so i could have changed, but didn t know they would keep saying. you know, dance, little woman. so i kept dancing. people either got tired or a man comes along and takes your time slot. again, not upset, got me a new life. but if i didn t have a new life, i d be quite bitter. laughs. clive, between you, you visited some massive stars of their day. how did you get access to some of these people? it was a combination of. it was also a very distinct time in history, if you want to know, because it was sort ofjust before social media, just before the internet you ll remember this, julian you know, when we have a guest, you used to call up the clippings library and you d get all the photocopies of every article. sadly, i do remember that. so, we used to do masses of research, and i think we would just. and also, a lot of the american
without much advance warning. and you weren t always sure you would get the interview when you got there as well? we were lucky. it was. we had a pretty good budget, it was bbc one prime time. i run an independent company now, but we were making it in house at the bbc. sometimes think, would i have taken the risks that idid then? we flew to manila, ten of us, and we d been offered half an hour with imelda. with imelda marcos, yeah. you didn t tell me that, clive. clive just gets me to the door and kicks me in like someone who says. . . it s just cruel. go ahead. ruby said to me before we leave, go and get some jewellery. i ve got to wear good jewellery because imelda marcos will clock the jewellery. we went to see theo fennell,
yes, ruby would say, and she was right, some cameramenjust aren t listening and can t do it. so we would audition the camera men and women and they would come round to ruby s house, and then we would walk around the house and they would have to film us. and if ruby said oh, look at that picture up there , if they didn t swing the camera and look at the picture and then come back to see our reaction, they didn t make the squad. you wanted the camera to have a personality, notjust a piece of dead meat. and layla, iwonder, given that celebrities in that kind of format were much more prepared to let their guards down to a good degree, perhaps in a way they hadn t much on british television much before, did that lead us down a route towards programmes like i m a celebrity get me out of here many years thereafter? yeah. clive, you know this, i m sure. which isjim allen, whose s- someone we all know very well, watched the joanna lumley- programme that clive produced.
and i think what you do, . with all shows, is you tend to look at it and think, | how can we improve? does it need something changing up? do we change elements of it? do we freshen up a format? when it s a game show. it might be different for ruby and clive with celebrity- interview, that s about really brilliant interview, isn t it? l but i don t think that - happened with the cube. so, actually, it s not so much that the format is broken, . but actually, viewers do demand a freshness to their content. - they don t just want the same thing, ad infinitum, and that s i think what i happened with the cube. itjust didn t have a fresh- view, and that s what we did. ruby, you ve gone back to some of your classic celebrity documentaries from the 90s and the noughties. again, why is now a good moment to revisit those? i didn t realise we were rebooting the show.
look, i ve done a lot of ad funded programming. i commissioned it and i ve made it for a number of broadcasters. i m really interested in this area. we took the decision to take changing rooms out and present it to channel 4 with some money attached. i ve pitched other ideas with a tonne of money attached, and broadcasters have still said no. in a way it doesn t matter if it is a good idea, they might be making a saving in that slot, layla knows this from being at itv. the risk you run in terms of your ad revenue and and in terms of not getting an audience to it, the paint brand didn t fund all of it for the channel as well. i think that s true with all ad funded programming now, the channel needs to pay some cash. clive, looking back to the interviews we were talking about, clearly some of that wasn t cheap you were jetting off all over the world, often