The Rest Is Entertainment - The Oscars, Ozempic & Wonka

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

With the Oscars last night we bring you an earlier than billed episode as Richard and Marina reflect on Al Pacino's 'best picture' announcement fluff, the real cost of "what are you wearing?" and the Hollywood epidemic of Ozempic. It's not all about the Oscars though, as Richard celebrates Channel 5's fast turnaround documentaries in light of a forthcoming Glasgow Willy Wonka tell-all. Plus, is boxing now a reality show after the announcement of Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson coming to Netflix. Twitter: @restisents Email: [e-mail] Producer: Neil Fearn Executive Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Recommendations; Marina - Hits, Flops & Other Illusions (read) Richard - One Day (watch) 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/trie It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello and welcome to another episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde. And me, Richard Osman. Hello, everybody. Hello, Marina. Hello, Richard. It's the morning after the Oscars. It is the morning after the Oscars. Once again, we came away empty-handed. Yes, but we won in many ways because if you live in this country, you don't actually have to watch the ceremony as live. You can just watch it in the morning. You get all the clips, all the red carpet, and you think,

oh yeah, now I've covered this one off. But you don't have to sit through all the tedium, and there is a huge amount in it. The way all British people experience the Oscars is just watching Ross King on Good Morning Britain. It was actually shorter than expected, though, the Oscars ceremony, because Al Pacino cocked up the announcement of Best Picture, which went to Oppenheimer. And he opened the envelope and instead of reading out all the 10 nominees for Best Pictures, just cut straight to this chase by saying, my eyes see Oppenheimer. My eyes see

Oppenheimer. It sounds like when they say, do you know what the shortest verse in the Bible is? It is my eyes see Oppenheimer. It does not sound like Al Pacino dialogue. Like, well done, you have got one job. It's not really that long ago that they announced La La Land instead of Moonlight.

You know, PricewaterhouseCoopers audits the Oscars. Do you know what? I knew we'd get onto PricewaterhouseCoopers. Sorry, yeah, this is a joke,

this podcast. I didn't think we'd get onto them this quickly. Yeah, but I mean, I have to say, they've got one job. You know, the rest is money

currently talking about the cinematography yeah and we're talking about they're doing the red carpet and the surgery which we'll come on to also al Pacino's been to an awful lot of award ceremonies i mean you must understand the sort of grammar of an award ceremony that don't just open it and go my icy oppenheimer because like everyone in the audience just went oh sorry can i just say he's a new dad Richard, at age 82 or 83 or whatever he is. He's just had a baby. Congratulations, Al. Someone 54 years younger than him.

And so, you know, it's possible that those late nights doing the nappies, diapers, as they say in America, are taking away some of his focus. Or perhaps he's AI Pacino. That would work written down. Written down, that's actually not a bad joke. Written down, that is. Now I say it out loud. Yeah, it needs help. That's very poor indeed.

It was good in a way that he did make that slight gaffe because there were no gaffes, really, which makes the ceremony less fun. And you need them. And also it made the point even clearer that we knew all the way in that this was going, right from the start of awards ceremonies, which was a month ago,

that this was sort of going to be a coronation for christopher nolan and for oppenheimer and whether or not you think it's christopher nolan's best film there is much more to the academy these days where they feel that oh dear there's someone who's really really big who people sort of credit with getting people back to the cinemas after the pandemic and who hasn't got an oscar now in the old days they were very relaxed about not giving people oscars howard hawks never got an oscar uh alfred hitchcock never got an oscar you know garbo never got a dietrich have fred astaire all these kind of great big tom cruise no he has had an oscar hasn't he tom cruise did you not get it for born on the fourth of july oh yeah you could sorry do you know what i'm thinking of j Jason Statham. Yeah, I'm thinking of Jason Statham. Anyhow, you need that.

You kind of need some viral moment. And they didn't have a lot of those, I must say. The red carpet, to me, it's almost like it's a sort of Lenny Riefenstahl event now. It is so organised. And the combination between the big fashion brands. There's two great big nights of the year for fashion, the Oscars and the Met Gala. I thought you were going to say the TV Quick Awards. Not the TV Quick Awards, but I'm sure that they do count.

But even for something like the Golden Globes, those agencies that run kind of metrics and impact and whatever say that just the red carpet of that is worth about $90 million to the fashion brands and so if you're a really big fashion brand and your stuff is out there like i don't know like louis vuitton emma stone and dave i enjoyed randolph who were both in louis vuitton so this is a big deal so louis vuitton is the real winner that louis vuitton is the real winner but everyone gets contracts you get paid and all the brands say we don't pay people to wear the dresses and all the brands do and they might try and say oh they were doing some promotional work or whatever, but you can get paid. We're talking about like non-Oscars ceremonies.

You can get paid tens of thousands. You might get paid up to 250,000 to wear a dress. And in some very rare cases, I saw a great fashion expert, Lauren Sherman, discussing this week, you can get a million for one night wearing a dress. What, me? And they will all deny it. Hold on.

Give me details about how I can get one million for one night wearing a dress. I will all deny it hold on give me details about how i can get one million because you will one night wearing a dress oh my god i did but it's the other interesting thing for years the thing on twitter was stop asking actresses what designer they're wearing you think oh no that's part of their contract believe me they want you to ask because if they don't get asked they're going to go along and the red carpet as well which people i noticed this year the way they shot the red carpet and the way they did the sort of wide shots they didn't do like a big wide shot so you'd see a lot of people think with red carpets oh there's just a small red carpet outside the thing and everyone walks past and gets photographed in front of the statue or whatever sometimes they are absolutely enormous and they're quite far from the venue in some in the kodak

theater that's a different thing it's the oscars and they try and make it a bit more like, you know, as live and how it actually is. But it is enormous, this thing. It goes on for absolutely miles, and it is a place of absolute military efficiency. And they are shouted at. And then, you know, you're in this awful situation where you're a photographer and you think,

yeah, I don't want your husband in there, actually. So they have to shout out, can we have one just for fashion? And that is the trade euphemism for get your husband out of the picture because nobody cares about him fashion there's if you ever go to like premieres and things like that which i very rarely do but sometimes you know something will crop up and there'll be as you say there'll be like a red carpet and say you turn up at the red carpet but the red carpet has like about four different lanes on it yeah uh for and like you go hold on i'm in lane four and there's no photographers in lane four so they have a red carpet but it has is it's really very carefully segregated you think i don't appear to be walking down the same path as hugh grant is

that what has happened here which one of us is in the a list but they want to put you and they also want the big stars want to turn up at the very end because they don't want to have to you know turn up at sort of three in the afternoon and go really, really slowly down it and then have to sit in their seat for even longer than they would wish to. One of the big stories on the red carpet this year is a Zen pic. Yes, a Zen pic is the real winner. It was even advertised during the Oscars, I think. That's really interesting.

Which is quite on the nose. Eli Lilly, who do a version of a semaglutide drug, a weight loss drug, and they actually advertised in the week beforehand rather sort of finger-wagging adverts saying, it's really bad that people are using this to get into a dress, which seemed really like,

okay, I guess you're talking about Hollywood a few days out from the Oscars. So they've attempted to have their cake and eat it, have they, by having an advert there? Or to have their cake and eat it, have they, by having an advert there? Or not to have their cake because they have lost their appetite. Apparently the food at these parties is now just completely left. You would have thought that that would always have been the case,

but apparently it wasn't. Having starved themselves to get into these dresses for weeks and months in many cases, the food at the parties afterwards was always very well consumed. I remember, I think Graydon Carter said, when I did the Vanity Fair party, he said, I always had starters on the plates. You arrive and you get there

and you sit down and your starter's already on your plate because people are really hungry. There's a great article about a Zempik last week and it was talking about the effect it's had on Hollywood because a lot of them are on it. Yeah. Okay, let's name names, but a lot of them are taking... Just assume everyone's on it, by the way. Yeah, exactly. It's much easier to assume everyone's on it. okay let's listen let's name names but a lot of them are taking just assume everyone's on it by the way yeah it's much easier to assume everyone's but it's saying the restaurant business in hollywood is genuinely struggling yeah nobody's eating

dinner people are not hungry anymore it was talking about like makeup artists but saying there's people's faces are really changing shape the job we're having to do is slightly different the people who loved it were the were the fashion designers who said listen who believe that you can never be too i'm not suggesting that i think you can never be too thin but the the fashion designers think this is great everyone fits into our sample sizes and this is a lot easier for us and the personal trainers were saying we have to literally the first 15 minutes of most sessions is somebody upstairs throwing up but yeah it's like an epidemic over there right yeah I think the first big one was when um for the Met Gala when Kim Kardashian wore that dress that Marilyn Monroe had sang

happy birthday to JFK and and she had lost a massive amount of weight even though she doesn't have a whole lot at all to lose to get into this thing and she did some extraordinary series of interviews about you know I had to be so disciplined eating my steamed fish and vegetables. You know my feelings about the steamed fish and vegetable idea. It passes for conversation from a celebrity. But she gave so many of these interviews. It's like, you know, you can't in three weeks lose what you did. So that was the first.

I think she was the real kind of canary in the coal mine for it and people thinking, oh, my God, what is this thing? Jockeys used to give themselves tapeworms. Yeah. Mariah Callas did that. I think she swallowed about five in her life. No, did she? Mm-hmm.

Wow. So listen, a Zenpick is very much the new tapeworm. Yes. Like everything's always one up from leeches, isn't it? Do you know what? The one thing I will say, no gaffs or anything like that. It felt like a proper old-fashioned big movie night. And the movie industry's been through some terrible times.

It's got more terrible times to come, I'm sure. But it felt like you've got Oppenheimer, you've got Barbie, you've got some great supporting films, you've got like American Fiction, Anatomy of a Force, like proper movies out there. But it's unusual, I think, that people had seen Barbie and they'd seen Oppenheimer. And I have to say, in the last few years,

you're looking at the best picture list and nobody's gone to the multiplex to see these things. I'm not saying they haven't kind of made money, but they're on smaller budgets and they're not the mainstream of what people go and see. But they've had a very great thing for themselves this year with the Academy because people had seen two billion dollar movies. But I think this is a blip.

Oh, do you think so this will be we'll look back on this and like next year we'll be back to Kung Fu Panda 4 will be uh well it does none of those films get nominated so you've got this two-track thing where you've got the awards films um which people like for prestige and more and more like we were talking about things like Saudi money you'll see that kind of money backing those kind of prestige features but people don't money backing those kind of prestige features but people don't throng to see essentially then you have movies which are popular which might be superhero franchise or things based on video games or whatever it is but they never get nominated and I think that they've been really lucky with that this year where people have seen so many people have seen two of the mega and it

had to happen the same weekend there with the Barbenheimer phenomenon people have seen two of the mega and it had to happen the same weekend there with the barbenheimer phenomenon people have seen those films and that counts for something because it makes people feel like this isn't some kind of weird self-indulgent thing that i mean it's kind of weird self-indulgent thing like all award ceremonies but it's not something that is so by the way congratulations on your podcast of the year uh nomination talking about award ceremonies we are nominated yeah broadcasting, Broadcasting Press. So I know that you won't be going because you don't approve of that sort of thing, but we are going to have a great old time.

Anyway, that aside. Now, you say it's a blip, but I wonder, I mean, the one thing you know about Hollywood is the one thing that attracts money is what worked last. What was the last thing to work? Let's do that again. And you would hope maybe the success of Oppenheimer means that there are projects that wouldn't have got greenlit, say, two years ago, which now will get greenlit. So maybe don't do that. said something quite good in his speech on that on the which was quite sort of political for within the town as it were he said um you know a lot of people passed on this movie so many people passed on this movie and i'm really glad it got made but you know just don't forget that a 200 million

dollar tentpole is also a risk and instead of making 200 million dollar tentpoles how about you make 20 10 million dollar films And it got a huge round of applause because I guess people, in lots of ways, people wish that they suddenly might find it more interesting as a project, as an actor to be involved in those type of films than basically doing a great big green screen superhero performance,

which has kind of eaten the market. If that could happen, that might be exciting. And yet it takes a long time for the supertanker to turn around. And they have essentially bet the farm on these kind of slates where everything is propped up by superhero or video game franchises

or maybe now after Barbie toy franchises. Or people who make nuclear reactors. Well, maybe, maybe. But Christopher Nolan is a sort of category of one, isn't he? And those are very expensive films and people believe that there's something about him

that can make kind of high art that whether or not you think it's high art but it can make something that they regard as high art and it can you know bring people back to cinemas after the pandemic tenet was really people held up as a sort of example like gosh i can't believe you know he'll only ever do theatrical release he's like tom cruise if it doesn't have a theatrical release he's not interested he's not a television star never won an oscar of course he will i'm sorry i've just looked that up tom cruise has not won he has been nominated four times but he has not won an oscar i don't know why i thought him could picture him winning for born on the fourth of july just uh and i've just looked it up and apparently jason statham has he has won he's won four oscars he's not there with katherine

hepburn in so many ways um i thought it was hosted by either Jimmy Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon. I can never remember which. But I thought it did a great job. Nice gags, proper, again, just an absolutely safe pair of hands, which is what you need. You think, oh, this is proper old school Oscars from years ago. It gave me a sense of optimism. Anyway, the success of Oppenheimer,

the fact that there's movies like American Fiction and Poor Things and Anatomy of a Fool, unusual movies being out there, the fact that there's movies like American Fiction and Poor Things and Anatomy of a Fool, unusual movies being out there, the fact that you've got this sort of ceremony that seems to work and everyone, you know, all the stars were there and there's big new stars, you know, Cillian Murphy and Emma Stone winning

and Margot Robbie there as a producer and lots of female producers winning big. I just think it gave me some optimism for that industry. And also, after 37 attempts, Godzilla finally won an Oscar. That's the big news. They find it for visual effects, so Godzilla finally got one as well. Box office receipts are going to be really down this year,

so I have to temper that note of optimism that you have. That's not like you. But I'm a big fan of what Cord Jefferson said, and I would love to see the same money being used to make a series of different films, and how many of the big tentpoles have essentially been flops for however many hundreds of millions of dollars. And also maybe make them shorter would be another note. I was thinking, as an Oppenheimer, listen,

it's nice that there's a big movie that you can have an opinion on. My opinion is imagine the film it was if you lost that last hour. I just think in Eurovision Song Contest, you can't go over three minutes. And I would say two hours 15. If your film is longer than two hours 15 minutes, you stop it there. I think it should be an hour 45. And you've got to really argue that you're making an epic if it goes to two 15. Honestly, I was trying to be kind of liberal liberal about it i would i would yeah 130 genuinely here's a category next

year for the oscars best film under an hour and 45 minutes imagine there'd be so many films in the edit going if we just knock another 17 minutes off this we could be eligible for the oscar yeah so somewhere in between best short feature and best film. I thought best picture was the Kate Middleton one. That's what I thought. Manipulated image. We'll see how that plays out. Yes. We may discuss this in full next week.

Yeah, exactly. So that's the Oscars. A Zen pic and films that are too long. Now, what else are we going to talk about? I wanted to talk about Channel 5, if I may. Please. Going from Oscars to Channel 5 five i want to talk specifically about their documentary output because this weekend they have a fast turnaround documentary about um the wonka land fiasco in glasgow which has entertained us all so mightily genuinely i guarantee i will watch and i genuinely guarantee

another million and a half or two million people will watch as well and it just shines a light on uh how brilliant channel five's documentaries are there's the fast turnaround ones which we'll talk about but they're so amazing at putting their fingers on what people are interested in it's like seo isn't it it's it really is it's almost like it's like human search engine optimization. Could we not do this really quite quickly? And the answer is yes, and particularly in the case of this Wonka one. You've got a lot of actors who either weren't paid or were...

Sorry, I didn't want to shame the House of Illuminati who organized this Wonka experience. The real Illuminati are obviously far more organized. But they... Most recently they did, I think, Al Pacino's Oscar speech speech yes they they put that one on they threw a great speech obviously all the characters who all the actors either they didn't get paid or they got paid very belatedly and they want to talk everyone's kind of quite glad to have been part of it so they're kind of the dream fast turnaround exactly and also it's absolutely one of those things that we want to hear make that

three hours long yeah okay and i'll keep watching it uh so they're doing that um they're very good at those those fast turnarounds uh ones and by and large they sort of give them to to itn or to mentor and it's very very very very hard to turn around those shows they did a great one on captain tom where did the money go uh see i, these are the things that people really, and I suppose what people don't often understand, and a lot of people say this to me, is like, but why couldn't you make a television programme about that? You're like, oh my God, you know, television takes so long to make

and blah, blah, but it doesn't have to. And for something like this, particularly, a lot of these people have current affairs backgrounds, so they're not stressed out. Some of them have, I remember reading an interview with one some years ago and he was um i think they it was an oscar pistorius documentary pistorius had been arrested and because we have a different it's not our legal system you even if you write stories about what had happened or make documentaries about it you're not in contempt of court which if he'd been was being tried under british law you would have been so someone had

said to this guy at like 4.30 on a Friday afternoon, let's have a Pistorius documentary. By Sunday morning, he was with a crew in Johannesburg. Wow. And all of these people have worked in war zones, they've done all sorts of things, so they don't get stressed and they can do fast turnaround. Well, that's it.

Well, you need two different things. You need an incredible crew of people who can do it. Exactly what you're saying. The sort of people who can be told with 24 hours notice. You've got to be in Johannesburg. But not only can shoot it, but also working out what the edit is as they go along. Because you're not overshooting at all. You've got to work out exactly what your story is and get it.

And then something unusual happens. You've got to sort of subsume that into your story as well. But they're brilliant at doing it, as they meant on an ITN. Someone said you can never have enough GVs, which is a general view. So if you're stuck they should be shooting at all points the second he got to johannesburg's like if we're not shooting we're making a mistake so let's get the outside a gv the general view of a property so they have the you have the outside of almost every possible house or property or like office or anything

featured in this story and then you're just banking stuff that you can use one way or another. Which either you use to say your narrative is now we're here or you use for your edit. You just sort of drop them in. So you need that. And the people who do that, it's extraordinary how they do it. But you also need at the channel somebody who can say yes within five minutes or no within five minutes.

This is not something that happens at the BBC. It is not something that happens at virtually any channel, but Channel 5 are very, very good. They've got a very small team. Ben Frow runs it. He's very, very instinctive. And if you do want to make a vast turnaround documentary, you can't have a commissioner

who takes a week and a half thinking about it. You need a quick yes. You need a quick yes. It needs to be five or ten minutes, and they're set up to do that at Channel 5 five you also need a channel who are happy to change their schedules at a moment's notice and to say look this is not going to be in the radio times but you know we hope that the social media and stuff might you know promote it anyway and they have that at channel five as well they're very happy to move their schedules around and you know it

really really pays off for them but that's incredibly rare to have a commissioner who will just it's more like a news editor yes so a newsletter has to well what they're sort of doing in many ways is what the sunday papers do when they there's a big news story of the week and then they're in the news reviews and this is a sort of historic thing but you know you'd have a much deeper analysis of that and someone would have gone to the town where the by-election happened or whatever it was and try and give you the story behind the music, as it were. But done very quickly. Yeah. And they're doing that for TV.

So they do those fast turnaround ones. But I think their general documentary output is also extraordinary. Talk about a channel who knows their audience. They're just about to do their fourth Air fryer documentary of the year right all of which by the way have rated over a million and you know a million today's money is a lot is a lot of people that's if you're four or five or bbc2 you kill for a million they did uh they did christmas made easy that's an air fryer one they did air fries versus microwaves was one of theirs they did air

fries do you know what you're missing not if you've watched the previous two big air fryer and they they're about to do air fry is the easy way to lose weight that's four within three months but all of which rate and again because you have a commissioning team there who sort of understands what normal human beings are interested in we've got generations of producers who make programs about what they think people should be watching whereas channel five are very happy just to make programs about what people are actually interested in it comes back to that seo thing that they almost are looking at the sort of top trends and thinking how quickly could we do this and why haven't we done this but it also has to be what's your sensibility as a human being yeah if you wake up in the morning and think why is everyone talking

about air fryers, which I'm guessing someone like Ben Frow does, listen, that's no judgment. I do the same. Then, of course, you commission a documentary about air fryers. If you wake up in the morning and you're thinking about the latest Philip Roth novel, you know, you're probably not going to commission

a documentary on air fryers. You're not your viewers. You're not your viewers. Exactly right. And I think, funnily enough, i talked to a couple of people at channel five about this on friday and they were on an away day at hampton court which is the most channel five thing imaginable so they've done all those they also do inside the m&s food hall yes tick i'm interested they do a day in the life of tesco yes tick i'm interested they've done the secrets

of aldi the secrets of Lidl I'm interested in all of these things because that's our everyday life. They did fall slightly foul of when the Titanic sub went down they did a really fast turnaround documentary and I think that it was I'm pretty sure I'm right in saying that it was was going to be on air at the time that the oxygen was scheduled to run out. As it turned out, before then, there was discovered that there'd been some debris and what have you. That was, for some, too fast a turnaround. But I think, did Dan Walker present that? And he was like, this is not a fast turnaround documentary.

It's a new special. Oh, I think they cut live, didn't they, to the press conference? Yes. Yes, it's interesting that, yeah, that's somewhere in between the two, isn't it? Well, he kept saying, this is a new special, but it had not been billed as a new special, but it became sort of, because I think that there was a little bit of backlash, the too fast turnaround, the too soon turnaround documentary. Yes, it's like us not wanting to talk about the Kate Middleton photograph.

Yeah. Yeah. They have amazing casting. We've talked before about Ben Fogel goes to Chernobyl, and everyone's just going, oh, my God, really, if they scrape the bottom of the barrel. And it was massive rating, massive rating, because people are interested in Chernobyl and people like Ben Fogel.

Even this week, Ben Fogel's in the Congo. I was watching, he had a thing called the Motorway Map of Britain, which is like the history of Britain's motorways, which I saw, again, the first two minutes of, and the archive was so great and the story was so great and it talked about the birth of service stations i was i watched the whole hour you know that's just great telly well made about things that people are interested in they are very interesting the people they have to do in their documentaries ben fogel they have alexander armstrong yes inside the royal palaces i started watching one of those

just so i could send him like a snarky message and I watched all the way to the end because it was brilliant. Susan Kalman, they have Nick Knowles going on trains. They have Tony Robinson going around the world on trains. Jay Blades, they've got Michael Palin. Oh, yes. They know who people want to watch. It's really well run.

And then they send them to interesting places. Zahra's always off to Iceland and South Korea and Iceland the country, by the way, but they should also send it to interesting places aren't there's always off to iceland and south korea and so and iceland the country by the way but they should also send to ice in the shop that's a documentary um here's a documentary that i've just thought of but this is a winner air fryers versus ozempic you give 10 people an air fryer you give 10 people to zempic one month you see who loses the most weight. Okay, I'd watch. Yeah. I think I know the answer, regrettably.

Yeah, exactly. It's not the air fryer. Imagine both. Yeah, imagine both, yes. But in some senses, it's almost like something like podcasts, which obviously has a low overhead and you can turn around immediately. Yeah. And there's something about the spirit of this particular age that responds to that. And so I think that having lent into that at Channel 5, they've done very done very well with it well i think it's an object lesson in two things which is there's an

audience which has been forgotten in the sort of rush for youth or rush for relevancy or you know there's that audience have been forgotten and channel five have not forgotten them and that audience watches an awful lot of television and and they watch it on linear and they watch it on linear which is incredible um for a channel like channel five who by the way the the suite of channels have raised their share over the last couple of years which is unheard of that's like raising your share of you know it's like a betamax company like raising market share in the in in the mid 80s and secondly it has a very very lean and linear commissioning process. Two people say yes and it's done.

And those people are very good at saying yes or very good at saying no as well. And it's sort of not rocket science in a funny kind of way. When you see a channel that is run in that way for its audience and done in a very neat, very smart way and is making money for people, you think, well, it is doable at a commercial broadcaster different channels have completely different issues of course but channel five if you wanted to do a template five years ago of how they should have run it it's been run exactly like that i think sometimes we have to give credit where it's due and there are success stories out there and channel five air fryers and willy wonka output is one of them well so that's the willie wonka

documentary on channel 5 which i think is this saturday march the 16th yeah i will be watching shall we have a quick break let's and when we're coming back from the break we're going to talk about jake paul versus mike tyson Tyson. and you won't want to miss it. So make every Wednesday a whopper Wednesday, only at Burger King, where you rule. Welcome back to The Rest Is Entertainment. We've done Oscars, we've done Channel 5 documentaries. What next? We are doing boxing, or is it boxing?

Because it's essentially a YouTuber, Jake Paul, who started on Vine. He's essentially a youtuber Jake Paul who started on vine he's become a massively successful youtuber alongside his brother Logan Paul and he is going to fight Mike Tyson at 58 at the time of the fight they're gonna it's gonna happen on July the 20th at the home of the Dallas Cowboys Dallas uh the AT&T stadium, and it will be absolutely massive. It will be, and it's not his first fight, Jake Paul. He's made it, as you say, he started on Vine and then did lots of YouTube videos.

He then sort of pivoted to become a very unsuccessful rapper. He had, by the way, the third most disliked video in YouTube history, his first rap single, which was It's Like Every Day. So I looked up the top 10 lists. I thought this would be interesting and it's really boring, the list. It's like beefs and stuff. But he had the third most disliked.

He's made a living on being disliked. And he, his brother, Logan Paul, who we'll get onto, got into all sorts of trouble. Jake has re-pivoted into becoming a boxer. The first fight was his brother, Logan Logan was called up by KSI, who's a British YouTuber, again, absolutely massive. And Logan fought KSI. Twice.

Twice. And Jake fought KSI's brother, again, in front of an enormous crowd. But can I, the statistics on that are so absolutely wild, okay? When Logan Paul fights KSI, boxing is mainly sold by pay-per-view tickets i should say that the jake paul and mike tyson fight is going to be on netflix and we're going to definitely come back to that in a minute um and that's going to be available to all netflix viewers but mostly it's sold by pay-per-view when um ksi fought logan paul the first fight there were two million pay-per-views which when you think what people are paying which is you know

tens of dollars it could be 60 it's an it's enormous the second was 1.2 million pay-per-views, which when you think what people are paying, which is, you know, tens of dollars, it could be $60. It's enormous. The second was 1.2 million pay-per-views. To put that into perspective, when Deontay Wilder fought Tyson Fury, the first fight was $325,000. And the second fight was $850,000 pay-per-view. Now, those are sort of boxing's biggest thing at the time. And this is blowing it out of the water. of the water but some of that is a lot of it and people have made it obviously you can imagine the complaint if you even if you don't follow boxing it doesn't really matter because you can imagine what people are saying is this isn't really sport he's not that good at boxing he's okay he's a journeyman how come he's getting it was like well i'm sorry but boxing bears a huge amount of responsibility for what has happened

here okay boxing it's like a sport that hates its fans. Why can they not see the match-ups they want to see? They have to wait years. I mean, finally, Tyson Fury is going to fight Alexander Usyk, but that's taken so long to happen. Also, it probably won't happen. Well, I think maybe it might now. But that will be the first undisputed

heavyweight champion of the world this century which tells another story to you fans don't get to see the match-ups they won it takes forever it's always talk and it never comes off and what these youtubers understand more than anything is attention eyeballs they they start you know a youtube beef becomes a feud becomes a fight and it all happens and it all actually takes place yeah and it becomes 40 million dollars yeah he made i can't remember what he made last year and i'm going to probably get this wrong but it's something like 48 million dollars just for him he's he's one of the top five best paid sports people in the world yeah and he's not a sports person except isn't he i mean why isn't he and people are watching these i mean when people

you're watching sort of ksi fight and he's not really fighting but it says such a lot that parody of the sport but it's doing bigger numbers than the sport itself well boxing really embraced hype very very early on that's why Ali was one of the greatest boxers of all time was the greatest showman of all time and so hype has always been a thing building up hatred before fights has always been a thing in boxing is how they market absolutely everything so jake paul just sort of very much leans into it you know it's quite impressive what he does and you know he's fought an awful lot of he fought an awful lot of youtubers first uh then he fought an awful lot of mma fighters who you you can outbox the first time he fought an actual boxer was tommy fury so

tommy fury relative of tyson fury of course love islander you've got a love islander if anything sums up culture in this century more than this i would like to know what it is a love islander and a youtuber in saudi arabia punching each other in the face and they made 40 million dollars out of it way more than other fight other sort of crazily more proper fighters well well Tommy Fury is making more money than Tyson Fury which is ridiculous but what I will say in his defense he understands his market he's very punchable so he's in the right sport yeah but he has put women boxers on his on the same undercard as him he has poured money i mean poured eyeballs i suppose onto the cards on which he's fighting and so he's done a lot for women's boxing he's trying to unionize them all he's done a lot for pay he's tried to come up with

these new pay-per-view models that are really fighter friendly he's done a huge amount for the sport and although people sort of hate it people a lot of people in boxing hate it because they think, oh, you know, this is the sweet science, all of this sort of stuff. It's like, yeah, but you've done it to yourselves. You've done it to yourselves. Boxers, as you say, Richard, have always need to be self-promoting.

Maybe boxers need to start cultivating online fandoms themselves. We have got to talk about Tyson because having said all of that... Mike Tyson. Mike Tyson. Yes. Not Tyson Fury. Which, by the way, Tyson. Mike Tyson. Yes. Yes, sorry, not Tyson Fury. Not Tyson Fury.

Which, by the way, if AI came up with the name of a boxer, that boxer would be called Tyson Fury. Yeah. I find it, it is depressing. God, I saw Andrew Tate had said, there's no honour now in knocking someone like that out when they're like 58 and thought, oh God, it pains me to agree with you. But Jake paul posted uh some footage of tyson which he said was this

is from two weeks ago he's working out in the gym or am i scared yeah not really i'm ready to do this and it is some great footage of tyson but as it turned out fans did sort of osint on it and they're like no no this is from four years ago he's now got sciatica he's got loads of back problems he's been pictured using a cane he's constantly pictured going through airports in wheelchairs using a cane yeah okay well that's something that's an improvement yes and to walk rather than to beat anyone with it um and going through airports in wheelchairs it's i mean the plot of rocky balboa is sylvester sloan for some reason age 60 gets back into the ring to sort into the ring with some self-promoting young fighter.

This is pretty grim. I mean, if he knocks out Jake Paul, I'll be the first to be enjoying it. But it's pretty grim to watch, I don't know, a nearly six-year-old do this for money. I don't know. I suppose it will depend a lot on the result. But lots of bad things could happen with this. Well, you can tell it's bad because even eddie hern thinks it's in bad taste okay we finally found this i think this is in very poor taste feels

like an unusual move for netflix to put this on i would say so they're going to be putting it on live as well they're putting it on live again we keep talking about netflix saying oh no no we don't do live sport it's like yeah but you've just done nadal and al-kharaz they have done they do do some live sport i mean obviously they're doing the wrestling as you said well there is a there's somebody who is um called his job at netflix is the vp of non-fiction sports oh wow non-fiction sports is a real kind of doomsday category isn't't it? But there was someone actually in the Iraq war whose job at the foreign office, you could ask for them at Switchboard, was head of story development. Really?

Yeah. Wow. Not a great harbinger on any front, I thought. But we'll leave that to the politics podcast. But yes, so head of nonfiction sports at Netflix thinks it will be huge. And again, you have to say that if it's going to be made freely available to all Netflix subscribers, then so many people, again, will be coming into the sport who don't, who would be, on other pay-for-you things would be like, what, $60 for one night?

No, I'm not paying that. And it's quite hard to get people in, especially when you don't provide the match-ups, as we've said, that they actually want to see. Well, we had Joshua against Nganou and that was all over in two rounds and it was a mismatch and again it was a boxer against an MMA fighter

I found that quite upsetting so I think boxing yeah that was a weird one boxing really does only have itself I mean it's never been squeaky clean let's say boxing it's never been sort of breaking news

yeah some pretty awful people might have been involved in it yeah and it's rum for them to go I can't believe someone dodgy has come into our sport yeah

it's not show jumping do you know what I mean no oh I bet show jumping is dodgy as well oh yeah yeah yeah yeah I know that show jumping

is quite dodgy too but one of the other ways some show jumpers are not dodgy it's really weird watching that kind of internet that extremely online sensibility being brought to it

and he you know just like when we talked about Mr Beast like he understood how to he just sat there for ages studying virality and how things went viral Jake Paul started doing this thing where he said okay in the trash talking pre-match pre-fight press conferences that they've always had in boxing okay but you know if you lose will you have to have I love Jake Paul tattooed on your middle finger? And this guy, this fighter has now had to have I love Jake Paul tattooed on his middle fingers. You know, people saying, will you bet your purse then?

If you're so confident, you're saying this to me in the press conference, will you bet your purse then? These huge stunts that then everyone talks about. And all he's studying is like, oh, I see that's how you work. This needs to be shaken up. It needs to be disrupted. And he is disrupting in many, many ways. I say the unionization helping women's boxing you can't knock it because the sport hasn't done it for itself well he said I think his brother was

saying that Jake was sort of universally hated and was monetizing that in certain ways and then I think Jake realized that being universally hated is the best way to make money in boxing there's no industry better to be hated in. That's where all of the money is. So he leans into it. He gets the crowd to chant F Jake Paul. That's the big chant of all these things. So he really leans into it.

And as you say, he promoted, it's Amanda Serrano who he promotes. And Amanda Serrano, Katie Taylor, was the biggest women's boxing match of all time, sold at Madison Square Gardens. So he's doing interesting, unusual things. He is not a particularly great boxer. He is not a bad a bad boxer by the way he's a lot better than his brother and the other youtubers yeah exactly but you know you can take a punch and give a punch and he commits you know I'll give him that he's not sort of you can't he doesn't do any sort of half

measures he's not he's not a weekend warrior it isn't't really sport. It's a grudge match. It's influencer boxing. But then that's influencer boxing. Non-fiction sports. Yeah, unboxing. Yeah. Yeah. Unboxing videos, we should call them. But it's a tricky one. Because ordinarily I would say, well, of course, I'll be watching this.

Him fighting a 58-year-old man, I don't know if I will. The one thing is... I will, I'm sorry to say. Is Mike Tyson has been sort of in the Jake Paul camp a little bit over the years. I think he's talked about him in respectful ways. In headlines for all the wrong reasons. He's had him on his undercard a few times. So I think Mike Tyson is a friend of Jake, if you know what I mean.

And whether, if he does have the power to do serious damage, he uses that power. I suspect, I don't think there's a big hatred there. It's not like Jake has called him out and called him all sorts of names. I think he's, you know... Yes, it's a very respectful build-up, I must say. Yes, it's far more, this is, you know, the baddest man on the planet

and the greatest fighter who ever lived and now I've got to go in the ring with him rather than I can beat your granddad, which I suspect would be slightly less interesting. We'll see how it turns out. My God, we will see how it how it turns out it's not till july so they've got plenty of time to get to that if i don't see the fight i would definitely watch the quick turnaround documentary on channel five afterwards that i will be watching but it's interesting his brother who we haven't talked about logan paul i think is sort of wrestles now because i think that's easier than

boxing and he's like the american wrestling champion in WWE. He's the one who got taken off air for having a video of a live suicide in Japan. On YouTube, this was originally when he was a YouTuber. That's going back quite a few years now. In a lot of ways more problematic than his brother. But yeah, Logan and Jake Paul are very much... Logan, Paul and KSI, which anyone who's got children will have been aware of the equivalent of the tulip bubble that's been happening, where they created this drink, an energy drink called Prime. Oh, yeah.

That has became insane. I mean, people were trying to sell bottles of it for sort of 55 pounds. My children told me that one boy in this class in the playground was selling just the caps of it for two pounds. Wow. Just like, God, I mean, really. And these drinks, they sold out people were queuing even a child psychologist that i was speaking to said yeah no i was in the um the cube at like 6 a.m outside asda on a sort of friday morning so that i could try and get like my two

allowed bottles of prime the first headline i saw about it was prime causes chaos at asda yeah it it's it's been unbelievable and i i thought it was going to be this incredibly short-lived bubble but strangely it is enduring and it's going on because i couldn't understand how they have the infrastructure to actually bring this thing out which was going to kind of collapse and then no one's going to be interested in it in about five weeks so it's not like being coca-cola when you've got a company and you're a long time long time concern but maybe it has become a long-term concern well i think it's so massive that it's just. Well, I think it has. Because it's so massive that it's just continued. And people are still interested in it,

although it's not the mania in the playgrounds anymore at all. It's gone, that. But I imagine they teamed up with a company who sold soft drinks to do it, who probably had the infrastructure already. I'm not sure I'd trust Logan Paul to actually deliver it himself, to be driving up the M1. No, but you think, oh, well, how can they actually take that much production because it's becoming so enormous.

But anyway, they managed to do it. And I think it is actually just a sort of, like it's a new addition to the supermarket shelves and it's there now, but you can actually buy it when you go in rather than everyone buying it and then reselling the bottles for sort of £60. What a world we live in, don't we?

What a gamut. We've gone from Royal Palaces with Alexander Armstrong to KSI's prime drink in Asda. Taking in the Izzempic red carpet. Very quick recommendations. Absolutely loved One Day on Netflix. I know I'm not the only person to say that, but I took a while before I went in because I love the book so much. And absolutely captivated by it. It's brilliant. And listen, I'm a man of a certain age, so the music was incredible,

but really beautifully written as well. Very funny. When you realise it's about class and not about romance, it really hooks you in. Oh, that's very good. Okay, mine is a book, which is by a director called Ed Zwick, which is called Hits, Flops and Other Illusions,

My 40-something Years in Hollywood. This guy, TV-wise, he made 30-something, My So-Called Life, movies, Legends of the Force, Shakespeare in Love, Last Samurai, Glory. I mean, he's got an incredible career, but it's the way he writes about the job of being a director, about stardom, I find the way he talks about stars and how humanely he talks about these really otherworldly creatures

and how exposed they are when they're making a mega movie and all sorts of things like that. But it's an absolutely fascinating account of his life directing and writing as well. He's written lots of screenplays. And I think it's absolutely terrific. So it's called Hits, Flops and Other Illusions. And it's by Ed Zwick.

Lovely. Please join us next week for more of the same. In fact, please join us on Thursday for our questions and answers edition, which I finally said the right way. Oh, well done. Yeah, as Al Pacino would say, my eyes see Oppenheimer.

My eyes? Yes, we'll see you for the Q&A. I'm calling it Q&A now. Yeah, okay. Very cool. With RO and MH.