ijust think there s so much control and so much. you just couldn t get the access. cause the reason this series came back was that we started to look into, our commissioning editor, who was a big ruby fan. said we ve gotta get ruby back on. we were going to try and see some of pamela and roseanne, and a couple were interesting. then the pandemic happen, so we thought about, ok, let sjust go back and look at the archive. then it chimed with the louis podcast then it chimed with the louis podcast and his good grace, we were podcast and his good grace, we were up podcast and his good grace, we were up and running. you use the word audition. and clive, i think there was a sense of how the camera crew operated. there was a degree of auditioning of how they did theirjobs. ruby would say, and she was right, some cameramenjust aren t listening and can t do it.
watched the joanna lumley- programme that clive produced. sat up and said what happens if it s notjustjoanna. - what happened if you take celebrities and really- strip them bare. it s not necessarily- from the celebrity interview, but it s from that programming in that instinct which is about l saying, and that is why i think| i m a celebrity endures today. it s notjust- a reality concept what happens if you take people who you think are normally- pampered, then what was happening as a result. - that show is now in its. can even remember how many seasons. | that still runs through. that s why i think. people still watch it, and it is very revealing. and not always in a bad way people meet characters -
clive will do anything but. that was too much fun. i went to america in may asked me if i would do a show behind the desk. and they asked me. i can t get anything five minutes. i need to move in. that doesn t exist any more. i suppose i was getting at we ve talked about rebooting programmes, but do people in front of the camera have to acknowledge the need to reboot as well? if i was doing more, but i m not that interested. these were movie stars with skills, and the thrill of spending time with them will never happen again. so, i wouldn t even know. i would invent something else. layla, how much further do you think this rebooting trend has got to go? ithink..well, i i think it will be. so, i don t want to write off| the reboots that are coming because i know you vel listed them, but i think there was also - and i hate this word but there was also|
people either got tired or a man comes along and takes her time slot. again, not upset, got a new life. but if i didn t, i d be quite bitter. clive, 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 because it was sort ofjust before social media and the internet, and you ll remember this, julian. when we had a guest, you would call up the library and you d get all the photocopies of every article. sadly, i do remember that. we used to do research, and i think we would just. a lot of the american stars in those days, britain was sort of regarded as like doing an advert injapan, they didn t really care.
we would audition the camera men and women and they would come around to ruby s house, and then we would walk around the house and they would have to film us. if ruby said oh, look at that picture , if they didn t swing the camera and come back to see our reaction, they didn t make the squad. we wanted the camera to have a personality, notjust a piece of dead meat. i wonder, given that celebrities in that kind of format were much more prepared to let their guards down to a good degree, perhaps over no way they have it much before, did that lead us down a route towards programmes like i m a celebrity many years thereafter? clive, you know this, i m sure. jim allen, whose is someone we all know very well, -