How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - Nish Kumar - Failure Is Information. Comedians Call It Material.

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

Nish Kumar is one of the UK’s best-known comedians, known for his impassioned political progressiveness. You might remember him as the host of the topical BBC comedy show, The Mash Report, which ran to great acclaim until it was abruptly cancelled in 2021 - one of his failures addresses this head-on. Kumar now co-hosts the popular podcast, Pod Save The UK and his 2026 tour, Angry Humour From A Really Nice Guy tackles the existential angst and political disquiet of a 40-year-old man. We talk through his failed Edinburgh show, the fact he would never consume Huel, ‘the whole bread roll Mash Report thing’, his people pleasing tendencies, how his experiences of racism led to therapy and a PTSD diagnosis…and how his friendship with Ed Gamble has changed over the years. It’s not one to miss. IN THIS EPISODE: 00:00 Intro 02:29 Immigrant Parents and Fear 04:41 Comedy Obsessed Teen 08:22 Nice Guy Angry Comic 11:31 Rage as Fuel 13:04 Edinburgh Show Failure 23:31 Bread Roll Fallout 27:20 Empathy and Comedy 27:53 The Bread Roll Incident 28:29 Clips, Context, and Backlash 29:49 Turning Failure into Material 31:24 Therapy and PTSD 34:28 Racism and Political Architecture 39:52 Progress, Parents and Politics 46:14 Friendship and Growing Up 💬 QUOTES TO REMEMBER: Intellectual intelligence is useless without emotional intelligence 2013 was the most important year because I learnt everything about what I didn’t want to do in stand-up My partner said I should seek therapy, but at the time that felt like an indulgence. I don’t feel that now. 🔗 LINKS + MENTIONS: Nish Kumar is touring across the UK with Angry Humour from a Really Nice Guy until the end of November. Tickets are available from www.nishkumar.co.uk/gigs Join the How To Fail community: www.howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content Elizabeth’s Substack: www.theelizabethday.substack.com 📚 WANT MORE? Stephen Merchant - swap.fm/l/Lta5mlFbVnPHyFb8R1n2 John Bishop - swap.fm/l/wRGKwuonJFQoujFlmDHI 💌 LOVE THIS EPISODE? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts Leave a 5⭐ review – it helps more people discover these stories 👋 Follow How To Fail & Elizabeth: Instagram: @elizabday TikTok: @howtofailpod Podcast Instagram: @howtofailpod Website: www.elizabethday.org Elizabeth and Nish answer listener questions in our subscriber series, Failing with Friends. Join our community of subscribers here: https://lnk.to/7i0moR Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: askhowtofail.com Production & Post Production Coordinator: Eric Ryan Engineer: Matias Torres Assistant Producer: Shania Manderson Senior Producer: Hannah Talbot Executive Producer: Alex Lawless How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is what I can't resolve the contradiction of. Again, I am a people-pleaser, but I also love winding people. I don't think enough people talk about how much of their personal ambitions have been motivated by rage. You are addicted to anxiety. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with me, Elizabeth Day. This is the podcast that believes all failure is data acquisition. and today is such a brilliant example of putting that into practice. Before we get started on this episode,

please do remember to like, follow and subscribe so that you never miss a single conversation. Best thing that's ever happened to you financially, go. Easy. Sold my car on Carvana. Amazing offer. Really? I hit 200 on a scratcher. Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check? No. How many scratchers did you hit to get that?

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Some evil thing happened here. Three people die in a quiet suburb in Mississauga, Canada. It's not a coincidence. One after the other. In the same house. Is this bad luck? or something more sinister. The worst investigative mess I've ever encountered.

A long simmering what took you so fucking long to get here. From Sony Music Entertainment, this is What Happened to the Harrisons. I'm Amy Dempsey Raven. What Happened to the Harrisons is available now on The Binge. Search for it wherever you get your podcasts to start listening today. Subscribers to The Binge can listen to all episodes, All at once, ad-free. When Nish Kumar was growing up in Croydon, South London, the child of Carolyn immigrants,

a teacher at his school solemnly told his parents he would one day be prime minister. When Kumar instead went into stand-up comedy, later becoming an acclaimed TV presenter and podcaster, he recalls his parents thinking that this product has not met its guarantee. But number 10's loss is culture's gain. After starting comedy at Durham University with peers including Ed Gamble, his first solo stand-up show came in 2012. His fan base grew over the following years, aided by frequent TV panel show appearances,

where he became known for his impassioned political progressiveness. By 2017, he was hosting the topical BBC comedy show The MASH Report, which ran to greater claim until it was abruptly cancelled in 2021. But more on that later. Kumar now co-hosts the popular podcast Pod Save the UK and his 2026 tour, angry humour from a really nice guy, tackles the existential angst and political disquiet of a 40-year-old man. Sometimes on bad days, Kumar says,

I feel as if I've let my younger self down, like I've fallen short of my ambitions for the type of person I wanted to be. Then on better days, I think, all I wanted to do was get inside the tea. TV and I've done that because deep down I am still that obsessive strange loudmouth geek. Nish Kumar, welcome to How to Fail. I feel like I've left my body.

It was like an out-of-body experience being present for that being. Was it like a eulogy? Do you actually feel that you've let your parents down? I mean, I guess I did for a while, largely because they told you. me. It wasn't like, it wasn't something I had to cleverly infer. I think they were very, very confused by my choice of occupation. And I think part of that is sort of this, a lot of that is motivated by fear because if you're a, you know, an immigrant, it's a classic first generation immigrant, the premise of what your life is supposed to look like is you are supposed to come to a

country and do some job, any job, whatever job you have. And that is supposed to enable your children to then have a better life. But there is this kind of, so when we were growing up, when I say we, I mean the children of first generation immigrants, we would complain that our parents didn't want us to have any fun. We would say that our parents had too narrow a view of what was available to us in this country. But in reality, I think what they were doing was a kind of fear motivated thing.

If you think about the jobs that people say immigrant parents want their children to do, it's always, what is it? It's doctor, lawyer, accountant. Those are three things that countries can't really do without, right? And the premise of the choice of jobs that first generation immigrants want for their children is to do jobs that are so necessary for the country that you're into function that they can't kick you out. That's essentially what they're trying to do. They're trying to, it's a kind of attempt to force integration. And so I think it was very fear motivated in this idea that, and also we don't come from, you know, there's no show business. There's sorts of actually is now.

You know, one of my cousins in India has been in Bollywood movies and another one is a singer. And so in my generation, there is, weirdly, now some show business in my family. But that's not our thing in general. So they were sort of, I think they were confused. I think they were scared, definitely, and I think they were definitely confused. Now, my argument to them has always been, you should not have been confused.

Because if you actually reflect on what I was like as a kid, I was never going to do anything else. When I was a kid, all I wanted to, you know, all I did was, I actually remember when I was a child, when the BBC got the rights to The Simpsons, I stayed in all day just because I was like, I don't want there to be a chance of, me missing the Simpsons when it starts on the BBC.

There was no chance. I wasn't being invited to anything. I don't know what. I was just like, I've got to be here. And you used to read books about how they wrote Simpsons episodes. And I used to, I forced my parents to take us to see, goodness gracious me when they did a live tour in 1999 at the Hackney Empire. I don't think I was, I don't think I turned 14 yet.

and all I did was talk about comedy and think about comedy. If you met me at 14, you'd probably have a pretty good guess of what adult I'd turn out to be. It's one of my innumerable privileges that I had never thought of what you've expressed so cogently there that immigrant parents want their kids to have a job that means they can't be kicked out of a country. Yeah. Because we didn't think about it when we were younger. We thought that our parents just didn't get comedy or books. A bunch of my friends are like novelists and screenwriters and comedians

who all had immigrant parents who said, why don't you become a doctor or a lawyer? And we thought it was a failure of their imagination. But actually, it was a tactical thing. They knew that these things existed. You know, my parents are very cultured and cultural people. You know, from when we were kids, my mom's favorite. who is the deer hunter.

You know, like, from when we were kids, the house was full of books and music. And so they're not blind to these things, but the, the tactic was maybe you could try and make yourself integral. And what I would say is in the last 15 to 20 years, I do have to acknowledge that they were correct on some fronts, you know, if you look at the Windrush scandal, that shows you what happened, that shows you how precarious. You know, the Windrass Generation were a group of people invited to this country from the Commonwealth by the British government to help rebuild the country after the Second World War, and then they deported their children.

You cannot get more important to the British state than the Windrush Generation and that contribution that they made in the post-war period. And yet, the government still deported their children. So when that happened, when the Windrash scandal happened, I remember thinking, yeah, my parents were 100% correct. I never thought we'd get to a place in this country where now there are mainstream political parties that have seats in the houses of parliament where their policy is repatriation of immigrants. My therapist once said to me, she was answering a question of mine and she said the problem is you have a paranoia because your parents were paranoid. And as you get older, you will have to understand that your parents were both paranoid and correct. So you have to try and reconcile those two ideas that the paranoia is unhealthy, but it is not totally unfounded. And that has been a really interesting journey to go on in the last 10, 15 years.

Yes, we're going to get more into that. And what a mind fuck that must be, given some of the things that we're going to talk about. I wanted to mention your tour, which has the greatest title, Angry Humor from a Really Nice Guy. You are renowned for being a really nice guy and whenever I said you were coming on how to fail, without fail, people would say to me, oh, he's really nice. Is that annoying?

No. As an edgy comedian, is it ever annoyed? You're just really nice. No, you know what's really weird? I remember when I was at university, I remember someone saying to me, God, the worst thing you can be in this world is nice. because it suggests that you're boring

and the worst thing you can be is nice and at the time I said yeah and in my head I thought there's way worse things pedo that's way, pedo, fascist fascist, fascist, fascist pedo, there's way worse things

you can be the nice are you mad? I think it's very important to meet the world with kindness one of the things I've learned from my partner of 14 years is that intelligence is really valuable

but intellectual intelligence is actually useless without emotional intelligence. I also think in terms of my sort of status as a comedian feels really strange and part of the title of the show is alluding to the fact that in my day-to-day personal dealings

I would actually say it goes into unhelpfully nice. I think it's good to be kind and it's good to be nice. You must not be a people pleaser and in my like one-to-one interactions with people, I am an obsequious people, please. When everyone says he's nice the whole time, you're like, yeah, because he's obsessed with everyone thinking he's nice.

And so it is then strange that the comedy that I've done is about subject matter that was always going to upset people. It was always going to upset people that if you talk about politics or if you talk about the news or if you talk about race or if you talk about anything. So it is really strange that a people pleaser has also done some of the most divisive comedy of the last kind of 10 years. And what's also fun is that I sort of, the people that know my work sort of know it simultaneously from the Mash Report and my series of Taskmaster, which both started in 2017. And if you ask Ed Gamble, for example, who's known me for 20 years, he will say the version of myself that I am on Taskmaster is the best representation of my real personality. So half of me is political, you know, tirades. And the other half is man attempts to kick over water cooler and fails.

And that's the real you? Yeah. And actually what I realised is the real me is both of those things. at the same time. And so the title is kind of an allusion to the idea of like, yeah, this is,

I am both a Burke and someone who knows about the news. Those two things are not mutually, those two things are not mutually exclusive. It's very, that analysis is very good. I can completely relate to the, the people pleasing,

overwhelm, and then the need for your repressed anger to go somewhere. And for me, it comes out in road rage. It's sort of very, Very comfortable road rage always behind a sort of windscreen encased in a metal box. Like I would never actually be the person who goes out of the car.

I'd never do that. But I think it does that. And you've spoken a lot about rage and the importance of focused rage as an agent for change. Yeah. And that can be part of being a nice guy. Yeah. It kind of has to be because you're protecting the people who need it. Yeah.

I mean, I think rage as an emotion is sort of useless. if it is an end of its in of itself. If you're being angry just to be angry, then that's, nobody needs more of that. There's enough of that in the world. But if you can use your anger about something to motivate you to do something, then I think that that is, I also think that that is an undervalued commodity in outside of politics, just in your professional life. I don't think enough people talk about how much of their personal ambitions have been

motivated by rage. People always say things like, no, I just wanted to achieve because I love the work. And every time I see one of those people talking, there's a part of me that always thinks, fuck you. I know that there is something that happened that made you think, oh, okay, I'm going to show that. 100%. Could not agree more. Spotify advertising connects you with an audience that's engaged and ready to discover your brand.

Launch a campaign with Spotify Ads Manager. Some evil thing happened here. Three people die in a quiet suburb in Mississauga, Canada. It's not a coincidence. One after the other. In the same house. Is this bad luck or something more sinister? The worst investigative mess I've ever encountered.

A long simmering what took you so fucking long to get here. From Sony Music Entertainment, this is What Happened to the Harrisons. I'm Amy Dempsey Raven. What Happened to the Harrisons is available now on The Binge. Search for it wherever you get your podcasts to start listening today. Subscribers to the Binge can listen to all episodes, all at once, ad free. Okay, let's get on to your failures. Your first failure is your 2013 Edinburgh show.

Yeah. That then got turned into an essay in The Good. immigrant. Yeah. Okay, tell us about this show. Now, I'm about to say something that makes me sound like I'm trying to go on a kind of DiRiver CEO hustle culture. You are wearing the black t-shirts, to be fair.

Where's your Huell? Are you sitting on it? I would never consume Huel. No, if my life depended on it. If Hule cured all disease, I would consume Huel. And that's the only circumstance. I have no desire. I hope this podcast is not as more responsive.

It's not. This will be the episode title. It's a good point of difference. I just think, why in the name of God, do you want to remove the pleasure of eating food? Why would you take that away from yourself? There's nothing to look forward to if you don't have the dinner that you're planning in your head as you're recording a podcast of Nish Kumar. So I'm just caveating this by saying that I know that this sounds like something that would be on a podcast

with two men wearing t-shirts that are slightly too tight for them. But failure is just information. Yes. To a comedian, failure is data. Yes. And so at the minute, I'm in, so I start my tour in September and I'm going to Edinburgh to do a sort of work in progress version of this show. And so like, I'm failing all the time.

And it's helpful. And it's really helpful for me because that's how I know what's going to work. You know, part of the thing with stand-up is it's contrived spontaneity. And what you're really doing is repeating the same thing over and over again, but every time trying to make it feel to the audience that you're performing, it's a confidence trick. Like you're trying to make the audience feel like you're saying it for the very first time. But also they've paid, you know, up to £30, you know, when it goes into theatres,

by the time it goes into theatres. So it has to be, it has to be good. And the only way it can be good is by going through this endless process of failing. And we're very lucky, you know, I always think we're very lucky because friends of my novelists and I always think, you've written novels. I always think, how do you know it's good? You don't.

You don't. I just rely on someone else telling me. That's where the people pleasing comes in. I guess you have editors who read it as we get feedback from them. Genuinely, the first time, for instance, that a joke bombed, did you still feel it then? Did you still feel, oh, that's great dating? No, it's taking me 20 years.

Yeah. Yeah, it's taking me 20 years. is. And now not only is it, it's not just a case of, it's not that I'm not emotionally robust, because I'm not emotionally robust. No one would ever describe me as being emotionally robust. But it's more that I've just done it enough times that I now, it's, I was going to say I don't take it personally. It's not even that I don't take it personally. I sort of welcome it because you, you go, great, that's great. I know that that doesn't work. And so I either need to change something round or drop it entirely. The biggest learning curve for me, the most important thing I did was

my show in 2013, which didn't work. It just didn't work. And in not working, it was miserable. I was so miserable. I did a two-week run of it at the Soho Theatre and then I did it in Melbourne in 2014. And by the time I got to Melbourne in 2014, I was thinking, oh dear, this is not working. So can I just interrupt? What's your definition of not working? Was it that people weren't responding or that there were no ticket sold or how did you measure that? You know what? Ticket sales weren't bad. It was more just people weren't responding.

Sometimes it would go well, then other times it would go bad. But a lot of the time it was just not working. The thing would stand up is that everyone has good nights. If you're pretty decent at the job, everyone has a good night. You don't really write your shows for the good nights. Because if the chemistry or atmosphere is right in the room, anyone who has half a clue of what they're doing

can have a good stand-up gig. The reason you write it is for the nights the chemistry is not right. You have to do it again and again and again. So there are like any job, you know, there are days where you go into your job and you think, I'm absolutely, I'm on this, I'm nailing it. And then there are days where you go into work and you think, God damn it, I just have to get to 5 o'clock.

Like, I just have to get through this day. And with Stand Up, the version of that is the spontaneity is not working. The chemistry with the audience is not correct. And then the thing that will save you is the writing. And the thing that will carry you through those nights is your written material. And also, if you record the show, that is just a test of the writing. But 2013, it's the most important show I did because I learned everything about what I didn't want to do in stand up. and I learned everything about how I come across on stage

and I learn everything about what ultimately I wanted a show to look like and the most important thing I learned was that you can't if you're making something and this is I think true of anything that like it's a book of film or whatever if I'm making something I've got to make it on the basis of

I am doing this thing that I would like to see rather than I am doing something that I think will be successful. Yes. I have friends, I think, who understand instinctively what an audience wants. And that's great. But if you're not one of those people, you must not attempt to second guess what an audience wants and you are better off making something for yourself

that you would like to see and then hoping that other people like it. That's such a great distinction. And it sounds as though there was a piece there about, removing a sense of ego and sort of how you wanted to come across and actually just like delved into who you were and what you wanted. That's definitely a big part of it for sure. It then became an essay in The Good Immigrant, is that right? So this seminar collection, which came out in 2016, edited by Nikesh Shukler. And so was that in your mind a successful repurposing?

Totally. Yeah. Nick Esh contacted me and said, I'm doing this essay collection, and he said, I want you to write it about the subject matter of the show. I don't stand by a lot of the material in that show in any way. But the premise of the show was that somebody had used a publicity still of me and put it into a meme generator. It's a very early 2010 issue, but someone put it into a meme generator,

and the meme was confused Muslim. and I'm not a Muslim but I was very confused and so it was people making kind of using my face to sort of make Islamophobic remarks and I tried to

turn that into an hour long comedy show in the way that I thought you had to do to make something into an in inverted commas show I thought it had to have a kind of beginning middle and end and it had to and the reason I was doing that was I thought that would be success

in Edinburgh and it would, you know, bring me to the attention of TV people and it would help supercharge my career. I didn't think, oh, this would be, this would be a good show. You know, I was making something that I thought would be received well rather than making something, I know this sounds corny's help, something that is a real expression of something that I was desperate to put out in the world. But then when Nikesh came back to me and suggested it as an essay, I said to him initially, buddy, I've got no interest in revisiting that crap. But he said, no, I think it would really work. And so I kind of just put it together as a shorter essay.

And it worked so much better. And what's really brilliant about the good immigrant. And what was very funny was when I read the book, suddenly, some of these essays are really beautiful. And some of them are really brutal. And some of them are really scary. And my one has a two-page diversion about still. leave Carell's performance as Michael Scott in the office.

Because I don't really know what a good essay is because I'd never really written one before. I wasn't really wrapped up in how I thought it should have been perceived. That is so fascinating and says so much about the nature of failure and success, both in terms of failure being data acquisition, but also success being contextual too. That sometimes the material needs to find it. form. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Sometimes, you know, you, you know, it's, you, I think we're seeing

this quite a lot at the moment, you know, I'm not, I'm not going to single anything out, I'm not going to slag anybody off, but we've all, in the last, I'd say, decade, half decade, certainly, sat down and in our three of ten of a TV show or documentary thought, this should have been a hundred minute feature. Yes. When, when people who start stand up, talk, to, ask me for advice now, I'm essentially, like I'm trying to spend like shillings. Like the currency that I'm spending is no longer relevant. You know, it's a completely different world because of the way that, you know, algorithms and Instagram and stuff have come to dominate.

And they now have to sit there and second guess what, you know, what out the algorithm is going to favor, you know, what subject matter is going to get your video promoted by the sort of invisible gods that nobody really understands. And they will always be people that understand how to play that system. There are comedians I know that when I watch them do observational material,

I think you are a real loss to politics. You would be a phenomenal political speechwriter because you have such an instinctive understanding. Peter Kay would have been phenomenal politicians. And genuinely, I'm not denigrating that as a skill. I think that that's an important part of, you know, you want a varied cultural diet. So that was 2013. We're now fast forwarding to 2019 for your second failure, which, as you put it, is the whole bread roll slash mash report fallout thing.

The bread roll niche. I'm so sorry you experienced that. So you were doing stand-up at a charity gig. Yeah. It went bad because I brought up the sticky topic of politics. It was December 2019. We were probably about a week away from a general election. The gig went badly.

So by any discernible metric, I failed in my job, which admittedly I was not being paid to do, but I failed in my stated aim as a comedian in that room. Well, can I interrupt you there? Sorry, so would you consider your stated aim to be, to entertain any audience? that you find in a room, or is your stated aim to do some good comedy

that's also politically engaged? Now we're getting into the crux of the problem with my personality, right? Because if you ask me what the stated aim of a comedian is, I would say the stated aim of a comedian is just to entertain the people that are in front of you. But if you ask me really, I... This is what I can't resolve the contradiction of.

Again, I am a people pleaser, but I also love winding people. It's not that I like upsetting people, is that I can't stop myself if I think, if something is going in my eyes badly or wrong, I don't have the ability to just not acknowledge it. that sort of the problem because there's a version of that gig where you just go, do 15 minutes of jokes about cricket

and get off. I love cricket. It was a cricket charity. I love cricket. I could have talked about cricket for 15 minutes. It would have been very entertaining. But in reality, there was so much going on in the country at the time. You know, it sort of feels hard to talk about now because obviously, you know, five months later, we were all locked in our houses.

So in some ways, some of it feels, It almost feels irrelevant to talk about pre-2020 stuff. But there was so much kind of, you know, going wrong at the time. You know, there's just a lot of very rich people in this room. And, you know, it was also a charity gig that was designed to help kids that, you know, have disabilities. And how the disabled community in this country was ravaged because of cuts to social care that happened under the, coalition government in the early 2010s. You know, it feels like an extension of Victorian

paternalistic charity culture to come together and talk about how we need to help, which we do, but not talk about the fact that there are, you know, political levers that have been pulled that have exacerbated difficult situations for disabled people living in this country. So, but there is also a version where you go, just do some jokes about cricket, get off the stage. Why can't you just do that?

And the truth is I just can't. I think there's two bits of my brain missing. And one of them is that just ability to stop myself. And the other bit of my brain that's missing is the bit that thinks I, because like it's, I love comedy and people love comedy and comedy writing. But there are definitely moments where you stand up in front of an audience. I've never had a problem with that. The idea of like an audience of people looking at me,

I've never had an issue with it. It makes all the sense in the world to me. And I've got friends that are conversationally very confident who, when they've had to do anything like that, have said to me, I don't understand how you do that. It does not make any sense. Maybe that comes from observing yourself so much. Yeah.

And sort of thinking about what makes you tick. And that's actually a form of empathetic intelligence, I would say. Yeah, I mean, the only problem with that is there's some comedies that are absolute what. Yes, fair enough, but I'm not putting all comedians into that bucket. I'm just saying, now, the bread roll. So someone threw a bread roll, what kind of bread roll was it? Do you remember? It was just a bog standard white bread roll.

A corporate. Yeah, it was a corporate. It was in like a Mayfair hotel. And the thing that I will always maintain is that I have no problem. I don't think you should throw things of people generally. But I don't have a problem with them yelling at me. Like, I really don't. Because they kind of, I have that right to express myself. And they also have a right to express themselves.

And when something happens in a room between a comedian and an audience, I think that that is, there is an honesty to that. I think a big problem that we've got into with the sort of proliferation of camera phones is that things that happen in comedy clubs are being filmed, cut out of context, and then being put on the internet. And you don't really know what happened, you know, if you weren't in the room. Like, you don't really know.

There's certain things that, you know, like when Michael Richards went on that incredibly offensive racist right, right? Like, regardless of the context, that's not okay. It doesn't matter how, it doesn't matter what happened before or after that. The context is irrelevant because of what you said. But there's a lot of stuff that has happened in the last

sort of 10, 15 years where you think you watch the clip of it and people say, well, this is an outrage. And you go, yeah, but what was going on around that? I genuinely believe they had the wrong. right to boo me and yell. They really did. That's fine. The problem was then somebody in the room was a telegraph journalist. Now, I've said this to various people and they said it was a cricket charity dinner. Of course somebody was a telegraph journalist. And the problem was that then for the sort of next 24 hours, it was like a kind of like shitstorm in the, in the press. And it then

became sort of it became something else. The really interesting thing for me was then I was able to write an 80 minute show about it. You know, like after COVID in the lockdowns, I went back on tour at the start of 2022. And I should not say after COVID because it is still something that we're dealing with. But after the lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, I went out on tour in 2022 and 22nd. and it is the greatest thing about comedy. Yeah. Is that failure is information

and also like failure is sort of material. There's things that I had to work really hard on about that show because I then talked about, you know, mental health implications and getting PTSD from the death threats and getting the balance of that to a comedy audience was really hard because it would make people too sad. You know, of course it would. So you've escalated that quite quickly.

And just to give a bit of context there, the telegraph wrote about this incident. And then it snowballed, and you were getting death threats on Facebook. Facebook, yeah. Several times a day. Yeah. Your agent said, we need to take this to the police.

The police said there's not that much we can do. Nothing, yeah. And you're then living in this state of repeated fear where you're visualising someone potentially attacking you or stabbing in the street and everything. And your partner and then your friend, Brett Goldstein, Clang, suggested that you get therapy. Talk to us a little bit about your therapeutic journey and what you think it's taught you. Well, the most important thing to say is I should have been in therapy for a long time.

And when the mass report started, because again, you know, it's, you know, it's, It's a political comedy show on BBC 2. And so it attracted a lot of hostility in the conservative press. I would argue personally, there were a lot of people who had newspaper columns that were very upset with the idea that someone who looks like me had an opinion on the way the British government was run. I would say that that is my personal view, that it reeked of racism. It reeked. I read it in the columns. And in some ways, I would think, you know, I can hear the slur.

Like you're not using the word, but I can just hear it in the way you've written about me here. It was also used in a kind of proxy fight with the BBC, which is the BBC shouldn't exist. There's a lot of institutions and organizations, and I would include the BBC and the Labour Party in this. They have no interest in feedback from people that they assume will always support them. And that's why both of them are seeing real serious. They are both experiencing really serious crises at the moment. And so anyway, there were all these articles saying this is BBC bias, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, when that happened, my partner said, you should seek therapy.

But at the time, I thought that that felt like an indulgence. And I felt myself, I felt a voice coming from myself saying, Oh God. Oh, I need therapy because I've got a host a TV show. Oh, this thing that I've wanted to do my whole life has happened and now I'm sad about it. All of that is wrong headed completely. But that's what was going through my head at the time. So I didn't do anything about it. And then I kind of left it until it was way too late. And because of the therapy, having started and been in it for kind of five years, I've sort of been able to create, I've been able to kind of answer a lot of questions for me. What's wrong with me was the first question because I'm spinning out, like this isn't good and so the first answer was you have post-romic stress disorder and then I was embarrassed about that for a while

because I'm not supposed to let racism affect me that's the lesson, that's the thing that I, from when I was a kid I was like, I'm not going to let it get to me and it really had affected me. I felt like I was sort of letting down my family and my community by allowing it to affect me this badly And I felt like ashamed a bit about it.

And, you know, because like everyone I know, so many people I know go through the same thing, you know. And I did feel very embarrassed about it initially. And now I know that that's all nonsense. And like racist abuses, racist abuse is always going to affect you. It's always going to get under your skin. Especially when it feels connected to a political architecture. You know, when I was a kid and a guy shouted, your kids would shout pach me in the street.

And it was upsetting and it was threatening. But when it happened in 2019 and 20 and what's going on now in the country, maybe we were naive, maybe I was too young, but those kids yelling at me didn't feel connected to an overarching political architecture or an infrastructure that was trying to push those ideas. It felt like they were outliers.

But now, it feels very connected to the name calling feels like a link in a chain. And so the guy in the street says the slur. So then Tommy Robinson organizes the United Kingdom March. He doesn't say the slur, but he's organizing the march. And that's connected to the guys who say the slur on the march. And Tommy Robinson says, we disavow racism, but we're, you know, blah, blah, by uniting the kingdom.

And then Nigel Farage says, well, I disavow Tommy Robinson, but we do need to do something about this. There's a lot of but we. That's the kind of phenomenon of racism at the moment. It's like, no, we wouldn't call, we wouldn't say these words, but we do need to have a conversation about, well, obviously, I wouldn't, I don't think Tommy Robinson is legitimate, but we need to have a political. And then it comes to a head in politicians like Boris Johnson, who say, well, obviously,

Nigel Farage is, you know, uncouth or whatever, but we do need to, you know, and then, and then on the end result of that is there's a guy who abuses you in the and then but we, but we, but we, but we, but we, but we ends up with a conservative home secretary saying, but we need a hostile environment because of all of these problems. And so, the therapy really helped me understand that. It then also helped me understand why my brain particularly was susceptible to it. And it's a sort of combination of an anxiety disorder and ADHD. So I have like a natural inclination. I have a generalized anxiety disorder and that means that my brain is constantly cycling the worst possible information. Like my therapist

always says the difference between someone who is very worried and someone who has a generalised anxiety disorder is that you are addicted to anxiety. It's not just that you like there's a part of you that sort of enjoys like the the adrenal rush of the worry. It's not, you know, because in your head you think, well, I'm just, you know, I'm planning ahead. I'm thinking constructively and actually you're like, so when somebody threatens to kill me, that feeds the anxiety. So then it's the worst thing possible, blah, blah, blah. Then, and then on top of that, if you also have ADHD,

your brain is just, you know, it's constantly, it's just a constantly wearing pinball machine. So then if you've got this constantly wearing pinball machine, and then the actual, I don't know enough about pinball to complete this analogy, and I regret embarking on it. The ball itself, is just a sort of compressed metal circle of all the worst thoughts

that can possibly have and if that's then flying around the pinball machine then of course that's going to leave a kind of damage that manifests itself as post-robatic stress disorder. So like it's been great for me to be in therapy because it's given me an explanation for what happened to me in 2020.

And it's also sort of given me an explanation for why a part of my brain is like this and has always been like this. You know, it's generally when my experience of my friends and I that have all gone into therapy in our kind of 30s and 40s, nobody's getting information that they're surprised by, man. Like nobody is sat down with a therapist

and they're going, what? I've got an anxiety disorder. Everyone is being told something that in their heart of hearts they knew from the beginning. With ADHD, I, I, I didn't know that I had ADHD because I didn't really know what ADHD was. I went to school in the late 90s and the very early 2000s. And we just didn't know what it was.

If a kid like was running around too much, everyone was like, yeah, they've got ADHD. We just didn't know really what it was. And the psychologist that diagnosed me with it said the H is the problem because he said hyperactivity is a word that we don't. sometimes scientists I think use terms that have a really specific scientific meaning but unfortunately when they come to us the non-scientific dummums of the public we don't know what the term means

so he said the problem is when you hear hyperactivity you hear a person kid running around a school classroom and he said that's part of it but hyperactivity also refers to mental hyperactivity right it's nobody would call me on a physical basis active. Hyperactive,

when no one's getting near that. So I think that's part of the problem. I'm not hyperactive. I'm barely active. Yeah. But actually it's mental hyperactivity. Fascinating. You've explained all of that

so unbelievably well. Thank you. I wonder whether your experiences with therapy and the realization that you were carrying this, that we live in a society that is structurally racist and hatred is embedded in those institutions. Have you ever spoken to your parents about it? Yeah. Yeah, I talk to them all the time.

Listen, two things can be true. Like, it's bad right now. But things have improved since my mum was hearing the same. I think the saddest thing is that my mum said to me, you know when Stama made that speech I know he's apologised for this I'll caveat that from the beginning but when Stama made that speech

where he whether consciously or not echoed some of the stuff Enoch Powell said in the Rivers of Blood speech now the Rivers of Blood speech is sort of about my family really you know it's it was sort of aimed at the influx of South Asian immigrants but he is broadly just about any person of colour

that comes to the UK but the timing of it's around that sort of time that was when my mum mom said, oh, maybe we have gone backwards a little bit. But, you know, my mum came, my mum was in Leicester in the early 70s. You know, the National Front was on the streets. You know, progress is like, I can't believe I'm about to embark on a maths metaphor. We've done pinball.

Now all that's left is algebra. You know, like, when you do maths at school and you do a graph and then you're, if you drew a line of upward data stuff. And then there was some exes outside of. Yeah. And then what you do is you sort of draw a line of best fit. Yes. And then the line of best fit looks super straight.

But the actual reality is that the data's going all over the place. But you're sort of broadly seeing. That's how I feel about social progress. And we right now, 26, Britain, we're in a downward bit. You know, in America, you know, Roe versus Wade was struck down. You know, we're definitely in like a global recession of basic human rights. It is interesting to talk to my parents

because I feel like my mum, sort of particularly, because she was here in the step, my parents actually met here, but my dad came here when he was in, he was in the early 80s. He was 30, maybe late 20s, early 30s. There's a kind of,

he sort of meets it all with a bit more of a, I don't know, maybe there's just a bit of a shrug. He's like, he sort of be like, yeah, yeah, we always knew this was going to happen. He's never totally articulated this. I think my dad in his back of his mind is thinking, yeah, they'll kick us out at some point. Maybe not they'll kick us out, but we should probably have a contingency plan when they do. And that may be the difference between being someone who immigrated in their late 20s

versus my mum who came here when she was 13, 14, 15. We're in a down point right now. It brings us on to your final failure, which, as you state it, is the broader failure to move the dial of the country into a more progressive direction. Do you feel that responsibility? No, I don't feel that responsibility, but I feel that as a progressive person. I'm not approaching this as like a thought leader or a political leader because I'm neither one of those things. But as a person who, as a voter, I have a certain set of beliefs and a vision for the country. and I will vote for whichever party I believe is going to do that.

The reason I have such an emotional relationship with the Labour Party is historically the Labour Party has been the political organisation that has been the catalyst, the vehicle for those political changes to happen. It's really funny to put that as a third. I did that partly because I thought it was funny. But also it wasn't because I feel some responsibility for changing the countries just more as a voter.

I think people talk about this a lot with the elder millennial generation versus the young millennials and the Gen Z, where they have just a bit more nihilism because we have the slight sense memory of when things are getting better. Well, I'm Gen X, so you're knocking on an open door here. That's so true. We do have the slight sense. We have the slight sense memory.

Like I went to university and my total debt was something like nine grand. Yeah. You know, and so, and you know, I do remember growing up, you know, when I was a kid, but I needed to see a doctor. We've booked an appointment and went to see the doctor. You know, that wasn't, we didn't really worry about that. So because you have that sense memory of things going, things functioning, there is more kind of anger and hurt and disappointment that really post-2008 and we really don't talk enough about, you know, financial crisis and it's really the kind of ghost at the feast of all of these conversations. You know, financial crisis, sort of broken economic model that had been functioning

since the end of the Cold War. But the problem is no one acknowledges that. You know, no one said, you know, like the amount of times I hear about the fucking bins not being picked up in the 70s, we had to change. We needed that job. We needed Reagan. Because in the 70s, they didn't pick the bins up. Okay, so in 2008, the entire economic system breaks.

So then you're, you know, advocating for deregulated capitalism doesn't make sense to people my age. You know, they keep wondering why people my age are not breaking or are breaking for left-wing parties or are voting for socialist parties. It's because it's not out of naivety. It's a response to the events of our lives. You know, 2008, we should talk about it all the time. You know, the ramifications of it have felt.

in our day-to-day lives all the time. Well, I really appreciated when you said earlier, let's not say after COVID, because we're still dealing with the consequences. And it's like that famous quote, and I think it was a Chinese diplomat who, when asked what the consequences of the French Revolution were,

said, I think it's too early to tell. But we're all still living this legacy. I wonder if I could bring this to a close on a slightly more hopeful note, which is, I would love to talk to you about friendship. because you have a great group of friends who have seen you through a lot. 100%.

And I think men aren't often asked about how they do friendship. How important is friendship to you? Can I just briefly, before we go on to friendship, just say, I think I don't want to leave the politics thing on a just that note. And the one thing I would say is, if you look at the 20th century,

if you look at where we are at the start of the 20th century and where we end up at the end of the 20th century, like massive strides of it were made. And we're actually so, in the grand span of human existence, the idea that women should be equal, non-white people have the same rights as white people, gay and lesbian, transgender people have the same rights as cisgender heterosexual people

and working class people shouldn't just be left to die in a mine or a factory. In the grand span of human existence, that idea is an infant. Yes. And we changed so much, especially in the second half of the 20th century. We've made so many advances in strides. And that quote, the Martin Luther King quote, you know, the arc of the moral universe bending towards progress.

I still believe it's true. And I still think the line of best fit will go upwards. I think what's just important is that you understand that Martin Luther King wasn't passive. He didn't, he wasn't saying, don't worry. It will bend towards progress. He was saying, put your hands. on the arc and bend it towards progress.

So, like, as bad as I think things are right now, I think if you acknowledge how much progress we were able to make in the 20th century, we should, we can still do it. You know, we can still turn, like stuff like the climate. If you think about how much progress, so many pioneering people were able to make in the second half into the 20th century,

we can, I still believe that we can replicate that. I don't believe that we'd be on time. So that I just want to, just so that I don't leave us on. Yeah, you don't leave us on the edge of a cliff from back to jump, phenomenally put. On political nihilism. But yeah, friendship is like hugely important to me.

I'll be 41 in August. So I guess like most of my childhood was me watching the show friends. So I believed that the way he lived was just with your friends in a flat next to some of your other friends. So like maybe that, maybe I was radicalized by Ross Geller. It has been really interesting learning how. how to evolve those friendships, you know, and evolve those relationships. Because I think when you're in a relationship, romantic relationship, by definition, you sort of have to work on it.

You know, you're in such close proximity to each other. And for me and Amy, you know, neither of us had really been in a relationship before we first took up with one another. And I think we sort of learned after a few years. We actually have to talk about this relationship. Like, how's it going? what are we trying to do? We've learned to sort of communicate with each other.

That's one thing. But also I think you have to learn how to evolve your relationship. And I think that happens quite organically with your partner or your husband or your wife. But you don't think about that as much with friendships. And also part of the joy of friendships is that you do also want to preserve a part of them. You know, when I see Ed, who I met when we were, I don't know,

19, 20. Ed Gamble, this is. Ed Gamble, yeah. There is still a part of us that is, it does regress. Yes. And you sort of don't want to lose that because that's sort of energetic,

but also, you know, Ed and I probably do have like a different relationship now than we are because we've sort of had to, you know, go through more life stuff together. You know, you do have to speak to each other about your emotions. Yes. I love hearing you talk about this. I mean, I wrote a book about friendship precisely for this reason

because we don't have enough language to express what we mean to each other as friends. And at the back of the paperback edition, I put a list of 20 questions that I believe we should all ask our friends that can be quite fun to do. And you can do it over a pint and stuff. But it's because we sometimes, because we don't talk about it, we don't understand what our friend thinks friendship is. And so I do think it's a really important thing to culture.

and to water. Yeah. Oh, 100%. And you realize when any kind of crisis occurs, how much those are the relationships that are really, you know, going to help you through it. Especially, I think especially straight men, it seems like there is a issue where, as we get older,

we don't maybe cultivate our friendships in the way that we should. And I think maybe part of it is that I'm like pretty lucky. key insofar as a lot of my, you know, a lot of my friends are stand-up comedians. We have a lot of odd sort of free time. But I do think that actually being more proactive in terms of like checking in on people is something that I am trying to do more actively now. And I think it is, yeah, I think it's, it's such an important part of my life. You know, in the early years of my career, I don't know why I didn't quit.

I should have quit probably. You know, the years 2007 to 2010 were not, the line of best fit was not pointing outwards. But part of the reason I didn't quit is I was egged on by so many of these morons. And they would just keep me like, no, it's going to be great. We're all, you know. And yeah, and like, I'm like. in the last few years when there have been, you know, the last kind of five years where there have been these issues, it is my friends that have kind of stepped up. Your personality and your relationships are things that you have to work at.

And if you don't, there is no version of stasis. The only options are improvement or getting worse. And relationships won't stay at the same place. They will just get worse unless you improve them. And, you know, I've watched some people just become dead. because they're not thinking. James Acaster. I've watched Acaster.

No, I mean, actually, to be honest, of all of the people I know, he's probably the one that is like he works on himself more like, or he certainly started work on himself before any of us. But I have seen some people where you just think there's no such thing as standing still. You can't do it. Well, Nish Kumar, we are so grateful for your pinball mind. You're arcing towards progress. Thank you so, so much for this wonderful conversation and for coming on How to Fail.

I was thrilled to be here. It was a wonderful conversation. I hope some of it made sense. All of it did. Now go get your heel. Please do follow How to Fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.

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