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Is X Factor Back From The Dead?

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Was the BBC right to cancel Ru Paul's Drag Race? Why do Brits still have to wait weeks to see Hollywood films? What was the only time Richard got into trouble with his publisher? Richard Osman and Marina Hyde answer your behind-the-scenes questions of film, tv and flappy books. The Rest is Entertainment is brought to you by Octopus Energy, Britain's most awarded energy supplier. Lloyds. 250 years on and still backing the nation's aspirations. Join The Rest Is Entertainment Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus content, ad-free listening, early access to Q&A episodes, access to our newsletter archive, discounted book prices with our partners at Coles Books, early ticket access to live events, and access to our chat community. Sign up directly at therestisentertainment.com For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Video Editor: Adam Thornton Assistant Producer: Imee Marriott Senior Producer: Joey McCarthy Exec Producer: Ami Bennett Social Producer: Emma Jackson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Is X Factor Back From The Dead?

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The Rest Is EntertainmentIs X Factor Back From The Dead?. Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.

The rest is entertainment is presented by octopus energy. Now traditionally, the entertainment gatekeepers had to find you before an audience ever could. It's been the biggest change really, I would say, an entertainment in the last five years or so. Just that generation grew up making their own content on YouTube, on TikTok and things like that. Suddenly finding themselves right at the heart of a culture and they say no one had to commission it from them. We talked before about Cain Parsons, he's at the backrooms, he just made his incredible YouTube series of shorts. And within a month they've gone so big that people would kind of battering down his door to direct a big movie version of it. And 824 eventually won and he created the backrooms which brought a huge audience online for that first weekend that was just a phenomenon. So by the time the traditional gatekeepers arrive you may have already proved there's an audience for what you've made. You haven't inherited a route in, you have built on yourself. And octopus came into energy with customers as the starting point. It's all they weren't being well served and built things differently from there. With each account looked after by the same small team of around 10 octopus energy specialists.

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Questions and answer the edition. I'm Marina Hayes. And I'm Richard Osman. Hello Marina. Hello Richard. How are you? Very well. Hello listeners. How are you? Plenty of questions to answer. Are we going to start with an interesting one? And it's from Mona. This is a short, this might be one of our shortest ever questions. Mona says, is X-factor revival a bad idea? It's not even is the X-factor revival a bad idea? Is X-factor revival a bad idea? Seven words. Okay, well the reason we're talking about this is because this is a story that has appeared a lot over the last week. I have noticed. You will have noticed lots of stories about this. In fact, you might almost think this was a story that was happening. Let me get there. ITV cancelled the X-factor in 2021 after I think 17 years. In terms of whether it's a bad idea, I don't know. First of all, you would have noticed lots of sub stories to this. They've said, Louis Wolf saying he would definitely come back on one condition that Sharon Osborne was on. Then there's more stories driving on.

And Maya Jam has been identified as the perfect presenter. She can bring a young audience. That's clever. Maya Jammer gets identified as the perfect presenter for everything. Yeah, exactly. Mainly because she is. And it's not happening, by the way. Can I just say this is a story that's got complete life of its own. By whom could such rumors be being stoked? I can't. I simply cannot say. Who would make money from the X-factor? Who would, yeah, who's got two big formats, both of which are loving our margins to an earlier existing formats. No, I don't know. Who knows? It was made by talkback tens. And obviously, we're Simon Cowell's show. I don't know where the rumors are coming from. I think it's pretty difficult to, first of all, it's very expensive. It used to cost like two million for an episode. I think even now you couldn't do it for about less than 1.5. So that means it would be costing what, you know, the really big shows like Ernest LeBord ever cost. The main problem, I think, is that there's a sort of, you know, the duty of care thing.

The world has moved on since humiliating people in that way. In those audition rounds was sort of acceptable. And even though there was some of it in Simon Cowell's Netflix thing to find the name of the Marxist Revolutionary Group. December 10th. December 10th. It's quite hard. I actually think it's impossible to separate that format from the theatre of cruelty out of which it's sort of sprung. So on the duty of care front, even if they've managed a way of kind of threading that needle, which maybe they would be able to do something, but it would make it more bland. I think it would still raise all those demons from the past. By the way, you haven't gone away. There are many, many contestants who are still saying that they were failed in a number of different ways by the programme. Some of them are organised into groups, blah, blah. So there are those kind of ongoing complaints. I don't think any more that the music industry would help. One of the sort of secrets of the old format was that the music industry used to help a lot. Yes, more for lots. They had their pipeline already. Yeah. In the century, those pipelines were fused together to cast the tool.

Most of those people who turned up who were really good don't let's forget had already been found by Labour. Yeah, a lot of them. And there were lots of newcomers, but yeah, a lot of them were. There were a few that had been ceded, yeah. Yeah, there was a significant number had already been found and spotted and developed and maybe even trained to some degree by the Labour's. I don't think that they would help at all now because I think there are just so many different ways. You know, we can see people of the surface, far the platforms and totally do social media platforms. Yeah, the world has changed. And I don't think, you know, it would be a liability to be on something like this, which is too risky. So I don't think they would help. So although you keep reading stories about this, I do not believe that reality will be bent to this outcome and that they will bring back the X factor. I definitely don't think ITV is thinking about it for one second. But maybe at some point Netflix or Disney or someone with tons of money will revive it. But as I say, without that theatre of cruelty, it doesn't particularly work. It's too bland as a format.

And if you do have it, then I think it just becomes a liability. It's like these people don't provide news programming for a reason. Well, there are lots of things in television now that are just a liability. Like, you know, I don't do news. I don't do political programming. It's just a liability. This would be a liability and you'd be paying to put yourself at risk because you're dealing with lots of young people. And it's a big hassle in lots and lots of different ways. There are other things that we're seeing, you know, we talked about the Mickey Mouse Club revival. We talked about it. And clearly Netflix in a very controlled way with Simon Cowell's last show did that. I don't think that, by the way, was some monster hit. And it didn't, you know, catch the world of light at all. Which might reach me, by the way, have some relation to why these rumors are surfacing. It's incredible when you think of what a behemoth expect to what? It was super massive. And, you know, these things do decline. And that had really declined to the point where there's no return of investment for ITV.

So financially, it doesn't work for them. In terms of kudos, it doesn't work for them because as you say, I've become a slightly tainted brand. And in terms of production, it doesn't work for them because it has all the issues that you were talking about. Brands do not die. I mean, if I think about some of the early end of my show's Big Brother, Deal, I know Deal, still going in different places because there's ways to reinvent them and things that we have happy memories of. And, you know, a generation before suddenly going, oh God, you remember the X-Factor? How amazing that was. There are ways of reimagining it. The way you are not going to currently re-imagine it is as a two million pounds an episode show on terrestrial television. That's not the world that we live in. There isn't a channel who could afford it. There isn't a channel who would want it. And as you say, there isn't an industry that needs it in the way that it used to. In not entirely unrelated questioning Richard, can I ask a question on behalf of Is it Ella Pennings, who is talking about drag race, saying, why would the BBC X drag race UK, a seemingly very popular and cheap to produce show? Yes, it is.

It is related in some ways. I mean, the key word in that question is seemingly, so seemingly very popular and cheap to produce show. And it's, I listen, we know the BBC is really cutting its cloth at the moment and getting rid of an awful lot of shows. And that's only just begun, I would say. Look at the things that we've talked before about live with the Apollo news and light being turned into a chat show. Lots of older brands that, you know, are being put out to pasture. So drag race, it's certainly very, very noisy. It's certainly very, very, very loved by the people who love it. It's not huge. It's not insanely huge. It really, really punches above its weight. Drag race because the people who like it, lots of big celebs like it and will appear on it. Obviously, it's huge worldwide and, you know, you get to plug into that world as well. But yeah, it's, I mean, it's the same answer as X-Facture. It's the same answer, which is for the money that it costs, it does not deliver enough for the BBC.

And for a BBC that was better funded five years ago, it definitely did deliver. It did that. But the number you have to hit keeps going up and up and up as the money goes down and down and down. And a number of shows have dipped underneath that. And because drag race is owned by World of Wander who've done such an extraordinary job with it, worldwide and have monetized it everywhere. But it's not a BBC studios show. So you don't even have that kind of economy of scale. So it's just one of those things and we're going to see more and more and more of them where the economics of it five years ago worked. The economics of it now don't work. It's not exactly like the X-Factor because I think the X-Factor was declining as well. And the world that it was representing was disappearing. And that's not the case with drag race as a brand. It's not declining particularly. And the world is representing. It's not declining either. It's just a situation where production costs when compared to ratings. It just when you're sat in a meeting with a spreadsheet and you do have to sit in meetings with spreadsheets.

Intellivision because it's a license fee payers money. It just doesn't work out anymore. The good news is drag race isn't going anywhere. We know that. But it's going to be on all sorts of different platforms for everyone. And if we think X-Fact as a big brand drag race, I would say world-wise isn't even bigger brand in terms of what it does in various territories. So it's not going anywhere. But the BBC as a home for it no longer makes economic sense. I would say if it was super massive or super cheap, it would just about make sense. But unfortunately it just sits underneath that line. It's a prosaic answer. But it's going to be the answer to lots of these things in the next three or four years I suspect. Should we do an entirely themed first half of the show and go on to Dan Babler's question. Thank you, Dan. Dan says, who will replace Montydon of Garden as world? Does anyone actually watch Garden as world anymore? Yeah, Montydon is the legendary, the iconic Montydon is leaving Garden as well. It's in terms of who will replace. I don't know.

I notice like Jeremy Clarkson, if you want to know how much people actually care about this, Jeremy Clarkson did his entire Sunday Times column this week. And he's not one for he's not one for a subject that people are interested in. Yeah, actually by the end was pushing someone called Chloe from Blooms and Greens. He's got an Instagram she's very young. She really knows what she's talking about and saying don't just get some kind of random person. But I don't think they will. It's really interesting. So I just a quick just a quick look in terms of like does anyone watch Garden as well? Yeah, yeah, they do. Okay. I can give you some numbers from very recently. First of all, it's got 75% name recognition amongst the British who know what it is amongst British public, which is that's the most recent you got polling that is absolutely massive. Often it's the second most popular show on BBC two on its night, usually after British doesn't. No, it's no, it beats us. It beats you. Oh my god, absolutely on on a Friday. We are not here. Yeah, on a Friday. It's a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. House of Games is always the best on BBC two. On Monday, it's only connect on Friday. It's Garden as well. Well, last Friday, the top show of the day. And this is giving you.

I'm giving you the numbers so that you can actually think about the ratings. This is the overnight. So you know, certain things can solidate, etc. But the top show of the day was BBC London news with 2.8 million viewers. That's not just London news. That's all of the regional news is combined. This is up against what I like to you, that garden as well, this. Now, would I like to you got 1.4 million viewers and a 15% share? I think how big would I like to you is garden as well got over a million and an 11% share. Often it changes seasonly because there were times in January where I like, okay, maybe I don't need to tune in this week. As I look at a window, my weakness. There are certain shows that lots of people who watch this show that were on right now probably don't realise are absolutely massive. And I'm talking about things like country file and text rojo. These shows are absolutely huge. I think the rojo is still just unmassive. Yeah. Absolutely massive. And people just think, what who want I to watch that? Again, just because you don't watch it, it doesn't mean it isn't just doing unbelievable numbers.

Much bigger numbers than any hot show on Netflix. Supposedly everyone is talking about much, much bigger numbers. And if we want a seemingly very popular and cheap to produce show, that is garden as well. And that's why that's still on. But yeah, it does really, really big numbers. And this is not expensive. And the people who watch it love it. And those are the things that the BBC are going to have to keep doing. It's interesting that the question of who replaces them. So we talked about Grand Tour last week and how they, you know, this word of do YouTubers work on TV and what Grand Tour have done is taken YouTubers who really know what they're talking about and putting them on TV. And there is a generation now of online gardeners, if you know what I mean, gardeners who then go online, they're not gardening online. So we are online gardener that guy. And there will be someone in that world who already has a following, but crucially knows what they are talking about. And there's had five years of broadcast experience because they've done their own stuff and you put that person on and they'll do an amazing job, I suspect. But yeah, it's it's it's a really great brand for the BBC because don't forget, you know, there's also some magazines spin-offs and live spin-offs and stuff like that.

So it's a proper, proper, proper money spinner. And Monti Don is one of those people who doesn't put himself out there much, but is so beloved in Britain. He's just one of those guys who absolutely has a has a love in the nation, which is much higher than his profile sometimes. Fantastic person. Okay, shall we go to a break now? Yeah, it was a real branded first off, wasn't it? Yeah, thanks everyone. This episode is bought to you by Lloyds. Now show business loves a club. I love all these sort of unofficial groupings of people. There's two brat packs that I'm big fan of. There are two brat packs. Yeah, there's two brat packs because there's the movie brat pack, all of the Judd Nelson, you know, Rob Lowe and Charlie Sheen and all those guys. They're on in the breakfast club. Yeah, and then there's also the brat pack of those kind of turn of the 90s novelists, Bretty Sinellis, Jay Macanani, Donna Tart. And that's I think creatively. It's actually very, very useful to hang out with other people who are incredibly talented because you drive each other on to do things.

Because a lot of the British novelists in the 80s, Martin Ames, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, they all used to go and have lunch and have dinner. And you could just tell you know, they would talk about stuff and they would make each other's work much better. And that's the benefit of being in a group being in a club. And it becomes more than the sum of its parts. Clubs really do have benefits like club Lloyds and elevated everyday bank account with exclusive benefits plus a lifestyle park like Cinematogates. And you get no fees on debit card spending and withdrawals abroad. And exclusive mortgage rate discount to interest on your balance. To join a club worth being in, search club Lloyds. You must be a UK resident, age 18 or over to apply. This account has a £5 monthly fee, refunded each month you pay in £2,000 or more. Evening, buyers remorse. Buy a new car? I'll be moving in. Let's get started. Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana. You what? Yeah, great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it. So there's no... No, no buyers remorse. More like buyers rejoice. I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it.

Buyers rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven day return policy at Carvana.com. This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma, O Depart Fum is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black current, central jasmine. Woody Cashmurren and Warm Vanilla. It's masculine counterpart, Womow Born in Roma, O Depart Fum has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, spicy ginger and mineral salt. Shop at macy's.com. Welcome back everybody. Now Peter Pence has a question, Richard, that you must answer. He says... The way must answer. Oh yeah. Sorry, I didn't... It's mandatory. Well, I'm not like you to misunderstand a format. However... I recently read Careless People by Sarah Win-Williams, says Peter,

which has an extra flap on the front cover that is covered in book review blurbs before you even reach the title page. It got me wondering, do these quote-fill covers actually help sell books or do they just clutter the design? Oh God, there is a lot, Peter. I'd like to talk about that. Firstly, this extra flap thing is a huge deal. You can't at any book shop, at any publisher. They're obsessed with... Do we have a double flap cover? Do we have sprayed edge, like colored pages? Can we have a little ribbon? All these things very, very, very costly. They send a message to the book trade that this is a huge book for us. That extra flap thing, I can't bear it. They do it in America all the time. It's messy. I don't like that. I think it's what they used to do on a wrap around, they call it on newspapers. Someone's paid for it. It's like, you feel really... I feel a rashly annoyed, like someone's putting you to album on my iTunes. Exactly. Give me a book with a front cover that I can turn to the front first page of and start reading. I don't need to be fiddling about. It's like...

I'm moving a slinky or something. So anyway, my publisher's always obsessed with these double flap things. I've said time again, I've said, I stand there, I say, do not double flap me. If you're even thinking of double flap in me, you better stop. If you dream about double flap in me, you better wake up on apologize. I think they did double flap me on the last one. I could be wrong about that. In America, they do it all the time. America is... Can I just say for the Americans? Now, Sarah Wim Williams, this book carries people. Can we, as a sidebar, just continue to say that she is not allowed to do any publicity. She will go to book festivals. This is about her time working as a Facebook executive. Sorry if you... It's extremely revelatory about the internal culture of the company. They have such legal constraints on her and what she's allowed to say and how she's allowed to promote this book. She is not allowed to promote this book at all. So we will do this for her. It's an absolutely terrific book. It's fascinating if you care at all about the future of democracy, media,

definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely worth reading and that's something that she's not allowed to say. So we'll say it for her. Now, this double flap thing may well be because of that, because the publishers are aware that Sarah Wim Williams can't go on this morning and talk about the books. She can't go on this today program and talk about it even though she'd be an amazing booking on all of those. So they want to show the reaction to this book. But it happens a lot on lots of paperbacks. You'll have all the reviews of the Harbett will be on the paperback. So when the Harbett comes out, you can't really put reviews on it because the reviews come too late. So I have all of these reviews. I never see my reviews, by the way, I don't show them the reviews. The first time I ever see my reviews is when I open the paperback of my book and they're obviously... Right. So I never see nice reviews. So they'll do that first. So firstly, the double flap thing is a sign to book sellers that this is a book we take seriously and we're spending a lot of money on because it costs an awful lot more money to do a special either spray-dage

or double flap to book. So it costs an awful lot of money. But you just tell them. You just tell them publicly. Like many things it could be done in an email. We are spending a lot of money on this book. We're not going to piss off all the people who have to pick it up by covering it in this outside stuff. Yes, in this ridiculous outside stuff. I'm not going to suggest it to them. But it's a signifier, I would say, of something. Does it work? Well, I mean, the idea of blurbs in general. Yeah, I do blurbs, but I think about this all the time. The blurbs sell books. They tell you they do, but I don't know. I mean, with care of this people, because it did pretty well in hardback and now what they really want is a huge paperback. I guess if you're sort of flicking it open and there's like ten unbelievable reviews. Everyone agreeing, saying this is amazing. And it's hugely important. I actually think for that book... I'll tell you what I'm reading a book about Facebook. I'm sorry, that might be original reaction. And I think that for this book, for all the reasons we've said, so let's take her out of the equation for a second. Blurbs in general, thoughts. Yes, blurbs in general. If you are a new author, so before a book comes out,

the one way you can get blurbs and hardbacks won't be from the newspapers and from reviews, but it will be... People say, why do they have celebrities or other authors giving blurbs? And that's because those are the people that get sent to six months before it comes out to try and get a blurb. And if you're a new author, yeah, listen, if Mick Herron has read your book and loves it and you know, Mick Herron says, this is an amazing spine novel on the front cover of your novel, that's helpful. I think there's a... What's on the front of We Chays Shadows? So We Chays Shadows is a car. I remember, I saw it, it's even on the proof, right? It's a really funnily enough way when they do original mock-ups of covers. It looks like an incredible quote here, XXX, just where it is. But We Chays Shadows, Richard Bravery, who designed it, it's my favourite of all my front covers. And it's a really lovely kind of sun and a cat. And I love the fun. I love the whole thing and Richard and myself spent so long trying to work at the exact angle of the airplane, the exact angle of the cat's head and all of this stuff. The Royal Miami Vice Field in the colours, you know, I love that aesthetic so much.

Like an 80s airport for a typing. So we had it exactly as we wanted it. And then the publishers are, oh, OK, we have to work out where to put the quote, where it goes right or left. I hope which is the blurb. Yeah, that was the quote. And they were sort of send things over and think, no, this doesn't look right at all. And I said to Sorry, why would we have a blurb? What's the blurb doing here? What is it advertising here? And there was not an answer to that. So we have no blurb on the front because we just loved it. I just loved the cover. And there is a... I love it. If it's gorgeous, it's so clean. And I absolutely understand, like, on the first bit, with my 30 Murder Club came out and Ian Rankin said something lovely and found it dumb and had... There was a point in that because they had real authority and understanding that this was a proper crime book. So I absolutely get that. I think it's not something now. The place blurb. They're just doing it because you always do it, because you always do it, because you always do it.

And I think I don't mind it at all, but the fact that we had this front cover, which I really, really love. And me saying, do we need a blurb? It took me two seconds to go and know. So I thought that was interesting. But I do think Sarah Winn Williams, I think it's probably worth it because it's a book that everybody should read. And I've said that too late. Unfortunately, to be one of those blurbs. So apologies to Sarah Winn Williams. And also from the two of us keep up the good fight. Kisha Petit has a question for you. One of you listening to it in Australia. Hey, Kisha. And every time I hear you say that, see you next Tuesday. I know it's more likely I will listen next Wednesday because we are ahead of the UK in time zones. Hi, Kisha. So, showing off much. It got me thinking about the release of film, music, books, etc. When they are deciding on a release date, do they always make it for the time zone that they are in or do they stagger them? Well, it's sort of different in lots of across lots of the different businesses. In music, music used to come out on different days in different countries. In the UK, it was on Mondays, chooses in America.

But once they had started having problems with sort of leapt and pirated tracks, once everything went digital, they had changed that. And they managed to persuade the labels to all release music on Friday. So new music Friday, which is a sort of thing. And they will do it at a great time of one minute past midnight. But that does mean one minute past midnight on your local clock. So, wherever you are, you know, New Zealand is going to get it first then Australia. So, you are ahead on that. For the world on New Zealand. It's like, you know, it travels around the world like New Year's Eve. And Friday, it's Friday, they chose... Or Father Christmas. Or Father Christmas. Yeah, exactly. They chose Friday because Friday music charts sales, like lots of things, Countens, seven day blocks. And they now start on Friday morning. So, you've got the sort of best chance of a good opening position. And that's the case with lots of... We'll get to books in a minute. But films are the opposite. And they... Films can release on totally different dates. It depends often on whether you've got a distributor for them.

I mean, there's lots of things that I think, quite small films that I think... Oh, no, you can see it in America when I'm going to be able to see it. And it's just not even clear that it's going to get a UK release. It's like, I play Rocky, we were talking about on Tuesday. You can bet. You'll probably see that in America a couple of weeks before you start. Yeah, that's November the 6th for us. But yes, it does take time. So, films they used to have to have the physical reels, and they would have to be shipped over for America. And because they were so expensive, they would be reused. So, not everyone is getting the film on day and date. But once everything went digital, they didn't have to worry about that. Studios now really want to open everywhere on the same day, because when we talk about box office receipts, we always use the US numbers, which as we've said before, are brilliant, they're great on their data, and the demographic breakdown and everything. They are, you know, fastidious about this kind of stuff. But you'll have the box office, meaning the North American box office, and then you'll have the... Yeah, they want to have interest or they want to have Chinese. You want everything because they need to consolidate it. Well, it's playing really, really well overseas or whatever it is.

So, the staggering that they still have is only because of marketing. So, sometimes if things get in advance, it's so that people can... The stars can promote it. And, you know, some things they held them back, up in Himer, only got a Japanese date after it won the Oscars. Obviously, it's quite a sensitive territory, shall we say, if I can put it that way. So, you know, the awards perhaps justified the excitement about the film. I'm just going to leave that one there now. I don't want to get any further into that. But, streamers choose... You notice streamers choose one moment for the whole world. And it's mid-knife... You know, Netflix originals go live at Midnight Pacific, because they had courted there. But, for instance, like the other week when they did the GTA VI thing, it was quite an annoying time. You know, it was going to have these six... It went over exclusivity. On Netflix to kind of have footage from the gameplay. And that was exactly the same time, round the world, which they couldn't have done any other way.

The Psycho's excited that every episode of Reacher comes out at 8am. Yeah, because it's specific. Yeah, because it's specific time, yeah. But books is more fragmented, right to sold territorially, and things come out at different times. And you can have different editions. And the bookshops get the stocks weeks in advance. They're forbidden from selling it before the agreed day, although as someone who is about to embark on her own book, my book comes out on the 24th. And there are ways of counting things into those first week sales. What your publisher might say to you is, you're doing this event, and it's actually before your publication date, but it will count into first week sales. And that's why you'll see lots of authors kind of consolidate things together. And they might do an event that's really quite considerably in advance of the date of publication. But that sales must be held and put into first week. Yeah, all your pre-sales are in that first. Yeah, my last book, I remember I was so annoyed because I did an event,

and it was put into the wrong week. And it was just a mistake. And I was like, because what happened? Obviously, then that affects your chart position. Yeah, the week one is the big deal. You want week one because you need to be in the chart. Sometimes week two is well, because week one is just a part week. But those first two weeks are the big weeks. But I remember being so annoyed, because you can't do anything about it, and they can't rescind it and take it back out, and say, oh, I've made a mistake. So you're just stuck with, like, I don't want to say it's wasted. But it was lots, and it wasn't in it didn't go in, but in the end it was all right. The most trouble I've ever gotten with my publishers was really book two or book three or something like that. And I'm aware that the books are in the book shops at like a week before they're allowed on sale. And you really, really, really can't put them on sale. They're book shops getting real trouble. They get them and you could might go in and sign them around the back, which you've all done lots, you know. Yeah, and then they can't put them out until the Thursday. But I say, I think someone on Twitter, this is a year's ago, just said, oh, I'm going on holiday on the Tuesday, and I really, really want to take your book with you.

I said, oh, do you know, I've just gone to the book shop and I sent you, and so because they've got copies there. Because I just thought it was a nice thing to do, because someone's going on holiday. Oh, my God. I see only time I've ever been in trouble. Yeah, really, yeah. Yeah, they really kind of, which we need to, and I thought they were joking, so I was really laughing. I looked at their faces and go, oh, and they really, because all of the other books are going, hold on, sorry. You said they were going to sell this, but why can't we sell this book on Tuesday? I just thought it would be like a stream of people going to book shops saying Richard Osman sent me, give me his book early. I think we can, again, would be quite a nightmare to deal with. I think there was a bit of that. But yeah, so yeah, I've really got in trouble, so you mustn't do that. But they are there. Yeah, they are there, and you can pre-order them in book shops and you can pre-order them, obviously, online. And all of that counts into first week sales, which is why people really care about it, and why I really hope that any of my sales get entered into the correct week this time round. What are time to be alive? Remind me of the release date. September the 24th. Although if you pop into shops a couple of days before that, no, do not do that.

Do not do that. You will get the book seller in trouble. Yeah. It's a last thing we want. I think that about wraps us up, Richard. Yep, we have the last of our first tranche of Bond specials, the end of the Sean Connery era for our members, restresonantstainment.com. If you want to become a member for you listening, etc, etc. You do not have to. It's been a great series though, that's... It all implodes in Japan, doesn't it, Richard? It all implodes in Japan. Anyway, see you next Tuesday. See you next Tuesday, or Keisha, and our lovely friends in Australia. See you next Wednesday. See you next Wednesday. See you next Wednesday.

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