TRIGGERnometry - Simon Evans on Woke Bias at the BBC

Episode Date: October 11, 2020

One of Britains finest comedians Simon Evans joins us once more! Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is the show for you. If you want honest conversations, we're fascinating people. Our brilliant and returning guest today is one of Britain's finest comedians. Simon Evans, welcome back to Trigonometry. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me back. And you both look extraordinarily well, better even, I would say, than you did two years ago. Fantastic. Thank you. The lockdown has done us well, apparently. We are the Donald Trump's. of mid-range conversation. A nice little setup there

for the rest of the conversation. But Simon, if you don't mind me revealing this a few weeks ago when the whole BBC left-wing, right-wing bias thing was being discussed, you called me up or we had a phone conversation and you were sounding increasingly irate as the conversation went on.

Maybe your new diet was kicking in not enough carbs or whatever it was. But you felt quite strongly about some of the things that were being said at the time. Yeah. And it's obviously, since, we last spoke to you, the culture war has accelerated, it's become much more part of everybody's lives. So just talk to us about your feelings on the whole thing, how it was presented, there was

articles written about how they're no funny right-wing comedians or all this sort of thing. Yeah, that's absolutely true. And my wife, incidentally, would agree with your diagnosis that it's due to a lack of carbohydrates, but I actually feel much better for having eliminated those. I feel clarity, which I wish I'd had 30, 35 years ago. I would say that something, I mean, I don't So it's a cliche, isn't it, to say that something snapped or something. Do you want to mean? These things are incremental. They change over time.

But there have been lots of iterations about that discussion. Is right when comedy even possible? Is it desirable? Should his representation important? Is it the equivalent of having on a climate change denier onto the today program? Do we need to hear from Pierce Corbyn every time that there's a new program or report comes out of the IPC? But I do feel that there was a dishonesty in the last iteration. that angered me.

There was, on this podcast, and I've been on a couple where we've discussed this kind of thing before, I've had five series of Simon Evans goes to market, which is not a right-wing show, but I suppose it is in support of the free market, and it champions the notion that markets have a role to play in organizing our affairs, which, you know, authoritarian state command is sometimes less able to do as efficiently. So it has its right-wing to that extent, you know. And I've had, I've been on the news quiz and so on. So I've always felt that, you know, I'm not like kind of ban.

I don't have pictures of myself with gaffer tape over my mouth, you know, to try and demonstrate that I feel like I'm in silence, you know, like I'm in some sort of gulac. But I think, like I'd say on the last trigonometry that I was on, that I came to the defence of the BBC to some extent and said, I think, among other things, it probably has fallen victim to some extent to conquest, Robert Conquest, second law, which just says that any organisational institution not explicitly dedicated to right-wing pursuits will drift leftwards over the course of its lifetime. I never heard that, that's great.

Well, all three of his laws are brilliant. The other two are that everyone is conservative about that, which they know most about. And the behaviour of most bureaucratic institutions is most easily understood if you assume it has been captured by a cabal of its enemies. Which I think is also possibly accurate for the BBC now. He was, of course, he was a brilliant writer.

He was the man who first exposed the great terror of Stalinism in the 30s and 40s, and all of British intelligentsia didn't want to have anything to do with that. When his book was republished, the Great Terror, and I think the 1990s, and the publishers asked him, I don't know if you know this story, but they asked him if he would like to change the title, and he said, yes, let's call it,

I told you so, you fucking fools. Which was pretty trenchant. But he also wrote brilliant light verse and limericks, which was anthologised by Kingsley Amos. So, you know, a man of many talents. Anyway, that was what I thought the BBC was. But there was something about the way they treated their most, you know, the way they defended themselves against the most recent. There was this thing that was apported, Tim Davy, which may or may not even have been true or may have been exaggerated, that he was concerned that a certain kind of woke tendency, which is like, I know it's a slightly laboured term, but, you know, it is very convenient shorthand.

A kind of, yeah, the new, the new orthodoxy about certain political views, which is okay or not okay to hold, was dominating British comedy. especially a topical comedy, and the other views weren't being heard. And he was anxious as well, I think, which I think is as much as it to do with anything, that a certain kind of juvenile attitude to those issues was predominant as well. And the middle-aged people were feeling hectored by students, essentially, every time they wanted to see some comedy. So this, yeah, this launched a thousand think pieces. And I just noticed a large number of them contained.

my name as an example of the BBC's determination to bring balance to topical comedy wherever possible. It said there are very few right-wing stand-ups for whatever reason. We just don't know. We just don't know. For some reason, right-wing views and stand-up comedy just don't mix. And presumably if you're a right-winger, you know, you immediately go into, you know, the privatised prison services or something, you know, rather than like trying to make people laugh. But the one or two right wingers that there are, which is to say me and Jeff Norcott, it seems, are never off our screens as a result. We are the beneficiaries of this terrible, you know, gap, this terrible market supply problem,

which somehow market forces have failed to meet as they normally would by producing water supply. There's this terrible shortage. And consequently, I haven't been on Mock the Week since 2011. I have never been on, have I got news for you, I've never been on the MASH report, I've never been on any topical comedy BBC television program at all, or in fact, for that matter, any of the ITV or Channel 4-1s. I'm not saying I should have been, I'm not saying I have a right to be, I'm not saying this is the dereliction of duty,

and the licensed peers that are being, you know, shafted by, but if you're going to present me as the totem of your earnest enthusiasm, for finding balance wherever possible, and I haven't been on a single program in over a decade, that feels to me like dishonesty. And that was the point at which something started twitching in me, and I just thought, I need to say something about that, because it's just absurd. You know, you cannot keep getting away with that. There is clearly some determination to either remain willfully oblivious to the appetite that at least half the nation, by definition, if half a left wing, half a right wing, you know, the centre moves, yes, but, you know, by definition, half a right

of centre, if you're oblivious to their weariness, their fatigue, this endless bias, and you're fighting a rearguard action to try and keep your licence fee in place, then I don't see that that ends well. You see what I mean? So you're saying there's no right wing privilege, sorry? No, I don't believe there is something. I mean, clearly, you know, the old-fashioned right-wing privileged and exists. You know, the aristocracy are all right. You know, there is still, there are still landed classes. Maybe there is still work to be done on that front, you know, but in terms of the voices that are heard, and it's not impossible. You know, I was on the news quiz last week, as I say, on radio, I still get a sniff of it. I was on the news quiz, and, you know,

I am confident enough in my performance to say, I think it went well. I don't think it felt like there was a turd floating in the swimming pool around which all the nice left wing, you know, Bien Ponson were forced to swim and hold their noses. I think I combined pretty well with, you know, two other comedians, three other comedians, an L.A. comedian who was kind of very progressive and does mainly Dutch routines about how Donald Trump is going to end the world. We still manage to sort of engage. And do you want I mean?

There's not necessarily some kind of oil and water issue here where you just cannot combine these ingredients to make a palatable soup. It's, you know, it is better for everyone. in this respect that diversity is actually better for everyone, you know. So why aren't we seeing it? And so now I feel like I am much less patient with this argument, you know, that they have than I was two years ago, which I think to some extent then, there was an argument that, you know, if you don't see representation, if you see a certain kind of political view is always the one

that's funny, if it is taken as well. I mean, I remember working on the 11 o'clock show, never appeared on it, but I worked on it as a writer, That must be, what, 15 or 16 years ago? The Levin O'clock's show was 99. Yeah. Ricky Javee, right? And Adi G, of course. You know, and it was kind of mocked at the time,

but it had some pretty good moments. Well, in the writer's room, they had a board up on the wall. I mean, it was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it was there, which had like a dozen core propositions, which this show finds funny and returns to in order to, you know, create jokes. And they were things like John Prescott is fat and likes pies. You know, it was that bold, you know. Now, they taught, you know, Labor and new Labor had been in for a while at that point,

and they were the, you know, they were the targets. But that's how writers' rooms work. You know, that's how these things, you know, they think it's all over. It was exactly the same. Certain football managers are fat and eat pies. Certain football managers drink too much. Certain players could probably lose a few pounds. Do you what I mean?

There's just these core propositions. You come back to them again and again and again. And it becomes very hard to dislodge them. And I just think a lot of people switch off after a while. And do you think that there is a fundamental bias within the heart of the BBC? Yes, a huge bias now. I don't, well, the heart, I suppose you might say, I don't think the news department is that badly biased.

I think, in fact, if anything, you could find evidence that some of its, you know, highest ranking, high-profile reporters may have a right-wing bias. I think you could probably say that Nick Robinson engaged with right-wing politics in his youth. You know, I think he keeps it under control, but, you know, there are a high-examples. I love the way you talk about it like some kind of disease.

He keeps it under control. I don't mean he keeps it under control in that it's toxic, but obviously in interviews. Andrew Neal, they could probably, I know they've lost him recently. I don't know whether it's due to that. I think he was by a mile the best interview of the BBC, probably the best interview I've ever seen tackling contemporary politicians in the UK and would be in the US as well. I think he's a grave loss, but I hope he'll find success with his new station.

But yeah, he obviously has some quite, let's say, skeptical views about certain left-wing politicians and the quality of people in Westminster as much as anything else, you know. So, yeah, the news and current affairs department, I think, is reasonably well balanced. But I think comedy and I think also drama and I think like entertainment, I think general radio for programming, it just displays. And it's a real, and I think it's just getting ridiculous now. And I want to say, this is, I say, I'm scaling this. I'm breaking cover in a way, knowing this is not going to help my BBC career.

They're not going to wake me up and go, oh, we heard you complaining on the podcast. Sorry, we'll be of an oversight. Let's get you on. But the fact is, I love the BBC. I grew up with, like, loving its programmes, everything from Blue Peter and Jack and Orr, you know, up to all creatures, grands, all of that kind of stuff. You know, that absolutely is my childhood. And I think it performs an incredibly valuable role in British culture and society

because it doesn't have advertising and because it doesn't have advertising and because it doesn't have, you know, the kind of commercial forces that China is currently able to bring to bear on private media companies in America now, terrifying degree of leverage that they have on everything from basketball and football right the way through to actual news programming. You know, you look at Bloomberg and how he downplays Chinese authoritarianism in order to keep his business channels open with him. Michael Bloomberg, you know, the actual individual. These are really worrying tendencies, and the BBC is our strongest. ballwork against that, but if it loses its legitimacy by just losing the goodwill of half the

nation, then it's in real trouble. And it cannot legitimately determine, it cannot legitimately demand the license fee, which is in essential, you know, in terms of a tax, can be used to fund it. I can see arguments for and against in the background, but its primary function at the heart of British culture is enormously important to me. And so in exactly the same way that I would actually reject the notion that, for instance, Ralph Miliband hated the country, which offered him safe sanctuary, you know, in the 1920, you know, that whole Daily Mail thing, oh, he came here and then, and then tried to undermine it with his, he came here, but he loved the country, but he had communist views. Now, I don't share those views, but I'm sure they were

sincerely held, and I'm sure he wanted to improve the country that had given him, you know, sanctuary, but... Make it's true, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it's insane, but... And I mean, I think it's also, it's also a legitimate thing to raise, incidentally, if you're trying to decide whether to elect a prime minister. But this is what I mean. I mean, I feel like the reverse of that now. I feel like I'm actually saying to the BBC,

for God's sake, you need to get this under control. Because, you know, I just see so many people switching off now and totally unable to trust it. And you've seen what happened in America. You know, Donald Trump, for the last four years, I don't see him as like so much like a torch that's been swung around down in the basements and the cellars under the media and the deep stay or whatever. He's more like he's like thrown down a, you know, like one of those flare-gup, you know,

there's been an explosion. It's made a terrible mess. And you can very easily argue it's done more damage than good. But it is, I think, incontrovertible that it has illuminated an extraordinary degree of bias in the American media. There is no question now to my mind. And people talk about, oh, you've been radicalized. I've only ever been radicalized by seeing obvious. it split it outright and naked lying on the part of the left.

I've never read anything by anyone right wing that has pushed me further right. Do you what I mean? I've never, I've been cage me glass at Katie Hopkins article. This is rabid, half-semitterate nonsense. I have no interest. But I read the Washington Post in its coverage of the Comington High School incident where those boys were approached by the Native American with his drum. And the way they promoted that as being somehow,

some kind of bunch of Catholic high school boys, bullying this political activist, that radicalised me. Yes, I was deeply affected by that. I was horrified by the anger and the malice and the poison and the invective that was directed at those points and the complete refusal of them to acknowledge that they got it totally wrong. Within 24 hours, lots of video evidence emerged that told the true story. And that was just one example. There's been loads of examples of that. And you don't want to go down that route. Because America now, nobody acknowledges a universal consensus about the media they can trust. There is not one single source of news now in America, which more than 40 or 50% of the country

will say is a trusted source. And that is not a good start. That is not a good place to go to. I agree completely. And that's one of the reasons we've been talking about BBC and the problems with the BBC, because we both feel passionately like you, that it's a hugely important institution. Actually, I would go beyond even what you. you said, it's hugely important for keeping Britain together.

Yeah. But, you know, my grandfather fled the Soviet Union because he actually listened to BBC World Service. Absolutely. He was a beacon of freedom to a lot of people. And still people talk about it in those terms, the shortwave radios, yeah. But equally, that's why you and I and Francis, we've all been warning about the path down which the BBC has gone, because it will destroy itself.

Yeah. You know. But one of the other interesting things about the chat we had on the phone a few weeks ago was that you were somewhat skeptical about the noise being made by Tim Davy and people on his behalf and saying that this is now this radical transformation that will bring the BBC back from the brink. You're less persuaded by that, are you? The only thing I would have to say about the Tim Davy remark, which then didn't really seem to correlate closely with his speech when it came.

This was like a sort of teaser for a speech he was giving to some conference. I can't remember which one. And it didn't seem to get a mention, in fact, in his speech. And some people said, oh, the Telegraph have taken this opportunity to, you know, go to one of their hobby horses, which, of course, the Telegraph have a biased interest. And they could commercial interest in seeing the BBC fail. So they would like to see that happen, you know. And, you know, can you trust them? Well, no, you can't trust them. That's half my point. But you can't trust anyone at the moment, really, without seeing some action. Because I don't know Tim Davy at all. I've never met him. And I haven't really followed his career up to this point. He seems like a decent chap.

and I think he has the credentials, you know, on paper to run the show and to do that job. But I don't know how serious he might be or might not be about this. So you can't be, you know, swayed by a press release. This is my point, really, you know. My wife works in PR. I see how it works all the time, you know. Press releases are sometimes put out to test the water. Sometimes they put out instead of doing anything.

Sometimes they put out deliberately. I'm not saying she's done this, but I know the industry. sometimes they put out deliberately in order to provoke such a strong reaction against the idea of a thing happening that it's retreated from before. Do you want to mean? It's deliberately done in order to make the action impossible. Now, I don't know whether you would say, sorry, I don't know whether you would say that that has taken place with Tim Davy. It flared up and in the time since we spoke, it's died down again a bit. Who knows what may or may not be coming.

Every so often you see stories in the media that Paul Mertland and Ian Husslop have been sacked from a Vigot. for you because they're seen as being old white men and now there's going to be some new box-ticking woke alternatives that are going to come in. And this isn't true. You know, it just isn't true. And I don't know whether any of these stories that come out have had any kind of connection with anyone who even, you know, puts the kettle on in the BBC. But you have to wait and see what actually happens. So yes, I'm not, I'm not skeptical specifically about this. I just, you know, this is just how the world of PR works now and how messaging is controlled. And And it is a dark art.

I mean, it always has been to some extent, you know. And confusion and befuddlement is usually like the absolute first go-to. You know, as everyone says, big tobacco playbook, that's the first thing. You cast doubt on everything. You know, you find alternative surveys and alternative findings. Everyone, I hate to use it because it's a term so beloved of the left, but gaslighting. It just feels to me like gaslighting, which, if you're in case your listeners don't know it, come from a movie in which a man drives his wife.

mad by altering the environment around her and then denying that he's doing so. Basically, he turns the lighting down and she's convinced things are getting darker and says, no, it's exactly the same and she goes mad. Now, whether that would actually make you mad or not is a moot point. People's nerves were a bit short after the war. But that happens a lot to us now. We can all see what's going on, but it's quite possible, you know, it's quite people can sustain for a long time media campaigns that if you have enough control of the argument of the conversation and where it goes, you can sustain the impression that actually this is an illusion you're suffering under and your conspiracy theorist or whatever, you know, when we all can see exactly what is

happening and it's absurd to pretend otherwise. So, you know, I want to see actual action before I see any kind of, before I have a view about whether Tim Davy is in earnest. Not that I'm saying, I think he's a liar or, you know, I don't think he's up to the job. But I do think it'll be a bigger job than he realizes because I think the culture, what we see, what emerges from the BBC and what emerges from a lot of places like universities and so on at the moment, is not a veneer. This is coming from deep inside. This is coming from, you know, the collective viewpoints, the collective mindset of, you know, the sentiment that is shared throughout the organization. You know, it's deep inside. It's not responding to some memo saying,

make comedy more woke, you know, so it's not like another memo going, okay, that's enough, he's back on the... That's not going to happen. This is downstream of the people who work there. So unless you're going to like sack everyone, you know... I've got no problem. You go rushing on them. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world,

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But I suppose that leads into the question, you know, Tim David can come in and he can try his best. But haven't we gone too far down this particular path? In the BBC? Well, I don't know. You have to be patient. You know, there is this phrase, the long march through the institutions, which sounds like paranoid absurdity. And if it had been invented by somebody on the right, I would say it probably was.

But given that it was, you know, coined by a German Marxist, I think, wasn't it? Was his name? Deutsch or something? Rudy Deutsch, something like that. It's an interesting, interesting thing to look up. And he got it, basically he was synthesizing Antonio Gramscii writings from sort of 1930s, Italy. It's very interesting stuff. It's very theoretical, but you know, you can see it's not hard to map it onto the reality

we live in now. The long march through the institutions is basically the proposition that you are never going to bring about a communist or left-wing revolution, a socialist revolution in the West through the traditional means employed in Russia or China, because contrary to Marx's views, everyone is too comfortable, there's too much. Cultural hegemony, which was Gramsci's phrase again, which is that there is too much control by the universities, by the media, by the government, by the establishment, as they used to be described, the various instruments of soft power, which to some extent we still have,

who will make people averse to this, you know, the idea that they should rise up and burn everything to the grammar start again. And so instead, what you have to do is get your hair cut, clean your nails, present yourself in a nice, clean shirt and tie, and get a job in the British library in the universities, in the BBC, and you are basically like sleeper agents. Now, as I say, put like that, it sounds like right-wing proper, you know, paranoia. But as it becomes a kind of, as patience, you know, takes its time and as a certain kind of shift in the mindset of the sort of people who might be inclined to go into the civil service changes, I mean, I was at university in the mid-80s. And I think most people who went into the civil service there, I regard

it as being, I couldn't imagine having the whole world, the opportunities that it presented, the different kinds of career paths that you could choose. I studied law and you didn't want to be a lawyer, but I thought I'm going to come out of this as a graduate, you know, as a free man with, like a wallet and a pair of boots and I can go wherever I want, do whatever I want. Who would conceivably join the civil service in that situation, you know, and basically sign up for 35 years with a nice pension, you know, as the main prize? So I do, I've never understood the kind of mindset of people who might do that, you know, never, never overlap with me. But they were fairly sort of conservative, I think, at that time, you know, but gradually

over time, it has become a role that's become more attractive to people of the left, you know, it's become more attractive to people with that kind of mindset. And the more of them there are, the more attractive it becomes, and the more they tend to get recruited, and the more they tend to see messaging that encourages them to think that their kind of thinking will be, well, them and that they will be able to get some leverage on the wheels of, you know, the levers of power will be available to them in a small way and they will be able to make the difference, as they say it. They don't see themselves as engaged in some sort of, you know, conspiracy or a terrible sort of evil plan. They think they are doing God's work, of course, you know.

Well, the right, correct moral people have finally taken control. Yes, exactly. And we are now able to educate children about the correct way to think about sex and gender from the age of seven and all the rest of it, you know, that has become, you know, a perfectly legitimate role for anyone working within the state sector now. So what we need, I suppose, what I'm saying is, is patience, you know, these are long, long fights and the pendulum is long and swing slowly, but it must eventually swing back again. It may even conceivably already have started. I don't know. I do see, my daughter is 16, and I see in her generation, you know, she is privately educated, so she may not be typical in that regard.

But I do see, hey, about which I have issues myself before anyone be in. But I do see in her generation, Generation Z or Gen Z, as they call them, you know, a good deal more skepticism about this project, you know, the great awakening than perhaps, you know, the people in their late 20s, early 30s or whatever who, you know, I think they can already see that, you know, that. they are being, you know, bossed around at the very least. I think there's a resistance to that that's emerging, I hope. It's an interesting thing talking about bias, because one of the things I've aware, and it's probably way too late into the interview, about half an hour in,

to explain to people who may not be familiar with your work or your thinking on things, that both you and Jeff Norcott, who's a friend of ours as well, who you mentioned as the two sort of, at least claimed representatives of right-wing comedy on BBC and other channels, you're both sort of, you are sort of more libertarian than anything.

Jeff is very much centre-right. So neither of you are sort of doing material on the benefits of flogging and hanging. Well, no, my stick to the extent that it was political at all, I suppose, things change. I've been doing it for 25 years. I think the first 10 years I did adopt quite an arch persona, which was obviously quite ironic, but was essentially almost a sort of, I mean, I don't know if you know Julius Evela, he's a sort of 1930s right-wing Italian thinker. never heard of him then, but I've since encountered him, and he's quite comical because some of

his pronouncements are just so sort of absurdly, you know, dignified. There's a famous one that I adapted for my Twitter bio in which he said that my views are only those which, prior to the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal. He said this in the 1930. But, you know, that was kind of my schick, and it was, as I say, it was very tongue-in-cheek. But I suppose what I would try and do, as I say, again, to the extent that it was political, was express views that were like comically of that kind, you know, comically antiquated and archaic and aristocratic rather than sort of right or left wing.

But also, I suppose, use those to puncture some of this sort of sentimentality or the absurdity of the left and just, you know, just make a space in which you could see the, you know, how you could make that point. But that's my point, Simon, which is that neither you or Jeff are sort of making material about the importance

of creating the Lebbins, ram, and Poland. No, no. That's not, that's not coming from. Well, it was Brexit, which I think created a thing, of course, as it did for most of us. I think Jeff genuinely did vote Brexit and has made a perfectly sort of clean case for that and expressed his views. My thing, of course, was I didn't really vote.

I didn't vote Brexit. I wasn't on the day of that itself. I found myself unexpectedly stuck in London. I didn't vote at all. But if I had voted, I would have voted the main. But without any great enthusiasm. But, you know, I paid attention. It was all it was to some of the legitimate arguments on the Brexit side.

and I knew, for instance, my friend Merrin Somerset Webb, who's an FT columnist and editor of Money Week, who used to be my guest on Goes to Market. She was an advocate for Brexit on economic grounds, long-term economic grounds, you know, always going to be bumpy, but there's, but there are huge gains to be had in her view and a few other people of that kind. And also, I was increasingly sick of people like my father who was in his late 80s and wanted to vote Brexit, you know, being treated as just unreconstructed racist, you know, and I didn't think that that was where he was. was coming from at all, you know. So it was more like a defense of a different point of view from my point of view, you know, and just, I mean, you know, I'm in danger of sounding like a kind of white knighting mentality, you know, which is obviously very obnoxious. But I just felt there were certain people who weren't getting properly represented. So I just sort of came out a little bit in their favor. But Brexit, obviously, you know, it divided everything and it redrew every

map, or rather it drew a much, much deeper chasm between two halves of that map. It was like the Berlin Wall going up, you know, I think in the comedy and in culture generally. I'm not, I still think to this day we are still seeing many things through a Brexit prison, which aren't really Brexit at all. For instance, this is my view, and I'm well aware this might not, I might not be able to sell this, but I genuinely hold it. Dominic Cummings, when he had that whole, like, Fiasco driving up to Durham with his kids and then going to Barnard Castle for the day. Which I think was unquestionably was a day trip with his wife, you know, regardless of the I-Tesh nonsense.

But the hate, the loathing, the vitriol directed at him for doing that after his rules, supposedly. We were obeying his rules as if he'd come up with him, I betrerebly, you know, because he thought that they might be for our better good. Neil Ferguson, who actually insisted on those rules, broke lockdown. There was no hatred and vitriol towards him whatsoever. It was basically, that was quite funny that he allowed his girlfriend, this married woman to come in through his French windows for a bit of hanky-panky during lockdown when that was breaking the rules. No question, I'm sure, he was right in thinking that they were...

Yeah, but he had a decent motive. Come on. Exactly. Maybe Dobby thought he was going to get his end away after day. My point is, my suspicion is, my suspicion. is the reason that Cummings was hated for the Barnard Castle excursion is because for a couple of years, everyone had thought he will deliver a no-deal Brexit

from the consequences of which he will then proceed to make himself safe and secure. He will not be the one feeling the food shortages, unable to get insulin, held up in a 20-mile tail back at Dover. He won't, none of that will apply to him. He will escape all of that. He will give us this absolute shit show of a no-deal Brexit it and then he will abscond from all the terrible consequences.

And that hasn't even happened yet. And may happen and maybe he will do that. I don't know. But when they saw him go to Barnard Castle, that's what they thought they were seeing. They thought they were seeing the mind they always knew. That's what he would do. It would be one rule for us and one rule for him. And they thought that's what they were seeing.

And that's how it's poisoned everything. You see what I mean? It's like everything is just seen through that lens now. And again, not good, not healthy. at all. How nice to be talking about Brexit. Yeah, it's been a while, isn't it? It just keeps like that gift that keeps on giving. When we started this show two and a half years ago, we had one dream. And that dream is now fulfilled finally after all that hard work, we're advertising B-Days. And it's not just any B-Days, it's Scoosh B-D-Days. And not just Scoosh B-D-Days, these are B-Dade Attachments,

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Just head over to their website and enter our code, which is T-P-O-D-1 to get your amazing discount. That's T-P-O-D-1 to get 10% off a B-D-A. I'm so glad we finally achieved our dreams. Well, we are three comedians here, and we've touched on comedy, but we haven't really delved into it. So it seems to me, and maybe you disagree with me on this, but the bias within comedy has just got worse

since the two years ago that we spoke to you. Yes, I'm afraid I think that's true. And it's funny, you know, when the virus came, I think there was a month or so, I suppose it was probably immediately prior to the death of George Floyd, when you felt that a lot of what had, you know, the kind of fluff and like loose hair we were all entangled in had just been swept away

and we were brought back to fundamentals, you know, we suddenly see what was important in life, the lives of our nearest and dearest and keeping yourself safe and all the rest of it. And it felt like a lot of the noise that might die away and we could all just embrace, albeit through Zoom, you know, and emerge into a new reset. And it just did. And then, of course, it all just exploded with 10 times the ferocity.

The Black Lives Matter riots and then the statue toppling and then people, against the statue toppling and then people believing that the mask wearing was yet another attempt to authoritarian control. And there's just been an escalation now of polarising views. I think it's much, much, not just in comedy, but obviously that. The thing I would say about comedy is, obviously I know who my colleagues are, and I speak to some of them on Twitter, but there is no comedy as such at all at the moment. I mean, it's gone into, in much the same way in the Second World War. You know, you had no football. I think he was Arthur Aski, who made his first broadcasting four years from the, you know, from Broadcasting House, you know, that all having been shut down during the war and then said, you know, anyway, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, you know, it feels a bit like that at the moment.

And so, of course, we're all inward looking. We are all trying to create, we're all trying to, let's be honest, you know, keep ourselves in the public eye to some extent. it's quite difficult to do that with jokes. You know, they are a bit lame. One of the thing that was quite interesting I found, I don't know if this is off topic, but in the first month or two of coronavirus, and it's continued to some extent,

in the first month or two, there was a sudden eruption of really funny memes and videos and like shared online humor from anonymous people. None of it credited to anyone. You know, some of it was classic internet meme Just a face of somebody famous with a speech bubble

Some of them were like people who'd done like a minute long TikTok video in their house which was brilliantly inventive Some of them people have made little models of people moving around the house Incredibly inventive and not one of them came from a recognised comedian as far as I could see To the extent that comedians did their own stuff It was a bit icky A lot of the time there was a lot of eaginess There was a lot of sense that

Ah, without you know I say there's a there was a famous saying when I think it was in 2008, the financial crash. Somebody said it's like when the tie goes out, you can see who's been swimming naked. And that's how I felt about comedians without laughter track. If you don't have an audience responding and saying, that was funny, do it again. Suddenly there's a kind of slightly, uh-feeling, you know, and we're not used to that. We're like tennis players, you know. We need the ball to come back over the net so we can punch another low ground shot over it.

It's like we're not used to just performing in a basketball. So we've had difficulty. And one way to get around that, of course, is to become politically activated, you know, to start doing stuff like, oh my God, I can't believe, you know, we're being asked to wear a mask stroke. I can't believe people are refusing to wear a mask, you know. It gives you something to connect with. It gives you something to engage with. And it makes you feel vital.

It makes you feel like you're an important part of people's lives. And, you know, comedians are, you know, we need to eat, you know. I totally understand that, you know. I don't know, to what extent I may or may not have got it right. or wrong myself, but I haven't produced a huge amount of, of, like, self-promoting content. I have written for a few online magazines, and, you know, I've tried to remain active. I've probably written more under lockdown than I have done in the previous 20 years, you know, month by month, for the pro rata basis.

I've written about 30, 35,000 words of what I, you know, is considered content, but it's not a whole book. But, you know, it's more than I normally would do. But you make the point, Simon, about the political angle because, you know, I think it's a legitimate point. Some of us, I've always been political with what I've done. So it's not been a thing for me. But there has seemed to be, and as you said, particularly since BLM and George Floyd, a sort of uptick in people's embrace of that. Yeah. People that I have friends and colleagues that were never political before, very political now.

And this is why I want to come back to the BBC briefly because there was this incident. And I don't want to get into the who said what and whatever, because it's not really that important. I think it just illustrates the point about the BBC's angle on things. There was this instance on Frankie Boyle's show, New World Order, where a black comedian was explaining how when people who are from that point of view, the BLM point of view, say, kill whitey. They don't really mean kill white people. And the joke was then, we do. Yeah, I saw that. And that created a stir.

And I just remember that the first time we had you on, Joe Brand had just made comments about Nigel Farage. And they were sort of very similarly tinged with a sort of, I defended Joe Brand at the time. But they were tinged with this idea that the joke was about hurting people. And what was your take on that situation? Well, we talked about Joe Brand. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. And I felt I defended her right to do it.

while observing that she had herself, you know, brought people to account in quite a decisive way previously for things they'd said. And also you were critical of the producer, which was interesting because this time I was critical of the producer while again defending the comedian's right to be a joke. And I got a lot of pushback on that as supposedly I'm this free speech warrior and now I'm saying. I watched Frankie Boyd's New World Order and I think it's, I'll be honest, I think it's a show of two halves. I think Frankie's monologues are amazing. They're densely packed, incredibly rich in analogy, creative language. You know, there's almost like a kind of magic realism to them, or you might say, like, they're very elusive.

They're very, they're almost biblical, you know. They remind me of like hard rain's going to fall or something. Do you want to mean the way that Dylan would channel Browning or the Old Testament? They have that kind of density, which is really rare in language. Funny enough, Russell Brand is capable of it when he puts his mind. mind to it as well, you know, who's another like man of the left, who has been on a more interesting journey in my view. I think Frankie is a really talented comedian. I hope he won't mind me acknowledging that he also has, I think, a very good writing team on that, you know, show.

And that's perfectly natural and normal. It's about creating the best product. And I know some of those writers. And I think it's a really, those monologues are amazing. I think Frankie himself, in my view, is not really a man of the left. I think he's a total nealist. I think he made quite a considered and probably correct judgment at a certain point in his career that he couldn't continue to just like degrade everything without any sort of sense of having any sort of focus or distinction between what was deserving and what wasn't. And so at that point, he basically threw his weight behind releasing political prisoners from Guantanamo and everything else was like directed, you know, I'm not saying it's insincere, but that's my, that's my impression.

That makes the most sense to me when I look at the arc of his career. But that show has become weird now where you get that monologue and that's very funny and engaging and thought-provoking and I have no quarrel with it being one-sided because it's obviously, you know, that's what it is. It's an author of piece. And then there's this kind of weird roundtable discussion which feels much more like some kind of 1960s Maoist struggle session in which Sarah Pascoe is expected repeatedly to acknowledge her white privilege and all the rest of it, you know, by a series of ever more didactic, you know, critical theory experts.

I'm interested that you say that woman was a comedian because she didn't come across like a comedian at all. She doesn't come across like somebody who wants to make people laugh. When she said, when we say Kill Whitey, we don't mean it, we do. I mean, people laugh, but it was the way you laugh at somebody who is like, you know, at a meeting and says something funny about the real, but suppressed for the purposes of PR intentions of the group. Now, I don't think it necessarily shouldn't have gone out.

I don't see it as a genuine incitement to Kill Whitey. it might have had some connection to that terrible event in East Croydon a little while later, who knows? I don't know. I'm not pinning that on them. I can just say if it were on the left, if that had been the sort of thing that somebody had said about Brexit just before the MP was stabbed up in the north, Joe Cox, then, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if some people had drawn connections between the BBC broadcasting that and that happening. Do you know what I mean? Who knows? But it's an extraordinary. widely, you know, wide definition of comedy what goes on that show right now. It feels like it's a very, very politically motivated and unadorned, you know, discussion of events from a

certain political perspective. And as I say, that would be fine, perhaps, to a degree, if there was anything at all from the other side, if there was any attempt to put on comedians who were as well-informed and well-read and well-referenced in libertarian points of view, or right-wing points of view, or, let's say, Roman Catholic points of view. Or just centrist's point of view. Or even just, yeah, a centrist's point of view, to say why Black Lives Matter actually has certain elements in its credo, which we should be very careful of introducing into our schools and playgrounds before we wholeheartedly endorse the capitalized version of that slogan. You know, I just think that these, this just, you've got to have some kind of pushback against, of material of that,

of that degree of, uh, that strength, I suppose, you know, that purposefulness. And I'm going to present you with the counter argument now. The counter argument to your point would be that really comedy can only be left wing, because the entire point of comedy is to mock to satirize the people in charge and power. And we have been in a conservative government now for 10 years. The right are the ones who hold power. Therefore, the only truly authentic position is to be on the left comedically. Do you agree? I think was it Swift or somebody of that era who said that satire is a sort of mirror

wherein everyone perceives every face but their own? Something like that. Not necessarily, initially felt not necessarily to be, I know, yes, what is it like to discomfort the comfortable and vice versa or something like that? And comfort their flickering. Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Satire to me, and I mean satire is quite a narrow definition anyway, and does it even exist or does it come and go?

Or, you know, could you honestly say, for instance, what the weakest satire? I don't mean that in a harsh way, honestly. It delivers a lot of laughs, you know, pound for punch. But satire, for me, at any rate, should be of the human condition. The fundamental purpose of comedy is to make us aware of how ridiculous life is, how ridiculous we all are, how ridiculous all our aspirations are, how ridiculous the aspirations of a Tory government that comes in with a huge elected majority

and has an incredible budget in which they essentially steal all of the left's clothes and present the red wool with a massive payday for their electoral loyalty and within a month are destroyed by a once-in-a-century medical event that nobody could have foreseen coming whatsoever. All of their aspirations and hopes and glories, you know, just reduced to dust in that respect. That's funny, you know. And so too, is it funny when Alf Garnett wants to just try and get through his Sunday

afternoon without being interrupted by the bloody Jehovah's Witnesses? A man of that low status with his tiny aspirations but still unable to pursue them. It's also funny. You know, comedy is about our absurd, inflated view of ourselves as having any command of control over our own fate and fortunes whatsoever, you know. I watched a good film a couple of nights ago, a Cohen Brothers movie called A Serious Man, which I've been thinking about a lot, which kind of deals with those issues, and about the insanity of pursuing meaning or coherence in life.

This is what a lot of comedy should and traditionally has been about. It's what Samuel Beckett's plays are about. High art can go there, but so too can Gorton Simpson. You know, Stepto and Son had aspirations. It was only because young Stepso had such huge aspirations that that series remains such an high watermark in British comedy. He is funny. Now you would go, well, that's punching down, Stepton and Son.

How could it be more punching down? These two men are the most, like, absolutely on their uppers, the most economically marginalised and vulnerable people in society. That wasn't how they saw themselves, you know, and that made the show funny. We're far, far too preoccupied now with this. kind of what is essentially a critical theory matrix, you know, of oppression dynamics, where does the power lie in any situation and that will tell us. And this is why when you go to

a comedy show like Unleashed, you know, where, which to be honest, is not nearly as kind of provocative as it pretends it might be sometimes, but it's just funny, puts on a good bill. There is this gale of laughter when anyone says something which they know they probably shouldn't laugh at. And we're not talking about racism or sexism or rape jokes. To be honest, you're more likely to see a rape joker at jimmy car live show or in fact a frankie boyle live show than you are at unleashed but you see jokes you know that just make you laugh before you run through all the fucking rolandex in your head to see whether it's okay to do so that's why comedy is necessary you know because it reminds us it's a it's a it's a truth which we struggle to repress most of the time

that's usually what breaks out in the middle of a comedy set you know so we're in the last 10 15 minutes in the home straight if you like i mean one of the things we were talking to just as we were sitting here before we started. And you mentioned it in the interview itself, which is you talked about how you don't expect the BBC to watch this and to go, let's get Simon on this and that and whatever. There is a price that can be paid by people who are critical of this critical race theory stuff.

And you talked actually to us about how it's not even your own career that you're so much concerned about now. There's a price to be paid by families of people who speak out against. this. Not what I would say, I mean, I'm not, no kind of physical threat has ever been offered to my family, but I'm aware that, you know, yeah, some people might say, oh, that's all your husband described as a right wing comedian, it's not right wing, you see? You know, well, I'm not saying I am right wing or I'm not, but, you know, those conversations can be uncomfortable, even that, right wing, which,

I mean, probably yes, I am, you know, in historical terms, I have probably sat center right to most governments that I've lived through, you know, even as everything has drifted leftwards in my view. but that is another, I suppose, moot point. And I suppose that's one of the reasons that few people are willing to be as open as you are about your concerns. Because I know a lot of people share certain views about, let's say, diversity, quote, unquote, in inverted commas, about things that are happening. But it's very difficult to discuss, number one, without being punished directly. And number two, without also sounding like a sort of bitter middle-aged white man. Yeah.

where you're going, why haven't been given this opportunity, even though, and I have no skin in the game anymore, because I'm not really doing the comedy, strictly speaking, in that sense, even though we all know that some people are promoted because of who they are rather than because of how skilled they are, you know. So we seem to be in this environment where it's very difficult to be open about these things, aren't we? Yeah, certainly. And the diversity thing, you know, I don't think, I don't know anyone who has a quarrel with diversity that emerges naturally or even, I think, perhaps, to some extent, is given a helping hands. Maybe if, for instance, posters went up in schools encouraging young black kids to think that there was a job for them in the BBC.

I mean, the BBC have made an awful lot of progress as they would see it. Maybe it is in terms of getting representation on the screen. There is still an enormous lack of diversity in the production and in the board, in the boardroom, in all the management. At that level, they can probably do to encouraging some people. That might not be such a bad thing. But it does become a racket. There's no question about it. It becomes a racket. You know, there's that great old phrase. I can never remember the guy's name. But every great, you know, every great movement starts as a cause, sorry, every great cause starts as a movement, becomes a business and ends up as a racket. I can't remember the guy's name. I wish I could, American sort of philosopher and,

and, you know, that's where we're at. You know, there is huge amounts of money, huge amounts of money now to be made. Essentially, it's classic rent-seeking, you know. You're not bringing any value. You're not creating wealth. You're not improving the lot of mankind. You are interfering with processes. But in order to do so, and in order to maintain your legitimacy,

you have to come down very hard on anyone who says anything. I have friends, for instance, a criminal barrister who was recently forced to go on an implicit bias training thing, you know, where they sit in front of the computer and you find out whether you have... No, how racist you are. Yeah. This stuff has been like... It's been thoroughly debunked.

I mean, there is no question about it at all. There are very, very substantial studies which have proven beyond doubt. It doesn't work. It doesn't... A, it doesn't demonstrate anything meaningful about how deep-rooted, deep-seated, somebody's racist and prejudiced opinions might be.

And it certainly doesn't improve their behavior afterwards. You know, they come out, having had a nasty shock, you know, or maybe or whatever, or being told, you know, and nothing improves. But there is loads of cash in it. And I remember, like, you know, two or three years ago, I overheard people at the BBC canteen talking about having been on one of these things, and how it was fascinating. Because people, it's a human behavior thing to my mind as well, as much as anything else. People are fascinated by themselves, you know, everyone, it's catnip, you know, especially to a certain kind of demographic. Youngish people usually, you know,

It's just fascinated. Oh, it turns out, look, I've got this and you've got that. You know what I mean? They're all people of constant. It's like astrology. It is literally like astrology. It has no greater claim to intellectual foundations than astrology, but it taps into exactly the same curiosity we all have about ourselves. And it's become a vast racket. And in order to sustain that, yes, they will come down very hard and you get that kind of thing, you know, which we all know about now, like white fragility, probably the highest, you know, The mode of it, the final form of it, where any attempt to resist the narrative only goes to prove how deeply embedded in the floor you are.

White fragility, written it, of course, itself by a white woman and one who collects vast fees to lecture people about how their fragility is preventing them from seeing the truth about their privilege. Bad, it's bad. I'm telling you, that is not good. These are not good. These are not good trends at all, bad. We need to raise productivity in this country.

You raise productivity and everyone starts feeling better off. The feel-good factor that, you know, that Tony Blair had, that was an economic factor. That was an economic reality. Raise productivity, improve everyone's lot. We urgently need to address the housing situation in this country and redistribute the wealth a little bit around the country and across the demographics.

I totally get that. I think this is, I think a lot of this. reflects terrible hand that's been dealt the young people. And certainly if you look over the last 10 or even 30 years, you know, you see the top 1% have absolutely creamed off all the extraneous wealth, all the new wealth that's come into the economy in the last 10 years, in particular since the crash, has gone straight to the top 1%, not even like to the headmasters or barristers or local newspaper editors,

you know, who used to be considered to be solidly middle class, you know, the Acacia Avenue guys with their umbrella and the, we're the morning dear you know slightly boring and stayed but you know knew we had a decent pension to look forward to those people have been shafted every bit as much as the kids have you know there's no wonder they feel the system is rotting but it's not to do with like the issues that black lives matter is you know it's not to do with police brutality not in this country certainly it is to do with economic you know some really deep-seated economic problems that are not being addressed and i think a lot of the deal with woke capital as they call it you know like the banks happy to

put up flags for gay pride and everything, you know, is because they're really happy for you to focus on that shit and not notice what's actually going on, which is that capital accrues value faster than Labour can keep track with. That's the problem we're facing. You know, that's the difficulty. And the only way it was solved in the past was with World War. So we really need to get to grips with that instead of fucking all these distractions, which is, you know, which is where we're at at the moment, as I say, and is why I think, you know, the whole edifice of the establishment is now behind the woke movement because it's an amazingly successful distraction from the actual issues we need to address.

And so how do we move forward, Simon? Well... He's already told you, World War, man. World War. Look at you. The Sun, the Russism. It was like, boy, yeah. Well, I don't know why...

General Winter is back. Whatever that accent was, didn't really much. It is funny. I have found myself reading endlessly books about summer of 1914. The lesser known of the Brian Adams songs. What's coming. That's right, yes. But my first real...

six-string but had nothing to plug it into. So that was... No, but you're right, Simon. I mean, wealth and income inequality, you can be on the right or left. It's toxic to harmonious societal relations. It kills everything. And the evidence on that is very clear. And unless we're addressed that, we're going to be screwed. And that's why a lot of us have been talking about the economic impact of the lockdown. Yeah. Because that's only going to make things worse. It's made it much worse. And I'll be honest with you, I will say this, you know, a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but the truth is, this virus left to its own devices would essentially have been quite benevolent towards mankind

in the long run because it was absolutely focused and targeted at the elderly. You know, it would have been like a bad flu. We would have had a bad winter flu. There would have been a lot of people would have gone a year or two before it was maybe their time. Otherwise, many of them already living in the hell of dementia. And two or three years later, people would probably have moved on and nobody would really have felt that there was any great terrible tragedy. A few people, yeah, but we've looked at the statistic, way less than a thousand people in this country

have died under the age of 70 with no comorbidities. That is not a public health emergency. You know, the last time I was here, this thing I said nobody is paying attention to is the demographic shift in, you know, the elderly social care, the ownership of property being held by the elderly, you know, young people unable to move forward. This is a massive societal problem. And this virus could actually have solved it. But we've buggered that up now.

You know how we said he's not really right wing? I think he is. I think what would have had, what would have been the best solution? You know, funny enough, the best policy was the one that Boris Johnson laid out to Philip Schofield and Holly Willoughby on this morning a couple of days before Neil Ferguson's phone call came through. We should have toughed it out, herd immunity. The elderly and vulnerable should have locked down and self-isolated.

We should have got systems in place, meals on wheels or whatever to keep them looked after and everyone else should have cracked on with it. think that would have been the best solution. We have now absolutely shafted young people. They have inherited an even vaster debt than the one they already had. Loads of the kind of jobs that they always wanted to get into have just disappeared. Zoom and all that kind of stuff, the absence of commuting and move to homeworking may or may not be like a viable way to move forward, and it could be part of the great reset that avoids the, you know, the cataclysmic climate change that has been on the table for some time. That may be a good long-term solution, but I don't think it's healthy

for young people not to be going to workplaces where they can engage with others. A lot of office romances and so on, you know, are not ever going to kind of, yeah, not ever going to get kindled via Zoom, you know, I think it's a, you know, a huge amount of, and London in particular, you know, was like a real young person. I mean, they were, they were getting shafted on the property and everything, yeah, but they were all coming here regardless because it was like, it was absolutely cooking, you know, places like Shawditch were like world centres of excellence for young people having ideas and using their vitality to create new you know all kinds of new modes and idioms of um of profit and and that has just been slammed you know i think it's a terrible

terrible error a terrible error and and again one which a lot of people who feel that way feel unable to speak about because you know oh you want to kill your granny you know there is there are lots and lots of different ways in which government programs can kill people and they aren't always immediately obvious, you know, but you've seen what's happened in America, you know, the Rust Belt, the opioid addictions, the deaths of despair, have rocketed over the last few years, and almost certainly played a huge part in leading to Donald Trump, which is what everyone says they don't want to happen over here, you know, and that's what you're going to get, I suspect. You know, it's not a total coincidence that fascism

emerged out of the Great Depression. Not, it's, that's a slight over it, simplification, you know, the collapse of empire as well, but it was a big part of it. And on that rather cheerful, I don't have any, finish with a song. Buddy, can you spare and die? We always finish with the same question, which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society, but we really should be? Well, I mean, I suppose in a way I've just said it. I said last time that it was the demographic shift towards the elderly, because it's the least glamorous demographic shift. People are actually quite happy to talk about changes in race,

changes in religion, the rise of Islam and the collapse of Christianity across the West. Those kind of issues feel, they feel dangerous, they feel risky. You know, you feel a frisson when they come up and you're worried that somebody might say something unacceptable. But people are quite excited about them, talking about old people just like living for 30 years after retirement and the our failure to address that, whatever, that's coming in, I think, has only got worse since. I think the care home fiasco with, you know, basically sending in patients with, I mean, it was almost like, I remember Winston Churchill in one of those books I mentioned,

I've been reading a lot earlier, I love this quote, referred to Lenin as being like a Plague Bacillus, who were sent in in a sealed carriage into Russia by the Germans in order to create their downfall. And, I mean, that's what I think about. Every time I think about the treatment and the whole approach to it. But, of course, the truth is it's something nobody wants to address. It's very easy to get angry with the government or to get angry with the local authorities for their callous treatment of the elderly.

But they wouldn't be in those homes in the first place if a certain degree of callousness was not already in evidence. from the society that doesn't feel it has a place for them. You know, they're basically in cold storage waiting to die. There's no escaping it. We've seen panorama does it like once every 18 months. You know, none of these places are like very pleasant. So I'm afraid I'm going to have to say that again.

I still think it's that. We are not talking about how we are dealing with demographic shifts. And, you know, we are not having children and we are not dying. You know, that is not an ultimately long-term sustainability. sustainable situation. It's a good point. You reminded me there was a comedian

who I used to gig with who had the joke about how he's put his mom in home and it must be a good one because it's been in the news. You're right. You're right.

Simon, thank you so much for coming back. Is there anything you'd like to plug at this point? Oh, God. Your Twitter is. Just remind everybody. Just follow my Twitter

at the Simon Evans. And if you want to read my Patreon stuff, The top tweet there, the pin tweet will tell you exactly where you can find that. But everything else comes through there anyway. That's where I spent most of my day. Fantastic. Simon, so good to have you back.

We'll see you guys very soon with another brilliant episode or a live stream. All of those go out at 7pm at UK time. Take care and see you soon, guys.