indeed yeah one bleeds into t'other do you consider it important as a custodian of this art form to to distinguish between reality television and documentary what are the important differences between reality tv and documentary

no look i've tried to um i've tried to draw lines around reality as a as a genre and i've failed quite miserably i think reality in general is more contrived, right? Most reality formats that we can think of are, you know, fake to the extent that the situation that everyone is in has been constructed for the purpose of the show.

So that is not usually the case with documentaries.

Although again, there are, you know, documentaries where you kind of take people and put them into an environment and that is the documentary.

So yeah,

Are they really all finishing their dishes with seconds to spare? And are the judges really eating the dish that they produce? Because surely the food would be cold for the dishes later on in the tasting.

I think it varies a little bit, but typically speaking, when you're doing on a reality show, especially a competition reality show with money involved, because that changes a lot of how things have to be managed when it comes to fairness, they will be timed and they will be, you know, they will be.

disqualified if they don't meet the timing so there is that but the nature of production is such that you know the process of going between we're all doing the cooking and everyone's set up to film all the cooking and okay now we have to set up again and relight potentially and move cameras around to film the judging like that does usually mean that the dishes that are being tasted maybe aren't quite as Um, fresh as they would like to be.

Do you look into that?

Yeah, we talk about that.

It comes up a bit a few times.

There's an episode later in the series where we sort of spend even more time talking about duty of care specifically, which is this idea that reality TV producers have a... an obligation to the people on the shows to look after them, um, both during the shows and after, you know, mental wellbeing, especially because it can be quite a stressful experience, especially seeing yourself on TV in a way that you didn't necessarily expect.

Um, Um, the general thing about being on reality TV and being edited in one way or another is, you know, most of those shows are taking place over days or, you know, many, many hours, at least of filming for every episode.

And the end up being, you know, 23 or 45 minutes, um, So it is by necessity always going to be an abbreviated version of what took place.

And the things that get focused on are the things that both bring drama and entertainment, but also are the things that make sense of everything that's taking place.

Can you talk me through the decision to go in front of the camera and then what that was like?

the day that was controversial, 'cause that was a bit of both, wasn't it?

Yeah, I mean, there's a whole category of, uh, unscripted entertainment, uh, called, that people sort of refer to as docu-soaps.

So the, the big examples of that are shows like, um, The Real Housewives franchise.

Observational in a, in a true sense.

You've got cameras that are following people around, but the entire conceit around it is constructed.

The people are, you know, not normally hanging out, having lunch together.

They're not normally doing all these things they do on the show.

So it's-

... that was controversial 'cause that was a bit of both, wasn't it?

Yeah, I mean, there's a whole category of unscripted entertainment people sort of refer to as docu-soaps, so the, the big examples of that are shows like The Real Housewives franchise.

Observational in a, in a true sense.

You've got cameras that are following people around, but the entire conceit around it is constructed.

The people are, you know, not normally hanging out, having lunch together.

They're not normally doing all these things they do on the show.

Those things have been put together by the producers.

So I'm always thinking when I watch that show, what am I not seeing? How many times have they shot that till they got the response they want, till they got the slack-jawed cry of surprise, uh, on take eight? You know, how's it done?

Your tax bill would not go up.

Well, no, there, there's no interpretation of triple your taxes which is true.

Like n- the, the amount of tax you pay is never gonna triple under any combination of these parties, nor is the number of taxes you're subjected to gonna triple.

There's, there's just no interpretation that triple your taxes means anything.

Now, I guess, like one of the things I've said about it is it's, it's all well and good having a catchy slogan, but usually if this were a, a non-political ad, if you would had some catchy slogan for your product, you would then have to have a little bit more information in the ad that explained what you were saying, and this doesn't.

Like, it's just the claim.

And, and, you know, uh, I think, um, Nicola Willis and Christopher Luxon have both sort of made statements about how, look, it's, it's obvious what we're talking about.

Mm-hmm.

And that's enough to like blast out of the cannon, right? Like it gives you like, okay, you know.

And we thought that was the documentary, right? Like we thought we were going to do that and we were going to come back and make, and I don't know what we thought we were going to make.

We were going to make a 60 minute documentary that we were going to release on Vimeo as a, as a pay-per-view or something.

You know, like there was no kind of end goal.

We'd had loose conversations with the broadcaster that David sort of had the working relationship with to see whether they might be interested.

They weren't willing to commission anything, but they were like, yeah, if you make a thing, show it to us.

Maybe we'll, you know, maybe we'll give you seven dollars and put it on here, you know.

So talk about that a little bit.