00:01:46.920Is it the equivalent of having on a climate change denier onto the Today programme?
00:01:51.340Do we need to hear from Piers Corbyn every time there's a new programme or report comes out of the IPC?
00:01:56.820But I do feel that there was a dishonesty in the last iteration that angered me.
00:02:03.060There was there was I on this this podcast and I've been on a couple where we've discussed this kind of thing before.
00:02:07.980I've had five series of Simon Evans goes to market, which is not a right wing show,
00:02:12.280But 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.
00:02:25.520So it has its right wing to that extent, you know, and I've had been on the news quiz and so on.
00:02:30.800So I've always felt that, you know, I'm not like kind of banned.
00:02:33.300I don't have pictures of myself with gaffer tape over my mouth to demonstrate that I feel like I'm in silence, you know, like I'm in some sort of gulag.
00:02:41.140But I think, like I say, on the last trigonometry that I was on, that I came to the defense of the BBC to some extent and said, I think, among other things, it probably has fallen victim to some extent to conquest, Robert Conquist's second law, which just says that any organizational institution not explicitly dedicated to right wing pursuits will drift leftwards over the course of its lifetime.
00:03:52.280Anyway, that's what I thought the BBC was.
00:03:55.920But there was something about the way they treated the most,
00:03:58.880you know, the way they defended themselves
00:04:00.200against the most recent, there was this thing that was appointed,
00:04:03.200Tim Davy, which may or may not even have been true
00:04:05.260or may have been exaggerated, that he was concerned
00:04:07.680that a certain kind of woke tendency, which is like,
00:04:10.480I know it's a slightly laboured term, but, you know,
00:04:12.500it is very convenient shorthand, a kind of, yeah,
00:04:15.560the new orthodoxy about certain political views,
00:04:22.260which is okay or not okay to hold, was dominating British comedy,
00:04:25.940especially a topical comedy, and the other views weren't being heard.
00:04:29.660And 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.
00:04:41.660You know, and the middle aged people were feeling hectored by students essentially every time they wanted to see some comedy.
00:04:47.000so this yeah this launched a thousand uh think pieces and i just noticed a a large number of
00:04:55.420them containing my name as an example of the bbc's determination to bring balance to topical
00:05:02.500comedy wherever possible it said there are very few stamp right-wing stand-ups for whatever reason
00:05:07.080we just don't know we just we just don't know for some reason right-wing views and stand-up comedy
00:05:12.600just don't mix. And presumably, if you're a right winger, you know, you immediately go into,
00:05:17.780you know, the privatized prison services or something, you know, rather than like trying
00:05:23.060to make people laugh. But the one or two right wingers that there are, which is to say me and
00:05:28.360Jeff Norcott, it seems, are never off our screens as a result. We are the beneficiaries of this
00:05:33.820terrible, you know, gap, this terrible market supply problem, which somehow market forces
00:05:40.780have failed to meet, as they normally would
00:05:42.720by producing more supply, there's this
00:05:44.740terrible shortage and consequently you never
00:22:18.960And if it had been invented by somebody on the right, I would say it probably was.
00:22:21.920but given that it was, you know, coined by a German Marxist, I think, wasn't it? Was his name?
00:22:27.720Deutsch or something, Rudi Deutsch, something like that. It's interesting, interesting thing to look
00:22:31.040up. And he got it. Basically, he was synthesizing Antonio Gramsci writings from sort of 1930s Italy.
00:22:37.700It's very interesting stuff. It's very theoretical. But, you know, you can see it's not hard to map
00:22:44.180it onto the reality we live in now. The long march through the institutions is basically the
00:22:48.180proposition that you are never going to bring about a communist or left-wing revolution,
00:22:52.280a socialist revolution in the West through the traditional means employed in Russia or China,
00:22:57.480because contrary to Marx's views, everyone is too comfortable, there's too much cultural hegemony,
00:23:04.940which was Gramsci's phrase again, which is that there is too much control by the universities,
00:23:12.400by the media, by the government, by the establishment, as they used to be described,
00:23:15.980the various instruments of soft power which to some extent we still have um who will make people
00:23:23.380averse to this you know the idea that they should rise up and burn everything to the ground and start
00:23:27.120again and so instead what you have to do is get your hair cut clean your nails present yourself
00:23:32.860in a nice clean shirt and tie and get a job in the british library in the universities in the bbc
00:23:39.120and you are basically like sleeper agents now as i say put like that it sounds like right wing
00:23:44.300proper, you know, paranoia. But as it becomes a kind of, as patience, you know, takes its time
00:23:52.680and as a certain kind of shift in the mindset of the sort of people who might be inclined to go
00:23:58.280into the civil service changes. I mean, I was at university in the mid eighties and I think most
00:24:02.960people who went into the civil service there, I regarded it as being, I couldn't imagine having
00:24:08.980the whole world, the opportunities that it presented, the different kinds of career paths
00:24:13.860that you could choose. I studied law. I knew you didn't want to be a lawyer, but I thought I'm
00:24:16.640going to come out of this as a graduate, you know, as a free man with like a, you know, a wallet and
00:24:22.000a pair of boots and I can go wherever I want, do whatever I want. Who would conceivably join the
00:24:27.260civil service in that situation, you know, and basically sign up for 35 years with a nice
00:24:32.160pension, you know, as the main prize. So I've never understood the kind of mindset of people
00:24:38.000who might do that, you know, never, never overlap with me. But they were fairly sort of conservative,
00:24:41.960I think, at that time, you know, but gradually over time, it has become a role that's become
00:24:48.380more attractive to people of the left, you know, it's become more attractive to people with that
00:24:53.900kind of mindset. And the more than there are, the more attractive it becomes, and the more they tend
00:24:58.420to get recruited, and the more they tend to see messaging that encourages them to think that
00:25:02.320their kind of thinking will be welcome, and that they will be able to get some leverage on the
00:25:09.440wheels of you know the levers of power will will be available to them in a small way and they will
00:25:13.680be able to make the difference as they say they don't see themselves as engaged in some sort of
00:25:18.360you know conspiracy or or or terrible sort of evil plan they think they are doing god's work
00:25:24.460of course you know this is the right correct moral people have finally exactly and we are now
00:25:29.340able to educate children about the correct way to think about sex and gender from the age of seven
00:25:34.520and all the rest of it. That has become a perfectly legitimate role for anyone working
00:25:39.980within the state sector now. So what we need, I suppose, what I'm saying is patience. These are
00:25:46.380long, long fights and the pendulum is long and swing slowly, but it must eventually swing back
00:25:52.200again. It may even conceivably already have started. I don't know. I do see, my daughter is
00:25:57.78016 and I see in her generation, she is privately educated, so she may not be typical in that regard,
00:26:04.140But I do see, about which I have issues myself before anyone starts, 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 were, you know, I think they can already see that they are being...
00:26:34.140you know, bossed around at the very least,
00:26:37.080I think there's a resistance to that that's emerging, I hope.
00:26:40.220It's an interesting thing talking about bias
00:27:58.340was express views that were like comically of that kind,
00:28:01.500you know comically antiquated and archaic and aristocratic rather than sort of right or left
00:28:05.580wing but also i suppose use those to puncture some of this sort of sentimentality or the
00:28:10.640absurdity of the left and just you know just make a space in which you could see the you know how
00:28:15.920you could make that point but that's my point which is that neither you or jeff are sort of
00:28:20.300making material about the importance of creating the lebens ram and poland no no that's not that's
00:28:25.420well it was it was brexit which i think created the thing of course as it did for most of us and
00:28:29.820And I think Jeff genuinely did vote Brexit and has made a perfectly sort of clean case for that and expressed his views.
00:28:37.780My thing, of course, was I didn't really vote. I didn't vote Brexit.
00:28:41.060I wasn't on the day of that itself. I found myself unexpectedly stuck in London.
00:28:46.940I didn't vote at all. But if I had voted, I would have voted the main, but without any great enthusiasm.
00:28:52.520But, you know, I paid attention, it was all it was, to some of the legitimate arguments on the Brexit side.
00:29:00.420And 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.
00:29:07.500She was an advocate for Brexit on economic grounds, long-term economic grounds, you know, always going to be bumpy.
00:29:14.520But there are huge gains to be had, in her view, and a few other people of that kind.
00:29:19.080And 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 coming from at all, you know.
00:29:31.320So 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.
00:29:44.320But I just felt there were certain people who weren't getting properly represented.
00:29:48.420So I just sort of came out a little bit in their favour.
00:29:51.820But Brexit, obviously, you know, it divided everything and it redrew every map.
00:29:57.140Or rather, it drew a much, much deeper chasm between two halves of that map.
00:30:03.040It was like the Berlin Wall going up, you know, I think in the comedy business and in culture generally.
00:30:09.380I still think to this day we are still seeing many things through a Brexit prism which aren't really Brexit at all.
00:30:15.620For instance, this is my view, and I'm well aware I might not be able to sell this, but I genuinely hold it.
00:30:23.920Dominic Cummings, when he had that whole fiasco, driving up to Durham with his kids and then going to Barnard Castle for the day,
00:30:31.180which I think was unquestionably was a day trip with his wife, regardless of the ITS nonsense.
00:30:36.720but the hate the loathing the the the vitriol directed at him for doing that after his rules
00:30:45.140supposedly we were obeying his rules as if he'd come up with them arbitrarily you know because
00:30:49.480he thought that they might be for our better good Neil Ferguson who actually insisted on those rules
00:30:54.700broke lockdown there was no hatred and vitriol towards him whatsoever it was basically he that
00:30:59.700was quite funny that he allowed allowed his girlfriend his this married woman to come in
00:31:03.980through his French windows for a bit of hanky-panky
00:31:06.320during lockdown, when Matt was breaking the rules.
00:31:08.960No question, I'm sure he was right in thinking that they weren't...
00:35:57.980One of the things that was quite interesting, I found,
00:36:01.080this is, I don't know if this is off topic,
00:36:02.360But in the first month or two of coronavirus, and it's continued to some extent, but 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.
00:38:32.700But 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.
00:38:42.620Friends and colleagues that were never political before, very political now.
00:38:47.400And this is why I want to come back to the BBC briefly, because there was this incident. 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 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.
00:39:32.560but they were tinged with this idea that the joke was about hurting people.
00:39:38.560And what was your take on that situation?
00:39:43.020Well, we talked about Joe Brand, didn't we, the last time I remember that?
00:39:46.040Yeah. And I felt I defended her right to do it while, you know, observing that she had herself, you know, brought people to account in quite a decisive way previously for things they'd said.
00:39:57.400And also you were critical of the producer.
00:39:59.720Which was interesting because this time I was critical of the producer while, again, defending the comedian's right to do the joke.
00:40:05.480And I got a lot of pushback on that as supposedly I'm this free speech warrior and now I'm saying.
00:40:10.880I watched Frankie Boyle'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.
00:40:37.020I mean, do you want to mean the way that Dylan would channel Browning or the Old Testament?
00:40:40.100They have that kind of density, which is really rare in language.
00:40:44.040Funnily enough, Russell Brand is capable of it when he puts his mind to it as well.
00:40:47.200You know, he's another man of the left who has been on a more interesting journey, in my view.
00:40:52.760I think Frank is a really talented comedian.
00:40:54.780I hope he won't mind me acknowledging that he also has, I think, a very good writing team on that show.
00:41:00.060And that's perfectly natural and normal. It's about creating the best product.
00:41:02.820and I know some of those writers and I think it's a really those monologues are amazing
00:41:07.260I think Frankie himself in my view is not really a man of the left I think he's a total nihilist
00:41:14.680I think he made quite a considered and probably correct judgment at a certain point in his career
00:41:19.720that he couldn't continue to just like degrade everything without any sort of sense of having
00:41:25.960any sort of focus or distinction between what was deserving and what wasn't and so at that point he
00:41:30.800basically threw his weight behind releasing political prisoners from Guantanamo and everything
00:41:35.140else was like directed you know I'm not saying it's insincere but that's my that's my impression
00:41:40.040that makes the most sense to me when I look at the arc of his career but that show has become
00:41:44.700weird now where you get that monologue and that's very funny and engaging and thought-provoking and
00:41:50.000I have no quarrel with it being one-sided because it's obviously you know that's what it is it's an
00:41:54.080authored piece and then there's this kind of weird round table discussion which feels much more like
00:56:42.260I will say this, you know, a little bit tongue-in-cheek,
00:56:44.900But 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.
00:56:55.080You know, it would have it would have been like a bad flu.