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April 25, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
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Delingpod 17: Andrew Doyle
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Welcome to the Telling Pod with me, James Telling Pod, and my very special guest.
it.
He's actually more famous as somebody else.
In fact, he's only famous as somebody else.
Andrew Doyle.
Hello.
Hello, Andrew.
But nobody knows who Andrew Doyle is.
This is the problem.
No.
But no, actually, it's a good thing.
It's a good thing.
You're better known as...
Titania McGrath.
Titania McGrath.
I actually envy your position because you're nicely below the radar.
You can do creative things and be sort of cheekily right wing without getting the shit that most of us get.
Sort of before, because I didn't want to come out as her.
So actually I preferred having the Twitter account without having people know it was me because I like the idea of people reading the character for the character and not thinking about me.
But unfortunately I got outed.
It wasn't my fault.
People think it was a plan that I wanted the publicity but I didn't.
I wanted to stay in the closet.
I was going to ask you how you got outed, but actually I'm thinking about it.
It must have been so hard not to be outed.
Yeah, but although it was a weird mistake, it was something to do with some sort of book fair in Frankfurt, and one of the people at the publishers had accidentally put my name next to the entry about the book.
So it was a complete accident.
It was probably just someone who worked there who didn't know that we were keeping it under wraps.
And then Chortle, the comedy website Chortle, somehow got hold of this obscure book catalogue from a Frankfurt book fair.
Very odd.
Yeah, but we live in the world of the interconnectedness of things.
This is it.
You cannot escape.
Apparently, you've just made me think that WikiLeaks, the reason that WikiLeaks ended up Killing all these people or betraying all these terrible secrets was that WikiLeaks hadn't meant the really bad stuff to come out, but somebody at The Guardian had accidentally given away details thinking that they were...
Everything is porous now, but then maybe it's a good thing.
I mean, I like to think that people, you know...
Writers always create fictional characters, don't they?
So I like to think, you know, when you read a novel, you don't think about who the author is particularly.
So I hope people can sort of, you know, suspend their disbelief.
Can I say, Andrew, that shows how old school and reactionary you actually are.
And pretty reactionary when it comes to literature.
because you know that the current thinking on literature is that you cannot write outside your class your race your gender this is weird though isn't it like beyond weird how did that happen i mean you know and because when i was at university the whole thing was about the role and bart and the death of the author and all of this sort of sort of thing you know the author doesn't matter it's about how you construct and construe the text you know but now it's all about well who is the author and what's the author done and does the does the author have a sufficient degree of moral rectitude
can we trust this author and and have they specifically experienced everything that their characters have and i find that really tedious Well, also, you'd have to wipe out huge chunks of literature, wouldn't you?
I mean, more Flanders.
Yeah.
You'd have to write that off.
Defoe's gone.
Well, anyone who writes as a...
Clarissa, Pamela.
Clarissa Richardson.
I mean, it's nuts, isn't it?
And particularly something like Pamela, which is all letters.
It's all very much, I'm right, it's me, it's his, it's...
And when that was...
How dare he try and get inside a woman's head?
Exactly.
Man, it was really successful.
I mean, Richardson was like the equivalent.
It was sort of like a blockbuster, kind of, like people had like sort of Pamela memorabilia and Pamela plates and things.
Yeah, it was nuts.
So, yeah, people were writing to him saying, oh, don't kill her off.
Don't let her be...
You know, hurt by this Lovelace character.
It's really funny.
But I think this is the point, though, isn't it?
That if we subscribe to this idea that you need to have a certain life experience in order to qualify to write about someone else's life experience, then we say goodbye to fiction.
We say goodbye to the craft of fiction.
And it even impacts on comedy, you know, because it means that you have to specifically always talk about your own experience.
Well, of course, comedians lie all the time to make things funny.
So what do we do?
And also to avoid getting complete shit from their wives, I imagine.
Okay, yeah.
Oh, and isn't that sex at all?
You're assuming it's heteronormative, certainly.
Well, I was also assuming that actually most comedians are male, which, duh.
Well, all sorts of problems with that, but actually, I mean, that is wrong.
There's loads of female comedians.
Yeah, yeah, but the majority are still men.
The majority are still men, and some female comedians, you see, might have wives as well.
So there's all sorts of assumptions going on in your discourse.
Yeah, exactly.
You see, you are policing my discourse now because you went to the most woke college in Oxford.
I did?
I went to Wadham.
I mean, the epicenter, the college that's probably...
Single-handedly brought Oxford University down.
Ever since, yeah, because Wadham had a warden, I wish I could remember when, it's a couple hundred years ago, who was called the Sodomite of Wadham.
They used to call it, basically, they used to make a pun on...
It used to be a fun place.
Yeah, exactly.
Like Peterhouse Cambridge, which used to be a bastion of sodomy and high church.
Sodomy is fun, yeah.
And I think, you know...
They should bring back sodomite as a form of self-identification.
Or somdomite.
Somdomite if you want the wildy thing.
I would use sodomite or somdomite.
Happy with that.
Yeah, Wadden was super woke.
Even when I was there, it was super woke.
Or that early version of woke.
Were you woke then as well?
That's a difficult one.
I think my views have refined on various things, but I don't think my broad political ideas have changed all that much.
But I think the left, for instance, has changed beyond my recognition.
So therefore I think politics has shifted away from me, or my political home has shifted away from me.
So I don't know where I am now.
In fact, I don't really think in terms of left and right anymore.
Well, that's partly because I think the terms are pretty much redundant now.
The division in the country, and I think this is probably a theme I've been rehearsing quite a lot on the podcast, is that we're now in the land of remain leave.
The alliances have changed.
And this is odd as well, isn't it?
Because you have Labour pushing for the second referendum.
They don't seem to be connecting with the fact that the majority of Labour constituencies are leave voting.
It's almost like they don't understand that their traditional working class base does not like the EU. And how can that be?
how is it that it took Jeremy Corbyn to make the Labour Party more middle class than Blair did?
How can that happen?
Yeah, privately educated Jeremy Corbyn.
I don't get it.
I honestly don't see what's happening.
But whenever people talk to me about the right-left thing, because, I mean, my background is from the left, and so people was...
How is your background from the left?
Insofar as I always identified as left-wing, insofar as a lot of my values and ideas would be traditionally left-wing, I suppose.
But now I don't know what that means anymore.
And also when people say, well, they call me alt-right now and things like that.
But being right-wing, I don't think there's anything wrong with being right-wing.
Like, that's the thing.
It's not a slur to me.
And I think if my values and ideas were in the right-wing bracket, as some probably are and some are not, I just say I was.
I don't have a problem with it.
Alt-right I have a problem with, because alt-right means white nationalist, which I most definitely am not.
It's the catch-all term that means basically you're a Nazi and you shouldn't have a hearing.
It's very non-specific in reality, because the people who've claimed the term right...
Oh, right.
Yeah.
That chap Spencer in America.
Yeah.
He's got about five followers, I should think.
No one gives a shit about what he says.
No, well, luckily, the white nationalist movement is still on the fringes, which I'm glad about because they're a bunch of nutters.
But the idea that that becomes a generalized smear for anyone who has any kind of conservative values.
I mean, I'm very interested in this.
I would like to know your opinion.
So what values of mine?
I mean, I believe in the welfare state.
I believe in a certain...
You're a communist state.
A certain degree of wealth redistribution from proportionate taxation.
I don't see those as right-wing values particularly.
But I also don't believe...
Yeah, well, there we go.
But I don't think there's anything wrong with having right-wing values.
I'll tell you your problem.
You're kind of into free speech.
That's it.
That's it.
And you know the weird thing?
When you and I were at university, I mean, you're younger than me, aren't you?
How old are you, child?
I'm 40 now.
Getting on.
No spring chicken.
So you're probably in the transitional generation between the common sense of my generation and absolute woke madness of the...
I'm the end of Gen X just before the millennials started.
And that means, yeah, I've kind of...
Well, I think people...
But I do think people in my generation are more pro-free speech on the whole than what came after us.
I think...
Because I think the old left, I think the new left, you know, the 60s and 70s and all the civil rights movements, they understood that you have to have free speech at the heart of anything.
Because if you don't have that, then any course that you wish to support is redundant anyway.
And they knew that.
Hence, you get sort of the movement in Berkeley and places like that, where now, of course, you get students sort of trouncing all over the principle in the name of being progressive, which is a complete incoherent stance.
I don't...
I mean, I worry about this.
When I say free speech or I talk about...
How I fear that free speech is under threat.
People then say, therefore you are a right-wing character.
I mean, that makes no sense at all.
And like I say, if I were right-wing, I wouldn't consider that a badge of shame.
I'd just say, yes, okay.
This is what I don't understand.
Well, the reason you don't understand it is because it's a bit like...
I put this to dear old Brendan O'Neill the other day.
And of course, Brendan thinks of himself as a Marxist, I think, partly as a way of...
I think he's sincere with that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I also think that there are elements that he hasn't thought through properly.
I mean, I love Brendan.
I won't have a word said against him.
I put to him that perhaps cultural Marxism is just a variant of Marxism where class has been replaced by identity politics, you know, by gender, by race and so on.
How is this relevant to what we were saying about the freedom of speech thing?
I've got completely lost.
Well, I suppose it's the ways in which people are mischaracterised.
I mean, Brendan's a very good example because people demonise him so much in terms of the media and what he says.
But of course, you know, when you get to know him, you realise that none of this is true.
I've suddenly remembered my point, which is that the language that...
That is being spoken by the woke.
Yes.
Is a bit like the Hegelian Marxist dialectic that Marxists would...
It's a kind of anti-thought.
It's a system of thought which is not about logic.
Yes.
It is not about empiricism.
It's not about the rational.
Yes.
It's about these are the rules.
This is how it is.
Free speech is a bad thing.
There it is because there's a thing called hate speech.
And hate speech means there can be no such thing as free speech.
It's why I've got to police it.
That's the logic.
I think you're right, and I think this comes out of the post-structuralist movement.
So we're going back now.
Did you do that shit?
Oh, yeah.
Well, we all had to, because I studied English literature, so we all had to read Derrida and people like that, and all the sort of French post-structuralists.
Foucault was everywhere.
Michel Foucault was absolutely everywhere, although he was the sort that nobody really read, but they read about him, you know.
But the thing about all of that, I mean, I had to read the bloody thing, but...
The thing about all of that post-structuralist movement is it did exactly what you say.
It took the sort of Marxist template and replaced money economics with power structures.
And that, you see, what we're experiencing at the moment is a kind of – it's out of date, actually, because this is decades ago now.
But it's this kind of filtered down, half misunderstood version of post-structuralist thought.
I think that's what's going on.
So I think when people say they have a problem with the cultural Marxist idea, to be fair, the likes of Derrida were claiming Marxism and claiming to be Marxist, but they were redefining what it meant to be Marxist.
system it's not entirely inaccurate but i i do think that they have a lot to answer for when i was at university i even then i thought it was bollocks you know even then when i was writing my thesis i wrote the opening chapter is all about how i'm not going to do this through the filter of post-structuralist thought or foucault and his history of sexuality which i think is bunkum so you know so i so i did that you're talking about your doctoral thesis yeah yeah Well, it was actually on early modern poetry.
It was on specifically William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney and Richard Barnfield, who no one will know.
But I did a lot of research on Richard Barnfield.
And it was about English Renaissance poetry, but about sexuality and eroticism.
And of course, at that time, everyone was saying, well, you've got to talk about Foucault.
You've got to acknowledge that there was no such thing as homosexual before the word homosexual existed, which is utter nonsense.
And it was a dogma back then.
And so I had to address all this stuff, but I said, look, I'm not going to read some overtly gay poetry like Shakespeare wrote and pretend it's not gay or not call it gay.
You know, it doesn't make sense.
If you're writing a love sonnet from one man to another, you're gay.
Or at least there's a gay element to that.
Yes.
You know, for me to be saying yes, but it's anachronistic to refer to them by a term they would not have...
Okay, sodomite then.
Whatever, you know, whatever.
So, well, now I've got you.
How gay was Shakespeare?
Pretty damn gay.
I mean, like...
Well, look, we don't know.
Nobody knows, but you can...
Nobody knows about anyone who's long dead, right?
You don't know about anyone's sexuality, really.
What I would say is there are only two English male poets of the Elizabethan era who are writing love poetry from one man to another.
And one of them is Shakespeare and the other is Richard Barnfield.
There are certain homoerotic elements in other people's work, but they're very direct.
First person, love sonnets.
You're a man, I'm a man, I love you.
That, to me, is pretty gay.
And you can say, well, yeah, but they were sort of imitating the classical president of Virgil or something like that.
People try and explain it away.
But, you know, bear in mind, when Shakespeare's sonnets came out, actually, Elizabeth was dead and King James was on the throne.
King James was openly gay.
I mean, he was flamboyantly gay.
He had open male lovers at his court.
And that's the point at which Shakespeare's sonnets suddenly get published, you know?
And it's interesting because people always quote either the later sonnets to the Dark Lady or they quote the earlier sonnets that don't have gendered pronouns out of context so it can look like it's a heterosexual love sequence.
Actually, the vast majority of those sonnets are to the young man and then there's some tacked on the end to the Dark Lady and they're very kind of...
It's sort of misogynistic.
I mean, it's more like a kind of bisexual love triangle.
There's even a point where Shakespeare sort of says to the woman, I will know if you've been fucking my young man because you'll get venereal disease or he'll get venereal disease off you.
That's effectively what he says.
But this is not the idealised, romanticised version of what we like to think the sonnets are.
Because all we hear is, shall I compare thee to a summer's day, which is to a man, by the way.
But we hear these things out of context.
Is it to a man?
It is.
Unequivocally, yes.
How do we know?
The first 126 of the sonnets are to the male, and then the last 28, I think, because it's connected to the lunar cycle, are to the Dark Lady.
So...
It's explicit.
So he's quite a kind of effeminate young man.
Yeah, he's an effeminate youth, a kind of ephebe, if you want to use the classical term.
His eternal summer shall not fade.
Exactly.
I mean, the first sonnet, sorry, this is becoming literary.
Nor lose possession of that fare thou owest.
Very good.
The first 17 or so, I think it is 17 sonnets, are him urging the young man to marry.
Which sounds quite heterosexual, but he's doing it because he says you have a duty to reproduce and produce more beautiful boys like yourself.
Oh, I see.
So all of this, you know, this stuff isn't really...
I can't believe we're talking about this.
No, no, I'm delighted we're talking about it.
Because actually, you get asked all the time about Titania McGrath and you don't often get talked about the Dark Lady and stuff like that.
Titania can't even...
Before we go on to Titania, tell me, would you rather have been gay in Shakespeare's time or now?
That's a really good question.
I mean, now, obviously, it's great because we live in a society where it's fine.
You've got dance music and drugs, which Shakespeare didn't have.
They had their equivalents.
You know, they had mead and sack and they had, you know, minstrels and things.
I'm sure they may do.
But yeah, I imagine that, you know, certainly at Shakespeare's time, around the Globe Theatre and the Rose Theatre and all the theatres on the South Bank, there was a kind of a debauched gay undercurrent, you know.
And was there a stigma attached to being gay or not?
Well, I mean, technically, sodomy was punishable by death.
Right.
But are there any cases of where that actually happened?
It happened a couple of times during Elizabeth's reign.
on to some other infraction so like for instance um in fact when Francis Bacon when they tried to do Francis Bacon for for buggery I mean he was almost certainly gay um was he yeah and and both Francis Bacon's were gay yeah exactly fine fine historical tradition so the essayist Francis Bacon though when he uh when they when they got him for sodomy it was because it was really tacked on to another crime you know it's a way to sort of to get someone so it was a sort of thing where I suppose maybe because they didn't have the terms.
They didn't have the terminology for it.
It wasn't sort of known as such.
You could be gay and they wouldn't...
In other words, a man could have sex with a man and you wouldn't say, oh, well, then that's a gay man.
Right.
You see what I mean?
Like, it would be...
Yes.
You know, and you had boys obviously dressed as women on the stage.
So boys were accepted.
I imagine the theatrical companies, particularly the boys playing the girls, must have been really...
They must have all been gay, surely.
Well, they're...
I think they just saw them as, you know, recognisable objects of desire.
Right.
In a way that women are, right, in this context.
So, whereas today, if a man has sex with another man, you're going to assume they have an orientation.
Maybe at the time...
I don't know about now.
This new generation that's about, they seem to be polysexual and they make it...
I know loads of younger, sort of 20-somethings, who seem to be very comfortable being gay and being straight at the same time.
Yeah, and, you know, I don't care what people do.
You know, it's completely up to the individual.
But I think if we're being honest, we all know we have a preference, don't we?
The vast majority of us have a preference.
And I think what identity politics has done in the realm of sexuality is it's kind of just...
It's focused too much on the labels and too much on...
On appearances and all the rest of it.
And not really on, you know, who do you think about when you wank, basically, which is a different kind of question.
Yes.
When I was at prep school, I was the most famously gay of my...
Is that right?
Yeah, yeah, I was.
And in fact, I was accused of having invented wanking.
That's quite an invention.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I remember it was in the last term.
And we were all sitting in the orchard in the summer term, all preparing to leave.
And somebody said to me...
Dillingpole, you showed us all how to wank, didn't you?
And I thought, that's extraordinary.
I can't believe...
I very much doubt that actually happened, but I like taking credit for it.
Why not?
Thank you.
But yes, now I am...
At least you made a lasting contribution.
Lasting contribution.
And now I'm famously heterosexual.
Marlowe was gay as well, wasn't he?
Yeah.
They that love not tobacco and boys are fools.
Very good.
That's one of the Richard Baines note.
You know yourself.
Well, I did...
You know, I did...
Actually, what surprises me is it's a long, long time since I read all this shit at Oxford.
And it's amazing how much stuck in my head.
And I think it goes to show, actually, we did work really hard.
And I bet you worked really hard when you were doing your...
You know, I didn't as an undergrad.
It was only when I started...
It's post-grad work that I started working hard.
If you'd gone to Oxford though, because you went to Aberystwyth.
Yes, for my first degree, yeah.
Had you gone to Oxford, I hate to say it, but they really do make you work yourself.
And even in the old days they did.
Nowadays I hear them complaining about the workload and they're always going on about how they're having breakdowns and stuff.
But I went through my files of my essays that I wrote.
Yeah.
Really, really thick files.
We were writing to...
Two and a half thousand, three thousand word essays a week.
And having to do all the research.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's really stressful.
I mean, I taught the Shakespeare module for the undergrads while I was doing my doctorate because I was a part-time lecturer.
And the workload that they had to do, it was tough.
It was full on.
And I think that's a really good...
That's why so much is stuck in your head.
I don't know how we found time to socialise and get drunk and try to get laid because it was...
The work schedule...
And teach people to wank.
Yeah, yeah.
That was prep school.
That wasn't...
Oh, you didn't carry on doing that?
I thought that was like your thing now.
I think people knew by the time they got to university.
Even the sheltered ones, I think, would have discovered that.
So, okay.
You did this extraordinary, interesting doctorate, I think.
And...
I think that comes across in Titania.
Her poetry is quite sophisticated.
I mean, it's ridiculous, but it draws on lots of literary references and lots of ideas and tropes.
I suppose it does.
I mean, it's bad.
But yeah, it does, I suppose, draw on those things.
Yeah.
It couldn't have been written by a thick person, is what I'm saying.
Well, you see, I wanted it to be bad in a good way, right?
And I think she's smart.
She's just utterly misguided.
That's the thing.
Like, she's not stupid.
I've seen so many of my really, really intelligent friends be swallowed up by this cult of identity politics, so that it doesn't matter how smart you are, like any cult...
You can start to believe utter nonsense.
Well, I think it's in an inverse proportion.
I think the smarter you are, the more likely.
It doesn't protect you from the idiocy.
And certainly, if I'm right about all of this coming from this sort of Foucauldian movement back in the day, this has come from the smartest people.
This has come from...
From academics who say there's no such thing as truth.
There's only language and discourse.
That's where this has come from.
Well, you can see how seductive it is to somebody who wants to kind of rebel against the system.
It's just the right age.
They catch you while you're just ready to be really stupid.
And here are these ideas that make you uber stupid.
It's trouble, isn't it?
I feel as though critical thinking has gone out the window.
I feel like people don't think for themselves anymore.
And I think if we could get people to do that again, then we wouldn't have this kind of polarization, this tribal approach to not just politics, but actually to anything.
But I think in terms of the poetry, just to come back to that, in terms of what Titania's doing there, I think, because she won't mention Shakespeare.
She sees Shakespeare as this icon of white male straights.
She doesn't know about the gay stuff, does she?
She probably doesn't.
No, she's not interested.
She doesn't know he was black either.
Doesn't know he's black, or a black woman, maybe?
Who knows?
She thinks all of these, any old, white, dead male, she thinks the canon is just riddled with this.
So you'll note in the book she references Shakespeare a couple of times, but she won't say his name.
She feels like it's a form of blasphemy to say his name, so she won't do it.
And I think she believes that she's bought into this thing that a lot of people now believe, that history has been written now.
By these dead straight white males.
And they need to be erased out, sort of tugged out of history.
You have to kind of unpick the tapestry.
And of course it doesn't work that way.
You can't just replace the canon with something new and trendy.
It doesn't work that way at all.
It's so embedded in the culture of the young, this woke stuff.
I was grumbling about watching the other day an episode of Sabrina, who's a witch, a teenage witch.
Is this the new version?
Yeah, it's the new version.
And the first episode, there's a female character who wants to be a boy.
Yes.
And she changes her identity at the end and she wants to play basketball even though she's shit at basketball because she's a girl, obviously.
Outrageous.
Really.
And all the jocks mock her.
Yeah.
And then Sabrina does magic on her to make her really good.
What does that say about women?
That's not good, is it?
Only through magic that they can...
Terrible.
But...
So this is what they're being fed in their popular entertainment, and they go to university, even the best universities, and they're being fed this stuff.
How are people going, how are we going to, before Western civilization collapses, which it may do soon, how are we going to recover the lost art of critical thinking?
I think it's going to come from the young themselves, because what I, whereas I think I'm probably a bit more optimistic than you, in that I honestly believe that most young people are sick of this shit.
I think most of them, right, because you get this small minority, the sort of very vocal, woke minority who have a lot of clout.
They're the ones who go for the post in the NUS, in the National Union of Students.
They're the ones who make the most noise on social media, in the media, whatever, right?
But they are not reflective of...
You see, I don't like this idea of just writing off a whole generation, calling them snowflakes and all this stuff.
It's not a word I use in that context because I just think it's not helpful.
And most young people I talk to are just as sick of it as anyone else.
And they hate the fact that everyone sort of thinks that their entire generation are just mindless.
And they're not.
And I think, ultimately, it will come from within.
You know, they're...
I mean, I used to be a school teacher, and when you do challenge young people, they realise there's a frisson to critical thinking.
Thinking for yourself is fantastic.
It's actually one of the most exciting things you can do, and when they experience it, they want more of it.
And I think just being positive about that, and it's about education, and it's about teaching them the right things at school and teaching them how to think, not what to think.
Can I say, Andrew, you've actually got me slightly wrong.
You think of me as a crusty old angry reactionary.
But actually, do you know what?
I love the kids.
I absolutely do.
Because A, I meet that generation because they're the friends of my kids.
And B, I too have been on the front line of teaching.
I taught with Brendan O'Neill at Radley.
Really?
Yeah, that roughhouse school, Radley, for two days.
And I taught at my old school, Malvern, for a week once, and I taught at Radley another time.
And it was the most fun thing, the most satisfying thing I've ever done.
Just introducing kids to ideas and...
Seeing them respond, it was glorious.
It's great.
It's so exciting.
And you're right, there is much good in them, as there always was.
You look at the Romans.
The Romans were writing about how the next generation had lost all the old values and the civilisation was fucked.
And clearly that didn't happen.
And this is why I'm really fascinated.
I remember someone for the New Statesman who hated the book, and she said, Actually, she gave a review of the book, but it was clear she hadn't read any of it.
Oh, I love that review.
It's a wonderful review.
I adore it because it's exactly the sort of review Titania would write.
It was.
And the thing about it was, though, is as always with this sort of woke approach...
It's very narcissistic.
And this writer was sort of claiming to speak on behalf of all millennials.
You know, she's sort of saying, we're sick of being sneered at, but the old sneering at the young.
And that's how she interpreted it.
And of course, what she doesn't realise is there's a lot of millennials who are really into Titania.
But because it's connected to this narcissism, this entitled worldview, she felt able to speak on behalf.
And it was perfect.
Because I had loads of messages saying, did you write that?
Because it felt like I'd written as a hoax.
It was.
Yes, it was.
It was probably the best review you're ever going to get.
I've quoted it.
We've done another reprint of the book and I've included it on the back.
I imagine it's selling quite well, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, it seems to be, yeah.
Again, which is really nice.
And it's not just selling to older people who are sick of the young.
It's really not.
And I think that annoys them.
I think the recognition that actually there are people of their own generation who are sick of this, that the power is shifting a little bit.
I think that really gets to them, you know?
And I think the fact that The fact that I'm annoying them suggests I'm doing something right.
I think that's it.
I must say, I am quite envious of you because you seem to be one of those people who is kind of accidentally successful, by which I mean not that you don't deserve it, but that you seem to have drifted along with your life.
You know, I thought, well, why don't I do a PhD on Shakespeare's Gay Sonnets and then I'll do a bit of teaching and then I'll run a comedy club.
I mean, is that how it's gone?
No, I mean, it feels a bit like that, doesn't it?
But I mean, you know, Or were you a civil servant?
No.
Okay, well I'll talk you through it.
I was at school and it was a normal comprehensive school.
What's your background?
Working class, middle, lower middle?
Yeah, it's a little normal, sort of lower middle, if you put a thing on it I guess.
I mean my dad was a printer, my parents broke up and so my mum was, I was mostly with my mum from there on and we didn't It felt normal at the time, but we didn't have money.
We weren't well off.
We didn't go on holidays abroad or anything like that.
So it was, I think, quite a normal upbringing, but certainly not poor.
And then I went to Aberystwyth University because I went to the library and it was the first prospectus on the shelf, alphabetically.
And I have always thought I would have ended up at Aberdeen if they'd had a copy of Aberdeen's perspectives, although I may not have got in, because I didn't work very hard.
Or Aardvark University.
Aardvark University would have been great.
So I went to Aberystwyth.
In the end, actually, I loved it there.
But after that, I wanted to do a master's.
So I went to York because I got a scholarship to do it.
which again, I wouldn't have been able to do, but I was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board.
So it's not like I've just coasted, like I've only been able to do stuff because I've been paid to do it, basically.
And then thereafter, I wanted to be a writer, but I'd run out of money.
And I thought...
I was living with an elderly woman because she'd seen one of my plays on the fringe.
And she said, oh, that's great.
Come and live with me.
You won't have to pay any rent.
And I'll, you know, just write.
So it was like having a patron, you know.
She was brilliant.
She was wonderful.
And so I lived with her.
Angela, her name was.
I lived with her for a while.
But then I just had no money at all.
So I thought, well, I'll go into teaching because that's all I'm qualified to do, really.
So I did that.
Well, hang on.
Pause there.
Okay.
You were a teacher for how long?
A full-time seven years.
That's a long time.
Yeah.
I mean, that's a mini-career.
Yeah.
You're teaching English, presumably.
And drama, yeah, yeah.
And drama at...
Oh, were you like drama teacher in...
What's that Australian...
What, Mr G? Chris Lilley.
I like to think not.
I like to think I have a bit more self-awareness than that.
I didn't really know what I was doing.
I didn't have any contact with private schools.
Suddenly I find myself teaching at a private school, boarding school in the middle of the countryside.
What was the school?
It was called Royal Hospital School.
Yeah.
And it's a naval school, so all the kids would be marching to lunch in squads.
They wouldn't refer to break, they'd call it stand easy.
They wouldn't refer to the lunch hall, they'd call it the mess.
And this was messing with my head, I didn't know what any of this was.
Messing with your head.
And of course I'm living in a boarding house because I had to look after them because I was a resident tutor.
So it's full on, 24-7, taking them to chapel on a Sunday, teaching on a Saturday.
You didn't have any time off.
And at the same time, I was trying to start a stand-up career.
So I was constantly going down to London, coming back really late.
It was exhausting, but fun and exhilarating.
Yeah.
Then because I started getting more stand-up work, I went to a school in London or near to London called Merchant Tailors.
Yeah.
So you were a gigging comedian at this point?
I was a gigging comedian at this point.
And then I started earning enough from stand-up comedy to go part-time.
So I went part-time and went to a school in the Barbican called the City of London School for Girls, where I was a part-time teacher for a couple of years.
Yeah.
And then I was earning enough from stand-up and writing to earn a living.
I mean, I wasn't well off.
I could basically scrape by on it, but I thought, I'll go for it.
Because, why not?
And then I started working on the Jonathan Pye stuff.
And of course, because Jonathan Pye took off...
I was able to sustain myself in terms of my career.
So do you write all Jonathan Pye?
No, so we've taken a hiatus.
We're not writing together at the moment.
The last one I wrote for him would have been back in January.
But up until that point, we wrote everything together, yeah.
And did you sort of create the character?
No, no.
Tom, who plays the character, created him.
Right.
And that was in 2015, sort of September time.
I started writing a few months later...
December sort of time because I'm much more into politics and Tom wanted someone who's more into politics and so we wrote together and we did some great things.
We did two live tours.
We did a book.
We had some majorly viral videos that we wrote, particularly the one after Donald Trump's election.
That went crazy all over America and actually that was the first time that people started connecting me with Pi because of course Tom was mentioning that we'd written it together in interviews and stuff and I was getting some very angry messages from America mostly about that one.
Because, of course, in that video, we were basically saying, look, Hillary was a terrible candidate.
The left has got to take some responsibility for being so shit.
Yes.
And it came at just the moment where a lot of people were sort of thinking that, but they weren't uttering that.
And I think it just, it became a big sort of viral hit.
It got something like 150 million views in it.
It was nuts.
But Titania came out later, and Titania was just something I've...
And I just started doing last year just for myself, because I was...
I'll tell you what it was.
Do you remember a character called Godfrey Elfwick?
Yes, of course.
Right, on Twitter.
So it was a brilliant, brilliant satirical character, this genderqueer Muslim atheist who was run by two people, but one of the people was Lisa Graves.
And I've become friendly with Lisa.
Yes.
I love Lisa.
She's fantastic.
And she encouraged me to do this because I said, I've always wanted to do something like this.
I love what you do.
And she said, well, you should just do it.
So I did it.
And I came up with this radical slam poet.
I love the idea of writing bad poetry.
And she mocked up the avi, you know, the picture for me.
Great, Avi.
It's great, isn't it?
I do quite fancy Titania.
Do you?
Well, I asked Lisa about it.
Apparently it's the composite of a number of women, so it's got no likeness to any real-life person.
That's clever.
But also what I love about that picture is...
Because I said to Lisa at the time, I remember, like, Titania does not smile.
She doesn't...
She's so po-faced.
So actually, when I tweet this stuff out, the jokes are enhanced by the fact that you've got this very kind of stern or steer madam staring at you and daring you to mock, you know, daring you to fight back.
And that's part of it, I think.
So yeah, I started doing it just for myself, really.
She kept getting suspended, like a couple of seven-day suspensions here and there for no reason.
I mean, the tweets they said it was about, it was nonsense.
It was nothing.
And then when she got to about 40,000 followers back in November, she got a total ban, complete permanent suspension.
Did she?
Yeah.
Yeah, so Twitter emailed...
Oh, I think I wrote about that.
Yes, probably.
Yeah, they emailed me saying, you're not coming back.
This is it.
And then all these people started complaining about it on Twitter and 24 hours later they brought her back.
And I think what happened was they realised that a lot of these sort of high-profile right-wing people were using this as ammunition to say, look, Twitter are partisan in their editorial practice, which they are.
But this was used as clear evidence.
So she's back now.
For how long?
I don't know, but I've got the book now and Yes, but how can they possibly suspend her when she's just saying the same things that...
You had an example today about the erasing gay characters...
Sorry, straight characters from literature.
You actually had a real person saying that?
Well, often you take...
Yeah, often she screenshots some of the more absurd things that people are actually saying and they're saying it sincerely.
And she just sort of accentuates them.
But these people aren't being banned.
No, they're not.
But I think if you're mocking it, you know, you've got to remember that Silicon Valley is largely run by people who are ideologically driven in this direction.
So of course they don't like it.
I mean, we said it ourselves with that New Statesman review, but if you're being mocked, you're not going to find this funny.
You're going to find it upsetting.
Yes, they are.
But I totally accept that these liberals in Silicon Valley are going to be infuriated by her.
But what is she actually saying that can justify it?
What they do, though, is they set up their terms of service in such a nebulous way.
They don't have to specify why they get rid of you.
We saw this when we had Tim Pool and Joe Rogan talking to Jack Dorsey on that interview.
Yeah.
They were quizzing them about their policies.
And ultimately what became very, very clear is that the way that they apply their terms of service are entirely ideological.
It just came out.
It's absolutely clear to me.
Dorsey himself has admitted there's a left-wing bias to the company.
And Quillette did a very good study where they specifically identified that if you're a conservative on Twitter, you're much more likely to be suspended or banned.
I mean, it's just true.
They do sometimes ensnare some on the left as well.
But there's very much a leaning there.
That can't really be denied anymore.
And I think they can say, well, if you're dehumanising, that's the phrase they use, if you're dehumanising someone, then we can ban you.
And they see comedy and jokes as violence.
And that's something that we see all the time.
That's why I set up this comedy night, is that people have completely now misunderstood what comedy is.
And they think that words can create monsters.
I'm glad you said that.
And you're the perfect person to...
Enlarge upon this.
I noticed some time ago this shift in left-wing thought whereby language suddenly becomes the equivalent of physical violence.
Right.
That has got to be a new thing.
I can't believe that even in the early 20th century the left was equating verbiage with No, but I suppose if you go back to the post-structuralist and if you say that there is no truth beyond language, then you can invest language with this kind of significance.
But also what troubles me about it is actually I think in some ways it could be deemed to be a tactic insofar as if you say your language hurts my feelings and therefore is an act of violence towards me, then it gives you a kind of...
I suppose it gives you a kind of defence in advance for inflicting violence upon them.
Because groups like Antifa, for instance, will say, well, I'll hit you with a bite lock because you've said some nasty things about this minority group.
So therefore, it's a form of self-defence.
So it gives you some kind of justification for violence.
So that's a disturbing interpretation of it.
The other one is just simply that we are in this culture of entitlement now and narcissism, which means that people have an expectation that they're not going to be challenged.
Or that their views are not going to be debated.
And they misconstrue criticism as harassment.
I've had it online where I get into quite civilised arguments with people about political ideas and then they say, why are you bullying me?
Why are you harassing me?
I'm like, I thought we were having a conversation here.
I'm not saying anything that's out of order.
I'm not attacking you or being unpleasant because I don't do that.
Did you find that when you were teaching the kids at Wadham?
No, not at Wadham.
I mean, that's going back a bit now.
But I think some of the kids I taught, certainly the sixth formers that I taught as a school teacher, particularly in the last few years...
City of London?
At City of London.
Really great kids.
But there was a problem with resilience.
And I think a number of the teachers would admit that there was a problem.
Because on the one hand, we have a culture, an anti-bullying culture, which is important.
You know, no one's for bullying.
Well, I don't know.
Well...
Character building, right?
But what it does is it does kind of, it means that there's an overly coddled, over-diagnostic culture, right?
So you'd say something like, you'd say, if you've got any problems at all, if you feel hurt or upset about anything, come to me, come to the teachers, come to the staff and we'll help you.
But sometimes, right, now sometimes that's important because if someone's genuinely been bullied or there's something going on, you need to have those mechanisms in place.
But on the other hand, if someone comes to you and says, oh, they said something mean and so therefore I'm crying about it, I've done all this sort of stuff.
But you just, at some point, you've got to be able to say, look, just get over yourself, right?
Pull yourself together.
You do have to be able to say that.
And the problem is it's becoming harder and harder to do that with kids at the moment because of the education policies as they stand.
So we've, we're speaking before your comedy night, which is once a month at the Backyard Comedy Club in Bethel Green in East London. - Okay.
And I'm feeling obviously very unsafe because I know that this is kind of quite a rough neighbourhood.
I'm presuming I'm going to have some laughs.
Tell me...
Your comedians are quite right-wing or ish?
No, this is something that's...
When we set up the night, it's called Comedy Unleashed, right?
And when we set up the night, the idea was that I'd been on the circuit for a long time, and of late, only the past couple of years, by the way, but of late, I've seen a kind of homogeneity on the circuit, so...
A lot of jokes about how Brexit voters are stupid and racist.
A lot of jokes about how Donald Trump is orange and has small hands.
And look, there's places for jokes like that.
I don't care who you...
Where?
No, it's fine.
It's fine.
What, in stupid world?
I can't...
Look, do you know what?
There is...
I don't...
I think...
Radio 4 is the place where...
Well, there you go.
But I think anything should be a target, and particularly people in power like Donald Trump.
Of course he should be mocked, right?
But my problem is that when everyone's doing the same thing, there's a kind of supply and demand issue there, and it gets a bit boring.
So all I was saying was, you know, it's okay.
To be a bit more experimental, I thought we'd have a night where...
Because I know for a fact that a lot of comedians, they worry about offending people now, and so they self-censor.
Because if they're perceived to be an offensive comedian, they get branded an edgelord, whatever the fuck that means.
They get called...
They won't get rebooked.
They jeopardise their chances of getting on TV. So what they do is they play it safe and everyone ends up sounding a bit bland.
So what I was saying is the art form has never been pushed forward by people not taking risks.
So we'll set up a night and we'll say, don't, it's not a safe space.
We don't believe comedy should be a safe space.
Do what you want.
Push the boundaries.
That doesn't mean that we only get right-wing comics, but it was interpreted that way.
You know, people would say, like, we had the Sunday Telegraph wrote an article saying free speech comedy night.
Finally, we've got a right-wing comedy night.
I was like, no, it's not.
We have left-wing comics.
We have right-wing comics.
We have a mix in the audience of political backgrounds.
It's genuinely weird.
When I did my last Edinburgh show, which was a pro-Brexit, left-wing pro-Brexit Edinburgh show, virtually no one in the audience would admit to voting leave.
When I did the Jonathan Pye tour...
And I was doing the support.
I would always ask the audience, so who voted Leave?
Silence.
In a room full of 3,000 people, by the way, night after night.
Very few.
And obviously that can't be true.
What that tells you is there's now a stigma attached to a certain political mindset.
And we would say, in this room, what you'll find is, it's probably half and half, and they'll admit it.
And that's more interesting to me.
Can I just tell you briefly, by way of digression, my Glastonbury the day after the vote story.
I went to Glastonbury and I was so excited that we'd won, we the Brexiteers, that I was late leaving for Glastonbury.
So the first band I got to see...
Was Bring Me the Horizon.
Right.
And the lead singer of Bring Me Horizon, whatever the name is, says, Anzapal's pissed off about the vault.
And everyone put their hands.
And Anzapal's happy.
I think I was the only person in the entire audience who was happy that...
There you go.
Because that's the kind of brave person I am, Andrew.
I mean, you are.
You are courageous.
But this is the point, is that we bought into the narrative that the Brexit vote was about whether you're racist or not, right?
The media pushed this narrative for months and months.
People bought into it.
And so, therefore, it didn't become about whether you believe the EU is a good or a bad thing.
It became about whether you are a good or a bad person.
And it still is that land.
It totally is.
Stop being reasonable.
You know it's true.
You know the other side are evil and dark.
And they ascribe bad faith to us, which we don't actually have.
But this is exactly the problem, isn't it?
Because there are good reasons on both sides of this argument.
A what?
Where?
Tell me the good reason for Remain.
Well, okay, here we go.
So I think we know why people voted.
The polls told us quite clearly why people voted.
Overwhelmingly, people voted Leave because of the principle that laws that govern this country should be made in this country.
So that principle of sovereignty, which was the main reason, according to the Ashcroft polls, straight after the vote.
Conversely, the principal reason for people voting Remain was an economic speculation that we would be better off within the EU. Speculation.
Right, sure.
That's a generous...
Well, because all economic predictions, if you know anything about the history of economics, will tell you...
Are often wrong.
So you're saying that the best case scenario, the best argument they had was the speculation that there might be economic problems.
The best argument was that, well firstly, that for them, of course, the system wasn't broke.
A lot of people, this is why, of course, working class people predominantly voted leave, because the system is broken for them.
It's fine if you are a kind of affluent middle class person and the system works for you.
Why would you want it to change, you know?
Hello.
Well, right.
Okay.
I'm not that affluent, but I'm certainly middle class.
And I'm telling you, there's quite a few of us who think the system is very broken.
And inevitably, I'm generalizing.
But what I would say is that overwhelmingly, I think, people voted leave on this principle.
And people voted Remain on this pragmatism.
And that's why there's this essential disconnect between understanding because a Remain voter will say, yeah, but we're going to crash out the mud, you know, there's going to be super gonorrhea, there's going to be army on the streets.
And people are like, yep, look, we can be poorer for the short term, but the principle matters more than that.
And you don't get it.
That's the problem.
Tell me about the shit you've had from running a right-wing...
Sorry.
Even you're doing it.
I know very carefully you avoided that term.
Okay.
Not rampantly left-wing.
How much trouble have you got yourself into for bucking this trend?
Because comedy is pretty much dominated by the left.
It is, but what I don't understand is the majority of comedians don't want to admit that.
But it's just definitely true.
So they don't want to admit that it's dominated by the left.
And they'll say...
And certainly this night, there's a lot of people who are not...
On board with it.
They think it's a, you know, it's been mischaracterised as this sort of alt-right, you know, there's a room full of racists and all this nonsense.
And everyone here is great.
And we've never had a racist act.
I wouldn't be interested in that.
It's quite novel.
Yeah, it would be.
Racism isn't funny.
And where are all these racist comics?
They're not here.
They don't exist.
No.
So we're just having...
You know, it's working really, really well, but I'd say the perception of it is exactly what you described.
It's like, oh, it's just a bunch of right-wingers, and it's just not.
It just isn't.
But you presumably have been ostracised by many of your peers.
Yeah.
I imagine, was there a time when you were part of the gang and you were loved and then suddenly, was there a moment when you knew that you were persona non grata?
Yeah, so there's a couple of things that happened.
There's Brexit was the first thing because I was open about voting leave and that really annoyed me.
I have lost friends and some within the comedy community.
Because I think people have bought into this cult and they believe that if you're not on side, you are evil.
And it's really sad.
But there's that.
The other reason is some of the Jonathan Pye videos, which I had a heavy hand in, are the ones that criticize identity politics and that sort of thing.
So again, there was one about the gender pay gap.
Which has angered a lot of people because we just pointed out the facts that it is illegal to pay women and men differently.
Oh, they hate facts.
They hate facts, exactly.
That's really below the belt to use.
I know, I know, exactly.
And so, and spiked is the other thing because I write columns for spiked.
And again, because spiked has been so mischaracterised by the people who don't read it, Some very, very smart people who have turned on me and called me Nazi and all this sort of stuff.
And I think to myself, if you really believe that about me, then we probably never were friends to begin with.
And it's just sort of brought out this bigotry.
And that is what it is.
I've seen so much bigotry, particularly from the Remain side of the debate.
Particularly from the people who profess to be progressive, who are pro-identity politics, who claim to be looking out for the vulnerable.
But they're the ones who are the most vicious people on Twitter, the most bullish and unpleasant people on social media.
But they're also the bigots.
Because the dictionary definition of bigotry is an incapability to listen to someone else's point of view.
And that's them in a nutshell.
So...
Do you know, I am always up for talking to anyone of any political persuasion and I always assume the best of people.
The problem I have with the woke friends who I have now lost is I think that they are the opposite.
I think they're pessimists who assume the worst of people.
I think they have a mistrust in humanity.
They think people are essentially bad.
They think the country is crawling with fascists.
They do.
I don't.
I don't buy into this fantasy because it is a fantasy.
I think people are essentially good.
And there are some rotten eggs out there, but...
I'll never assume the worst of someone.
The people who perform at the Backyard Club, aren't they taking a bit of a career risk?
Well, I mean...
Not because you're purveying racist ideas, but because of that perception.
Yeah, I mean, one very prominent comic, she said to me that some other very famous television comic had gone up to her and said, why are you performing at that racist night?
And she had to say, well, it's not racist.
And people who know me know that I bore racism.
I hate racism.
The idea that I even have to say that is ludicrous, but it's true.
And the idea that they want to just mischaracterise the night, yeah, sure.
I suppose...
I did have another friend, by the way, who emailed and said, yeah, I don't think I can perform at your night anymore because of what it's come to represent.
And I thought, well...
What it's come to...
Yeah.
That's not what it is, though, is it?
That you're buying into and you're accepting this narrative.
Why not challenge the narrative?
Oh, but it's about signs and signifiers, isn't it?
Well, there we go.
Signs and signifiers.
Yeah, yeah.
I want to get more sort of...
We've got lefty, woke comics on.
We've got one tonight, right?
But I want more.
I want all kinds of comics to come on here.
But because of this tribalism thing, they now think, oh, well, then you're on the other side.
But actually, we've had some really woke-ish comics so far, and I just want to keep doing that.
I suppose the most depressing example is Frankie Boyle.
Frankie Boyle, who was a comedian, for those who are not familiar with him, he was...
Glasgow, hard as nails, or his act was hard as nails.
And brilliant stagecraft.
And there was nowhere that he would not go.
And I watched him.
The show is how fast things have moved.
He had a show, a late night show, on Channel 4, I think.
Is this the New World Order, the new show?
No, no, no.
We're talking about ten years ago.
Oh, that's...
I know the one you mean.
It was very near the knuckle.
Really near the knuckle.
It was Tramadol Nights.
Tramadol Nights.
That's it, yeah, yeah.
And Tramadol Nights...
I wrote about it in The Spectator and I praised it because even then things were starting to change and you could see that Tramadol was very much on the edge of what was politically acceptable.
Oh, yeah.
And he was making jokes about disabled people, about Jordan's disabled son and stuff like that.
Very famously, he got in a lot of trouble.
Famously.
But...
Although the jokes about the Queen Mother, and even if you didn't want these targets being attacked, nevertheless you applauded him, I certainly did, for thinking, well, at least somebody is pushing the boundaries.
But also, isn't it really about...
I think something's happened where we have this literal-minded interpretation now, or so many audiences have this literal-minded interpretation where they think...
If you joke about a subject, it's the same as an endorsement of that subject.
That comes back to that thing I say about equating words with actual physical acts.
Yeah, exactly.
And sometimes we joke about things...
We don't mean everything we say on stage.
And sometimes we joke about things knowing that you shouldn't go there because it's sort of cathartic.
It sort of reminds us of why we have these parameters in society.
And I think there's a really good thing about...
What you'd call political correctness, as in politeness, a social contract.
Because that's a good thing, right?
That's the David Aronovich excuse.
No, no, no.
But I think it's true.
You don't want to live in a world where you could be in an office or I could be at work as a teacher and someone's like, oh, you faggot, do this for me and stuff.
But it's called good manners.
Good manners, right.
Okay.
Which is not really the same.
Political correctness is actually much, much...
Oh, well, that's...
It's weaponised good manners.
Okay, but that's a whole other debate.
But I think, broadly speaking, we're on the same side about decorum.
And I think it's not the role of the stand-up comic to be polite.
Totally not.
That's the point, is that I think that they have, like Leah's Fool, this licence to go beyond what you're meant to say.
And I love that about it.
And they can get away with it.
We can do that.
I'm never saying I'm being censored.
People always say this to me, like...
Why are you going on about saying you can't say anything when you're saying it?
I've never made that claim.
I've never made the claim that I'm being censored.
What I'm saying is people in our society at the moment are getting nervous about being misconstrued and so therefore they self-censor.
Of course they do.
That's why people make WhatsApp groups to have chats with their mates at work so that they don't get fired from having a joke misunderstood.
This is not rocket science.
I'm not saying I'm being stifled in my free speech.
I've never made that claim.
People will tell me I made that claim, but I don't.
I don't believe that at all.
And I'm in a very privileged position because I'm a stand-up comic and I can say these things on stage.
Or because I can write the columns that I write and the character and the Titania stuff that I write.
But if I still worked as a teacher, you know, I'd be nervous now about joking with my colleagues.
Yeah.
I'd be really nervous about it.
And I probably wouldn't do it.
Yeah, rightly so.
And I wouldn't do it.
I really wouldn't.
I wouldn't take that risk.
I'd make myself as bland as possible just for an easy life.
And, you know, and I don't blame people who do.
Yeah.
You've actually got a field of call from America now, because that's how big you are.
You are Andrew Doyle megastar.
I really wouldn't go that far.
I think this is the right-wing comedy entrepreneur, as you won't be described.
I do have to go and do a podcast for America, but it's interesting though, isn't it, that it's the right-wing conservative outlets in America that want to talk to me.
Well, because you are Rara Arvis...
I wish I could have both though, don't you think?
It just shows how the world, how messed up the world is.
Yeah, it really does.
Here you are trying to semi-apologise, not apologising, but having to defend having a comedy night where people tell jokes.
Or people come from different political perspectives.
Yeah, yeah.
All of this nonsense is about you're sharing platforms, you're talking to someone, so therefore you are...
No, this is the phrase, fascist-adjacent.
Have you heard that one?
People are now using fascist-adjacent.
So now Titani uses proxy-fascist-adjacent if you've spoken to someone who's spoken to someone who has dodgy views.
This is so...
You have gone so fascist-adjacent on this, because I can tell you, judging by Twitter, I am about the most fascist right-wing Nazi.
Right, and it doesn't matter what you believe.
It matters what people think you believe, right?
And now that I've shared a platform with you...
It's like, it's airborne.
You know, I've caught it.
It's contagious, right?
So I've got it now, and anyone who talks to me has probably got it.
My cat's going to get it, right?
This is the problem.
I'm going to have a fascist cat.
Oh, that's sad.
Anyway, the point is, I wish I could be in it.
I think this is what's wrong.
This is how we got to this problem that no one's fucking talking to each other.
People are afraid to talk to someone of different views because then someone will brand them in the wrong way or take a picture with them and say, you're one of them now because you're not in my tribe.
Yeah.
What the fuck's going on?
That's not how humanity can work.
It's not how politics can work.
It really pisses me off.
I agree.
If you were listening, ladies and gentlemen, to the end of Andrew Doyle's career, thank you and good night.
That was great.
You're listening to The Delling Pod.
It wasn't really The End of Andrew Doyle's career.
It was just a joke, by the way.
Just a joke.
It was The Delling Pod with Andrew Doyle, creator of Titania McGrath and proprietor...
No, what?
Host?
Yeah, proprietor.
Proprietor of the...
Founder.
Founder.
Co-founder of the Backyard Comedy Club.
No, no.
Sorry.
Unleashed.
Unleashed.
Okay.
Right.
Great.
Thanks.
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