower Heist, which was originally going to be called Trump Heist. I know.
That's mad, isn't it?

Speaker 1 Absolutely mad. So it's Tower Heist is up heist in a big skyscraper as Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy.

Speaker 2 Every comedian was in or out of the movie over the development period. Everyone.

Speaker 1 Sounds like a great idea. It's actually quite a disappointing movie.
But yes, originally it was written as, and Eddie Murphy was on board when it was Trump heist.

Speaker 1 And the whole idea of the thing was Trump's employees are so mad at him that they pull off a heist in Trump Tower.

Speaker 2 By the way, he was fine with it, which I find sort of incredible. I guess the portrayal of just giant mogul.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 He's not going to worry about the details.

Speaker 1 I'm showing I've got a tower.

Speaker 1 I'm showing I'm the Nakatomi of

Speaker 1 New York.

Speaker 1 So yeah, so Brett Ratner directed that. It was supposed to be Trump Heist turned into Tower Heist.

Speaker 2 Brett Ratner said it would have been a bigger hit if they kept the name.

Speaker 1 Yes, I'd agree.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, and Trump would, I'm sure, say, if my name had still been on

Speaker 2 the ratings, as he calls anything, would be better.

Speaker 1 I think also it would have been a bigger hit if it had been better.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. The movie, I've seen it and it's not very good.
It's really not good.

Speaker 2 Trump did lease them a lot of buildings. And I think everything that's in that film is filmed in kind of Trump New York properties.
So I'm sure he did quite well out of it so often.

Speaker 2 This deal that he's trying to push is for Paramount to release Rush Affair, which, as I say, hasn't yet been made. Can I just say, can we talk about the two stars? Chris Tucker is now 54.

Speaker 2 Jackie Chan is 71. But look, listen, that's the gerontocracy in action.
Why shouldn't he be an action movie song? Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Yeah, maybe lose the word rush.

Speaker 1 Can I set you a very quick quiz for you and for our listeners at home? Knowing everything you do so far about... Rush Affair and what's happening around it.

Speaker 1 Chris Tucker, do we think he played the Riyadh Comedy Festival or didn't play the Riyadh Comedy Festival?

Speaker 2 I think he played it, Richard. He did indeed.

Speaker 1 Yes, of course he did.

Speaker 2 Well, he hasn't headlined a movie since probably the last one.

Speaker 1 No, he really hasn't had a big hit movie since then. You know, his comedy career is still going great.
But yeah, he played Riyadh Comedy Fest. He was good pals with Michael Jackson.

Speaker 1 He was on the Epstein plane with Clinton and Spacey. So

Speaker 1 he's ticking a lot of boxes there, I would say.

Speaker 2 Paramount will release it, but somebody's actually got to make this movie and finance it.

Speaker 2 And obviously, everyone, it's been shopped around many times before, rush half war because it's a long time since the last one and maybe they're saying warners which if you remember in our endless ma quest is the next target for the Ellisons to buy and put together with Paramount so maybe Warners will finance the movie it's not clear but again you can see how that

Speaker 2 someone's got to approve the Warners purchase if it happens Richard and somebody's going to need another sweetener for that so it's interesting what is Trump doing because

Speaker 2 who cares about Russia? You know, is it just like a favorous friend? What's he doing in entertainment? We know he wants to destroy late night.

Speaker 2 He's obviously successfully managed to get something happen to Jimmy Kimmel, have him taken off air temporarily.

Speaker 2 And people say that the cancellation of the Colbert was to do with getting that Paramount deal over the line. We know he's made massive attacks on Seth Mars, all of them really.

Speaker 2 So we know he's at war with that. We know he is mounting an ongoing assault on news.
I don't know if you saw this, but

Speaker 2 last week, the new thing has appeared on the White House official website, which is a sort of visual and a graphic and a chart called Media Offender of the Week, in which they call out news organizations for supposed misreporting of him, media bias, etc.

Speaker 2 And I mean, anyone can be on it. Even CBS News, which is now,

Speaker 2 which is part of Paramount and is now widely believed to be sort of tacking much closer to him as a sort of force in news media, was named last week as having overstepped that.

Speaker 2 I can't remember what they'd done wrong. Okay, so this is obviously fictional and entertainment, but if you think of Rush R4 as a vibe, it's like a

Speaker 2 uncomplicated, non-woke action movie. And it slightly reminded me all of this because I went back and I was like reading about Hollywood in the 1940s.

Speaker 2 And I was like, this is a bit like America during the war, you know, where all the studios were kind of co-opted and you, it was Americanism.

Speaker 2 You had to make sort of a certain amount of patriotic films. And

Speaker 2 some of the stories are hilarious. I've probably told this one on the podcast before, in which case, sorry.

Speaker 2 But Jack Warner at Warner Brothers, you know, they were all made a sort of lieutenant colonel in the, in the army, even though they were working on their lots in Hollywood.

Speaker 2 Jack Warner was like, well, you know, where's my uniform? They said, yeah, obviously it doesn't come with a uniform. It's kind of an honorary title.

Speaker 2 So he got the wardrobe department to knock him up a uniform, which he wore all the time around the lot. And when, but when an actual

Speaker 2 more senior officer in the American military came and visited it, they said to Jack Warner, actually, you should have saluted me. Warner was so angry.
He never wore the uniform again. again.

Speaker 1 Well, it reminds me of more than anything. You would not be shocked, for example, this is 100% a news story that we would mock till the ends of time

Speaker 1 that North Korea have decided to fund and remake Under Siege 4 with Stephen Seagal. Yes.
I mean, 100%, that's the sort of thing that they would absolutely do.

Speaker 1 Just say that, you know, that we're going to have a huge hit with this. Yeah.
That's that's.

Speaker 2 I don't know why Putin hasn't got into it myself because he's certainly got lots of the actors. You know, he's got Depujan now, hasn't he? He's definitely got Segal.

Speaker 1 There's quite a lot of people are resident there but yeah if if putin decides to do um police academy mission to moscow too

Speaker 2 i would which i would certainly watch brackets get me gutenberg

Speaker 2 to go back to my point about you know that that that thing of america of hollywood during the war i think that trump sees the culture war like that that the enemies are within and so he is I definitely can see a world in which he is demanding certain things like this.

Speaker 2 And it's not just a sort of favor for my postponed friend. It's an actual, it's actually more of a strategy.

Speaker 2 Because so, in that way, the idea of the sort of, it reminds me much more in some ways of the sort of red scare and that trying to root out a kind of, yeah,

Speaker 2 a kind of corrosive and

Speaker 2 secretive influence, you know, woke culture or whatever it is in Hollywood. And it reminds me much more of that.
But I do think that he has quite clear cultural plans now.

Speaker 2 And it's quite difficult to avoid saying that he hasn't when you think of the attack on news um

Speaker 2 late night and and things like this which are so sort of extraordinary that it's not difficult to extrapolate and think that there is actually method to the madness.

Speaker 1 Yeah, a part of me is glad that this is where he's spending his energy.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of other really bad things he could do that wouldn't be somehow would not be

Speaker 2 what Rush R4 would not be as bad as.

Speaker 1 But also when it comes out,

Speaker 1 he has a lot at stake there. He needs that to open big and he needs it immediately for Rush Hour 5 to be announced.

Speaker 2 Well, it will

Speaker 2 5. I mean, Jackie Chan, how old?

Speaker 1 Rush Hour 9 to 5. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But he could push it.

Speaker 2 You can push it as and as we've seen in lots of faith-based filming, there are ways that if people feel they have to turn out because it's about something different than just like, do I want to see this thing or not?

Speaker 2 If they feel there's some sort of moral or quasi-moral obligation to see this, it will be interesting to see what the Melania documentary does. I mean, I think that's a harder sell than this.

Speaker 2 But you can definitely see that

Speaker 2 this could be pushed. Anyway, I do think he has cultural plans that we don't really talk quite a bit.

Speaker 1 Oh, he definitely has it. But, you know, I think if

Speaker 1 I think, I genuinely think there is a distinction between interfering with news, and I would include satire. in that

Speaker 1 and this side of things, which is forever there's been like ridiculous rich people with money who've tried to put films on. I mean, that's the whole history of Hollywood is that.

Speaker 1 And that I don't mind putting on whatever film you want because there'll always be other amazing films alongside it.

Speaker 1 Dismantling the structure of network news and of cable news, that is a genuine harbinger of something very dark. This I prefer.

Speaker 2 This is less bad, definitely.

Speaker 1 Poor Jackie Chan

Speaker 1 getting a call saying, we need you for Rush Hour 4, and him going, oh, God, I really don't want to do Rush Hour 4. And then the money keeps going up and up and up.

Speaker 1 And he goes, all right, okay, I'll do it. I loved his quote on the first one, which is, he said, I don't like the way I speak English and I didn't understand anything Chris Tucker said.

Speaker 1 Jackie Chan is so successful and so rich and so popular that

Speaker 1 he's sort of uncoachable.

Speaker 1 He'll say whatever he wants at any given time. So I look forward to his comments on this.
Yeah, I look forward to the press tour very much.

Speaker 2 I'm dying for the press tour.

Speaker 1 What I didn't realize was I hadn't, I sort of knew in the back of my head that Ratner started out making videos for Public Enemy. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's where he started, and Wu-Tang and LL Cool J, and then he moved on to Madonna and Mariah and stuff like that. But that's, you know, that's, that's how he got his break into the movie business.

Speaker 1 The other story, I think maybe we did it on a bonus episode because I was looking at the Rotten Tomatoes scores of the first three Rush Hour movies, which, by the way, all of which did very well.

Speaker 1 All of which did over a quarter of a billion dollars. So they're

Speaker 2 big movies. In those days, money.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Exactly. And, you know, the Rotten Tomatoes scores are not bad.
But I forgot that Rotten Tomatoes only exist exists because of Rush Hour, which is Rotten Tomatoes.

Speaker 1 It was set up by that guy at Sen Duong, who is a huge Jackie Chan fan and would rank his movies. And when Rush Hour came out, he went, oh, no, I need to standardise how this works.

Speaker 1 So he set up Rotten Tomatoes just so he could rank Rush Hour. And now, you know, who thought that it would become quite so culturally central to everything that happens?

Speaker 2 Anything can happen in the current timeline.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it sure can.

Speaker 2 Anyway, speaking of timelines, after the break, we will be delving into the universe of Stranger Things, which jumps back and forward.

Speaker 1 And also paying tribute to the great Tom Stoppard.

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Speaker 1 Welcome back, everybody. Now, Stranger Things, biggest show in the world, probably the most profitable show in the world as well.
Its final season is now well underway.

Speaker 1 Marina, I have never seen a single segment of Stranger Things. I have never, I have never got involved because, you know, you're either both feet in or you're nothing.

Speaker 2 I'm shoulder deep and I can give you a a rough overview, and anyone else can take it.

Speaker 1 You're going to give me a masterclass.

Speaker 2 I'm going to give you a very brief Precy because it's, and then we can.

Speaker 1 See, I didn't mean a masterclass. Just like a I can't give a masterclass on anything.
I'm a half-ass Pracy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, half-ass Pracy.

Speaker 2 It's set in Hawkins, Indiana, which is a sort of anywhere USA town. And

Speaker 2 there's some little geek, well, they were quite young at the very start of it, and we'll get to all that.

Speaker 2 Geeks at school, but strange things are afoot. A shaven-headed girl escapes from a lab.

Speaker 2 There's a missing boy. This is all in the first season.
And then we get the emergence of this sort of parallel world, the upside down.

Speaker 2 And we discover that the US military originally sort of opened, once again, have made one of their bishops and opened the gate to this world. Guys.
And have been sort of managing the problem secretly.

Speaker 2 And malign elements from that world

Speaker 2 who've crossed over from that world into our world seek to sort of disrupt. We don't know, all of these ends will presumably be tied up.

Speaker 1 So it's got that sort of Spielbergy Stephen King sort of thing of small town America multiplied by it's not even got that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 It is an unbelievably detailed homage to that this particular you know if you think about E.T. and the basement and all of those things, I mean it really is beyond a tribute really.

Speaker 2 And that that whole aesthetic and it it's it just hit right.

Speaker 2 I mean the first one came out in 2016, the first season.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I suppose we do live in an era of intense sort of nostalgia and re-shredding things. And it's interesting, the Duffer brothers who created it, who are twins who created this, it was retro to them.

Speaker 2 They didn't live during that time. And then

Speaker 1 that's why it can be an homage, I think. It's not ripping something off.
It is literally in the same way that directors from our generation would make Westerns. It's like this is...

Speaker 1 something that I've grown an aesthetic which I want to play with.

Speaker 2 Which has sort of metamorphosed that aesthetic, exactly.

Speaker 2 Westerns now seem quite sort of left field, whereas before they were the mainstream. Geek culture, which this show delves right into, has sort of become cool.

Speaker 2 And it definitely helps with the kind of multi-generational thing. If you've got, I don't know, parents who might think, oh my god, yes, I remember all this.
I remember watching shows like this.

Speaker 2 I remember, oh, I lived through this. It was very bingeable.
It had these great cliffhangers. And it had kind of really timeless themes like kids knowing best and adults not really getting it

Speaker 2 and outsiders.

Speaker 2 But also, I think trauma, which which i do think is particularly i think they i think they've talked a lot about it being really about you know untreated and and unacknowledged trauma and that is definitely something more of our age than other things but in terms of what it's done for netflix like you said i mean it people say that it's made them a billion i would put it at almost double that i saw the number of a billion and i thought i mean you can i mean start at a billion yeah and go up i mean you know even the i mean the play has made i mean hundreds of millions stranger things the first First Shadow which opened in London and then is now on Broadway as well they say it's brought 2 million new subscribers I would have thought I I don't know I would have thought a lot more but and the merchandise is obviously very popular but it's a lot about retention and you'll you'll see that in their release schedule for these things now because of course what people used to do when things um like they thought oh I'm not going to have you know I mean now a lot of people a lot more people have Netflix but at the time they thought I'll get Netflix I will watch stranger things in one go and then I will get rid of my subscription.

Speaker 2 You know, that's what they call churn.

Speaker 2 And the way they, they sort of drop it in four episodes, and then

Speaker 2 there'll be another way, and then you'll get another four. And so it really helps with retention.
So you can see what it's given them. And it has become just this enormous behemoth.

Speaker 2 And I mean, I was reading about their salaries for the final.

Speaker 2 I find this quite, I'm not sure I've agreed with them.

Speaker 1 Certainly compared to the first, you know, what? Yeah, the salaries for the final.

Speaker 2 Winona Ryder and David Harbour, who were the sort of adults, getting $9.5 million dollars the kids as we would call them the kids but we'll get to the age problem and they'll sort of jackie chan age yeah

Speaker 2 they're on seven million the kind of young adults like um nancy and steve and robin and jonathan they're on six million millie bobby brown who plays 11 the original chauvin haired girl who escaped from the lab she has a separate deal yes we don't even she has a deal with netflix she it's she's really interesting and this is a whole new this is very specific she is a massive star on Netflix.

Speaker 2 If she does a movie, if she does like one of her Enola Holmes ones, or

Speaker 2 she does the Electric State, which she did with the Russo brothers, all of those are enormous on Netflix. So she is a huge star on Netflix.

Speaker 2 I really question whether she could open a movie in cinemas. But she doesn't need to.
But why do you, exactly.

Speaker 1 If you can, if you can open a show on Netflix,

Speaker 1 that's all you need to do.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's very interesting. Nonetheless, the Duffer brothers who created this,

Speaker 2 and you'd think, you know, it became this enormous show and this massive kind of cultural phenomenon.

Speaker 2 They are going to Paramount.

Speaker 2 They have, Netflix offered even money than Paramount offered, but they decided to leave because they still, they want to make theatrical movies, which you can't really do at Netflix.

Speaker 1 Did somebody say Rush Out Five? Yeah,

Speaker 2 yeah. I mean, hopefully they'd be at least in the mix.
Nice to be considered. In terms of like, there's lots of interesting things about.
First of all, like, what does Netflix do now?

Speaker 2 You can't, obviously, you just can't replace something like this. They do have the rights, I think, to spin off universe stuff that the which the duffers can't take to Paramount.

Speaker 2 And I suppose what you always want to do with something like this is what

Speaker 2 Star Wars or Marvel do, which is you kind of keep the franchise alive in some way or another so that it can constantly be producing for you. Maybe that will work for them.

Speaker 2 But there is a sort of sense that,

Speaker 2 and they have lots of big creators, but I wonder in terms of what particularly works and what these big hit shows are, these kind of teen ensembles, I think, work.

Speaker 2 If you look at Wednesday, Wednesday is another big, big thing for them. Um, obviously, Squid Game, but that's finished.
You don't know when. I think that teen ensemble format, the sense of spectacle,

Speaker 2 things that you might have previously only seen in movies, which, you know, these huge special effects, and

Speaker 2 world building, very, very immersive world building, which is what particularly you have on something like Wednesday or on this.

Speaker 2 So, one thing I do think has been problematic, and this is just, I mean, everybody says this, and we've talked about it before on the podcast, but I do think it's significant, is the sheer gaps between the seasons of these TV shows.

Speaker 2 Game of Thrones was the last show to religiously release a series at about the same time every single year, and they did it for, you know, whatever it was, eight or ten years.

Speaker 2 Wednesday, that was two and a half years between the seasons. Euphoria, which has yet to come back, is going to be four years.

Speaker 2 You know, Stranger Things was a very long time. I mean, it'll be interesting to see what they do with Harry Potter and whether they really do.

Speaker 1 Well, they're going to have to, because you say Stranger Things, the thing is, you know, you've got kids in it, and that's so it's

Speaker 2 you do sort of have to make it fair and that's the disapp the disappointment of this for me which is that I mean not to sort of get into the critical side of it but I do think that

Speaker 2 with this with the season which I've watched what they've dropped so far there's not really you know they're still playing Dungeons and Dragons and riding around on their bikes and it's kind of like this is ridiculous they're 10 years older and they look at and I know that you can and the same in euphoria they I think there is going to be a time jump in euphoria but otherwise what she's going to have a mortgage and kids I don't know I just Zendaya is going to have it's going to be a very different phase of her life And it's difficult why these gaps happen.

Speaker 2 There's some sort of sense that it's

Speaker 2 some kind of mystical, modern form of quality control because we live in an age of such amazing television that they can't possibly get it back that quickly.

Speaker 2 I don't think that's the case because there's things like The Wire or Seinfeld or The Sopranos that didn't release like that.

Speaker 2 And released, people literally can't remember what happened in previous series of things anymore. And they really can't.
But equally, there are shows that have released on a really tight schedule.

Speaker 2 And I'm thinking about something like Slow Horses that my friend, my brilliant friend Will Smith did. But it is so punishing the schedule.

Speaker 1 I mean, to make sure that you're not going to be able to do that.

Speaker 2 You know, Will has left after seasoning. It is so punishing the schedule because you're always in pre-production, writing, and or shooting or in post-production at any one time.

Speaker 2 You're doing two of those.

Speaker 1 And also, just on a contractual level, you have to have Jack Loudon, who everyone wants to be in everything. You have to have Gary Oldman, you have to have Kristen Scott Thomas.

Speaker 1 They have to be available

Speaker 1 for such a large part of every single year. It's very, very hard to release a big show once a year.
And it's amazing that Slow Horses have done it.

Speaker 1 And it's not surprising that other, you know, with Stranger Things,

Speaker 1 when you start out, you've essentially got some untried talent. Even the Duffer brothers,

Speaker 1 they've really done an awful lot, which I can talk about in a moment. And so you can...

Speaker 1 say, oh, and we're doing this and then we're going to do series season two or three back-to-back. But the second the first one breaks, everyone is getting offers from everywhere.

Speaker 2 Sure, but you are, if, if it, but you will have it, they will have in their contract that they're

Speaker 2 contracted for seven seasons or whatever. This sort of standard thing is.

Speaker 1 And absolutely, by the way, but if you're Millie Bobby Brown, you can have that seven season contract, but you are such a huge deal to Netflix that if you say after two seasons, oh no, I am.

Speaker 2 I'm doing a Nola Holmes. I'm doing that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but you're doing it for them.

Speaker 1 I'm taking two years off or whatever it is. There's not a lot you can do about it.

Speaker 2 But this doesn't service the fans at all. And I do think that's interesting.
You know, the difference between TV and movies is that TV was was a continuity medium.

Speaker 2 You know, it was always on and things returned. And obviously, we know in the old days in America, they used to have like 22, 24 episodes or something, and they would release every year.

Speaker 2 But it's not producing what consumers want. It's interesting because podcasts, of which this is one of the always-on types,

Speaker 2 people always say to me, and do you even do it on holiday? It's like, yes, because that is really what people want. That's what people want it to be available.
every week.

Speaker 2 People don't want there to be two and a half years, four years between series of things they love that they genuinely can't remember what happens anymore. We now live in an era where

Speaker 2 there's a huge recapping industry, just people who basically

Speaker 2 part of the entertainment industry is the recapping industry of people who do TikToks or YouTubes who are dedicated to it. I noticed, which is really interesting, that

Speaker 2 Amazon, that Prime is now trialing an AI recap button.

Speaker 2 So you can get, you used to be able to get text recap, but now you can get AI video recap of a series. It's not just clips.

Speaker 2 The AI identifies kind of key plot points, then it matches them to clips, then it might even have soundtrack to the trailer rather than just bits of the soundtrack on top.

Speaker 2 And then it generates a voice narration. And Amazon say that will be theatrical quality.
Samsung have now added Copilot to their TVs, which is...

Speaker 2 a recapping thing. Recapping is so enormous, but it's not.
Skip recap. Yeah, skip recap.
Yes, but you wouldn't be skipping the recap when you're watching Stranger Themes.

Speaker 2 Because, you know, I watched every one of that last series. By the way, some of them, it was preposterous.
They were all episodes that were over two hours long.

Speaker 2 Just the absolute high watermark of indulged creators thinking that they're making a feature.

Speaker 2 And actually, like, there's absolutely no way this episode needed to be, you know, an hour 48, two hours 20. This is a nonsense.

Speaker 1 As a sidebar on recaps, whenever there's a like a big crime novel that gets adapted for TV and you know a lot of twists and turns and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 and I don't really know what you do about this it's very hard but AI certainly won't help in any big crime story there are you know the idea is you tell people who did the murder like you know it's the clues are all there yeah but in the recap you sort of have to put in things you know because you're you're hiding these things somewhere in inconsequential scenes and suddenly in the recap you're thinking why is this inconst inconsequential scene with the shopkeeper in there that's what why is it why is he going and buying a packet of rollos That seems weird.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And then you're like, oh, so that must be important.
That shopkeeper must be important.

Speaker 1 And that's, I think, with Twisty Turney crime things, the recap industry is,

Speaker 1 I would say, an issue.

Speaker 2 Hamstrung.

Speaker 1 You are Hamstrung, which, by the way, is my new detective, John Hamstrung.

Speaker 2 I love him.

Speaker 2 And there is also a sense where these worlds have become kind of deliberately complicated and they're full of Easter eggs and all this sort of thing.

Speaker 2 That, I mean, there was some suggestion now that some TV critics were saying to people, Can you tell us what happened in the Stranger Things play?

Speaker 2 It's like, oh, right, this is where we're going, is it? Which is the first shadow, which is like, okay, do we.

Speaker 2 It's like that Marvel feeling where there was just so much homework. And like, if you hadn't watched WandaVision, then you didn't really understand the next movie.

Speaker 2 And we know with Marvel, they completely overexploited that aspect of things. And people are just like, I've had enough.
There was too much TV. There was too much whatever.

Speaker 2 This is almost the opposite problem. It's not, it's a slightly different problem.
But people simply don't want this long between things and it doesn't serve the fans.

Speaker 2 And actually, what a lot of other sort of producers are saying is this is just destroying. You know, we spend so much money on this television.

Speaker 2 And people have really just like got what they're not going to go back to it. They may not.
Stranger Things is its own kind of giant phenomenon. And I'm not saying that this is the case here.

Speaker 2 I'm sure it isn't.

Speaker 2 People are heading back to that. There's a lot of great stuff that people just say, yeah, you know what? It's two and a half years now.

Speaker 2 I don't think I'm going to get back into that one because a lot of other stuff's come along.

Speaker 2 And so we're killing some of our best stuff because we just can't get it out there in a manageable release schedule.

Speaker 2 And as I say, I don't think it's about like, oh, television is so good now that that's the only way you can do it. I don't think that is the case.

Speaker 2 And there just must be a better way that serves the viewer, the consumer better than this way.

Speaker 1 And can I talk about this interesting thing of when you have an enormous hit and it goes away, how do you replace it? Because that's a particular... issue.

Speaker 1 If you're on Netflix and something, you know, you are almost punished for your success because if you have, as you say, a squid game or a Stranger Things, at some point they do have to come to an end.

Speaker 1 And how do you replace something that is so iconic and sits right on your homepage and that people are buying their subscriptions for?

Speaker 1 And the temptation has always been, oh, well, let's try and copy Stranger Things. Let's try and copy Squid Game.

Speaker 1 And then you realise, of course, well, what was Squid Game copying?

Speaker 1 Nothing. That came out of a clear blue sky.
What was Stranger Things copying? Nothing. You know, the Duffer Brothers had made one movie.

Speaker 1 They made Hidden, which is a very good movie, but it's not, it's a low budget, you know, made $300,000 worldwide.

Speaker 1 You know, if you were thinking, okay, how do we have a definite juggernaut, definitive, like absolute cast iron hit? You would not go to the Duffer Brothers.

Speaker 1 And, but of course, that is the thing you do. And so you have to replace it by just having good people in good places looking for great creatives and trusting their instincts, right?

Speaker 1 You can't do kind of,

Speaker 1 you can't do copycat television because all of their huge hits, perhaps Wednesday aside, come out of somewhere where you think, oh, well, that's completely unexpected.

Speaker 1 But it's every time one of these ends,

Speaker 1 people are sitting around going, I mean, we need a billion-dollar franchise here. Yeah.
And billion-dollar franchises are hard to come up with.

Speaker 2 I completely agree. And

Speaker 2 as I said earlier, I do think there's just in the vaguest terms, those elements, in the same way that we've talked about how young YouTubers or whatever are bringing people into these old formats like Dancing with the Stars or maybe even Strictly or whatever it is.

Speaker 2 I do think that having something that appeals to teens, and we know that kind of teen ensemble casts, or people playing teens credibly or otherwise, do appeal in that sense.

Speaker 2 And also that kind of, those very immersive worlds are particularly engaging and

Speaker 1 very, very easy to get wrong, though. Very, very hard to get right.
Very, very easy to get wrong. Yeah.
By the way, again, sidebar dancing with the stars, the final was huge in America last week.

Speaker 1 So it just goes to show they're doing... they're doing something very right over there.
And how much did Stranger Things grow with its audience?

Speaker 1 Did it get more sort of horror-based as the because you know the Duffer brothers come from a horror background and suddenly they're making this thing that that feels kind of pop culturally but but but but did it become scarier and darker as it went on?

Speaker 2 Actually it was much more scary and dark in in terms of sort of in the first one I thought more successfully almost because it was

Speaker 2 almost like in Jaws that just the hint of it and this the upside-down world and the kind of weirdly kind of the kind of ethereal grimness of it that you didn't understand.

Speaker 2 It has it there's It's become more overtly horrible with characters like Vekner or what have you, who

Speaker 2 it's a much more obviously kind of, there's a much more obviously horror background there. And I suppose it's that grows with the audience.

Speaker 2 I do think, as I said, that it's difficult that the characters really should be worrying about slightly different things now.

Speaker 2 And there have been sort of almost like deplots about emergent sexuality and things like that. But it's kind of odd that they've preserved them in aspects.

Speaker 1 You're in your early 40s now. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Come on. I think we should have gone some slightly differently.

Speaker 1 Someone should be saying, I just think reducing the

Speaker 1 ISA ceiling from 20,000 to 12,000, I just think that it discourages sailing. It discourages saving.
I don't know what Rachel Reeves is doing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, there's not one of those discussions.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Anyway, on to something and someone utterly timeless.
an absolute one-off Tom Stoppard who passed away last week.

Speaker 2 This is such an enormous last.

Speaker 2 It's such an incredible life he had. Most extraordinary playwright.
I mean, I'll just give you, I mean, I'll give a tiny little prosey in case people aren't familiar with his work.

Speaker 2 But I mean, a lot of this is going to be a recommendation to familiarise yourself with his work because he's so wonderful.

Speaker 2 He was born in 1937 in Czechoslovakia, and he was Jewish, but he didn't discover this until middle age, which is sort of very significant. And they've got out just in time.
They fled for Singapore.

Speaker 2 Then he ended up in India a bit. And then his father died.
And his mother married an Englishman who I think was slightly anti-Semitic.

Speaker 2 And they came here and the mother very much underplayed the ancestry so I think he thought he perhaps had some very distant Jewish relatives and eventually he discovered the full story of which is the most extraordinarily awful story where almost all the other brothers someone one of his relatives who had survived the Holocaust came and drew him a family tree and I mean all of the ends of the the roads were in you know Auschwitz and Decker or on death marches but he didn't know of any of this until middle age and it's very interesting and he anyway but he was a news reporter in in Bristol.

Speaker 2 He never went to university.

Speaker 2 I mean, he was the most extraordinarily clever man, beyond, beyond, but wore it so lightly.

Speaker 2 And it's really sort of fun that all the tributes have been from people like, you know, Mick Jagger saying, you know, he was just, he was the best fun because his mind was...

Speaker 1 He was super handsome as well, wasn't he? Oh my gosh. Which I know is not important, but it is.

Speaker 1 Nice to have. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 Nice to have. Anyway, he broke out

Speaker 2 in 1966 with Rosenkrantz and Guildenstein are dead, which is such a weird idea.

Speaker 2 And just it's these two completely minor characters in Hamlet who we only sort of really know about because

Speaker 2 there's a line, Rosencrantz and Guildenstone are dead. It's just like sort of uttered almost as an aside.
But he kind of and he told their story and mashed it up with Waiting for Godo, basically.

Speaker 1 Which is an incredibly modern thing to do, by the way. There's now lots of things that, yeah, just like that.

Speaker 2 I don't like that, but so much of that way of looking at things came from him. And I'm going to talk about something in a bit, which I thought was a coincidence.

Speaker 2 But he gave actually the king the perfect quotation because that line, there's a line in that look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else and so that's the great line that the king was able to say to make comment on his death but that's from raisenkranzer gildenstein because they he there the the full line was you know we keep to our usual stuff more or less only inside out we do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off which is a kind of integrity if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else so it's like an inside out play and it's it's completely brilliant and beautiful but so his verbally incredibly ingenious his ideas are incredibly ingenious, he could be funny, he could be smart, he did incredible things with language.

Speaker 1 He just did stuff that no other writer was able to do.

Speaker 2 And Richard, when I was growing up, we never, literally, we never went to the theater. Nothing, we never did anything like that.
And I came to his writing via the reading of it.

Speaker 2 And I would get these plays out from the library. And eventually, you know, over the many years, I now own them all.
And I mean, almost every line in these books is underlined by me.

Speaker 2 Which one don't you underline? They're so, so good.

Speaker 1 And I,

Speaker 2 it was, must have been, you know, late into my 20s is when I could first,

Speaker 2 you know, buy a ticket and go and see one of his plays. And I loved it.
I loved him even more. The minute I read him, I came to him by reading him.

Speaker 2 And you can read the plays right now, and they are extraordinary. And of course, it doesn't take you long to read.

Speaker 1 But where would you start if you were someone who didn't know him at all, or if you're a youngster who wants to write?

Speaker 2 Well, I'd start with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and I'd read Jumpers and then arcadia i mean this is the thing he taught me about these extraordinarily complicated things like chaos theory or moral philosophy or all of these sort of things but he does it with a lot of that in there with a very lightness of touch with such and it's a bit like reading a book like when michael lewis writes a book about money and while i'm reading it i'm like i fully understand the most complicated financial instrument and then

Speaker 2 you know a few weeks later you're like nah it's gone completely gone but someone once said to me actually um about tom stoffard oh you know know, I'm not so keen, but I think he makes people feel cleverer than they are.

Speaker 2 And I remember thinking, oh, you'd hate that, wouldn't you?

Speaker 2 People are just feeling that they actually are clever and that they can understand things simply because of the magical and funny way that Tom Stuffard... Sorry, what's wrong with that?

Speaker 2 I think it's so much more about you than me.

Speaker 1 You know, exactly.

Speaker 1 You want to put references in that make people, you want people to be going away and looking stuff up

Speaker 1 and thinking the world is bigger than they thought it was before they started. That's a lovely thing to do whilst entertaining them, which was always his number one priority.

Speaker 2 Can I just say it's so he was he is like he will always be so completely alive to me.

Speaker 2 And it's just odd because when we were leaving here, when we were leaving here last week, I was going down the escalator at Embankment and I thought, oh, look, they're reviving Indian Inc., which is one of his plays.

Speaker 2 And it's got Felicity Kendall in, who was one of his great muses. And in fact, they had a long relationship together.
And I thought, oh, I must go and get tickets to that.

Speaker 2 But to show how alive he was, can I talk to you you about two conversations I had last week? And bear with, bear with. Because, okay, one of them was about someone was saying to me, oh, you know,

Speaker 2 have you met Tom Sophia? And I said, well, I've had this. I once had, I've had a couple of great letters from him, which are very much my treasure box.
But there's a...

Speaker 2 Jumpers, his play, which is interesting. He wrote it in the wake of the moon landings.
And he thought that he thought that what the moon landings signified was that

Speaker 2 it would cause some sort of great unmooring unmooring or kind of moral discombobulation amongst people because this thing that they'd set up as this romantic trope, the moon, and it had always been this distant sort of sense of longing thing.

Speaker 2 If they knew that men had sort of trampled on it, that something would happen. Anyway, he gave an interview in which he said, and of course that didn't happen at all.
I was completely wrong.

Speaker 2 And I thought it was so funny. Of course, it was so self-deprecating of him.
And anyway, but not long after that, I read a...

Speaker 2 interview with I think Buzz Aldrin who said that honestly sometimes like at night he'd be going out and putting the rubbish out and he'd look up at the moon and say, huh, I went there once.

Speaker 2 And I just thought, oh my god, that's so funny. That's so exactly what, you know, to me, the normalization of the fact that we went there is almost madder than the fact that we did.

Speaker 2 So I cut out this article and I sent it to him saying, I saw this and thought you'd make me laugh. And he wrote me about this really long and incredible letter.

Speaker 2 So I was telling someone about this last week.

Speaker 2 The other thing I was talking about, and I am going to land this plane eventually, but the other thing I was talking about was his, he wrote this brilliant play called Travesties, which I absolutely love.

Speaker 2 This is such a Stoppardian thing. I'm going to use say Stopadian.

Speaker 2 He discovered that in Zurich in 1917, both James Joyce, Lenin, and the Dadaist artist Tristan Zahra were all living in Zurich at that time. And Joyce was writing Ulysses.

Speaker 2 Lenin obviously had revolution on his mind. And Dada was this crazy new art form that was coming up.
So he also mashed that up with Fairy Tom Soffer with the importance of being earnest.

Speaker 2 And he wrote this amazing play. Anyway, last week I was listening to this interview with James Cameron, a fantastic,

Speaker 2 the director of obviously

Speaker 2 Terminator and Aliens and Titanic and Avatar and all of those things. And he's so clever, you know, he's such a fascinating person to listen to, by the way.

Speaker 2 And in the course of this interview, he was asked a little bit about his relationship with Elon Musk. And he said, well, of course, we we knew each other from the Mars Society in the 90s.

Speaker 2 And I thought, hang on a second, what's that? And I thought, I must get into this because I think that's fascinating. So I looked at the Mars Society and

Speaker 2 it's in LA. It was founded out of this sort of underground movement who really believed in

Speaker 2 Mars exploration and colonization. And it's obviously it's utopian and escapist and a kind of underground movement.
And I thought, my God, well, that's so interesting.

Speaker 2 So in the 90s, he would have been on the cusp of releasing Titanic, which would have been this kind of when he went stratospheric, James Cameron. Elon Musk was not even, was not really Elon Musk then.

Speaker 2 He had founded Zip 2. It was just kind kind of city guide, a mapping software.
And I was thinking, well, who else was involved in it? Because, of course, I was always looking for my third character.

Speaker 2 And Buzz Aldrin. Now, Buzz Aldrin was huge in the society.
And I was thinking, well, how, that's a fun sort of thing. But of course, the fact that I can't hear an interview with James Cameron.

Speaker 2 just mentioning that sort of association without going off down this imaginary side alley and thinking, oh, well, hang on, who else would have been there?

Speaker 2 And what would that have been like as a sort of play? That way of looking at the world completely was given to me by Tom Stoppard. That's not a form of original thought.
That's lockstock and barrel.

Speaker 2 But it conditioned my thinking so much, I guess, because I read him at a particular young age. And so I always think like this now.
And it's impossible for me to hear those kind of interviews.

Speaker 2 It's interesting. I thought, how funny that those are the two conversations I had last week.
They're sort of, it's so typical because it's funny and it's fantastical.

Speaker 2 Both go so directly back to his plays. And in a weird way, maybe there's this linking figure in the...
personage of Buzz Aldrin.

Speaker 1 I just, I can't really put my name.

Speaker 2 It's just, anyway.

Speaker 1 And so that play is called Buzz. And, you you know, also interestingly, he was, you know, incredibly unsnobbish.
And he did a lot of work in Hollywood.

Speaker 1 You know, he wasn't one of those people who was too cool for school. You know, he would, he'd always get it.
He's a brilliant script, though. He'd always get his hands dirty.

Speaker 1 There's a story, it's absolutely apocryphal, but

Speaker 1 you can believe it, where on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, they say, old Sean Connery had said to Tom Stoppard, I need you to work on some of my lines because they're not very good.

Speaker 1 And so he'd have these amazing lines.

Speaker 1 And then Harrison ford would come in and say but sorry why are your lines so amazing and um sean connery would say well because tom stoppard is writing them and he said well could he write some for me so tom stoppard starts writing for harrison ford and then the next day spielberg comes in goes sorry why is the script so good suddenly and they go oh it's tom stoppard so he goes to stoppard nonsense because he'd worked with stoppard on empire of the sun and you know he knows exactly what uh tom stoppard does but you know yeah he would write on that he did revenge of the sith there's an amazing thing in in that book that you recommended the Edswick book about Hollywood, where he's talking about Shakespearean love.

Speaker 1 Oh, did you read that? Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 I was rereading it yesterday for this. It's a brilliant book.
It's really, really so

Speaker 1 readable.

Speaker 1 And Edswick's putting together this Shakespearean love thing with, and he said, the only person he wrote this is Tom Stoppard. So he flies over to London to try and get Stoppard to do it.

Speaker 1 And he said, I had just the best day of my life. As I said, I went to see him.
Stoppard wasn't particularly interested. He said, let's go and have tea.
And he describes him.

Speaker 1 Actually, he says, he's the most graciously well-mannered, self-deprecating, world-renowned genius I had ever met.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 that's a nice epitaph, isn't it? Anyway, so he has fun with Tom Stoppard, and he leaves at the end of the day and realizes that Tom Stoppard has not said whether he would do it or not.

Speaker 1 But he's assuming he's not going to do it. But he's thinking, I've got to spend a day with, you know, one of the greatest writers of all time.
So I'm very happy.

Speaker 1 He then says, like, three days later, they get a message from Tom Stoppard going, Oh, yeah, I'll do it. Yeah, I'll do it.
It seems like fun. And he's going, Oh, that's amazing.

Speaker 1 He goes, Um, but it'll be a million pounds. And he's like, Oh, no, I don't have a million pounds.

Speaker 1 Uh, and then literally the next day, Julia Roberts says she wants to do the movie, and suddenly he does have a million pounds. So it goes to Tom Stoppard, here's a million pounds.

Speaker 1 Will you write Shakespeare in love for me? Uh, and weirdly, that film has a very unusual gestation period, as you can tell, because Julia Roberts is not in it in the end.

Speaker 1 And it's many, many years later, and it's Harvey Weinstein and Miramax, and he fires Ed Swick off it, and all of this stuff. But Eswick is sort of back on board for when the Oscars come along.

Speaker 1 And Tom Stoppard, literally, at the start of his speech, he turns away from Harvey Weinstein and said, Sorry, Harvey, I want to thank Edswick. And you think, oh, that's nice, that's classy, isn't it?

Speaker 1 But you know, just somebody who can do the cleverest thing in the world, but also understands entertainment and also understands to, you know, looking after people and that life and art are supposed to be fun.

Speaker 2 I think that it's so interesting to think of

Speaker 2 Leopold Stadt, which became his final play. But I think people all

Speaker 2 his entire career felt that he hid himself within his writing and his own story.

Speaker 2 I didn't feel that ever because I feel like his mind is in every single line and that's the true thing, you know, the mind and it's all out there to see.

Speaker 2 But the story of that kind of

Speaker 2 Jewishness that was concealed from him and that he

Speaker 2 only discovered belatedly,

Speaker 2 he addresses in Leopoldstadt, which is his final play, which was extraordinary. And Now I saw that just before that it was directed by Patrick Marber.
It was, I mean, it's got sort of 40 characters.

Speaker 2 It is extraordinary.

Speaker 2 And there's a character that's really very much stopped at the end of the play. And

Speaker 2 who's sort of having to apologise for

Speaker 2 not really knowing and for just having this lovely English life and not being part of this charmed life. And he keeps saying, I didn't know, I didn't know.

Speaker 2 And then there's, as I say, the list of what had happened to all the other branches of the family. But funnily enough, I was able to talk to Patrick.

Speaker 2 I went to a shiver with you know the Jewish prayers after a death for somebody and I went was lucky enough to go back in a taxi afterwards with Patrick Marbury and we were talking about it and I said God it meant such a lot to me and it was also just before the pandemic when all the kind of lights went out and he said yeah it was great in London but it was extraordinary in New York it was such a different feeling because that was so many people's story in in New York that so many of the Jewish people in New York had that kind of story of having escaped in time which was so completely particular and he said, in, you know, they really felt it in their souls there.

Speaker 2 And of course, it won, and it won, you know, the Tony for Best Play in 2023.

Speaker 2 I mean, what a crowning sort of to say when people told him he never wrote about where he came from, which I don't think is remotely true, by the way.

Speaker 2 But to end with that and that to be your final play, I mean, it is a sort of perfect career in every sense. And I there's a great, there's a, I know that it's supposed to be absolutely amazing.

Speaker 2 Hermione Lee wrote a very long and amazing biography of him, which I have always been saving for when there was definitely not going to be any more of him. And so I'm going to read that now.

Speaker 2 And anyway,

Speaker 2 it's been really nice to talk about it today. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so, no need to recommend anything this week other than get your hands on some Tom Stop art.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Read it, get tickets for it.

Speaker 2 Both have given me the greatest joy in my life.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much. We covered a lot of ground there.
We did. We have a questions and answers episode on Thursday.

Speaker 1 Look forward to uh answering lots of your questions we have for our members we have a special it's a look behind the scenes at the lion king which by the way has a lot in common with rosenkrants and gildenstern are dead the whole structure of the thing and timon and pumbo and all of that anyway listen um so we have that on friday as well don't forget send in your questions for simon cowell as well please send in your questions to the rest's entertainmentthgoalhanger.com we will ask him anything and everything well i think with that it must be goodbye Yes, see you on Thursday, everybody.

Speaker 1 See you on Thursday.

Speaker 2 A warm dinner, a full table, peace of mind. That's the holiday we all wish for.
Your gift to Feeding America helps make it possible for every family. Give now at feedingamerica.org/slash holiday.