The Rest Is Entertainment - Gary Lineker Leaves The BBC

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

Why has Gary Lineker's career at the BBC ended after 30 years? Who has been enabling Diddy for decades in his infamous 'freak-off' parties? Why did Marina queue for three hours in Westfield for a tiny plastic doll - and was it worth it? Richard Osman and Marina Hyde investigate the sordid Diddy trial for sex trafficking and racketeering and ask if anyone else is to blame for enabling celebrity monsters. Tim Davie sets out his vision for a renewed BBC last week, the pair discuss the future of the public service broadcaster in the UK. What the hell is a Labubu? And where are 20-somethings obsessed with a cheap plastic toy from China? Marina has the scoop from the frontlines (of late-stage capitalism). The Rest Is Entertainment AAA Club: Become a member for exclusive bonus content, early access to our Q&A episodes, ad-free listening, access to our exclusive newsletter archive, discount book prices on selected titles with our partners at Coles, early ticket access to future live events, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. Just head to therestisentertainment.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestisentertainment. The Rest Is Entertainment is proudly presented by Sky. Sky is home to award-winning shows such as The White Lotus, Gangs of London and The Last of Us. Visit Sky.com to find out more For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Assistant Producer: Aaliyah Akude Video Editor: Kieron Leslie, Charlie Rodwell, Harry Swan Producer: Joey McCarthy Senior Producer: Neil Fearn Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by our friends at Sky. And when we say friends, we mean friends with excellent taste in television. Absolutely. And diving into my never ending TV list is so seamless. Sky does all the hard work for me by bringing whatever I want to watch across all my apps and channels into one place. Now let's not forget the blockbuster shows they bring us, Gangs of London, Day of the Jackal. All the different apps all in one place. I like to say effortless input, exceptional output. Do you like that?

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Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest Is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And me, Richard Os Osman. Hello, Marina. Hello, Richard. We're not together. We're a long way away. I'll have to shout. I'm in sunny Italy. Moving on, Richard, did you see Eurovision? Yes, we did. We've got a houseful here of family, one of whom is a cybersecurity expert. I think we're probably about two minutes ahead of the live stream. The tech works so well. I thought Italy was robbed, not just because I'm in Italy, but I love the Bowie,

McRonson vibes of the Italy song. Okay. It was really funny, but I have to say, I loved Sweden so much. For me, it had everything. It was catchy. It had the meta humor and obviously a subject matter, saunas, which is very close to our, you know, national ideal picture of the nation itself. I tell you what, Marina's like a sauner out here in Tuscany. Is it now? I should say I'm not here for much longer and I've got to do a lot of book events, so it's not really a holiday. What are we actually going to talk about today? We are talking about P. Diddy, the ongoing trial of P. Diddy, and why there seem to be so many toxic men in our culture and whether there's anything we can do about that.

We're talking about Tim Davey made a very big speech, the director general of the BBC, about the future of the BBC launching their pitch for Charter Renewal. We're going to think about the future of the BBC and how that could play out. And also, I think we will cover the departure of Gary Lineker of the BBC and how that could play out. And also, I think we will cover the departure of Gary Lineker from the BBC. I've heard of the guy. Yes. Tell me he's not leaving Goalhanger.

Well, anyway, we'll get to it all. We'll get to it all in that item. And finally, I have queued for a Labooboo. If you know what a Labooboo is, you'll be very sympathetic to my experience. And if you don't, you're going to find out at some length, but not the remorseless length of the queue that I was in. Diddy, Linneker and Labooboo. Absolute classic textbook versus entertainment. Exactly. Now listen, we're going to start with the trial of Diddy, the sort of rap music mogul

currently on trial in New York for a child. He's charged with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, transportation to engage in prostitution. Most of last week was taken up with his former girlfriend, Cassie Ventura, taking the stand, although various other people who I'm sure will get to, and talking about these freak-offs, these kind of crazed sex and drug-fueled sort of marathon she says she was coerced into taking part in for many, many years. Anyway, everyone will be familiar with the details of the trial because it's sort of a kind of news sensation. But I suppose what I'm particularly interested in is the people in a way who weren't Cassie Ventura,

who we saw last week and the week before and we'll be seeing this week. It's sort of extraordinary to me just how many people know and are involved in allowing an alleged criminal enterprise like this to continue. And obviously we've seen this and we'll get to them. Many other powerful men, just the sheer sort of number of lawyers and assistants and bodyguards and spokespeople and doctors and all of these people who know, who've seen things happen. Just one assistant who said, I saw him beat her. The endless NDAs. I mean, we've done a whole special on the NDAs before. And obviously the proliferation of this document and how easily it can be handed out and how binding people feel it absolutely must be. I sort of feel like entourage is too nice

a word for this sort of massive apparatus. I've thought about it before and I've sort of thought of the sort of sex case industrial complex. It's a whole kind of concerted group of people sort of conducted, I suppose, by the alleged criminal themselves. Well, it's extraordinary, isn't it? Because if you've got someone like Diddy, the second he starts making an awful lot of money for record companies or for investors in his own record company, they turn a blind eye to what he's doing or don't want to hear about what he's doing, which is, you to hear about what he's doing, which is more to the point.

Oh no, yeah, listen, that's Diddy. Everyone underneath is then thinking, well, everyone seems to think this is okay. Everyone seems to have given this the say so, and I'm on the payroll as well. And then you get people who tangentially get themselves involved with him, as you say, security guards, people like that.

And he can sit in a chair and give out a wad of dollars to them to keep quiet. All the ones who didn't keep quiet, and there's plenty of them, I'm glad to say, are not listened to or not believed. And it's such an extraordinary story that we see time and time again of people who are able to Protect themselves and who are able to keep what they're doing quiet But the story seems to happen in the same way every single time I was thinking, you know in New York in the 1980s, they had that broken windows policy Which is the best way to stop crime is from the absolute from the bottom up second You see any any antisocial behavior a broken window was was case they used. You fix that and then the next thing gets fixed and the next thing gets fixed. And it's almost like we need to intervene in

people's careers at a very, very, very early stage because none of these people are coming out of a clear blue sky. They're really not, you know, there's high-profile examples in the UK. None of them were free of rumor at any point. And we've spoken before, I think, when we talked about Greg Wallace, that legally you have to report somebody. Legally you have to make a report about anyone's behaviour, and legally that person has to be talked to about that. Lots of people listen to this

or work in different industries and will understand the issues they have in those industries with powerful people, but we can only really speak of the industry we know. And it's very, very easy in a big organization to in the same way that students make a report on their teachers each year and are allowed to say whatever they want.

And that feedback gets given back to a teacher and anyone who works in the public sector will tell you how often they're sort of appraised and the feedback that they're having to be given. And I just think it'd be lovely when I think back to myself as a researcher and all sorts of things, some of the bullies you come across. My first ever job, there was a guy there who was such a bully. And of course, that was 1992.

So you're thinking, oh, there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. And you know, that's not the environment we were brought up in. But the ability just once every six months to say, who do you have an issue with? Can you tell us about any particular behavior that gets brought up with that person? I mean, it's something, isn't it? I mean, whether that stops the diddies

and Jimmy Savils of the world, I don't know. But at least we have a culture where people who are making money out of somebody have a responsibility and a duty to be completely transparent about that person's behavior and about complaints that have been made about that person because this doesn't come out of a clear police guy. No, I mean, I suddenly think like perhaps within record companies and things like that,

you could institute this sort of thing. Here's the little detail I find so fascinating is that video that was shown to the jury and was shown in the courtroom, which is from the Intercontinental Hotel in LA, and it's from 2016. It's a public area near a lift in which Cassie walks into it and then sort of chasing her is Diddy in a towel and he throws her to the floor and he kicks her repeatedly. And then he drags her body presumably back to the hotel room she had left. Now that was in 2016. That video finally saw the light of day. It was published by CNN last year in 2024.

Now please tell me how many people you think would have had to have known about that video. This is a major international hotel chain. I would like to hear so much more from the Intercontinental on what I think we'll have to euphemize as their internal processes. And what's very interesting is that in the final moments almost of Cassie's testimony, Diddy's defense revealed that she had taken a $10 million payout from the Intercontinental. It was presented as a sort of flourish of the defence, as in you see you've taken money from these people and I sort of felt like,

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

a hugely toxic human being. So he is going to lie. That's what Diddy is going to do. His whole career, he's going to lie. So you have to sort of put him to one side and go, OK, you've got a guy here who's making billions of pounds for you, but he lies all the time. Diddy is having his time in court

and hopefully will serve time for some of the things he's done. But the people around him, the people who supported him, the people who are supporting people even now, there'll be record industry executives or various people or movie executive listening to this going, oh, actually, yes, that story I heard about X.

And I've slightly tried to brush it under the carpet because I just hope it won't happen again, because actually we've got the new movie coming out and that's gonna do big numbers. Those people, you think at some point this is gonna end up in a court of law and at some point your children are gonna read that you didn't do anything about it.

You didn't do anything, yeah. I mean, we should say that this is as old as the entertainment industry. If you think of all the cover-ups at MGM, just as right in the golden ages of Hollywood, what they had to do to the stars, people like Judy Garland, how they were sort of, I don't know, given drugs to wake them up and given drugs to go to sleep and all of these things and crimes covered up, crimes by stars, all the way up to murder and things like that.

The people who know and don't say anything, particularly who have power, I thought it was interesting. I remember at the time when everything came out about Harvey Weinstein, everybody of course didn't know anything. Quentin Tarantino said, I knew enough to do more than I did, which I think is a pretty good way of putting it. And I think when you look at someone like Epstein and you look at, you know, Trump even making a speech saying he likes his girls on the young side, you know, he said it out loud, but you don't think that sort of someone like Bill Clinton noticed certain behaviors. I mean, I do, I think he did. And the former, it's interesting, the former telephone engineer on Epstein's private island said, you tell yourself that you didn't know for sure and that you never really saw anything,

but that is all just rationalization. Jeffrey Epstein, he was a guy who concealed his deviants very well, but he didn't conceal it that well. And I agree because when we talk about these people, we always say they ran a sophisticated operation. Well, in the case of Epstein, if your island is known locally as Pido Island, how sophisticated is it really? If people call your plane the Lolita Express. In the case of, you know, Diddy, when there were just so many people involved, you can see it's like a sort of, you know, army of people. How sophisticated is this operation really? When you are a serial abuser, one of the things you do is you make everyone complicit. You

make anyone who comes into your orbit complicit with you. So you can see when Diddy had his white parties, which were the huge parties he used to have in the Hamptons. And, you know, it was the hottest ticket in town. And those white parties, of course, every tale you ever hear of them, they are, you know, wildly excessive and, you know, all sorts of things going on. The culture was there. The culture was evident. And of course there were, you know, legal freak-offs during those. There were, you know, you push the envelope as far as you can without anyone, you know, ever doing anything illegal.

And so everyone that goes to that, the capios of this world, you know, all of these people had been to these parties and gone, oh my God, it's crazy, he's a crazy guy. What an amazing time we had. And then when something comes out that's slightly beyond the pale, they go, do you know what, we were all at his parties and we just thought it was a bit full

of Rome. So I sort of get that, you know, perhaps Diddy in his private life, he's the same, he's a bit crazy. And the further and further it gets, the more and more, the deeper and deeper you're in, we're all human beings, okay? Security guards, post stars, everyone. We're flawed. It's quite hard to navigate one's way through the world. It's quite hard when you're put into an environment where there's a huge power struggle and huge power structures above you. It's difficult.

It's very difficult to be the first person to say something. It's particularly difficult to be the first person to say something if you're on a wage and you're junior and you're not gonna be believed. The easiest way it is to say something is if you're on a wage and you're junior and you're not going to be believed. The easiest way it is to say something is if you're someone's boss or if you're the record company executive. Those are the people who can actually say, do you know what, this guy made us 800 million last year, but we're getting rid of him. We're taking all of our money out of his record label, all of those things. But they're going, you know what, why don't we wait five

years for the lawsuit and then we'll cut our ties with him. You know, there's all sorts of sponsors. You think, you knew, there's people, you know, people know and they don't know, as you so beautifully pointed out there. It's the same with people like Mohammed Fayyad and Harrods and all of that. His whole stewardship, his whole sort of imperium at Harrods was rotten all the way down. It was really interesting when, of course, he, as I say, you know, he ran his race and he got away with it.

But when all of that stuff came out, you thought the sheer number of people again, so you're talking about spokesmen and security and lawyers who I always think are like mob lawyers, because if you bat away the same type of accusation that many times, then please don't think you work in some esteemed part of the legal profession. You're like a mob lawyer, you really are. And it was interesting, oh my God, there were doctors who did purity tests on these young women. I mean, just absolutely horrific, the whole Harrod story. But I was reading something by Henry Porter, who wrote it in The Guardian about some sort of investigative run. And this is right back in the day. This is, you this is many, many, many years, decades ago, about dealing with Fayyad's people at the time. And he

said, he'd been left with the eerie sense that we'd been dealing with a foreign power, a fiefdom, which despite its real location in Knightsbridge operated quite independently from the rest of Britain with a security service of its own, an armed police force and a tyrant in command. Well, couldn't that read across to the Diddy case, to all of these things? And it is the sort of professional classes involved in that, as I say, the sort of lawyers and the doctors and the same in the case of Diddy. And as you say, the people who can count

as some form of peer or even superior have an absolute obligation to say something no matter how much money is being made. I would say it's tricky because doctors and lawyers, again, if you're a serial abuser, then you're very good at working out who will abet you. And there are doctors and lawyers who are not nice people and who are amoral and will gladly help you. Genuinely, I'm sure that Muhammad Al-Fayyad's doctor is not going home every night, you know, kind of go, oh, should I, shouldn't I, oh, I don't know, did I do something bad? It's not something that crosses her mind.

You know, she's doing a job that she squared off with herself, and she's absolutely fine with it. Same with lawyers. You know, the people who shouldn't have that amorality are the people bankrolling these things, especially stars early in their career. Look, Diddy got to the stage where he's bankrolling himself and, you know, his record company is his own record company. He does not have a boss, he does not have a superior. All he actually has in when you get to that stage are, you know,

sponsors and, you know, the agio he teamed up with to make a some sort of alcohol, which is a original move for a celebrity. You will always find support staff. You will always find people who are as amoral as you in your gang. And they're not gonna take a moral stance on what you do. But the people who are making the money very, very early on, I think it's beholden on them to say what they see

and to discuss with people what they see. And for everyone just to say out loud, can I just say, I saw this at the weekend, I saw Diddy do this at the weekend, what do we all think as a company about that? I'm not gonna keep this a secret, cause I saw it. What do we all think as a company? If everyone goes, oh, that's fine,

that's just Diddy being Diddy, great, we move on. If two or three people on your staff are going, do you know what, I'm not sure about that, then maybe we have a lot of thinking about it and make someone else a pop star. I mean, there's plenty of people who want to be it and there's plenty of people who won't abuse people who want to be movie stars and pop stars. There's plenty of people out there who will make you money. Plenty of people out there with great ideas who will make the world a better place and who will

make you a load of money as well. And the idea that this behaviour is sort of correlated with talent and artistry is the most sort of insidious of all and of course it isn't. It's very important that that particular sort of link is broken to think that oh you know a certain amount of abuse is always permissible. They say yeah but that's you know it's just the way they think, they think differently. The rules don't apply to them, creative rules and the rules of society they don't apply. You think you know who the rules of society apply to? Everybody and people who break them tend to be pricks.

I think you're quite right, Richard. So I think we sort of both violently agree on that. But I would say one interesting little thing just to, which is a sort of complete sidebar to this, but did you see that TV network Law and Crime in the US did an AI reconstruction of the trial, which I think is really interesting because obviously weren't allowed cameras in this courtroom. Not all US courts allowed cameras. And they sort of managed to completely get around this by basically restaging the trial entirely with AI. And so there are sort of animated, you know, quite detailed versions of the people and the entire testimony has been put

into their mouths. We've had reconstructions of like really sensational trials and Skynews have done various ones. I can't remember which ones they did in the past. I've seen every now and then you get a big thing and someone will sort of do a reconstruction of it. But I think that has just opened the floodgates. It wasn't glitchy, but it was a bit weird. But you can see that in six months months it'll be far better and they'll do it for all of it. They have to make that illegal surely. People have a similarity to who they're supposed to look like and it gets over supposedly all of these issues. They'll have to work quite quickly to make it illegal because I think that is just going to be the very start of

it anyway. So that trial continues. We've seen the story happen often enough now. Anyone who works in any organisation, there's people we have trouble with who are difficult, who bully a bit, stuff like that. We're not talking about that. We're talking about someone you know for a fact is doing bad things and is going to do worse things. And as industries, I just think there must be a reporting procedure that we can put into place. But the main people it's beholden on are the people who are making all of the money. It's the heads of the record companies, it's the heads of the TV companies, it's the heads of the movie companies.

And the managers of the hotels and the various ones like that. Agents, you know, all sorts of things, all sorts of people. But come on, come on, we need to normalise reporting people in that way. Not accusing people, just reporting people and having an open process where everyone can put their side. I'm just making that completely normal from the start of people's careers. Well now we've taken care of that. Shall we proceed to a break after which we are going to talk about the BBC, including Gary Lineker and LeBoubous. What are they? Join us after

the break to find out. This episode is brought to you by Sky, where you can watch the brand new series of the award winning The Last of Us. So we've both been watching the new season, which once more does not hold back. If we thought the first series was dark and had twists and turns, I'd say this one's darkerer and more twisty turn-over. I think that's correct. The infected are obviously terrifying, but the real danger arguably now

comes from the living, Richard. The first season for people who watch that in a year to watch the second season, you know exactly what you're going to expect here. But this time, I would say there are even more rug pulls and even more extraordinary moments where you go, okay, I didn't see that coming. Beneath the horror, I suppose it's about the fragile ties that bind people together. So grief, revenge, love, the price of survival, which is fairly high.

Now the new characters, Abby and Dina, they have taken off in a whole different direction, which is as you would expect. And without giving anything away for those yet to watch, it does just keep delivering those moments where you think, what, I can't believe they just did that. Watch the brand new season of the award-winning The Last of Us available now on Sky. Welcome back, everybody. Now, we are going to talk about the BBC.

We worry a lot about the future of terrestrial television. We talked about a lot of the jobs involved and Tim Teby made a speech last week about the future of the BBC, which I thought was very, very impressive. We want to talk about some of the things he talked about and whether they're achievable. But then also at the weekend, the news that Gary Lineker is leaving his BBC contract early, we thought, well, let's, should we add those two things together and see where we are with the state of the BBC? Well, yeah, it's very interesting. The speech is the Tim Davies speech, the director general's speech is the kind of kicking off of the charter renewal process. And he centered the whole

thing on trust. And I mean, you know, I don't need to tell everybody that we live in a polarized world. It's interesting. I mean, three quarters of people now say that the UK is divided and six in 10 say they feel exhausted by these divisions. So he sort of reminded people that the BBC, trust is absolutely central to what the BBC does and that we need that more than ever in a world where things are falling away. I think, I thought it was quite interesting how he linked it to growth and how the sort of discussion of the fact that countries where a sense of distrust is most prevalent don't do as well. Erosion of social capital, you know, kind of anti-growth in lots of ways. I mean, if any of us

look at America now and think that its best days are almost definitely ahead of them, I certainly don't see it that way. It's really interesting how quickly that kind of what's been built over 100 years can be eroded in 100 days in terms of soft power. And I think that the BBC and our creative industries in general are such a huge instrument of soft power. As I've said before, but you know, we kind of export three things in this country, three really big things, financial services, weapons, and the creative industries. And you and I are involved in any two of those. Yeah, exactly. Let's keep everybody guessing. But yeah.

Different too, if you make the best of us as well. Yeah, different. But the UK is the third largest exporter of creative industries in the world. So things you might not be aware of if you believe everything you read, trust in the BBC actually went up in 2024. It's used regularly, iPlayer grew faster in the UK than all other streamers. And it's sort of interesting how they want to continue and how much I think and agree that we need the BBC. Like you'd really try and invent it in countries which are fracturing, but we're lucky enough to have it. In a world of disinformation and misinformation and whatever we think about the the political events of any particular day, that's the great full time that's going to define the

next century. Yeah. Can we believe anything we see? Can we believe anything we hear? And it's very, very easy to build an army of people who don't believe anything because it's the simplest way to make a stupid person feel clever is to give them the arsenal that says nothing is true and be cynical about everything. And no one is trying their best and no one has your best interests at heart. And no one is running a business or no one is running any sort of enterprise

for anything other than their own good. So that's a very easy way to look at the world and a very prevalent way of looking at the world at the moment and those people have been mobilized and those people also tend to you know be very radical about their beliefs. You cannot believe anything and the way they've been sold is everyone is lying to you all the time. And that's the battleground of the next century. And as you say, a place that we can find that does have trust, that a majority of the public can trust and trust for information and trust to tell the truth and trust to look for facts, and where you can trust to have two different people from different perspectives arguing with each other and not screaming at each other seems to be a very useful thing to have in the middle of our culture. At the moment, the whole of our culture, the

online side of our culture is so hugely leveraged so that actually everything that happens now feels like it is run by people who are trying to tell you that, you know, nothing is true and you mustn't believe anything. But actually, most of culture is not that. We do still have a majority of people in this country who think roughly the same thing and who understand the world is incredibly complicated and who understand there are people out there who are trying to do their best, but they're going to be deluged sometime soon. So anything we can do to keep the fight to say, no, actually, as human beings, we're smarter than we're being told we are at the moment. Yeah. I mean, in this country, we have the world's most trusted global news provider.

94% of people at UK adults use the BBC monthly, 75% use the BBC news weekly. Okay. Even young people in the top five, it's the only UK service that is in the top five most used for young people. Can I say by the way, the BBC is great because also the BBC, one thing that's fostered in this country is we have a number of incredibly powerful and smart news organisations. ITN News and Sky News, we actually have a very, very healthy news industry in this country. And I think a lot of that is because we have the BBC in the background.

But we're not just saying just watch the BBC. We're saying we have a healthy news culture in our country. The bits of it aren't, of course, but we do have a healthy news culture. And the BBC is an example of that. Yes, in large part, we're talking about the other public service broadcasters. In fact, Tim Davies said, you know, we need a charter which allows the BBC to extend our partnerships with other public service broadcasters and enables the BBC and other players to build scale together.

What do you think you sort of meant by that? I think that we are going to get to the stage. We all know how much the industry is changing. We all grew up with television being a certain thing. And at some point we're going to have to face the unfortunate thing that they're all going to have to team up, you know, and that whatever branding they might have, BBC, ITV, Channel 4, they're all going to slightly have to become the same thing. They're all going to have to share resources on streaming. So everything's going to have to, you know, the iPlayer, which came along way before a lot of other streaming services is so blue chip, it would be crazy not to use that as the streaming service. But ITV and Channel 4,

they're all going to have to team up and have one streaming service, I think, in order to compete. To explain why, okay, the commercial public service broadcasters, so that's ITV channel four and channel five, their business model is advertising, right? Now what drives success in advertising is reach. It is a reach-based business. But who ironically has the most reach and yet doesn't do advertising is the BBC because iPlayer, as you've said, is this hugely successful thing. They've spent 15 years making it big, it's best, it grew far faster in the UK than any other streaming service last year, including Netflix. But what the BBC care about, because they're much more like Netflix in some ways,

they are a subscription service. They want people to feel okay about paying the license fee. They want people to feel that there's value there and there's value for all. So if you put them together and ITV Channel 4 and Channel 5 shows were available on iPlayer, then what you're doing by getting them in is you're giving them reach because they're getting the reach of iPlayer, which is incomparable and you couldn't possibly build a new brand now. Why would you bother? You've got this amazing thing. You're giving them reach and then you're getting value because people are seeing all these things on iPlayer on a service. It's a sort of win-win. Of course, you would still have ads in ITV or Channel 4, whatever shows. People understand this. Within the iPlayer, you wouldn still have ads in ITV or Channel 4, whatever shows. People understand this, okay? Within the iPlay, you wouldn't have ads in BBC shows because that's how that works.

But we've lived with the linear EPG or whatever it is for a long time and people understand that when they flick between channels, you get different things. And sometimes the programmes will have ads and sometimes they won't. And I totally agree with you. I think that then everyone would win from that particular situation. I think everyone, and listen, there will be holdouts and certainly people would like, you know, those organizations need to negotiate in their own way.

But I think everyone understands that. I think everyone at the BBC, ITV, Five, less so Five maybe, but Channel Four certainly understand at some point, they're all gonna have to come under the same umbrella. They tried to do it a number of years ago with Project Kangaroo, which was 10 years ahead of its time. At that point, everyone goes, no, this is crazy. Why on earth would you do that?

And we find ourselves now in the situation we're in with the streaming services and the collapse in funding for lots of traditional TV. We find ourselves now in a position where we go, now it makes sense. Now it makes a lot of sense for everyone. Everyone can keep their independence, but they share an awful lot of backroom stuff and they share a streaming platform.

I don't see a way in five years that there isn't a streamer, which has all of those BBC terrestrial, although it has all of those terrestrial broadcasters in the same place. I agree with you in it. And it's obvious that it should be iPlayer because it's already built. Um, the one thing I would say is- By the way, they would call it something else, but you will use the should be iPlayer because it's already built. The one thing I would say is... By the way, they will call it something else, but you will use the infrastructure of iPlayer. I would have thought they would call it something else.

Why don't you try and build a new brand in this economy? I just think you'd be mad. Build the one that's already the fastest growing. Yeah, but if I, but there's ego involved, of course, and I don't mean that in a bad way, we're all human beings. But if you're ITV or you're Channel 4, you don't want to see it as being subsumed into BBC iPlayer you want it to be a joint venture which says we're all different we all have completely different skills we need to call it something there's no way they're going to say no we're going to call it iPlayer no way in

a million years. Well they should they should say they're going to call it iPlayer that's an act of madness and I don't care about the individual people's ego, because actually, what's far more important is the future of public service broadcasting. However, one speaking of which, the media act, he was really pushing the government to kind of get on with the media out. I think he's Tim Davey. Yeah, Tim Davey was. But it's interesting. I know I've talked about this before, but you know, they've left out remote controls of this. You know, when you get a telly in this country and because of clever lobbying and whatever, you've got a Netflix button, you've got a YouTube button on your remote control, right? Why don't you have an iPlayer button or a freely button, which is the collaboration between them. They've left it out and it's either

because Ofcom or the government have either ducked it or forgotten about it, whatever. I was talking to someone in Netflix, 80% of Netflix journeys start with the Netflix button on the remote control. It's such an unbelievable that that type of prominence. And we've talked before about prominence in news, you know, like when you buy a phone, if it's got Apple News or Upday or whatever it is, lots of people sort of carry on with that. The BBC spent a really long time trying to build BBC News and it's actually become bigger than that. But before then, most people just have what's on their remote control, have what's on their phone, smart speakers, all those sorts of things, pre-programmed stuff in cars, all of that really matters. So in a way, we already need a kind of

a media act too. But that's another interesting thing that we haven't talked about in the podcast, what people are saying about the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, which I think is a real mess. What I'm reading now and what I keep hearing from people is that they're thinking of breaking it up. So, they're going to break up the whole department and split it between Treasury and education and business. That seems to me like a really would be very bad. It's a huge mistake.

I think culture needs a seat at the cabinet table specifically. I don't know what's going to happen to Lisa Nandy because there's constant talks about what's going to happen to her. People are saying, or maybe Peter Kyle would go in. He again seems to me someone who is, I saw Elson John call him a complete moron on Laura Coomba's show yesterday, which was, I wouldn't necessarily say he's a first class mind, but I do think captured by the tech companies is that there's a lot of people's opinion about him. So I do think they're in quite a dangerous situation and you really need a culture department that is willing to drive forward that media act

and actually add more to it, as I've discussed on things like remote controls or whatever it is like that. Yes, I think if government has a role and you know government roles have changed many times over many years, we live, we talked about this on the podcast a number of times, we live in an era where the march of technology feels inevitable. Okay, it feels absolutely inevitable, like you know, AI, the search engines, all of these big companies, it feels like they're so powerful, there is sort of nothing we can do about it. And we can, you know, raise our voices every now and again, and shake our fist every now and again, but the future is going to be the future. And actually, the role of a

government is to say, I wonder if we could define future in our own way, in the same way that the setting up of the BBC that they didn't have to do that, they just chose as a society to do it in the same way, the setting up of the BBC, that they didn't have to do that. They just chose as a society to do it. In the same way, we didn't have to set up the welfare state after the war. We chose as a society to do it. There are times where you can choose to do something. And I would say now with the march of AI into so many industries and into all of our lives, now is a time for a government to say, as a country, the point of being a government, the government is not, a government is there to say, who do we want to be as a country? Who do we want to be as a country, the point of being a government, the government is not, a government is there to say, who do we want to be as a country? Who do we want to be as a people?

Are there big giant bullies that we want to see off? That's the job of a government. And culture is such an easy place to start with that because it's so ever present all the time. And it's so popular and everybody consumes it all the time. So I would have thought that a few very well aimed cultural blows to some of the big tech giants and to the future of AI wouldn't be a bad way to start the next part of this century.

Absolutely. I really think that it's worth boosting something that other countries would invent if they could. Yes. If only there were examples of polarised and fractured media landscapes for us to look at right now and see what the political result is. Yeah. And also, by the way, some people want that.

But we all know people who thrive on chaos. And that's how they want the country to go. But those of us who don't, we can put our foot down. I thought also Tim Davey talked very smartly about how the future of the BBC is also we can put a foot down. I thought also, Tim Davey talked very smartly about, how the future of the BBC is also on social media. And I think BBC is already the biggest news brand on Instagram, which is achievement

that shouldn't be overlooked. And talking about going on to TikTok and YouTube and all of those things. And again, if anyone's sitting at home thinking, oh God, we don't need to be trendy, we don't need to do this or that, you do. I'm afraid that's where the audience is. I mean, there's no point saying, why don't you just commission more challenging programs on BBC One and beef up the news? Because that's not where the audience is. They're not going to see it. And this audience

is real. This audience has a hunger for information and intelligence. And don't forget, if you're in a generation that grows up in an age't forget, if you're in a generation that grows up in an age of disinformation, and you're smart, which an awful lot of this generation are, you're looking for something. You are looking for someone to give you something. You cannot roll over and just let the algorithm give you everything.

There is a group of people hungry for things, hungry for information, hungry for news. And I felt having listened to Tim Davies' speech, that that's something that he at least understands and will hopefully drag the BBC towards. Absolutely. And as you say, the remit of all these people is public service.

It's not public services, we've always known it, half hour, one hour programs or news in a particular style. It doesn't have to be any of those things. It just has to be public service. And so as you say, to go where the audience is and to do all sorts of different things is part of the future. And we also have to be grown up and understand that the BBC is not going to be perfect and that there are always going to be issues and problems and difficult people who work there. And, you know, I'm compromised. I work, you know, I do a show there.

I mean, it's not, it's a small part of what I do, but I definitely do work there. So you can take everything I'm saying with an interest or I could actually be in the pocket of big BBC. I'm not, I think we have a fight for our culture ahead of us. So it's hard for me to talk about the BBC. My husband works at the BBC. I feel, you know, passionately pro it in every way. But yes,

of course, we have to talk about it. And I, you know, it is difficult. And another thing we have to talk about is this speech, which I'm afraid was a bit overshadowed by an Instagram repost by Gary. And it's difficult. He's now leaving Match of the Day, and he's not going to host the World Cup coverage. Essentially, I was thinking this morning and thinking, you know, that saying all political careers end in failure. I have to say that all stellar BBC careers can often end badly or sadly in one way or another. And it's just, there's something about the organisation. There are so many idiosyncratic things about the BBC, the way it reports on itself all the time. There were all of those things. We know about them.

And in some ways, these things are sort of slightly irresistible, as it were. But I do think when a speech is all about trust and when the future is all about trust, I know that what Gary, I haven't certainly haven't spoken to him about this, but I've read what he said, saying, you know, I think that the situation in Gaza is more important than BBC. You know, of course, of course, but I think that's a false binary. I think many, many things are more important than the BBC. But what is absolutely vital is the free and fair and trusted reporting of those things being brought to the world. And it always has been. And if in any way you are undermining that trust,

then you are undermining something much sort of more important about those things, however well-meaning, however well-meaning, however compassionate. And I should, you know, I think that's really important to say. And I do slightly feel that in lots of ways, and I understand how so many people feel they can't do anything apart from

say things on social media at this time. And we live in an era where people feel like, you know, if you don't say something on social media, then perhaps you don't mind about it, which isn't necessarily the case. But I do think that when so many posts on Instagram and Twitter and whatever are helping to very specific situations. And those are the situations of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. The more we know about these platforms and the more we understand how they monetize discord and how they monetize anger and how they monetize people staying on the platform. I sometimes think that all of us have the potential to be working for those people for

free in a way that actually doesn't sort of help anything particularly. Yeah, culturally, it's fascinating because if you do care a great deal about something, you have two choices if you have a social media following. And that is to say something or to not say something. And people mustn't think that if someone is not saying something then that is them not caring. There is a choice you can make to think if I say something is it going to advance the cause that I believe in? Is it going to make the end of the situation I want to end quicker? Or if I don't say something is that going to actually advance the cause? Or if I say something

is it is it going to actually work in the opposite Or if I say something, is it going to actually work in the opposite direction? I think the way our culture works at the moment, there are arguments for both of those things. So I absolutely understand why some people use their platform in that way, and I understand why some people don't. But I also understand, and by the way, I think Gary understands and Tim Davey understands, that there comes a point where the place the BBC needs to go, and the place Gary Lineker needs to go and the place Gary Lineker needs to go are different places and that's okay because they are different and I think probably they all shook hands together rather happily. You know, you get people who

work at the BBC for a really, really long time and they genuinely care passionately about it and who then leave and you talk to them and they just go, I can wake up in the morning and I don't have to panic that, you know, suddenly I'm going to be on the front page of something. I don't have to panic about every single word of every single thing I say, you know, being picked over. I agree that thing of being picked over, but it's who's doing the picking over sometimes. And I think that those people are often the BBC's enemies. And it does make me laugh somewhat mercilessly when I read the shim amount of coverage of something Gary Lineker said in like the Times or the Sunday Times. And I think, oh, well, I mean, I wonder who's been more of a

poison to this world. Is it Gary Lineker? Or is it Rupert Murdoch, whose, I mean, whose own presenters in America we saw undermining American democracy, something we all took for granted until quite recently and now no longer do. The amount of poison dripped into that body politic by Rupert Murdoch and yet you'll never read about that in the Times or the Sunday Times. So when I see them making endless hair out of it, you know, we wish them all well, but it is a reminder that we are all in the gutter and please, please remember a reminder that we are all in the gutter. And please, please remember that. And we're all in the gutter. Some of us are looking at the stars, but one star we're not going to be looking

at for much longer on the BBC is Gary Denneker. Thank you for winding that up so neatly. That's what we call a button in the business. We sewed a button on the end of it. So we talked about Diddy and the BBC, but now we are going to talk about the biggest news of the week, which is what you did last Thursday. You were, you were in a long queue for a disappointing reason. It's never much of a happy reason, is it, being in a long queue, but I was in the queue

for a Labooboo. Let me briefly describe this thing. It is a little key ring about this big. It is half monster, half fluffy thing. It's a sort of bag charm, I guess. Rihanna's popularized them, Lisa from Blackpink, anyway, this sort of came of thing last year. They cost £17.50 at retail price. Anyhow, I promised my daughter one for a reason. She worked very hard on something that I'd slightly dropped the ball on and we had to do it quite quickly. She said, can I have one? And I said, yes. Obviously I thought you'd be able to buy it on Amazon, like everything other thing that comes into my house, just a constant river of money flowing one way towards Jeff Bezos. And also to be fair towards Laurence Sanchez.

And towards Laurence Sanchez. Which you resent far less. I'm happy to. I'm happy. If anything, I just want to buy it. I'm going to leave here and buy some more stuff. Anyhow. So I said, I'll go on Thursday. She said, oh, you have to go on Thursday because they have drops of the new merchandise of this stuff. And I said, okay, but I'll go on Thursday because like everyone's at school, right? So there's not going to be a queue. Okay. I got to Westfield White City, which any regular listeners of this podcast will know I believe to be in a cursed space. And I got there 45 minutes before the shop opened. The queue I thought was about 250 people, but

I hadn't actually realized it went around a corner. It was about 400 people long at that time. By the way, they're not mothers like me buying them for their children. They are, you know, in their 20s buying them for them. Okay. And it's, it was a very respectful queue. It's really depressing though. Everyone was just on their phones. No one spoke. There was no camaraderie. It's not like prime where, you know, as our producer, Joey mentioned, you just punch someone in Asda and then you can get a bottle. That's not like that. Not that particular craze. I had three and a half hours in this queue. Three and a half hours?

Yes. And when I got 10 people from the front, the very nice people who work in the shop came out. And I've discovered during this queue, by the way, that I wasn't even queuing for the toy. I was queuing for a ticket for the toy that I would come back later before 9pm to get the toy. Okay. So once I'd got over that, I'm 10 from the front and they come out and say, I'm so sorry, we have now sold all our stock. Wow. I know. Wow. So I thought I'm suddenly getting a podcast item out of this. In fact, that's what I was thinking about. So in the queue, I was thinking about this is one of these toys.

There's been a proliferation of these types of toy crazes over the past few years. For me, it used to be sort of generational. Obviously, you go right the way back to when I was a child. There was cabbage patch kids, and then there were beanie babies and things like that. It's almost generational. It's kind of once every 10 years or whatever it is. It's now almost, now so many toys come like this. They come in drops, there's scarcity.

Well, I'll get onto this in a minute, but it reminds me a lot about how De Beers controlled the diamond market, which we'll get to. Very similar. Well, actually, do you know how you used to buy diamonds? In fact, they still do this. De Beers, they completely controlled the diamond supply. That was what was crucial. Okay. So they had rough diamonds and they had to constantly create the exactly right and calibrate the illusion of scarcity. And they have something called the central selling organization, which

is effectively a cartel. If you were a buyer, you were called what was called a site holder. And you were summoned to London 10 times a year. And you go to the Central Selling Organization and there is a private room with a chair. This is genuinely how it happens. There's a chair and a table and they distributed you one cardboard box, like a shoe box. It was a blind box, rather like these Labooboos, can I say, which you don't know what you're buying box, like a shoe box. It was a blind box, rather like these Labooboo's, can I say, which you don't know what you're buying. It's a blind box, you don't know what's inside. And they distribute you one cardboard box, like a shoe box, and it was an assortment of rough diamonds. They chose for you, you were a diamond casting

factory, they chose for you. They gave you what you thought you needed or what they thought was appropriate for the world diamond market. And that was it. It could be a million dollars worth or it could be 30 million dollars worth. You got what you got. As my daughter's teacher used to say, you get what you get and you don't get upset. And that's it. And you pay cash, they never ever reduce their prices. This is just like Laboubu, right? But what they do is they cut back supply so they can create that kind of world within the market. So blind boxes is very interesting and I love the idea that your version of a blind box is diamonds because my version of a blind box would be something different. So when you buy a Labubu, as you say, you literally get a sealed box. You do not know which version of the Labubu you're

going to get because there's all sorts of different versions. You know what version, but you don't know what doll within that version. Yes, yes exactly. So you don't know exactly what you're getting and some are scarcer than others and so you could open the box and get one that's worth a lot of money or you could open the box and get one that you know everyone else has got and there are online marketplaces where you can swap and all those sorts of things. So it's a market so it's almost a form of gambling. Agreed, agreed. What it's exactly like is Panini football stickers. Yeah. So Panini football stickers,

you have no idea which six or five stickers you're gonna get in your thing. You open them up, some of them you've been waiting for ages for, you go into the playground and you can swap them. It's that, but every single one of them, as you say, costs a lot of money. And most of the people who are collecting them

are in their twenties. So it's a weird sort of older online marketplace. And funnily enough, Laboubu is this obsession, of course, with Japanese and Korean culture at the moment. And it's interesting that Laboubu really, really took off when Lisa from Blackpink had one hanging off her bag. And Lisa from Blackpink is virtually the biggest star in the whole world. Younger podcast listeners will know from Blackpink and from her own solo career. Older podcast listeners will know her as Mook from White Lotus. She was, she started that, she was, she bestrides the whole of our culture like a colossus. So she had them. But the US is not the cultural centre of our world anymore. You really realise this when you're, when you go into the shop. But it's sold via a retailer called Pop Mart.

And it's all just, it's Korean media. But that's the interesting thing is because Korea and Japan have got a stranglehold on our popular culture. And China have been going, hold on, why don't we have a stranglehold on popular culture? And actually Laboeba is Chinese.

So Pop Mart is a Chinese company. I think it's not the sort of thing that the Chinese government were thinking, this is the thing we want to spread Chinese culture worldwide. I think the 70 year old men who run China think this might be a bit trite for them. They prefer Nurjar, the big movie they loved, and Wukong, the video game, these things that are based on kind of ancient Chinese law. So I think that Labibu was not the thing they were looking really to break Chinese culture abroad. But this is the first big Chinese entry into the market, which has been dominated by Korea and Japan.

But yeah, anyone in their teens and 20s, the whole cultural axis of the world has shifted. Right, we were obsessed with America. they are obsessed with Japan and Korea, and that's why you're queuing up for three and a half hours to not... So you didn't get anything? No, but no, I didn't. But they're also obsessed, I think, or they don't know any better than, which is my old voice talking, the gamification of the buying process. And I've seen some people say, oh, it's called gamble-ification or whatever it is, but that kind of blind box culture where the kind of risk and uncertainty

and weirdly like actually disappointment is part of the appeal. Like I know someone whose daughter got two boxes for her grandmother for Christmas and they were the same. That seems to me just so rotten, because it's so hard to get them. And rather like gamblers are actually addicted. When people understand gambling addiction, they understand that gambling addiction is an addiction really to losing because that is actually what you know most of the time, that it's a form, it is a complicated and difficult form of self-loathing and all sorts of things like that. But weirdly, just the things that they like, disappointment is part of the appeal and almost thinking of buying things and consumerism as a game of chance, a spin of the wheel.

The interesting thing is, you know, if blind boxes are banned in China, so, you know, for children, the Chinese government understands that's a form of gambling. So, you know, you are not able to buy blind boxes if you're if you're a child in China. Is it sad? I don't think it's new. I think I think I think Panini football stickers were always this just I guess they were a little cheaper. But that's for children. I realize I was trying to buy this for a you know, a 10 year old girl. But in general, as I said, I was I was a freak. I was the freak in the queue. I was not the 20 to 28 year old person who's

buying it for themselves. And the thing itself, you know, people call it like, okay, so let's think about the thing itself, this fluffy little cutie, slight little monster thing. There is a sort of infantilization to all of these things to sort of wanting something like that, I think, in your 20s. And I'm not saying this as a judgment. I've talked before about cosplay and how that sprung up in Japan after the 1990 financial crisis. That retreat, in a world that's basically failed young people, and I really do believe it has, the retreat into childlike things and to comforting things and little treat in the absence of being able to sort of have any wider

purchase on society, I think is linked. And also people do talk about that thing, the lipstick index, you know, that sort of economic indicator that sales of affordable luxury items, which I think you'd class this as, increase in economic downturns. And people think that actually it's a sort of canary in the coal mine. And if you see these things happening, then what's around the corner is a significant economic downturn because, you know, the kind of market knows before you, don't take investment advice from me. I thought after talking about Diddy and the Gary Lineker thing, I thought this would be a lovely, lovely light end to the show. And you're saying this is a precursor to economic Armageddon. I'm not saying it definitely is. Listen, I don't know, but there's something odd that has happened

to consumerism where that is tolerated as part of the process. The blind thing that came from, what were those dreadful little tramps? I hated them. The LOLs. Okay, you don't know what those are. LOL Surprise or a little goal? Sorry. A little things. No. And now those LOL surprises, those were blind boxes. And that was a sort of, and you know, you see the whole, the whole unboxing culture of all of it, but you don't know what's in it. The idea that sort of risk and disappointment is a welcomed part of the consumer experience. I mean, I was, honestly, I love it. You love it. I love, I love, I love,

yeah, I love that sort of thing. Because I, yeah, but I do, but I enjoy I enjoy that sort of thing. You know, you go to a shop, it just makes shopping more fun. I don't care about shopping, right? It doesn't interest me in any way whatsoever. What I do like is a little gamble. Is it a ring quest? You like a ring quest to get a key ring. Right, okay. Yeah, that did me fine. Now, what did your daughter say when you came home without your Le Babu? She was? Lebarbu. She was massively disappointed. I tried to explain that to her for three and a half hours and hadn't done actually any of my work, which I was very worried about. It didn't cut any mustard. Then somebody told me that down the back of the address of a shop where you can buy one for yes, 38 pounds. So basically double, right? And there's no queue, you just walk in. And this is, so the people buying all

the sets are going and then reselling them in shops for, and I'm actually quite surprised they only do a hundred percent markup because honestly after, so I am afraid I spent an absolutely disgusting amount on it. My husband kept texting me saying I'm so surprised you're doing it. It's not the spending up of the markup. I don't think he was surprised about that. But what I can't believe you're in the queue. I'm so surprised you're doing this. I'm honestly surprised. You're really surprising me now. Leave the queue. And I was like, I can't I'm getting closer.

But that's it. You see, you were hooked. They've got you hooked immediately. Honestly, but that's bad. Do you think you're going. They've got you hooked immediately. Yeah, that's bad. Do you think? You're going to be hooked on something. You might as well be queuing up for a little toy. I'm hooked on the latest stuff. I don't need anything more. I don't need to be hooked on keyring cues. I can't be. I tell you what I did think was quite interesting in a slightly more positive thing is that lots of cinemas have started doing like those, you know, like, oh, it's a surprise screening.

So you don't know what you're going to get. And Netflix has that thing, doesn't it? You know, play me something or whatever it's called where you can see. And there are, there are various things that people feel, perhaps people feel like they've been able to curate and decide and whatever too much. So maybe there's an element of that, where an element of chance coming into it is kind of fun and surprising. But yes, I mean, it's not for me, but you know, I'm 104. So why would I have enjoyed the queue? But Laboubou, they're available in your local shop. Yes, you're probably not available in your local shop. They're not available.

Please don't tell anyone there again. Don't take Laboubou advice from me. I'll tell you what you didn't used to get when we were growing up or even in our 20s and 30s. You didn't used to walk down a high street and suddenly for absolutely no reason, see a queue of 49 teenagers outside a random shop. And now every time you go anywhere, you think, oh, it's an enormous queue for

people who just, the shop, either it's for like bowel buns or it's for trainers or it's, you know, a model railway shop. You think, okay, that's interesting. They love queuing. Yeah. Well, there's been a drop. It's the gamification of all of it. I'm going to end on a negative if I carry on much longer. I'm wrapping up here, Richard. I love it. I see. I love it.

My whole career has been a gamification of something or other. I disagree that I don't see that as a reading of your career at all. And I think your career has been something much more open. Listen, you would know more about my career than me. I know. I wouldn't. But I don't have that reading of it of it. I don't feel that you've tried to rip people off and create hype and despair. Oh no,

definitely not that. I don't think gamification is that. I think gamification is just making something more fun. It's having quests is you know achieving that you know that's what I like. Well let's end on your incorrect opinion then. Have you any recommendations? That's a head of a catchphrase by the way. No, all my recommendations I'm afraid would be watching the Bezerra d'Italia with Italian commentary which I'm absolutely obsessed with. Is it coming past the house? It is, yeah, so we're not going to be able to get out of the house tomorrow but I love listening to foreign language commentary on something because I have no idea what they're saying at any point. They do not stop talking at

any point but the rhythms of it are so familiar to me and no idea what they're saying at any point. They do not stop talking at any point, but the rhythms of it are so familiar to me. And I know when they're doing a gag, I know when they're doing banter, I know when they're talking about someone being disappointing. The whole thing I've loved watching, but I know that doesn't count as a recommendation.

I apologize to everyone. That sounds like being with me on this podcast, but anyway, we have a questions and answers episode coming up, as usual on Thursday. And for our members, if you want to join, it's the rest is entertainment.com. We have a bonus episode about Pixar, the whole story of Pixar, which is a really interesting one. Can I say, because I know people worry that Lisa Lanlotti are being well looked after. There's people living in the house looking after Lisa Lanlotti. You mustn't worry. Well, while we're in Italy, they are being loved and fed.

Thank you so much for that. And I look very much forward to seeing you on Thursday. See if we did end on some good news. See you on Thursday. See you on Thursday. Well, that brings us to the end of another episode of The Rest Is Entertainment brought to you by our friends at Sky. I have been catching up on The Last Of Us recently, such a gripping watch. Absolutely right. The critics are fairly unanimous. It's dark and intense, brilliantly done, they're all saying, especially on your sky glass with its high quality screen. Even those very low lit scenes, every flicker, every detail, it really pulls you in.

One minute you'll be stretched out on the sofa, the next you'll be gripping the cushion and that is not a euphemism. The picture quality really just brings everything to life from the comfort of your living room. It feels properly cinematic, like the room fades away and you're in the thick of it. Until the clickers show up, then it feels a bit too real. That's when you reach for the blanket. The perfect night in. Couldn't agree more, so for anyone wanting to upgrade their screen time, head to Sky.com

and check out Sky TV.