TRIGGERnometry - Comedian Simon Evans Learns the Life-Changing Truth About His Dad

00:00:00.440 In the show that I'm just winding up now, The Work of the Devil, which contained two major revelations in the second half,

00:00:07.360 one of which, the most famous one, and what it's sort of about, was the discovery that I was donor-conceived.

00:00:13.960 And I learned through a DNA test that I was actually conceived in a clinic in central London,

00:00:18.980 run by a woman called Mary Barton and her husband, Bertolt Wiesner.

00:00:22.700 And the husband, Bertolt Wiesner, was, it turns out, supplying the vast majority of the sperm

00:00:27.280 that was getting women pregnant over the course of about 22 years.

00:00:30.360 It's thought to a father of somewhere between 600 and 1,000 children, so I have all these half-siblings.

00:00:34.940 The first time I went into that room, where they were all having lunch, the first big gathering,

00:00:39.500 there were 27 of them in there, and they were the first blood relatives I'd been in a room with, ever.

00:00:46.600 I mean, that's extraordinary, isn't it? At the age of, what, 55 or something?

00:00:50.180 I think the kind of the core philosophical conundrum that you get to through recognising it and pondering on it

00:00:55.620 is, there is no alternative. It's not like, I could have been this, or I could have, I would not exist.

00:01:11.920 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.

00:01:15.940 I'm Constantinus.

00:01:16.960 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

00:01:22.120 Our terrific guest today returns to the show for the third time. He's one of our favourite comedians here in Britain

00:01:27.700 and has also become a very prominent commentator as well. Simon Evans, welcome back to the show.

00:01:31.780 Thank you very much. I'm very excited to be doing my third show. I am looking forward to wearing my badge.

00:01:37.640 Yeah, we'll have to design a badge.

00:01:39.700 I think there should be one, or maybe a tattoo or something. I don't know.

00:01:42.400 Oh, absolutely, on your forehead. It comes with a free bank account cancellation, mate.

00:01:46.060 Oh, yeah. I've been reading about those. Yeah, they're spreading out now, aren't they?

00:01:49.340 Yeah. Just want to make it clear that we were the first.

00:01:52.420 I actually had my bank account cancelled in 1993.

00:01:58.180 Oh.

00:01:58.760 Yeah. Before I'd even become a comedian, let alone a commentator,

00:02:03.160 just for not ever, like, having enough money in my bank account.

00:02:07.420 It was like, you know what, we're just, this is getting boring.

00:02:10.360 Yeah.

00:02:11.000 That's a very old school way to get your bank account cancelled.

00:02:13.700 Exactly. It was like, stop fooling with us. You know, I was like, I was basically, like, broken up with.

00:02:21.420 I got a Dear John letter from NatWest.

00:02:23.820 Right.

00:02:23.960 So, yeah, so I have, you know, I have that mottled sympathy for the current wave.

00:02:27.740 Yeah, well, it is pretty extraordinary what's happening now, isn't it?

00:02:30.260 Yeah.

00:02:30.360 I mean, weaponising financial services is kind of, I mean, people, it's the sort of thing that weird conspiracy people on Twitter with weird avatars used to sort of say, you know, CDBC and this and that.

00:02:44.580 And now it's happening.

00:02:46.140 It does seem to be happening, yeah.

00:02:47.540 Yeah, I think the first time I became aware of that level of interference was during the truckers demos in Canada.

00:02:54.040 And that was particularly disgusting because, of course, people were trying to support them through charitable donation.

00:03:00.800 And the platforms through which those donations were collected were going, sorry, we're not going to give that to the truckers, but here are some causes that we're going to support instead.

00:03:09.220 I mean, that was a level of chutzpah, you might say, that was quite jaw-dropping.

00:03:13.880 I mean, almost comical.

00:03:14.740 But, yeah, I mean, it is, I don't know, individual cases, obviously yours, you know, it just seems appalling.

00:03:21.500 Other people, there might be reasons, who knows, you know, obviously you don't want to stick your nose in too far and find out what might be going on.

00:03:30.040 But that level of control, that level of chill, you know, every so often you think with the general trend that we've been talking about,

00:03:40.320 obviously since trigonometry has been around, that kind of quiet authoritarianism that's, you know, the ability to render certain narratives or points of view inoperable, non-viable, to move the Overton window.

00:03:56.280 You know, we keep thinking it's losing its momentum now, it's petering out.

00:04:02.140 And then something like that happens and you go, no, actually, it's moving into a new and slightly more sinister form.

00:04:08.160 And do you feel that authoritarian chill on your shoulder, Simon?

00:04:11.500 Well, I mean, I don't know that I, I've always tried to keep it at arm's length.

00:04:17.720 You know, I host a show a couple of weeks, a couple of nights a week on GB News.

00:04:21.140 And GB News, some people would say is, you know, is very much, you know, a shibboleth for a certain kind of tribe in the culture wars.

00:04:30.680 But I'm not one of those people who kind of puts that in my bio and goes, here I am, you know, and I don't have flags and emojis next to my name.

00:04:39.520 I personally don't feel I've been closed down personally, you know, and I don't think my bank account is under threat.

00:04:45.940 But of course, you never know which HR departments have decided that you're not going to be hosting their awards this year.

00:04:52.400 You never know which venues have quietly thought we'd probably rather not have him touring it.

00:04:59.060 I don't think anything like that has happened.

00:05:01.620 But of course, you know, you wouldn't necessarily hear about it.

00:05:05.520 If they're doing their job well, those authoritarians, you don't know until you just sort of find yourself washed up on some beach on some uncharted island and no longer booked.

00:05:16.180 And Simon, you've always been someone who had something to say in addition to the comedy that you did.

00:05:21.280 It's one of the reasons I'm such a big fan of yours.

00:05:23.040 But with GB News and with more writing that you now do for the publications, you've kind of stepped into a little bit more of a commentator role as well, more so than in the past.

00:05:35.400 I think is that fair to say?

00:05:36.460 Yeah.

00:05:36.900 I mean, I started writing for Spiked a couple of years ago.

00:05:39.820 I think it'll be two years in September.

00:05:41.460 That initially started really, actually, with a sort of couple of comedian obituaries.

00:05:45.040 It's quite sad that a good friend and a guy I'd worked with, Sean Locke, died and they asked me to write an obituary for him.

00:05:51.860 And then once you're sort of anchored to them, I write a fortnightly column for Spiked necessarily, I suppose, because that's the kind of engagement, you know, the sort of conversation that triggers engagement.

00:06:03.220 You find yourself one week reflecting on something that feels like in the meat of the bat for me, like, I don't know.

00:06:12.560 I mean, I am by instinct quite nostalgic, quite reflective, quite mellow, honestly, you know, and occasionally becoming infuriated, if anything, by triviality and so on.

00:06:24.860 But you do notice the engagement absolutely skyrockets as soon as you start talking about certain, you know, hot-button topics.

00:06:34.080 And so that eventually happens, you know.

00:06:35.900 Well, it's been five minutes, so let's talk about trans-sign.

00:06:42.260 As we all do.

00:06:43.720 No, but what I was going to ask you is, it's actually something, I mean, I don't even do stand-up anymore, it's something.

00:06:48.400 What do you make, we asked Noam, who owns the Comedy Cellar in New York, about comedians commenting on things, and he actually thought it was quite a good thing, because comedians offer a slightly different perspective on things.

00:07:02.900 Have you enjoyed that?

00:07:04.040 Do you enjoy that?

00:07:05.180 Do you think comedians should do that?

00:07:06.640 I mean, my take on slightly edgier topics has always been, as I always, I've been doing it for 25 years, and I think straight away I was starting to do that, is to tease people and tantalise them with the prospect that I'm about to say something appalling or, you know, something that will get me cancelled, and then just pull back from the edge.

00:07:24.240 And that's what I think of as edgy comedy.

00:07:26.220 The point of the edge is that you'll kind of go, you know, you'll get the vertigo, but you shouldn't actually be shoving people into the chasm, you know.

00:07:33.100 And I think I've done that for a while.

00:07:34.920 I mean, I used to do a joke, like, 20, I say 25 years ago, I think, about saying, I have developed a painful condition, went to see the doctor about it, Indian chap. 1.00

00:07:49.020 Pause while they go, oh my God, he's going to say something terrible about Indian doctors, Indian chap.

00:07:53.020 Well, they call it Indian chap, it's just nappy rash, really, but they try and use it a bit, and it's just that.

00:07:58.540 That kind of joke, I think, it's interesting, even just over the course of my career, you know,

00:08:03.540 you will get people now who will recoil more firmly and be harder to tease back out again, you know.

00:08:11.380 But, I mean, just on the trans thing, in the show that I'm just winding up now,

00:08:15.840 The Work of the Devil, which contained two major revelations in the second half,

00:08:20.040 one of which, the most famous one, and what it's sort of about,

00:08:23.300 it was the discovery that I was donor-conceived.

00:08:25.580 And I learned through a DNA test that I was actually conceived in a clinic in central London,

00:08:31.480 run by a woman called Mary Barton and her husband, Bertolt Wiesner.

00:08:35.180 And the husband, Bertolt Wiesner, was, it turns out, supplying the vast majority of the sperm

00:08:39.780 that was getting women pregnant over the course of about 22 years.

00:08:43.160 This has become, there are other cases of this coming out, there's been one come out this week, in fact.

00:08:47.640 But at the time, and for several years, this was a standalone.

00:08:52.840 It's thought to a father of somewhere between 600 and 1,000 children,

00:08:55.880 so I have all these half-siblings.

00:08:57.920 So I use that to discuss, to give me the right, I suppose, to discuss the work of the devil

00:09:04.900 being kind of technological strokes, sociological developments and innovations

00:09:10.240 which are messing with nature.

00:09:12.060 Are we sure that it's fine, that not only can two gay men get married,

00:09:17.840 but they can have a child, they can have a baby?

00:09:20.920 What methods are they using for this to happen?

00:09:23.300 Express a certain amount of old-fashioned shock and horror about that in the first half,

00:09:27.420 then reveal in the second half that exactly those methods were used to bring my existence about.

00:09:33.000 If we hadn't been willing to, I mean, in the view of the church at the time,

00:09:36.960 it was, they regarded it as a brainwave of Beelzebub.

00:09:40.640 So I am literally the work of the devil.

00:09:43.220 But the other one, which I find as interesting as well, was I had very low testosterone.

00:09:50.360 And I did a blood test and found that that was causing me a certain amount of mental fog

00:09:55.900 and actually sort of something quite close to depression, really,

00:09:59.360 just like feeling miserable and unmotivated and so on.

00:10:03.480 And I now take regular testosterone injections, which is not that unusual, of course, in middle-aged men.

00:10:08.140 But at the level of testosterone that I had prior to those injections,

00:10:12.160 I was eligible to compete in the women's weight mixture at the Olympic Games.

00:10:18.860 And so that, again, I think gives me a right,

00:10:22.780 or at least an opportunity to tease a little bit about, you know, let's see, how do we feel about, you know.

00:10:29.500 And then, I mean, recently the substance I use is called sustenone.

00:10:33.140 Sustenone, I think it comes from Australia for some reason.

00:10:36.600 And there was a sort of a bottleneck in supply, I think actually just caused by government interference

00:10:43.620 and wanting to see documentation or something.

00:10:46.300 I went on Twitter to find out if other people were getting these troubles.

00:10:49.620 And all the other tweets were trans, trans men who were using sustenone, 0.95

00:10:56.180 relying on sustenone to complete their or to continue their transition, you know.

00:11:01.560 So I really genuinely am in that cohort by some standards.

00:11:06.920 It's your lived experience, Simon.

00:11:08.340 Exactly, yeah.

00:11:09.880 And so just as a brief segue,

00:11:12.320 what was it like before you had T replacement and after T replacement?

00:11:18.240 Well, I don't know how long it had been, like, really scraping along the bottom

00:11:22.460 because it was quite bad by the time I had the blood test.

00:11:26.340 But the sense beforehand that I was most aware of

00:11:30.360 was a sort of a loss of motivation, a loss of decision-making ability.

00:11:35.300 There's some quite interesting experiments been done

00:11:37.880 where human brains have lost the part of, I can never remember which region it is,

00:11:44.900 but the region that is emotional.

00:11:48.460 And some people think, oh, that will turn you into Spock, right?

00:11:51.980 You'll just make clear decisions without having emotions cloud your thought processes.

00:11:57.500 And in reality, the opposite happens.

00:11:59.220 Without emotions, you have no idea what to do.

00:12:02.160 You have no template, you know, you have no rights and wrongs.

00:12:06.120 It was a bit like that.

00:12:07.260 I found it very hard to determine even in what order

00:12:11.500 I should put on my socks and trousers in the morning.

00:12:13.960 You know, I mean, I could be hesitating over that kind of thing, you know.

00:12:17.020 And if four or five different objects were sitting on my desk requiring attention,

00:12:20.920 I might spend the whole afternoon unable to...

00:12:22.860 So you literally became a woman.

00:12:24.300 Me too.

00:12:26.920 It was the obvious joke to me.

00:12:29.800 But there is a sort of, I mean, there is an old man thing to that as well.

00:12:34.680 I had the testosterone levels associated traditionally with 80-year-old men.

00:12:38.320 But I mean, funny enough, I'd already spoken about it.

00:12:40.520 There's a, I think it was a BBC show, The Big Question, hosted by Nicky Campbell,

00:12:44.560 which had had an episode about masculinity and crisis, you know.

00:12:49.040 And that had been my thing talking about, mainly because I'd read about it rather than

00:12:52.780 realising I was subject to it, that men at all ages now, on average, have roughly half

00:12:59.720 the testosterone that we used to have.

00:13:01.380 And I mean, I suppose the question is, well, is that necessarily a bad thing?

00:13:05.300 Is that going to diminish the amount of pub fights and, you know, and brutalised marriages 0.99

00:13:10.260 and so on?

00:13:11.320 Or is it actually why we might all just be, you know, productivity is down and we don't

00:13:18.060 quite know what we want to do next?

00:13:20.060 There is a kind of feeling like the whole country is seized by that same lack of forward

00:13:25.640 motion at the moment.

00:13:26.820 I don't know.

00:13:27.500 I don't know how much that maps out.

00:13:29.500 But afterwards, to answer your question, I felt pretty good almost straight away.

00:13:33.700 A lot of the clouds cleared and I had a surge of activity.

00:13:38.300 And like everything, you know, nothing lasts.

00:13:41.500 You know, the feeling of becoming better is the greatest feeling.

00:13:45.240 You know, convalescence, it can't carry on forever.

00:13:48.240 And I didn't keep pumping it up and like pumping iron, you know.

00:13:51.360 But although I will say actually, funnily enough, I mean, I do go to the gym and I had

00:13:56.260 noticed that it was beginning to become very difficult to improve in the gym.

00:14:01.920 And I can now occasionally, if I like set my mind to it, see some results there as well.

00:14:07.200 So that is kind of important.

00:14:08.960 But yeah, I mean, everything comes back a little bit.

00:14:10.960 And obviously the thing people will think about is libido, which, yeah, to some extent,

00:14:14.780 I mean, it doesn't restore you to your 20s, but you have some sort of sense of being an

00:14:20.340 active player in the world, I suppose, again.

00:14:22.600 Yeah.

00:14:23.420 And I saw your show, the show that you are wrapping up now.

00:14:26.520 I saw an earlier version of it before the pandemic, actually.

00:14:30.960 It's a brilliant show, really, really fascinating.

00:14:34.240 And part of it is, of course, your character on stage.

00:14:38.360 This is another dimension that you didn't mention.

00:14:40.480 Your character on stage has always been of the slightly, somewhat snooty English gentleman.

00:14:45.540 Yeah.

00:14:45.820 It turns out you're not English at all.

00:14:48.540 Not English at all, no.

00:14:49.860 My mother's side is actually, in a way, almost more...

00:14:52.300 Obviously, the father's genes are pure Ashkenazi. 0.96

00:14:56.680 My mother's side is, like, seems to be Celtic and East European, and there's a bit of North

00:15:01.660 Africa in there as well, which is really mysterious.

00:15:04.960 But they, my parents, who are both still alive, are not particularly interested in pursuing that

00:15:09.280 and finding out why that might be.

00:15:11.340 But yeah, I think to some extent, I think when you start out in stand-up comedy, you try

00:15:17.020 on a few different persona.

00:15:18.140 And I'm quite interested.

00:15:20.780 I read a book recently, or listened to it, as I always do now, Camille Pallier's Sexual

00:15:24.600 Personae.

00:15:25.680 And thinking about Personae, as in masks, in performance and so on, they have to be quite

00:15:33.120 oversimplified and specific and direct and consistent in order to create drama within what is otherwise

00:15:41.900 just the mud, the mess of everyday life.

00:15:44.740 And I think when you start out as a stand-up, you try on a few, some people, I did anyway,

00:15:50.060 you know, to see which one the audience bought, basically, you know.

00:15:54.100 And I remember the first few gigs I did, I was trying to present myself as a bit of a kind

00:15:59.700 of, I don't know, Joe Strummer-type character.

00:16:02.860 I thought of myself as a bit of a rock and roller, you know, in my late 20s, early 30s.

00:16:07.400 I was a bit chaotic, a bit anarchic, you know, and a bit of an outsider and a rebel.

00:16:13.020 And I remember audiences going, no, that's all it.

00:16:16.960 And one day, you know, you try, well, how about if I'm a bit more like a lounge lizard?

00:16:21.580 You know, there was a character Rob Newman used to do in Newman and Baddiel that was a

00:16:25.480 sort of a Jarvis, I think he was called, who was sort of slimy and unreliable, you know, 1.00

00:16:30.360 and superior and callous.

00:16:32.080 And I found that they were, yeah, now we can see that.

00:16:35.200 So you should work on that.

00:16:36.540 But I think over the course of a stand-up career, necessarily, you will, if you allow

00:16:41.680 yourself to, you will evolve.

00:16:43.180 And it's important you do, because otherwise you start just repeating yourself.

00:16:46.100 I think the first 10 years or so, I was like that.

00:16:49.240 Then I think I moved into a slightly different persona when I had kids and became admired

00:16:56.980 in domesticity. 0.95

00:16:58.020 And then I became, you know, your classic sitcom dad, you know, beleaguered, you know,

00:17:04.620 and a bit more Tony Hancock.

00:17:07.460 And I felt much more comfortable in that terrain ever since, actually.

00:17:10.920 I think, I don't know what it was.

00:17:13.180 I think when you're a cuckoo in the nest and you don't know why, you look around for a persona

00:17:20.300 that might enable you to critique the expectations of your own family and upbringing and so on.

00:17:25.680 And I didn't feel comfortable entirely in that upbringing.

00:17:28.480 And I thought, well, maybe that's one way I could do it.

00:17:31.520 But funny enough, on the way up here, for instance, I was listening to a wonderful book

00:17:36.820 by Don Patterson.

00:17:39.840 I don't know if you know him.

00:17:40.560 He's a Scottish poet.

00:17:41.640 And he's written a memoir of growing up in a pretty poor family in Dundee, Dundee area.

00:17:48.300 And it's vastly more recognisable to me, that background, weirdly, than any of the stuff

00:17:55.260 I sort of purported to be a part of, you know, when I was a stand-up.

00:17:58.600 He was talking about, you know, street games and playground nonsense and, you know, collecting

00:18:09.900 coal that had fallen off the back of the coal truck.

00:18:12.540 That's how poor they were.

00:18:13.620 He was sent out after the coal truck.

00:18:15.100 Now, we weren't quite that poor, but I was a lot closer to that than the sort of thing

00:18:18.340 I've pretended to be.

00:18:19.700 And after a while, that kind of mask just gets uncomfortable and you want to throw it

00:18:24.780 off.

00:18:25.240 But I mean, yeah, having children was a natural break in that.

00:18:30.100 I think I'm making a conscious one now.

00:18:34.940 Having done the work of the devil, it feels like that was a culmination, like everything

00:18:39.900 I'd done for the previous 25 years, could suddenly be seen in a new and clearer light.

00:18:45.340 Oh, that's what was going on.

00:18:46.920 Do you know what I mean?

00:18:47.960 There's an interesting book called, I think, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas

00:18:52.780 Kuhn, that came out, I think, in the 60s.

00:18:54.800 But he created the idea of the paradigm shift.

00:18:58.540 And he says in, if I've understood it correctly, which is, you know, far from certain, he says,

00:19:03.640 what happens, we tend to think of science as proceeding gradually in a linear fashion.

00:19:09.340 He says, no, in fact, you have a set of theories which purport to describe and explain a certain

00:19:14.840 phenomena, let's say, you know, the organisation of the solar system.

00:19:20.440 And in order to make the observable facts fit that theory, more and more pressure builds,

00:19:29.880 you know, more and more implausible workarounds or exemptions from the apparent rules.

00:19:37.460 If you see the maps of the solar system and the orbits that the planets were supposed to

00:19:42.340 be pursuing in order to obey the Ptolemaic universe before Copernicus goes, I don't know

00:19:49.660 if anyone's noticed, but if you put the sun in the middle, it all gets a lot simpler.

00:19:53.440 I'm just saying, you know, well, I think that happens in our own lives as well, to some

00:19:58.560 extent, you know, you think to yourself, I know I'm, I don't know, I know I'm this,

00:20:05.320 I know I'm that, I know I'm the other, and everything has to be crammed in there.

00:20:09.280 And somebody goes, you know, I'm just saying, if you turned out to be half Jewish, and your

00:20:16.240 father had not been, you know, that would explain quite a lot of it, wouldn't it?

00:20:20.440 And you kind of go, oh, yeah, so it would.

00:20:22.360 And a whole, like, heap of all the material I've been doing for the previous 25 years

00:20:27.360 is suddenly, you know, thrown into a new light by that.

00:20:31.320 And having done that, that being the sort of nature of that show, I feel like I almost

00:20:36.820 just want to clear it all away, you know what I mean?

00:20:38.860 And start again in some kind of Peter Brook, you know, experimental theatre, empty, empty

00:20:44.540 space kind of, right.

00:20:47.040 What should we talk about now?

00:20:48.100 Yeah, well, that's exciting for you creatively, but I was going to actually ask you something

00:20:52.480 that I'm thinking about a lot.

00:20:54.080 Obviously, I had my son about 13 months ago.

00:20:57.340 And it's something I think we need to talk more about in the public space.

00:21:00.520 And I'm trying to do that, which is fatherhood and parenthood more generally.

00:21:05.920 What was it like for you?

00:21:07.580 And what kind of impact did it have on you becoming a father?

00:21:10.640 And did it spur you on?

00:21:13.460 Did you look at the world in a new light?

00:21:15.400 Or was it more of a burden in terms of your career and creativity and so on?

00:21:20.400 Well, a number of things happened all at once, not all of which were directly just having

00:21:25.200 a child.

00:21:26.000 My wife experienced quite bad postnatal depression.

00:21:28.700 And I think that was probably a bigger issue in terms of maintaining my own sanity and balance

00:21:33.600 at the time.

00:21:34.940 She was determined to carry on working.

00:21:37.240 And I think that was possibly one of the reasons why she was experiencing so much pain

00:21:41.120 in discomfort, because I think for women, I mean, you're absolutely right, fatherhood,

00:21:46.280 but also parent, I think motherhood even more so.

00:21:49.440 I think, you know, both parents, but especially women are, I'm paraphrasing my own wife, 0.86

00:21:56.740 I wouldn't dare to say it just off my own bat, but she says they're fed a lie, they're told

00:22:00.460 a lie that they can have it all, that you can have kids and carry on enjoying your same

00:22:03.880 career and you see, and it just isn't true.

00:22:06.360 And I'm not saying she's the first one or I'm the first one to acknowledge this.

00:22:09.380 Obviously, you know, people have written books about it.

00:22:12.420 It's funny how careful you have to be about saying that, though, because it is something,

00:22:16.380 I mean, you're paraphrasing your wife, I will now paraphrase my wife, and you can speak

00:22:21.340 to lots of women who you can paraphrase afterwards, who will all tell you exactly that, which is,

00:22:26.800 you know, you have been told a bit of a lie, it changes the way you look at your life,

00:22:30.820 your career, everything, and those things cease to be as important.

00:22:34.200 Absolutely. And I mean, funny enough, I was listening yesterday, and I'm going to start

00:22:39.560 throwing around my literary references too fast now, but Essays of Montaigne, who was

00:22:44.300 like contemporary slightly earlier than Shakespeare, so this is 500 years ago, so people have been

00:22:49.140 thinking about this, but he talks about the senses and about how there may be other conceivable

00:22:55.620 senses of which we're not aware, and he has a blind friend who just doesn't understand

00:23:00.260 what he's missing, and uses terms, he had a godson, and he says, oh, what a handsome boy,

00:23:07.120 as he picks him up and holds him. He cannot see him, and the word handsome to him, who knows

00:23:10.920 what that means, but he has heard it and he uses it. I think parenthood is a bit like that,

00:23:15.340 and especially for mothers. Until you have a child, you don't know what it is that gets

00:23:19.900 switched on inside you. It's not like wanting to get home to see like a TV drama that you've

00:23:26.800 been following and being annoyed when your train is delayed because you can't get home.

00:23:30.940 It's not like, it's not, it's a tug you haven't felt before. It's a hook that's placed into

00:23:35.780 the centre of your being on a tightened cord that you cannot escape. And even now, Matilda,

00:23:44.120 our daughter, is 19 and on her gap year and sends in WhatsApp messages and videos of her

00:23:49.740 tearing through northern Thailand on mopeds without a helmet on, and I see them and go,

00:23:54.420 what's she like? And I can see it is having the same effect that Kate would have if she

00:24:00.240 saw her pram starting to roll down a hill. It just never goes. So as a father, I think

00:24:07.400 to some extent, you are then coping with that, and the domestic environment becomes more complex

00:24:15.300 than you might have thought. And also, if I'm honest, I suppose we had a few, well,

00:24:20.920 there were a few conversations we perhaps should have had before we had the children, which might

00:24:24.940 have at least allowed us to navigate beforehand and know exactly where we were going.

00:24:30.620 Like what, Simon?

00:24:31.460 Well, for instance, it turned out my wife was particularly keen that they be privately educated,

00:24:36.860 which has been extraordinarily expensive. And it is one of the reasons she wanted to carry

00:24:42.580 on working so that that could happen. Now, I'm not sure that would have been a priority for me,

00:24:46.100 but certainly it's one of those things. I think if you're going to have kids, it's, I mean, I don't

00:24:50.560 know, this is tricky, because on the one hand, I would say yes, as an individual, if you're going

00:24:55.440 to have kids, you will probably benefit from having a lot of serious conversations beforehand,

00:25:01.120 before you even get married, really, about, you know, if we're getting married, this isn't just a

00:25:05.120 question of like, expressing devotion and love for one another. We are, what we're about to do make

00:25:10.580 setting up a business look trivial. You know, having children, by comparison with getting a

00:25:16.280 mortgage or something together is, you know, it's, it's an enormous commitment.

00:25:20.760 And you have a great line about it, don't you? Something about how you're running.

00:25:25.120 We've set up a small business together. This is going well, why don't we see,

00:25:28.480 why don't we get a troop of baboons to run the posters? Yeah, it's disruptive. And also, 1.00

00:25:34.480 you know, you want to make sure your values are roughly aligned. People talk about value

00:25:38.060 alignment now in terms of AI. But you know, we find it hard enough in marriages, we think the

00:25:42.340 marriage will go fine. So part of me wants to say that to individuals. But of course, as a society,

00:25:47.480 we're already dipping well below replacement level fertility. And anything you say that puts people

00:25:52.260 off, I don't know, I mean, it's a tricky conundrum. Because the truth is, of course, I mean, I've started

00:25:59.400 to form the view over the last few years, that sort of realisation that the traditional purpose of

00:26:06.180 religion as much as anything else was to enforce fertility, you know, to stop people just having 0.95

00:26:11.720 fun, you know, to take their responsibility for planting and harvesting seriously. And it's

00:26:21.600 terribly tempting to just keep putting it off. And if I say things like, oh, you need to make sure you

00:26:26.020 both agree exactly on, you know, well, maybe you should just like, let nature take its course. I don't

00:26:31.540 know. I do not know. My own father, born in 1930, I think he discovered quite recently going back

00:26:38.800 through his own Paris records, I say my father, my social father, whatever, my dad, that he was born

00:26:47.000 at the end of March 1930. His parents had been married three months previously. So that tells its

00:26:53.000 own story as well. You know, he probably wouldn't exist if they'd had a discussion about value alignment,

00:26:58.660 you know. Me neither. So who knows? Who knows? But yeah, you can't, you can't minimise it. And it is

00:27:05.500 disruptive. And interesting, I know that some people have said, I know some men say, you know,

00:27:10.720 you have a child and you go, right, I will go out and provide. Well, if you can do that, that's great.

00:27:15.080 But on the other hand, of course, it is quite, again, the domestic environment does suppress

00:27:20.420 testosterone. I mean, that's proven. If you allow yourself to become enveloped in its warm embrace,

00:27:27.680 you know, the whole point is to stop you playing around, for instance, you know, the more testosterone

00:27:32.700 you have, the more likely you are to be to try and be unfaithful. And so nature has generally

00:27:37.900 encouraged that to go down. And that then, of course, might diminish your inclination to go out

00:27:44.260 hunting quite as often, you know. But yeah, it changes you. And it's not always easy to anticipate

00:27:51.220 how it will do so, you know. And although you hear a lot of men going, I absolutely, it's all

00:27:57.040 about, it's all about my wife. It's all about the little, you know, you do also notice a lot of men

00:28:01.660 start taking on later nights at the office and so on. I mean, there was a guy, I don't want to call

00:28:08.320 him an absolutely, you know, an absolute hypocrite. But I can't remember his name, Ben something, 0.96

00:28:14.540 I think, a sort of outdoorsman who makes TV documentaries about, you know, going down,

00:28:20.700 paddling down the Amazon and that sort of thing. And he did one of those interviews,

00:28:24.780 like lifestyle interview in the Sunday magazine, you know, saying, I always carry with me the,

00:28:29.420 you know, the Polaroid of my wife and daughter, because that's who I'm doing it for. And I'm like,

00:28:35.320 mate, you're away for three months shooting a documentary on the Amazon. You don't get to

00:28:39.940 present as the devoted father. I'm sorry, you are absent, you know. And there are other ways you

00:28:47.020 could have earned a living, but you want to do something exciting. I don't blame you, but you

00:28:51.320 know, let's not pretend that you are doing it for them, you know. Simon, we've been talking a lot,

00:28:57.780 actually, what's very interesting about this interview is about identity. And when you receive

00:29:03.900 that news about who your biological father was, what did that do to your identity, your identity

00:29:12.060 as a son to your father, but also who you are? Did it make you literally question every single

00:29:17.900 thing about you? Well, I wouldn't say every single thing, but it certainly changed my relationship,

00:29:22.860 my realisation. For instance, my relationship with my father, yes. And I realised, and I still do

00:29:28.920 think that I've spent quite a lot of my adult life kind of defending his views to an extent that I

00:29:37.520 might not have done if I didn't actually find them so puzzling. Or his way of being, seeing it at a

00:29:45.040 slight remove, you know, and always thinking. I admired, for instance, the fact that he made a very

00:29:50.240 plain decision early in life, I think, to accept that he had to sell eight hours of his waking life

00:29:57.460 every day to a firm, do something in which he would not take a huge amount of constructive

00:30:04.620 satisfaction. But then he had his hobbies in the evening, and he always got all of his satisfaction

00:30:11.920 from life out of model making, gardening, carpentry, winemaking, and all sorts of weird,

00:30:17.980 incredible, rich hobby life. Had no real interest. And I always, one of the reasons is to stand up,

00:30:24.160 I don't really like it when compayers stand on the stage and say to the bloke in the front row,

00:30:28.180 what's your name and what do you do? Because they're being asked for their job title, and that

00:30:32.740 isn't who people are, you know. And yet I've gone down completely the opposite route. I have virtually

00:30:37.680 no hobbies to speak of, and I get all my creative satisfaction from the work I do as a career.

00:30:43.180 And so I suppose I always had him at a sort of one remove, in a way, and I felt almost fiercely

00:30:49.600 defensive of him. I mean, I didn't vote for Brexit, didn't want Brexit. I wasn't like a fierce

00:30:54.400 remainer. But when the hostility emerged to people who had voted for Brexit, and my father

00:31:01.060 had voted for Brexit, you know, that aroused in me a kind of like a red mist, you know, level of 0.99

00:31:08.580 defensive, you know, don't you dare call my father an idiot, bigot, racist, whatever. I'm not sure 0.99

00:31:15.520 I would, one would normally have had that relationship with a man who was actually one's 0.98

00:31:20.740 biological father. I don't know. But I feel like I was protecting a man who I had a slightly

00:31:28.740 unresolved relationship with in that respect. And I think I feel I see it slightly more differently

00:31:33.280 now. But in terms of identity, this is, it's extraordinarily potentially toxic, but I am in

00:31:39.440 no doubt. I think I've always had like massively disproportionately more Jewish friends than you

00:31:46.660 know, you would expect from representation. My best friend at school, as I say in the show, was

00:31:51.320 Ross Cohen, who was the best man, my best man at my wedding, and I now know was the only other Jewish

00:31:56.820 boy in the class, you know. I don't know that that could have been coincidence. It seems like an

00:32:02.300 odd one to me. So yes, I do think there is, you know, just a smidgen of Jewish identity that comes 1.00

00:32:09.380 from God knows how, some sort of, you know, Gino type expression in, in personality. But

00:32:17.100 I suppose, funny enough, one of the people I used to have regular conversations with about

00:32:23.600 is their identity, you know, one of the reasons I think I wanted to take the DNA test, which I don't

00:32:29.300 explore that much on stage, but I think I had become aware that everyone, I think this was about

00:32:34.740 2016. Everyone seemed to be aligning more and more with their racial or ethnic identity. That was

00:32:44.600 becoming a big thing. And it had underscored a lot of, yeah, tribal behavior on Twitter and so on.

00:32:53.840 And I thought, I don't even really know what my ethnic identity is. Evans is a Welsh surname,

00:32:59.280 but I don't, we don't have any kind of sense of being Welsh. There's a sort of, you know,

00:33:06.440 there's, there's, my parents have done a bit of the old fascial version of ancestry and that

00:33:10.160 disappeared into the mud of, you know, of Bedfordshire subsistence farming. And I thought maybe if I

00:33:16.840 discover, you know, some Viking or Mongolian or some kind of warrior horde from 2000 years ago,

00:33:22.620 that gives you some sense of being anchored in the past, that other people seem to draw some sort of

00:33:28.220 sustenance from. And not always necessarily a bad thing, you know. I think a lot of us, I think a lot,

00:33:34.660 I think of, I say us, a lot of those of us who felt we were just white British in a vague sense,

00:33:41.640 felt a certain amount of envy for those who could say, I am, I don't know, Palestinian British,

00:33:48.440 or I am Iranian British, or whatever. They have some ethnicity with a, with a, with a story to it that

00:33:56.240 has, I don't know, kind of inflames the imagination a little bit. I didn't expect to find what I did,

00:34:01.740 of course. And having done so, in a way, I find that I can close that book now. And I don't actually

00:34:07.980 rely on it. But I do recognise that it, it probably informs me a little bit more than,

00:34:13.560 than I had previously recognised. Because so many of my traits are traditional Jewish traits,

00:34:19.560 you know.

00:34:19.800 And has it changed your mind about the whole nurture and nature debate? Are there things that

00:34:24.400 you look at, and you just go, now that you've got this information, you go, well, actually,

00:34:29.400 this, this isn't my lived experience, for want of a better word, Simon?

00:34:34.220 I think my, funny enough, my view of the nature and nurture debate has been affirmed by it. I don't

00:34:40.980 think I was that rocked, because I genuinely do, I've been firmly in the nature side for quite some

00:34:46.200 time. I'd done a bit of reading anyway, I found Robert Plowman's work on it very interesting. You

00:34:51.580 know, that seems to me fairly unambiguous. I think that there's, you know, I understand why people

00:34:56.800 want to believe that they can nurture their children. And my father, of course, took on the

00:35:03.880 responsibility of doing so on the understanding that he would have some impact on who I am.

00:35:08.380 And I don't want to say, sorry, Dad. But I don't know, I don't think there's any shame in feeling

00:35:15.060 that it's all, a lot of it is baked in. There seems to be, to me, most of the, most of the

00:35:21.080 literature now, most of the science seems to confirm that something between 50 and 75% of what

00:35:28.000 you might call personality traits or whatever, are pretty much baked in through genetics, albeit with

00:35:33.860 the ability. It's not predictably baked in, based on the two people who are mating, you can have two

00:35:39.360 completely different children. In fact, if anything, the thing, the first thing that will teach you that

00:35:43.280 nurture is, is an illusion is your second child. You know, because as soon as you try and apply exactly

00:35:48.840 the same parenting techniques, and they just, you know, they're off, and you're like, what the hell

00:35:52.560 happened there? But even then, yeah, so there's some kind of, there's a lot of noise, even as your body

00:35:58.340 tries to read the blueprint and going, so what, sorry, where are we supposed to put the, you know, and

00:36:02.820 Chinese whispers is as good a description as anything for how, you know, the cracks that 0.96

00:36:09.600 the light gets in, or the swerve, you know, as Lucretius has it. But the other part is even

00:36:15.680 more weird, is the non-shared environment. They say there is, you know, there are environmental

00:36:21.740 effects, but they have no idea what it is. The shared environment is the family or your friends,

00:36:27.340 whatever. The non-shared environment is essentially the dark matter, as far as I can tell, of,

00:36:32.820 personality. And nobody knows what it is. But I was pretty much there with that already. You know,

00:36:39.420 I was already quite convinced of that. In a way, that was why I wanted to sort of have a name and

00:36:44.180 a tag to put on my identity to know what it was, you know, what was emerging, what was expressing

00:36:51.240 itself. And I think if we got past the idea that, consequently, if you just put enough money into

00:36:58.860 education or whatever, we can raise a universally, you know, high achieving cohort of young people who

00:37:08.020 are currently being let down by nursery or whatever, if we could just get past that nonsense, that

00:37:13.540 fiction, that fantasy, it would just take so much of the pressure off parents who might be, like, concerned

00:37:21.380 that they are failing in some way as soon as their child turns out to struggle with math. You know,

00:37:26.740 it's like, so much of it is, I'm afraid, you know, which is not to say that they don't need some sort

00:37:32.480 of support structures. But parenting is much more fun if you go, to be honest, it doesn't really

00:37:36.860 matter if we spend the weekend going over their homework, or like, just like rolling around like

00:37:41.920 gorillas in the mist. Do you know what I mean? That is not going to have a long term effect on their

00:37:46.700 educational prospects. So I feel that is, that would be like the gospel if we could get it out there.

00:37:53.100 But again, that, funny enough, goes back again, because my wife is genetically predetermined to 1.00

00:37:59.020 believe that you need to spend the weekend going over their homework. So, you know.

00:38:03.420 But it's also, it must have been impressed on you, the genetics and the roles genetics plays in all

00:38:09.740 of our lives, even though we don't want to admit it. When you met brothers and sisters, I know one of your

00:38:16.340 brothers, that must have been a real light bulb moment.

00:38:19.380 Which one do you know?

00:38:20.460 I know David Tabazil.

00:38:21.820 Ah, okay. That's interesting. Yeah. I mean, and we were born quite close to each other as well. I

00:38:26.240 have brothers and sisters stretching backwards, mostly, back to 1945. My oldest brother is 79 now.

00:38:31.740 Sounds like you're from the Nation of Islam.

00:38:33.400 I know.

00:38:36.020 David and I have worked together. I mean, we are obviously close, and we think we may have been

00:38:39.920 from the same batch, as we put it, because he was certainly freezing batches, because he was

00:38:43.980 getting old and had Parkinson's by the time we were born. But yeah. Yeah. I mean, it certainly

00:38:50.800 did. We don't all, I mean, we're half brothers and sisters. So there's the opportunity for a lot to

00:38:54.980 be, you know, messed with. But as a cohort, we are, yeah, there are certain traits, you know.

00:39:02.700 Now, I could then say, are they from Wiesner, or are they like Ashkenazi traits? And I personally 0.83

00:39:11.580 think they're pretty much, obviously, Ashkenazi traits. You know, pretty much everyone is very 0.95

00:39:15.820 verbal. You know, they all have, there's an awful lot of us, as I put it in the show, who have

00:39:21.200 leveraged a degree of verbal fluency to avoid doing any hard work.

00:39:25.200 And I feel that, you know, I'm in the position to be able to say that. But that's a recognisable

00:39:32.940 thing, certainly, you know. But then Ashkenazi, it's weird, because I know there's been a, you 0.98

00:39:37.360 know, a long history of arguing, is it a faith? Is it an ethnicity, you know, Judaism? There's

00:39:45.700 a famous line from one of my absolute all-time heroes, Alan Corrin, reading about the Jewish 1.00

00:39:51.400 Chronicle, I think it was, congratulating him on becoming the first, it wasn't the first

00:39:57.100 Jewish editor of Punch, but something like that, something he'd achieved. And he went,

00:40:00.100 what nonsense, I haven't been Jewish for years. Now, he's obviously tongue-in-cheek, but that, 0.71

00:40:04.920 you know, and at times, of course, that has inflamed, I mean, that's kind of, you know, that's

00:40:09.440 the part of the whole road to Auschwitz stuff, you know, is it just a religion or whatever?

00:40:15.560 But, you know, the data is in now. It's an ethnicity and the most definitely identifiable

00:40:22.200 and unmistakable ethnicity probably of any in Europe. You know, the particular heartland

00:40:29.500 of the Ashkenazi Jews from, well, Germany, Poland around there or whatever. And to the 0.92

00:40:37.140 extent that David finds through a perfectly, you know, not alarmingly, but he is connected

00:40:44.920 to Wiesner twice. He was fathered by him, but it was also a tiny bit incestuous, his union.

00:40:51.820 You know, his mother was slightly related to Wiesner, which is, again, not that unusual,

00:40:57.820 you know. So if you want to have like a, I don't know, a test case, a natural laboratory

00:41:07.100 for testing these things, then the Ashkenazi have already presented you with it to a very 0.90

00:41:11.040 large extent. I don't know, are you fully Ashkenazi?

00:41:13.520 No, I'm a quarter.

00:41:14.420 Quarter, okay. And what are the three quarters?

00:41:17.840 So I'm half Eastern European, which will be a mix of Russian, Ukrainian, and a quarter,

00:41:23.480 I mean, we would say Greek, but it's probably more like Ottoman Greek.

00:41:29.020 Right, okay.

00:41:29.880 You know, from that part of the Black Sea coast, I'd imagine.

00:41:34.320 Yeah, yeah.

00:41:35.420 Well, that's quite a common, I think.

00:41:37.120 But again, the verbal thing, I think, is getting away with the hard work. I was curious to touch

00:41:43.820 on your relationship with your father, and I'm curious about, you talk about it in the

00:41:49.260 show a little bit, the impact that had, because here you are, you suddenly realize this person

00:41:55.360 you've called your father and thought of as your father and treated as your father isn't

00:42:01.160 your biological father. And it was, you know what, maybe this will be me revealing publicly

00:42:06.240 how weird my parents were, but they always asked me what, how I would feel if I'd found

00:42:12.620 out I was adopted. Now, in my case, there's zero chance of that, because they had me when

00:42:18.240 my mother had been 18 for four days.

00:42:20.360 Right.

00:42:20.560 So I don't think they were in the adoption market, so to speak, at all. It was a complete

00:42:25.020 accident. And again, it wouldn't have happened if people had thought about childbirth as carefully

00:42:29.080 as you suggest they do.

00:42:30.300 No.

00:42:31.440 But it is an interesting question, I think, and a question that most people would actually

00:42:36.280 think about in some way. You know, what happens if you realize that your parents or one of

00:42:41.480 your parents isn't actually your parent?

00:42:43.440 Yeah, it's interesting that your parents would ask you that. I mean, mine obviously steered me

00:42:47.120 away from that.

00:42:48.820 I imagine so.

00:42:49.800 Absolutely, you know. I mean, I remember you, I did used to think when I said, I remember

00:42:53.600 very specifically having these thoughts, I think maybe age or nine, but I can picture

00:42:57.340 myself in bed thinking, I just don't think he's my dad. And yet I cannot imagine a scenario

00:43:03.380 that would, that would explain that because I knew I wasn't adopted because my mother had

00:43:08.140 gone into a lot of detail about exactly how painful and touch and go labor had been. You

00:43:13.920 know, I was in, I think, an incubator for a couple of days and she was desperately like

00:43:18.300 sad that she wasn't allowed to hold me and cuddle me. And she talks about that quite

00:43:21.220 often and we get misty eyed talking about it, you know. And I was like, you wouldn't

00:43:24.660 make that up, you know, just to kind of give plausible. And so I knew she wouldn't have

00:43:30.860 had an affair. I mean, there was like zero chance of that or anything weird like that.

00:43:34.720 And obviously it never occurred to me that such a transgressive scenario as artificial

00:43:40.420 insemination would have been used. 0.99

00:43:41.940 Well, why did you think that your dad is not your dad? Is it just because you're so different?

00:43:46.360 Good question. It's a really good question. I think at that age, I can't have been thinking

00:43:49.960 it logically. So I think it must have been visceral. And I think what it might have been,

00:43:54.140 I sometimes think it might have been like pheromones or something like that. He used to be quite

00:44:00.280 affectionate. I would sit on his lap sometimes when I was little and watch TV, you know.

00:44:03.820 And I was very fond of him and he was a lovely big bear to hug. But I kind of felt differently

00:44:12.240 about his smell and being than I did about my mother's, you know, with whom I would kind

00:44:17.860 of absolutely, you know, nestle up to like a pup in a basket, you know. Whereas with him,

00:44:24.140 it was more like an uncle. And I do remember also I had another uncle. We're a quite small

00:44:29.200 family. My mother's an only child as well. And my father has one half sister. His mother died

00:44:33.620 very sadly before he was one. And his father remarried and they had Margaret. And so Margaret

00:44:41.460 is supposed to be related to me. And it turns out isn't as well. My cousins, her two daughters

00:44:46.480 were supposed to be related to me, aren't related to me. And then there was Fred, her husband,

00:44:50.640 who was not supposed to be related to me. And I always instinctively felt a really strong

00:44:56.040 bond with Fred. Because I think, I'm mapping this out now, but I think it was because I

00:45:04.360 didn't sense that there was something I was supposed to feel or sense that I wasn't getting.

00:45:10.320 So I relaxed about it. Do you know what I mean? He was just a man who was married into

00:45:15.320 our family. And so I kind of instinctively, oh, we're like you and I, we're the same, you

00:45:21.200 know. But where that came from? I mean, I just don't know. And I don't want any of this

00:45:25.840 to, I mean, my dad was really a great dad. You know, he was a totally like a mensch. 1.00

00:45:33.360 But, you know, it was weird. I know my, my, one of my best friends, Danny Solomon, who

00:45:40.600 I was at university with and his dad, Harry Solomon.

00:45:44.480 You really do stick with your lot, don't you?

00:45:46.180 Yeah, yeah. So he used to come up to you or down to Southampton on occasion and take

00:45:50.900 us out for dinner. And Harry took us out for dinner, me and Danny at one time. And I just

00:45:55.780 had this weird feeling like, this is weird. This feels like a dad, you know, like this

00:46:02.660 is how I, you know, I getting a little kind of bat signal like of this could be. And then 0.93

00:46:09.640 when I met Jonathan Wiesner, who, again, is 78, I think, who is the natural born son

00:46:15.700 of Bertolt Wiesner and Mary Barton, and was the kind of Rosetta Stone through which we all

00:46:21.540 went, oh, we're his. He's quite like Sir Harry Solomon and quite like, again, I mean, he's

00:46:28.460 my brother, but I actually feel like he's my father.

00:46:31.340 So you genuinely feel a kinship with people to whom you're biologically related to, you perhaps

00:46:36.520 hadn't met before. And that is so interesting, man.

00:46:39.460 I mean, the first time I went into that room where they were all having lunch, the first

00:46:43.480 big gathering, I was, you know, it was, they were the first, there were 27 of them in there.

00:46:48.620 And they were the first blood relatives I'd been in a room with ever, basically, putting

00:46:55.620 aside my own mother, you know, blood relatives of anything approaching my own tier, you know,

00:47:02.240 my own generation. I mean, that's extraordinary, isn't it? At the age of, what, 55 or something?

00:47:08.100 You know, it reminds me of something. I was talking to a friend of mine, because obviously

00:47:11.320 my wife and I, we left having children quite late. So we'll probably, you know, who knows

00:47:16.700 how many we'll be able to have. I'd happily, you know, have a lot, unlikely biologically

00:47:21.160 to happen. And I was talking to a friend of mine who has adopted children. And he, without

00:47:26.760 being overt about it, was kind of, he was saying, it's, it's not as rosy a thing as you think.

00:47:34.840 Now, I'm not saying that's always the case for people. But it's interesting that there

00:47:39.320 is that physical, whatever, physical or whatever it is. It's so fascinating to me. But we went

00:47:46.640 on this sidetrack a little bit. And I asked you about the relationship with your father and

00:47:50.820 what changed for you when you found out that actually you're not biologically. And it sounds

00:47:54.420 like partly things clicked into place for you.

00:47:56.960 Yeah. I mean, I suppose, yes, there's always a point. You lose something, I suppose. We

00:48:03.760 have moved into perhaps a slightly more pragmatic recognition of the truth. And I know he felt

00:48:09.580 hugely relieved when I went up and told my parents, you know, and some people said you shouldn't

00:48:13.940 do that because it might be of a shock to them. They might have managed to suppress that

00:48:17.960 information. Apparently there were some fathers who, you always attended the clinic together,

00:48:23.500 but there were some of them that were told that their sperm would be mingled with the

00:48:27.480 donor sperm. And it might just encourage it forward, give it the full propulsion. When 0.99

00:48:31.600 it got there, it might be their sperm that got the woman pregnant, you know, so they might 0.99

00:48:35.400 be all kinds of things that they've allowed themselves to believe. But when I told them

00:48:40.200 there was huge relief, definitely. And, and I think he had always just felt, you know,

00:48:46.340 that it was a fairly trivial thing, you know, and I certainly don't want to like, kind of

00:48:53.740 like shaking by the rappels and go, no, it's not trivial. You know, this is, this is life

00:48:58.400 itself, you know, but my view has to be that, you know, I have to recognize the truth of it

00:49:03.260 and there is a powerful bond there. But that is absolutely, of course, not to say the thing

00:49:07.400 you, I think the kind of the core philosophical conundrum that you get to through recognizing it

00:49:12.920 and pondering on it is there is no alternative. It's not like I could have been this or I could

00:49:18.480 have, I would not exist. They may have had a child by some other means, they might have

00:49:23.120 adopted or something, but I wouldn't exist. There is only one set of circumstances in which

00:49:28.060 I exist and that's it. You know, so there's no point at all in thinking I wish you this

00:49:33.780 or I wish you that, you know, whatever, or recognize it. It just, I wouldn't be, you know.

00:49:38.740 But I do think it's, it's probably relatively minor compared to the fact that, you know,

00:49:46.820 my father was 89 when he, when we closed that loop. He's now 93, they're elderly, you know,

00:49:54.900 and they are, the relationship with your parents changes at that point anyway. You know, you realize

00:49:59.700 it's on you now to be the parent, you know, to an extent. And, you know, I don't think,

00:50:05.540 I don't think the DNA connection is that important in terms of the responsibility I have towards

00:50:13.560 them or whatever at that point, you know. We're far past the point at which you, you know,

00:50:18.600 you have the kind of rebel without a cause kind of tear-stained row on the landing, you know,

00:50:23.380 about, you shouldn't, you know, what did you, why did you, you know, but that we can't do it.

00:50:28.760 Yeah. That's, that's gone. So.

00:50:31.560 You know what I'm getting from this interview, Simon, is what a wonderful man your father is.

00:50:36.540 Oh, he is a great man. Yeah, he is. I can't talk about him for long on stage.

00:50:41.440 Really?

00:50:41.840 Before the old lower lip starts going. Yeah. He is because I think apart from anything else,

00:50:46.880 he's like an absolute template for how you make the best of what you have, you know,

00:50:51.280 which wasn't that much. He had such a blow to lose his mother. He was like 10 months old.

00:50:57.880 I think tuberculosis, nobody knows really. He has no memory of her at all. And he was farmed out

00:51:04.780 into foster care, basically, in extended family, because in those days, you know, a man,

00:51:08.840 working man couldn't look after a child on his own. And then they came, then they came back and then

00:51:13.320 the, and he was given Margaret and, and they are still incredibly close. But then the second

00:51:17.940 wife died again. And as I say, it's starting to look a bit suspicious now, but he married a third

00:51:22.580 time. He was raised by his stepmother. Well, he was 14. And I think when, when his father remarried the

00:51:27.520 second time to Ivy, who I knew as my grand, but she wasn't related to anyone, they had no children

00:51:32.840 together. People were just like picked off left, right and center. Do you want to mean like the

00:51:36.580 1930s and 40s, even without the war, she was a war widow, but most of it was pre penicillin.

00:51:41.420 That was the big deal. I think, I still think people don't recognize how, you know, how much of the

00:51:47.060 world changed when penicillin became available. That just, you know, people just used to die all the

00:51:52.160 time before their fifth birthday. You know, it was extraordinary. So he emerges out of that. He's

00:51:57.180 yanked out of school at the age of 14 by still living at that point with, with foster parents

00:52:02.220 who were just tired of feeding a child who wasn't contributing. So they pulled him out of school and

00:52:06.400 made him go to work. You know, he's a bright man. He could have had, I would have definitely a degree

00:52:11.340 of some sort and might've had a different life, but you know, no grudges made his way. As I say,

00:52:16.120 created his own reality, you know, that I could talk for an hour just about his hobbies, you know,

00:52:21.660 and about how rich he made his life at home. And you wrote a beautiful thread, I think on Father's

00:52:27.720 Day, perhaps last year about him and his hobbies and so on. Was it his, was it Father's Day? Was it

00:52:33.100 a birthday? It was his birthday. Yeah. It's there. Yeah. Aviation being the big one. He's still,

00:52:38.180 I've never met anyone who knows as much about my, about anything as my father knows about aviation and

00:52:43.320 not just, I mean, he will spot, you know, a mosquito at 2,000 paces or even by, by the specific

00:52:49.320 wine it makes. He made over 1,172 scale models, never, never moved out into a different, um, scale.

00:52:58.380 It's like, that's his religion, you know, that would be like, uh, like converting, but, um,

00:53:04.480 yeah, he made over. Like apostasy, it sounds like. Exactly. Yeah. He made over 40 specific 0.54

00:53:09.180 different versions of the de Havilland Mosquito. That was his like, and, and they are now in

00:53:15.100 the Mosquito Museum. And then, but yeah, I mean, just like, um, I don't know, it feel like

00:53:23.200 a different, and because I'm not like him, I suppose I sort of see him as a, yeah, almost

00:53:27.720 as a sort of a figure I've read about in books or something, you know, and, um, I do have

00:53:35.100 that, uh, yeah, like that kind of, I'm slightly in awe of how anyone can be that, that patient

00:53:42.340 and committed to a certain way of life without, I suppose, seeking the affirmation that I've

00:53:49.460 done, you know, in my work and that sort of thing. He has just different needs. And so

00:53:53.400 it's, I'm very, very grateful to have known him in that respect, you know, but it is a,

00:53:58.260 uh, just a slightly different recognition because of that difference.

00:54:01.580 I think just as having mentioned him earlier, the first poem I encountered with Don Patterson

00:54:07.380 was a poem called The Elliptical Stylus, which is a fierce, like, like unbelievably fierce

00:54:13.780 defense of his father in a particular, very like tiny scenario. And that was the connection I made

00:54:22.100 with him. It's, uh, it's, and he is, I'm sure his biological father, but that is a, uh, a thing that

00:54:27.400 I find, yeah, is a very moving, like when you dwell on it, even for a moment, you, you, you get

00:54:33.640 overwhelmed.

00:54:37.460 It's, it, they're a different generation. I remember you brought up the mosquito. So my grandfather 1.00

00:54:43.240 was born in the 1920s. My British grandfather, very, very bright, very intelligent man, went to

00:54:48.560 school in the North of England, had to leave school because it was the 1930s. He was from a

00:54:55.260 working class background. He emerged into the Great Depression in the Northwest of England.

00:55:01.200 So he would go and try and get work. He would go to Liverpool, to Liverpool docks. There'd be

00:55:05.920 hundreds of men who would go to the gates of Liverpool docks. The foreman would come out

00:55:09.800 and would pick you, you, you, the rest of you F off. Just as this time that he started to make his

00:55:15.780 way, the World War II started. Then he became a joiner and he was working on the mosquito. 0.93

00:55:21.460 He was, and he was a master joiner in the factories in the North of England.

00:55:25.840 Wow. He worked on that plane.

00:55:27.100 He worked on that plane. And then what happened is obviously, he was a very intelligent man,

00:55:31.660 a very learning man, self-taught man. He would read the newspapers. He saw what was happening

00:55:36.340 with Hitler in second, in the second world, during the Second World War. And he was omitted. He didn't

00:55:43.100 have to go and fight because he was a vital part of the war effort because he was making the

00:55:47.620 mosquito plane as a master joiner. But he felt so compelled to go and fight because he thought

00:55:54.480 what was happening in Europe was so egregious that he gave up that job and relative safety,

00:56:00.180 said goodbye to his family, joined the war effort. Then he fought in Italy, fought all the way down

00:56:06.900 and then fought in the Battle of El Alamein as a desert rat. Wow.

00:56:11.520 Wow. And then after the end of the war, he was asked by his commanding officer, he said,

00:56:17.840 Foster, you are a magnificent soldier. You should stay. You should stay on and be part of the army.

00:56:24.760 And he actually said no, because he didn't see himself as a man of war. That was a principle

00:56:30.060 for him. And then he returned to his family and raised a family. I think that generation

00:56:35.260 were different, the way they saw things, the way, their sense of duty. Maybe it's me

00:56:41.880 being nostalgic and projecting, but I think we've lost something. I don't think that generation,

00:56:51.660 I think we've lost something of that generation, that sense of duty, that sense of there is something

00:56:56.440 more important than me when we live in the age of the self.

00:56:59.700 I mean, yeah, I absolutely agree. And it's a huge conversation in itself. I think there

00:57:07.200 are certain things. I wrote a piece when the Queen died last year, just saying that I found

00:57:12.940 it almost baffling that people didn't, that some people could express bemusement at the sense

00:57:20.280 of loss other people felt. I mean, she'd been there my entire life. There aren't many people

00:57:25.060 that had been famous, let alone, you know, as a symbol of nationhood or whatever for my entire

00:57:31.860 life. But more, it was a sort of stirring of like what had at one time been throughout most of human

00:57:38.460 history, you know, the most primal emotion there is, you know, your commitment, your part of the

00:57:45.500 tribe, you know, your sense of belonging to something and being able to, you know, the imaginative

00:57:51.460 sympathy to be able to invest an individual with a, with a, with a, with that sort of symbolic

00:57:56.820 importance. And regardless of scandals that come and go or personal failings, not very few of which

00:58:02.880 she of course really had anyway. But I think it's a similar thing, you know, the, the ability to

00:58:08.360 identify and almost submerge yourself in something is something that I still have a stirring of, but I

00:58:14.580 don't know whether it will be enough to sort of sign up to war if I've been younger, but, but is

00:58:18.860 gradually being, being lost and diminished as we, as we move, as you say, it's a kind of era of

00:58:25.360 individualism. And, and, and in some respects, you know, liberal democracy has, has encouraged that.

00:58:34.100 And, and, and, and, you know, you've had plenty of guests on the show who've, who've flagged the

00:58:40.180 dangers of collectivism under whatever banner it might fly. I mean, there will be some people who would

00:58:46.020 say that for the very same reason that people like your grandfather are less inclined, don't

00:58:52.520 exist now, who would, who would take it on as a duty to sign up. That's the same reason that we

00:58:57.400 don't see so many wars. We don't, you know, other nations find it difficult to, to, to muster the

00:59:04.740 support for their nationalistic expansions or whatever. It's why, why Putin's activities in Ukraine,

00:59:12.360 apart from anything else, seem so jarring now, such, such, such an extraordinary sort of abrupt

00:59:18.620 collision with all the values we had assumed had just kind of like washed out across the whole

00:59:24.180 surface of the earth, you know. But also the age of self is an individual choice. You get to make

00:59:29.220 that decision every day. Do you commit yourself to something beyond yourself? Or are you only worried

00:59:34.140 about yourself? Are you only thinking about you? Or are you actually trying to, whether it's your

00:59:38.780 family, whether it's some other thing that you're attempting to serve? I mean, I certainly know that

00:59:43.320 for me, the most fulfilling things tend to be things that are outside of me. Yeah. And so we all get to

00:59:48.900 make that choice. Do you want to live in the age of the self or not every single day? And we have

00:59:53.240 plenty of opportunity not to do that if we choose not to. Well, that's a good, I mean, I'm glad you feel

00:59:58.060 that way. But some might say that it's so the temptations, the, you know, just the, the artifacts,

01:00:06.020 the, the, the means through which to express the individual in yourself are so readily available and

01:00:12.180 so instantly addictive for want of a more technically appropriate term, you know. And incredibly

01:00:18.080 unsatisfying. Yeah, absolutely. They're incredibly unsatisfying. And once you realize that, then you've

01:00:23.800 got to stop going on about the age of self and start acting in a way that serves you and other

01:00:28.140 people around you. And it's fulfilling. And I, you know, the reason I'm saying this is I was just in

01:00:32.820 the US at a conference, which is full of young people who, who are, they're sort of on the

01:00:38.820 conservative side of the spectrum, but they are interested in environmental issues and climate

01:00:43.820 change and whatever. They're all in their 20s, 20 to 25. Half of them are married already. Most of them

01:00:50.720 are about to have children and they're working on things beyond them. I just think we, you know,

01:00:56.060 we've got to realize we have the power to change reality if we choose it, you know, for ourselves.

01:01:03.320 No one's making us spend our time on Instagram. No one. It's interesting, isn't it? That, I mean,

01:01:10.000 all of the studies, I remember it came out sort of 15, 20 years ago, the, the sort of positive

01:01:14.740 psychology movement, Martin Seligman and so on. And there were a lot of books about that. And I think

01:01:18.500 Jonathan Haidt's book, The Happiness Hypothesis, which is a terrible title for an amazing book.

01:01:24.200 But they emphasize that again and again and again, being part of something larger than

01:01:30.360 yourself, feeling yourself emerged in a community that hopefully you share goals together. And of

01:01:36.280 course, we all know the, you know, the collapse of the church is a tragedy from that point of view.

01:01:40.560 The superstitious element of it was of almost no importance whatsoever. I mean, I've thought

01:01:44.980 when I do my, the show, The Work of the Devil, part of the glory of it for me is the ability to

01:01:50.660 express gratitude at the end, gratitude for the sacrifices made that I could exist. It's such an

01:01:55.960 amazing feeling when you express gratitude in front of a group of people. It's like a kind of,

01:02:00.440 I know people do AA, they say they feel better for it, but I don't know whether they get that full,

01:02:04.980 I don't know where the church used to supply that.

01:02:06.940 But the ability to, as you say, pursue a common goal with a large number of people

01:02:11.780 is, I mean, it's great that you think it is there, but it's not that easily found out.

01:02:19.440 Of course, people will try and encourage you to have a certain amount of commitment to your company

01:02:23.800 if you, you know, you go into work. But of course, all the different contractual obligations and so

01:02:28.480 on can undermine the sense of being voluntarily there. It seems to be a much more powerful effect on

01:02:35.360 your happiness and satisfaction if you volunteer, if you work for charity than anything you get.

01:02:41.500 But a lot of people even then will go watch a football match on a Saturday afternoon and feel

01:02:46.900 that that's a communal gathering. But of course, it's totally passive. They're not working towards

01:02:51.940 anything together. Whereas if three or four of you, I mean, my son's most satisfactory activity

01:02:57.080 at the moment, he's nearly 16, is the band he's in, you know, and that has created a, he plays guitar,

01:03:03.600 Ari's got two or three mates at any given moment in the band, and they are working together towards

01:03:08.900 a goal. And it's obvious to me that that is so much more satisfying for him than playing as Xbox

01:03:15.280 or whatever. You know, hopefully that kind of life lesson will stick even if he doesn't actually end

01:03:20.800 up headlining the pyramids.

01:03:21.860 Right. I mean, this is why I enjoy doing this much more than I ever enjoy doing stand-up.

01:03:26.880 Yeah.

01:03:27.220 Much more, because there's that element. But I was very lucky. I had a lesson that I learned

01:03:31.100 very early on. I used to play basketball in the local park. There's a court there. And

01:03:36.920 I was doing this kind of like personal development course, and they would get you to do things

01:03:40.500 that you feared or found difficult or whatever, scary. And they were like, you need to do a

01:03:45.640 project that's not about you, but it's about contributing to your local community. So I

01:03:49.640 organized a basketball tournament.

01:03:52.160 Right.

01:03:52.420 In this park.

01:03:53.540 Right.

01:03:54.080 And what I learned was the way people treated me changed like that. When you become of value

01:04:02.700 to other people, your relationships with other people change dramatically because they see

01:04:08.900 you in a completely different light. So for me, it was a very practical in-your-face experience

01:04:14.520 of what contributing to others actually does for you. So even in a very selfish way.

01:04:20.640 Yeah.

01:04:21.260 It's something that I learned very early on. Anyway, we've gone off the track. Simon,

01:04:25.240 put a bow on this for us. A philosophical bow, if you like. You know, discovering what you

01:04:32.300 discovered and doing the show. You just mentioned giving gratitude. What have you learned from

01:04:36.860 all of this that would be worth sharing other than what we already talked about, of course?

01:04:41.600 Well, you know, it's funny. When you were talking about this, I'm not avoiding the answer, but

01:04:45.680 just going back to your basketball thing, I think if I had a single light switch moment

01:04:53.560 in my whole life, light bulb or whatever, it was when I first started doing improv or

01:04:57.660 impro, I think we then called it, which was in about 1994. I hadn't really intended to.

01:05:03.860 I was trying to make it as a journalist and a newspaper asked me to review or write a piece

01:05:08.120 about the sudden surge of popularity because we had Whose Line Is It Anyway?

01:05:12.260 on and so on. And, I mean, I could write a book about what improv taught me. Other people

01:05:19.720 have tried to do that, but you really do have to experience it for yourself. But the kind

01:05:24.100 of taking a deep breath and jumping into an improv scene, having no idea where it's going

01:05:28.920 to go, trusting other people to support you. It's like you do those trust exercises where

01:05:33.880 you fall backwards and other people catch you. But in an improv scene, you're all falling

01:05:37.700 backwards and catching at the same time. It's a constant emerging thing. And it totally woke

01:05:43.040 me up to both those things. The satisfaction that can come from creating something in real

01:05:49.140 time with other people. Nobody's trying to be a leader actually in that situation. So

01:05:53.200 it's not quite the same, but you are providing value and you are reassuring with trust. And

01:05:57.880 also, you're taking a huge risk with vulnerability. Because if you do a scene in real time, you

01:06:03.500 know, there's a chance you'll say something that people, this is the fear that people have.

01:06:07.920 Will I say something that makes people realise, I don't know, something that I've been trying

01:06:11.920 to conceal and protect for all this time. And over the course of a couple of months of

01:06:16.880 doing improv with these people, you might reveal yourself much more on stage than you do,

01:06:20.760 you know, off. And there are all kinds of exercises to get that out of you. And then also about

01:06:26.740 letting go. I've been left in like the most helpless giggles, I suppose, essentially ever

01:06:32.460 in my life. They used to do a thing called three-headed expert, where three improv players

01:06:37.260 line up side by side, you can even like link arms. And, and somebody like yourself asked them

01:06:42.880 a question and they're an expert on it. So you say, so Professor Wagglebottom, I believe

01:06:48.600 you're an expert on the Australian octopus. Yes, that is correct. I have been studying

01:06:55.100 the octopus for years. And, and you just do it one word at a time. But it teaches you

01:07:01.100 that you're not in control. So you have an idea of where you think this is going, and

01:07:04.720 there may go somewhere completely different with it. And the realisation that, I mean,

01:07:09.460 it's almost like the confabulation thing in the split brain patient, you know, you're laughing

01:07:13.540 because you have no control over what you just said. And, and so the reason I mentioned

01:07:19.740 that is because fast forward to work of the devil, the thing I learned is that every single

01:07:24.200 time you take the risk of exposing yourself, the vulnerability, that's, that's what creates

01:07:30.920 the moment that's memorable every time. And the first time you do it, you might do it quite

01:07:35.200 clumsily and you can sense they're supportive, but they're not really laughing. But, but once

01:07:39.340 you then kind of furnish it as well and do it with some degree of skill and competence,

01:07:45.020 it is so rewarding. It's like, you have to just constantly be tearing off the carapace.

01:07:53.120 You have to be constantly breaking the ice on the surface. Because otherwise you as a performer

01:07:57.740 will find tricks to avoid exposing yourself, just like an eight year old child will find tricks to

01:08:03.260 avoid exposing itself at school. And, and the job you have is to constantly be smashing those off,

01:08:10.720 ripping them off and showing your soft white underbelly as often as you can. And that's 0.98

01:08:15.080 what I've learned. And it's been, you know, a long time coming, I guess, but it's, um,

01:08:19.620 and now I'm addicted to it. Now I have to like hunt around. What else can I expose this?

01:08:25.580 As long as this might be, of course, the downfall.

01:08:28.600 Yeah. As long as it's metaphorical and not useful.

01:08:30.640 Yeah. Soft white underbelly, but stop there if you don't mind. Yeah. 0.98

01:08:36.280 Indeed. But Simon, as always, an absolute pleasure to interview. The last question we

01:08:42.000 always ask our guests is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

01:08:45.640 Well, it's so interesting that question, because of course, if you spend your days on Twitter as I

01:08:50.640 do, or indeed watching Trigonometry podcasts, it does feel like everybody is talking about all these

01:08:55.140 things, you know, um, but out there in the real world, I'm going to take a massive sort of left turn

01:09:00.520 after everything I've been talking now. And I do think there is something different about the AI

01:09:05.440 threat that the world at large is not talking about very much. And the reason is, I just become aware

01:09:11.820 recently, I think you may have spoken to some of them, the chap who I never remember names, who

01:09:15.540 withdrew himself from the Google projects and has been saying, we need to be very careful,

01:09:20.320 you know, maybe a moratorium and so on. Well, we all know there's not going to be a moratorium on,

01:09:24.640 on AI research, because if it was enforced in Silicon Valley or across America or the West or

01:09:29.440 whatever, then all that would happen is our enemies would get the gain. But I've never seen

01:09:35.120 people before flagging up danger ahead in their field of which they are an expert,

01:09:43.680 where they are not asking for more funding, not asking that we invest more in this, not asking that

01:09:50.280 this be raised up in the agenda in government programming and so on. But literally just going,

01:09:56.580 I've got a horrible feeling we've opened up a wormhole into a space through which a torrent of

01:10:02.200 demons might be about to rush. And I really think we should maybe just like slow down here. I cannot

01:10:07.700 think of all, I'm not a climate change sceptic, but you can't help but notice that all the people who

01:10:13.480 are sounding that alarm are demanding more funds are demanding more that more be done of the kind

01:10:20.500 of things that they would like to see be done anyway. They almost always have an agenda for

01:10:26.840 redistribution of resources and so on that they would have been quite keen on even if there weren't

01:10:31.260 this kind of climate. But the AI thing seems to be like very different. And I think it's one of

01:10:39.140 those things that kind of, you know, you see a front page newspaper, it will have a picture of

01:10:43.480 the tennis in Wimbledon and the latest, you know, spending cuts in the National Health Service. And

01:10:49.960 just down the bottom, it says, AI expert warns more than 50% risk of world ending, you know,

01:10:57.240 existential threat from the thing he's been working on for the last 30 years. And you kind of go,

01:11:01.840 these stories are not the same. So anyway, I don't know what the solution to that is. It's obviously

01:11:07.340 be on my capabilities. But I do worry that a lot of young people feel demoralized by, you know,

01:11:14.440 the threats made to now quite significant, you know, previously aspirational jobs, not like just

01:11:20.440 driving trucks or Sainsbury's checkouts by automation. I don't know, we need to disentangle

01:11:28.160 and identify what might be that these experts are genuinely worried about and engage with it.

01:11:35.820 Well, Eric Weinstein, who was sitting in that chair very not long ago, his argument is we need a new

01:11:42.020 economic model. And I think that may end up, may end up be one of the potential solutions when you've

01:11:48.480 got robots making everything effectively. It may, it may actually open humanity to a world of very good

01:11:55.120 possibilities too. We just, but every transition in history has been accompanied by a lot of breakages

01:12:00.860 and destruction. I think it was my old colleague on Radio 4, Tim Halford, who said that, you know,

01:12:05.260 if you take the black box approach, then to some extent, there's very little difference between

01:12:10.000 traditional automation and the shifting of factors to the third world or the developing world or

01:12:17.260 whatever, or just across the border in America, you know, in the sense that jobs just disappeared and

01:12:21.820 were being done somewhere else by something else. In that case, you know, poorly paid workers who knew

01:12:28.160 no better than to accept that deal. And that has, broadly speaking, yes, been a good thing worldwide,

01:12:34.700 you know, just not for the people in the Rust Belt or whatever. But I don't know, it feels different

01:12:39.720 this time, I think. So yes, a new economic model where obviously you tax the people who own the

01:12:44.520 robots. But you know, the capacity, I mean, it's always an arms race, isn't it? The tax code, you know,

01:12:48.780 between the attempt to claw some of that back for the general good. And the private sector

01:12:55.900 accountants generally win. So I'm not sure, you know, what we do about that from that point of

01:13:00.780 view. I just wish I could see, I mean, as I say, I'm not pro, I wasn't pro Brexit. But the one thing

01:13:06.440 I thought was, you know, a good argument for it was the sort of agenda that Dominic Cummings had,

01:13:11.220 to be honest, that he wanted to see a change in the way that Westminster was populated, in the way the

01:13:17.480 cabinet was people by people who had expertise in something other than winning constituency votes.

01:13:23.960 And this is something we're still struggling with, you know, there are just too many people in

01:13:28.200 government who don't have the kind of technical nows to understand what they're looking at.

01:13:33.040 So I think it's very obviously what went wrong with the pandemic as well, you know,

01:13:37.520 the, you look at something, I mean, it's not his fault, but how the hell did we end up going into

01:13:42.360 that with somebody like Matt Hancock in charge? You know, I mean, it's just, it's just not good

01:13:47.240 enough. You know, it's not a question of his morality or his, is like, you know, rates mates or

01:13:53.920 whatever. It's, it's just not, just not got the cognitive firepower. But it's very difficult for

01:13:59.820 people who do have to find themselves in cabinet through the traditional means of creating that.

01:14:04.780 And very little incentive to do so. Anyway, Simon, this is the most British ending to an interview ever.

01:14:09.660 It's not good enough. Follow us on Locals where we're going to ask Simon your questions. And of

01:14:15.500 course, make sure you go and find Simon online, follow him at the Simon Evans on Twitter.

01:14:20.560 Yes, correct.

01:14:20.860 And of course, you are going to be doing an Edinburgh show, a new one, which will then go

01:14:25.540 out as a tour as well. So that's called Have We Met?

01:14:29.660 Have We Met? It's all about memory.

01:14:31.620 It's about memory, although the more I've written it, the more I've realised there are all sorts of

01:14:35.080 interesting meanings to that phrase, not least, of course, relating to my brothers and sisters.

01:14:42.100 Simon and you guys head on over to Locals. We'll see you there.

01:14:46.540 Are there any subjects you don't make jokes about and why?

TRIGGERnometry - July 12, 2023

Comedian Simon Evans Learns the Life-Changing Truth About His Dad

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