The Rest Is Entertainment

Snapshot · The Rest Is Entertainment

Could Kathy Burke Be Bond?

Explore episode Jul 1, 2026

Where this was said

Social Media Vetting: How TV Does It and Why It Fails

At 23:00 · chapter starts 21:50

Rosie Norton asks whether the Ashley Cain situation — where the BBC dropped a documentary after his misogynistic social media history was discovered post-production — reveals a systemic failure in vetting processes. Marina Hyde provides a detailed breakdown: the BBC uses third-party firms to check social media alongside DBS criminal record checks, because the business risk of pulling a finished documentary is enormous. But as the Emilia Perez Oscar campaign showed, even major studios with serious resources can fail spectacularly — Netflix's failure to scrutinise Carla Sofia Gascon's old posts was, in Hyde's words, 'complete amateur hour vetting'. Similarly, Disney shelved an entire completed season of The Bachelorette after star Taylor Frankie Paul's domestic violence arrest emerged post-casting. Hyde widens the lens to politics, noting Reform and its predecessor parties have repeatedly failed to vet candidates who turned out to hold extreme views, while pointing out that Peter Mandelson — despite being appointed British Ambassador to the United States — would never have cleared BBC vetting for The Apprentice due to his publicly known Epstein connection. Television, she concludes, is actually better at this than most industries, and certainly better than politics.

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