Erm, right, The Rest is Entertainment Podcast (Richard Osman & Marina Hyde) have just put out an episode where they talk about the Riyadh Comedy Festival and question if comedians are doing it for the right reasons. And rightly so, will they question on stage the regime they are performing under, will they use this moment to be the bastions of free-speech that comedians can be or are they doing it just for a big bag of cash. As there is so little media coverage of this festival it’s good that the podcast is doing this.
BUT, with the chances of me putting any dream of doing House of Games in jeapardy, it’s really hard to listen someone get on their high horse about moral principles when they say at the beginning of said podcast that it is sponsored by Nestle. A company that has been accused of (to quote Google) forced labor, child labor, contaminated food, aggressive marketing of infant formula, unsustainable water practices, deforestation, price-fixing, and union-busting.
Seriously, maybe in an earlier episode you flagged your sponsors and justified it. But you can’t tell people to not take money from the baddies when your purse is full of the same coin.
There was then some debate about this Nestle ad, which some people didn't hear on their version of the podcast. Then, unexpectedly, Richard Osman himself joined the thread, saying he didn't remember recording a Nestle ad. Though he later realised he had and fessed up, I joined in with this reply to him:
From Kev F:
It defo has a Nestle presenter-voiced ad on my Apple Podcasts version.
Also another vote here for Andre on House of Games.
Thirdly I have done a corporate in Saudi Arabia, twice. (2023 and 24). The audiences will sell out cos they’ll mostly be employees of Aramco who are a mix of Westerners, Saudis and non Saudis (they call them ex-pats cos anyone who’s not a Saudi can’t be a permanent resident).
I learned a lot about how the country is trying to Westernise under the new Crown Prince, and one Saudi woman in particular painted a very good picture of how the place has changed in the last decade. She’d just won custody of her daughter in a divorce, both of them were out in the restaurant with us, and she drove us there. All things that would have been unthinkable ten years earlier.
It’s hardly perfect, and yes their spies chopped up a journalist recently. But the country’s moved from one that had, almost literally, the same laws as the Taliban, to one that has laws that, if they had their way, most MAGA voters would opt for.
To which Richard replied:
That's really interesting Kev, thank you!
So that's nice. I still get a buzz from the one-to-one connection you can get from the most surprising directions.
Of course back in June, my tone was more...
How much is this not selling your soul? “Our sponsors, Voxel, who are all about embracing a bit of a chaos when it comes to a family road trip, have asked us a very apt question, Marina….”
In podcasts we’ve all, in recent years, got used to the host-read advert. Something that had previously never existed in this country (right at the start of ITV in the 1950s it was banned*), where the trusted presenter of the show is suddenly reading out an advert for the sponsor.
Then in yesterday’s episode of The Rest Is Entertainment (a favourite of mine) Richard Osman reads out a question from the sponsor, with the tagline ”Our sponsors, Voxel**, who are all about embracing a bit of a chaos when it comes to a family road trip” right in the middle of the show. No break , no warning, no caveats, just straight out selling his soul, doing what Bill Hicks called sucking the devil’s dick, right there on the show.
Does anyone else find this akin to the recent Black Mirror story where she starts blurting out adverts cos her brain surgery’s been sponsored?
I find this all morally questionable. Just me and the ITA circa 1955?
* A bit of googling later I discover host-read ads were banned in 1962 following The Pilkington Report, which was critical of sponsored content in so-called Ad Mag shows on ITV.
** You'll notice neither the Youtube caption nor the transcript of the show is able to spell the sponsors' name, which is the home to a famous Tavern, to MI5, and is the Russian word for an underground railway terminus.
My Books And Where To Find Them...
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Richard The Third (Colour) | Doctors Who? Colouring | Socks Do Shakespeare | Kids Comics Annual 2026 |
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Richard The Third (bw) | Findlay Macbeth | Prince of Denmark Street | Midsummer Night's Dream Team |
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Shakespeare Omnibus | Comic Tales From The Bible | Joseph, Ruth & Other Stories | Space Elain |
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