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It certainly means a new, live, UK sketch show has plenty of material – but how should comedy respond to the challenging times we are all living through?

Plus – why having a weekly opinion column is good for your mental health and why news organisations need to do more to tackle the lies and extreme rhetoric coming from politicians.

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TRANSCRIPT

Nish Kumar Hi, this is Pod Save the UK. I’m Nish Kumar.

Coco Khan And I’m Coco Khan.

Nish Kumar To horribly misquote John Lennon, war is over if Iran wants it. At least that’s what Donald Trump has been claiming this week.

Coco Khan That is a great reference for our Gen Z listeners. Are they gonna get that?

Nish Kumar Of course they know who John Lennon is. He’s being played by Harris Dickinson in the new movie.

Coco Khan Right, of course. So at the same time, when we’re talking about Trump, we should mention that he’s currently insisting that the war has already been won by the US. It’s enough to make you doubt everything the man says, isn’t it? But luckily, we’re joined by the comedian Stewart Lee, because someone’s got to help us work out what Trump is thinking.

Nish Kumar His column for the new-ish news provider The Nerve covers everything from Trump’s madness to Westminster’s rat problem.

Coco Khan So we can’t wait to dig into all the week’s biggest stories with him.

Nish Kumar After the first few confusing weeks of a war, the reporting usually becomes a bit more focused because the battle lines are clearer and there’s more time for analysis. But that is absolutely not the case when this particular US president is involved. Most of this week has been taken up by journalists trying to work out if there are talks happening between the US and Iran.

Coco Khan Even by his standards, Trump is all over the place. According to one report from the substack Gold and Geopolitics, during a 40-minute press conference, he claimed victory twice, said he wanted a ceasefire twice, he said he was sending in marines but then said there would be no boots on the ground. He also denied there was a war but claimed Iran was begging for a cease-fire and insisted the Strait of Hormuz was open before demanding that Iran reopen it.

Nish Kumar It’s dizzying stuff and you would think it would keep somebody incredibly occupied, but somehow the American president still found the time to share a clip from the new Saturday Night Live UK version on Sky, which featured this imitation of Keir Starmer being a right old woman.

Clip Whoa, whoa, oh golly, well, what if Donald shouts at me? What do I say, Lambie? Just be yourself, Prime Minister. Yourself is who everyone likes. Allo!

Coco Khan So, as politics and comedy collide in ways which we, as a news and comedy podcast, will be all over, it’s great to be joined by the comedian Stewart Lee. Stewart, it is a cliché to say people need no introduction. It’s probably because there’s just too much to say. But one of your newer job titles is opinion column writer for The Nerve. So, we want to talk to you more about that in detail. But first, welcome.

Stewart Lee Thanks for having me, it’s really great to be over this way actually. I used to live around here 36 years ago when believe it or not as someone getting cash gigs on the comedy circuit could afford to be in a flat share in Fulham in a very different world that was.

Nish Kumar Flash gigs with Stewart declared all up. Okay HMRC, if you’re listening, god damn it. Obviously we want to talk more about the nerve and how you came to work with them. But first off, I mean, where do you even start with how you respond satirically to a figure who is themselves seemingly delighted by their own satirisation?

Stewart Lee Well, you know, on a practical level, it’s really difficult. Like you say, I write a column for The Nerve and I used to do The Observer every other week and then The Nerves every week and it used to take me a day or so and now I have to track. He’s such a disruptive force on your attempts to comment on him. On Monday I was driving back from the Lawn Book Festival from West Wales and during the course of the journey home where I was sort of listening to talk radio and news radio all day thinking about what I was going to write today, his position change. A dozen times, you know, at 10 o’clock he was in talks with Iran and then by about 11.15 they’d said that no one had talked to them. In the middle of that there was this thing that looks very suspicious now where the market spiked and quite a lot of people made a lot money on the impact that his statement had had. And then over the afternoon positions changed again so it’s really difficult to, at what point do you draw the line in the sand and say, right, I’m going to do the joke about this because the position will change by the time you’ve filed it. I don’t think it’s a strategy, I mean, I think that you just can’t hold a chain of thought together. I mean I thought that’s a really funny impression of Stammer that they’ve done on the British Saturday Night Live, but actually in his own quiet, strange way, he has kind of stood up to Trump, really. He’s not risen to the bait of any of Trump’s mad insults, which he then contradicts the next day anyway. He’s kind of held the line with all the other European leaders about not getting actively involved. In the war, he’s doubled down on understanding what NATO means, that it isn’t a tool at America’s disposal to do whatever it wants with it. So I think it’s kind of a little bit more complicated than that sketch would suggest.

Nish Kumar I know that you and I share some of the same frustrations about this, but what do you say when someone says to you, boy, isn’t Trump great for comedy? You must be so pleased as a comedian about Donald Trump and Nigel Farage and Brexit. You know, basically the last decade. I know people must be saying that to you three or four times a week, because they’re saying it to me three or five times a day. What do you say?

Stewart Lee Well, the weird thing is, this current show that I’m touring, Stewart Lee vs the Man Wolf, is about the kind of attitudes of the Manosphere, of Donald Trump, of the far-right in this country and how they affect comedy and the comedians that give voice to those attitudes, either deliberately like a lot of the American ones or just by not really understanding anything like Ricky Gervais. And well, it’s true, isn’t it? He’s got this advert, you know, where he’s got his vodka. And he’s saying, welcome to London, don’t forget to bring a stab vest. So he’s basically, to flog vodka, he’s reiterating the American anti-multicultural London propaganda which is put out by all those people because they hate Mayor and they hate the fact that we have a functioning multicultural city which doesn’t fit in with their white supremacist idea. He’s basically acting as a funnel for that, right, and he has given it no thought. People need to think what’s this joke doing and who doesn’t. So the weird thing is all this stuff is actually really good for this show. When I write a show and I have to tour it for two years, my worry is that the premise of it is going to go down during that time and in fact there was one that I was touring a while ago about Brexit and Boris Johnson and whatever and in the kind of dying months of it, it kept looking like he was going to be sacked or stepped down maybe. And every time he wasn’t, I’d be going. Because the whole like last section of it was about him and the one I finally did the last run of it at Leicester Square, I think he was about seven days later that he finally was forced out and he just held me in. And this one, the tragic thing about this show is all the, when I wrote it, a lot of the stuff about what I was saying was happening culturally, I could see people thinking it’s not that bad, really. But now everything’s aligning with it and moving ahead of it and in fact the second half where I am a horrible right-wing American werewolf Netflix comedian. I need to get back into it because the things he’s saying are not as bad as what politicians are saying now. I need go and make him worse.

Coco Khan One of the things I thought about watching that clip, and I don’t want to presume the politics of everyone involved with the making of it, but I would imagine that they’re not massive fans of Donald Trump. It’s a strange thing that when you participate in the national conversation for someone that you probably would regard as worse, taking joy from it and being gleeful about it. That must be a kind of uncomfortable situation to be in where you’re like, well, actually I’m trying to enhance dialog in my country, but there’s this kind of nefarious, bigger actor who wants to utilize that for his own aims. Yeah. And it kind of made me think, you must bear with me on this, I was like, wow, everyone in Britain is a South Asian woman now.

Stewart Lee Ha ha ha haaaa

Coco Khan When you’re a South Asian woman and you ever want to talk about things that are related to gender, you often hold back because you’re like, as soon as I start talking about this, white people will take this for their own racist ends and say, oh, these people are uncivilized. And you’re constantly in this bind all the time. And I was like, wow, the desification of Britain has happened because now it’s Brits. It’s like, well, if we critique Labour too much, there’s a risk that it plays into the hands of the JD Vances and the Donald Trumps of the world. How sad for us all!

Stewart Lee Well, that’s what they’ve done, isn’t it? That program has inadvertently given Trump a useful bit of content, which is not what you want to do. I mean, I think about this a lot. If you’re using irony or you make particular sorts of statements, you worry that you don’t want those to be clipped and misused.

Nish Kumar I just think it’s really important to identify this is a sort of key cornerstone of Coco Khan’s charm.

Coco Khan Yeah

Nish Kumar that you can put a statement out like everyone in Britain is now a South Asian woman, you think, what in the name of God are you fucking talking about? And then somehow she will bring it back. It will be brought around and it will be justified cleanly. Obviously it’s been in a week of, I guess, like interesting excitement in British comedy specifically because outside of any other feelings people might have about the show, it is the first in a long time that any television channel in Britain has spent. That amount of money and brought in that volume of, particularly in terms of the cast and writers, a lot of very young talent, which is, you know, it’s very exciting. Like I know a lot the writers in the cast of that show and it has been a sort of about a decade. The last generation of comedians that was brought through by British television is my generation of comedian. So we’re all in our late thirties and early forties now. And so, there was this sort of… Dearth of ability to actually blood new talent. So it was exciting from my perspective. The guy playing Keir Starmer is George Foray because he’s an incredible sketch comedian and has been for about 12 years now. From that perspective, it was excited to see money being spent. And also I’m really pleased that the response to it seems to have been, this was good and I think it will improve. Because often with comedy shows, reviewing the first episode of a show like that is not a great idea because… You know, you can only learn it by doing it. And so like, I’m sort of generally pleased for everybody on the show.

Stewart Lee Okay, well I don’t understand how to watch television anymore, right, so I haven’t watched it properly, I watched the clips of it on YouTube. So I, you know, when I turn, I’ve got a Samsung TV and when I turned it on, all different things come up and I don t know, like, what any of them are. And also my son’s left home and he used to explain these things, but, so, so I watched bits of it, I watch that sketch, which I didn’t understand because a rap singer comes in at the end. I don’t know who that is or what that’s supposed to be. If I’d watched it with my children they might have known, they were absolutely baffling to me. But I thought the impression of Keir Starmer was really good and I thought when they did their desk news bit, I thought they did that as well as if not better than that’s normally done on those kind of programs. It was really great writing, it was politically satirical but it also had a quirky language and an air of surrealism about it, so that was really bang on. I’d like to be able to see the whole thing, I’ve no idea how you would do that. I probably will never watch it again, because it’s just not beyond me, but um… We’ll get your son to send some email instructions. But Danny, it’s interesting that we live in a time where 250,000 people watching something is considered a success. Yeah, right. I mean, Christ. Yeah. I felt like from the little bits I saw, it was basically, they’re basically banking on it being viewable in America, which will make up the numbers and justify the cost.

Nish Kumar I think yeah, I think with all with those with even with the American turn now I think it’s more about how many people watch it on YouTube. Yeah

Stewart Lee But the main thing I think is this, right, doing personality-driven political satire at the moment is missing the point, right? Because we’re living in a time where the information that we consume is controlled by a coitory of American tech bros, most of whom skew right either in pursuit of financial reward or to a lesser extent, weirdly, politically. Those information sources are being brought up and controlled by people that are tacitly or actively Trump loyalists. And any political satire that doesn’t go through the filter of talking about how that is happening is not really worth doing. If it’s going to make a contribution to the debate, it needs to get a lot more on top of that. And instead of having a funny voice for Keir Starmer, it need to be about Palantir, and it needs be about Amazon, it’s needs to be Jeff Bezos, it has to be Elon Musk. It needs to about the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail. This personality politics if hasn’t Keir starmer got a funny voice. Is a sideshow to what’s happening. It’s a useful distraction, if anything. And also, it gives the impression that we live in a democratic society where we’re allowed to satirize things. Well done to us, we’re not Russia or America, as it happens. But it’s largely irrelevant to where the damage is being done. A good idea for the desk bit would be a desk bit every week about what the tech bros have done this week, what information they’ve skewed, who they’ve funded.

Nish Kumar So let’s go back to the consequences of some of this damage that’s been done. So the tech bros have brought Trump to power, he’s now engaged in this war, so last night as we record on Wednesday, Trump claimed that Iran has agreed to never have a nuclear weapon. He said that nobody knows who to talk to, we have killed everybody, but we are talking to the right people. The New York Times is currently reporting that the US has sent a 15-point peace plan to Iran. And all of that is rubbish. Yeah, it’s all absolute nonsense. I mean, it doesn’t make sense within the quote that I’ve read. Nobody knows who to talk to. We’ve killed everybody. We’re talking to the right people in of itself doesn’t make any sense in response. The head of Iran’s main military command, Ibrahim Zulfaghari has released a video message saying, has the level of your internal conflict reached the point where you were negotiating with yourselves? And I mean.

Stewart Lee That is a funnier take on that than we’ve seen any satirists do. And that’s from the horrible head of an autocratic. To me, one of the stories this week, Trump did a speech towards the end of last week. Well, was it a speech? I don’t know what it was. Where he started saying that the BBC had used AI to generate images of him saying things that he hadn’t said. And most outlets covered this. This was the speech was about how all news was fake, how, um… The BBC weren’t backing him up on the war and saying how well it was going. And that they’d used AI to have him say horrible things in this speech when he g’d up all the people that went on to attack the Capitol on January the 6th. And the Daily Telegraph report just missed that bit out. Yeah, the bit where… Just made up a thing, saying that AI was being used by the British broadcasters, they just missed it out. That is a dereliction of duty that is akin to lying, it’s a sin of a mission. And the sketch I would have done about that if I was, it would be Daily Telegraph journalists covering a news conference where you see the news conference and then you see the edit of it and it comes out with the crucial thing that makes Trump look like a deranged insane man who shouldn’t be allowed near power removed. We need to be doing comedy about the press, about how the social media platforms skew things and where people are getting their information from and who’s funding things. You know, that’s the story, not that Keir Starmer has a funny voice.

Coco Khan The idea that comedy should be hard of hitting, I agree with, journalism should be harder hitting because we’re in a time now where you can’t just muck about, twiddle around the edges. And anything that appears, and I’m just using this as a word because I can’t think of a better one right now, but anything that is center right now does feel just totally irrelevant. Yeah. Like it really does. It feels weak. Yeah. You know, everything from, you know, the institutions that are meant to uphold international law, I mean, they seem so lackluster and almost pathetic feeble, you what I mean? And so, yeah.

Stewart Lee Well, I’m here here at home, you know, what is, why is GB News still on? In any public place, when you turn on a TV, the first news button that comes up is GB news because they’ve paid everyone to be the first thing that comes out. And they can afford that because Paul Marshall, the billionaire father of the banjo player from Mumford and Sons, who has been censured repeatedly by hope not hate for spreading racist stuff online. His pockets are bottomless, and it’s for him, GB News isn’t about making a profit. It’s about putting news stories out there that will help with deregulation, that will help his class of people financially. Ofcom have done nothing about climate change denialists come on programs and say things that are just patently not true. They’ve been lent on it by Good Law Project this week. About trying to force them to take this a bit more seriously because one of the charter things is you’re not supposed to say things that are materially untrue. And so we’re not on top of this stuff and maybe that’s something satirists could be talking about because really the means of where information is disseminated is so broken and wrong that to get through to the stories you have to get that that’s most important. It’s difficult. I was thinking about this the other day. So how a joke works. There needs to be a commonly understood truth and then you either double down on it and exaggerate it for comic effects or you undermine it and you can do that with your own political bias can be brought to bear on it but it has to go from a commonly understand fact and there are not commonly understood facts. If I get in a cab and the bloke finds out I’m a comedian by the end of it he’ll be telling me that Keir Starmer has defended the Southport killer’s parents. People have stopped asking me to tell them a joke. When I tell them I’m a comedian and they said, oh my God, it must be really hard with council culture. Well, that happened to me in a record shop in Stroud, actually, where we’re all going to have to go and live when reform gets in. I went in and the bloke went, what she does to her comedian, I must be really difficult with political correctness. It’s not like the old days was better, wasn’t it, when you could say anything? I went, What was better? Was it good that you could do this, this and this? And he went, Oh no, it was worse, wasn’t t it? I went yeah. Like basically it’s just the thing people say. And as soon as you actually ask them, what are the things, what the things that you used to be allowed to say, that you can’t say now that you’d like to say? They clam up a bit. And I saw an interview with Paul Rudolph from the Pink Fairies. 70S hippie rock band. They used to be part of the Ladbroke Grove scene that did benefits for CND, for women’s rights, for gay rights, for vegetarians, for everything. And he was complaining about political correctness gone mad. I thought, what was all that stuff you were doing like, what did you think that was in 1972? It’s just the thing people say with that. And often when you ask them what they mean by political correctness, and this is itself a cliché, I’ve done so much about it, you realize they’re actually talking about the fact that they’re required to have certain kinds of safety things on their plugs. It’s kind of often about quite useful health and safety rules or whatever. So, you know And when they say to me, you must find it really difficult, I say, no, it’s not a problem. In fact, if anything, it gives you a lot to talk about. People say, you can’t say this and you can say that, right? A, it is nonsense. The people that can’t this and can’t that are getting Grammys, they’re getting $60 million deals. They’re not prevented from saying those things. I think that talking about Israel is a difficult thing to talk about because you get so much pressure from special interest groups that seem to have the ear of the media if it’s something you talk about. You have to tread really, really carefully with that. That’s probably the only thing I think is impossible. And also our use of language has changed. I wrote a routine 15, 20 years ago about how Tory party supporters in a 1964 by-election in Birmingham. Used posters and leaflets with the N word on it, and I quoted the actual phrase. And I did it partly in a slightly adolescent way, I think, that I knew it would be a shock. I also wanted people to know what a shock, how shocking it now seems that that word was on election literature, you know. And I wouldn’t quote that word now, right? Because I think that, and one of the reasons I wouldn’t quote it is that we’re living in a world where… Those attitudes are endorsed by mainstream parties again, right? So it’s not off the scale, it’s kind of in the mix. Well, I stand by the piece as I wrote it 20 years ago, but I think circumstances around it change things. But even now, I’ve got a long routine in this show about Dave Chappelle’s use of the N-word, and I just say the N word, so you can talk about it. It’s like, the idea that you can’t… Talk about things is really, really undermined by the fact that the supposed things you can’t talk about actually make millions for the trigonometry blokes when they monetize them on X. They make millions of the comedians that supposedly can’t say them. So yeah, it is that. That is the first thing. Don’t say tell us a joke. They say it must be terrible with political correctness. And what I say is no, I think it’s great. I really political correctness and it really helps me and then they’re like just Confused. Really? You can’t work out where you’re going.

Coco Khan This is a slight tangent, but stick with me, right?

Stewart Lee Is it about South Asian women again?

Coco Khan It’s about the 60s.

Stewart Lee Yeah, okay. Well, I remember that, just.

Coco Khan Okay, so now this is going to be uncomfortable because I’m going to say a thing, which is a sweeping generalization and you’re going to correct me. But people always talk about the swinging sixties, right? But like when you actually look at how many people attended these clubs, it wasn’t that many. It was a subculture in the sixties. But we have this idea that everyone was doing it. And that’s not always been the case. And I think I wonder if deep down, there’s loads of quite just normal people who believe that if they were in the 60s, they would be in the swinging 60s. That if it was the war, they’d be in the resistance. And they have this idea of themselves. And so part of this political correctness thing is just to appeal to this. I was actually a punk. No, you weren’t a punk, you were not a punk and there would have been someone like wanging on about how much you hate the punks. All just admit that we’re quite boring.

Stewart Lee What do you think? Yeah, I mean, you might be right. I mean I think a young person was trying to talk to me about something the other day about how come it was okay for little Britain to black up and do like, you know, all this kind of controversial stuff. It was like 20 years ago now. Yeah, yeah. And I think it’s because people in the liberal bubble thought those arguments were won. You know, I think they thought, we can have fun with this now, because we’re all so… Politically correct and liberal, that if I do this, they’ll know I don’t mean it. And it’s like a joke amongst friends. And yet what suddenly happened, bang, you know, the rise of the far right in Britain and across Europe. So it was like the sleeper agents were sitting there going, yeah, you have your fun, you know. And it was never a done deal. It was never sorted out. So it it was true that I think, funny if I should be able to answer your question better than I can because I worked on a documentary with just one of the press skills. Radio series of the year called Whatever Happened to the Counterculture. And I think the 60s, the progressive values of social mobility, you know, it had a knock on effect far beyond. You didn’t have to go to the UFO club and take acid to benefit from the sea change that all those things brought about, you, know, collectively at the start of the But it would have helped.

Coco Khan But it would have helped though, wouldn’t it?

Nish Kumar After the break we’ll have more with Stewart about truth, lies and his weekly column for The Nerve.

Nish Kumar [AD]

Nish Kumar Um, listen, let’s talk about the nerve. So look, it’s not a surprise that traditional news providers are struggling with the impact of declining budgets and the ubiquitous social media AI and all this stuff. Um, so it’s great that journalists are now finding ways to report on the world and we need rigorous and fact-based and well-funded journalism now more than ever.

Coco Khan So one of these new offerings is The Nerve. So it’s been set up by five former Observer and Guardian journalists. Among them most famously is Carol Cudwallader. She’s the investigative reporter who’s known for breaking the story about the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal. So all of the founders actually worked on that story and they’ve got a really strong group of contributors on board, yourself particularly among them. So how did the column for The Nerv come about?

Stewart Lee I wrote every other week for the Observer for about 20 years and I was really lucky to get that job. I wasn’t very good at it when I started and I know that there’s a trade-off in newspapers isn’t there between can we get a celebrity to write something and I think I was probably the best of a bad bunch that might have been able to cobble something together. But I did get good at over the years and by the end I was sort of really in a groove with it and if I felt quite frustrated every other it would be David Williams, not David. David Mitchell would do it, not David Walliams. David Walliams’ Observer columns would have a very different type. It would be David Mitchell. Yeah, it would be. Which was good, but I felt like, oh, my story’s being broken. Then The Observer was going to be bought out by this company called TOR, signed by James Harding. He’s a sort of start-up, entrepreneur kind of bloke. He was one of the people, when he was working at the Times, he was one the people who led the campaigns against defund the BBC and all this kind of thing. He’s that sort of bloKE. You know, then there was a strike. Because the backers of Tort’s Media were not, it wasn’t made clear who was funding them and there was no real need for the paper to be sold off. So we got to go on a picket line, which was exciting. And then people started getting sacked. Carol was sacked, her contract wasn’t renewed, which is amazing given that she has gone from being called a crazy cat lady by Andrew Neil, to really being the first person to understand what is happening to how we get information. She was absolutely. Essential cog in our understanding of it, and even people that were her critics ten years ago would now have to accept that. Then I was going to stay, but I realized that James Harding, who had taken it over, had been George Osborne’s best man, I think, or at least friends with him, and it seemed to me like this is the whole problem with the political and journalistic class, isn’t it? Is that they’re all people that went to school together and are friends, right? So it’s kind of like a big game, you know, I’m writing for the Telegraph, oh, I’ve moved to the Guardian, and now, instead of… Having a tie on, I’ve got a beard in my photo, do you know what I mean? It’s sort of like, it’s just meaningless. And they can move from being a political advisor to Theresa May, like Robbie Gibb, to being on the board of a supposedly independent broadcaster. It is bullshit. I thought, why is like a friend of George Osborne taking over this like what was historically one of the last, look, people have all sorts of problems with the Guardian Observer, often about, you know, gender issues, whatever, but broadly the best we had as like liberal broadsheets, you know, and then the other thing that happened was as people were being sacked or quitting, I started to get emails from new staff there about when will you file this, when will do that, and I noticed that a lot of them had come from the telegraph and stuff like that, I know that times are hard and it’s difficult for journalists and the print media is shrinking and you’ve got to take the work where you can get it, but I don’t think people should work for the telegram. I think it’s a terrible, terrible thing, I don’t want anything to do. With anyone that was comfortable working there so I quit. I quit, I immediately was very frustrated by that. This is something you probably both might understand. I don’t know how ordinary people cope because when I see stupid things like Trump lying and changing his story, I’m really annoyed by it and I think, oh right, I’ve come about that. I’ll do a joke about it and it’ll be alright. It’s like, suddenly I can’t do anything. I felt really like wound up all the time and then they said… Four months later, those five women, they put their redundancy money into setting up the nerve and I went for a meeting with Carol and Jane and they said, what we want is for people to show they’re working out. We want within the story for you to say what your sources were and how you know it’s true. Not explicitly up the front, but just make sure your footnotes are all, and I really, really liked that about it because if the Daily Mail had to do that. It couldn’t, right, because it just makes up people that don’t exist. And so I really liked that about it, and the people they were talking to about writing for it were great. Because what is sad about it is that it doesn’t have the reach that a conventional newspaper did. Unfortunately, the reach it may have had is limited in as much as since the tech took over things like ex-formerly Twitter. The algorithms deliberately skew away from content people like us would generate.

Nish Kumar I think it’s really interesting that you have picked up on the fact that they want everybody to cite their sources because we interviewed Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia on here and Wikipedia, one of the things that I talked about was when I was at university, it was a bogeyman. People would say you can’t cite Wikipedia as an example, but now Wikipedia has become a kind of bastion on the internet of fact-based. Don’t go to the AOA thing, go three down to Wikipedia. Yeah, that’s right, because it requires you to cite your sources and just- I mean, there’s two conversations to have. One, I think, is the kind of balance between populist right and progressive left media, which is obviously massively out of whack. So the Labour MP, Liam Byrne, found that funding for the populist-right, what he called the sort of media-political complex, has exceeded £170 million. And there is always going to be. More money in defending the rights of capital than there is in the rights of people. But even outside of explicitly politicized news organizations, massive, you know, conceptually at least impartial news sources like CBS are experiencing huge and deliberate cuts because of changes in their ownership structure. So you know Larry Ellison now, because of the paramount takeover, own CBS. CBS radio has gone. Yeah. Thousands of jobs. Just over the weekend, you know, my partner’s father is from New York and, you know, he’s sort of heartbroken. He was saying that, you know, I grew up listening.

Stewart Lee Well Bezos has pulled all the reporters, has basically taken the news out of the Washington Post. You know, they can’t manage to sense the news, they just stop having news it seems.

Coco Khan That’s one of the things that I get really frustrated by is, you know, I wonder where, I would love to know what the right path is and where to direct my energies because it nothing seems to be clear. So I have friends of mine who are like, Oh, I don’t read the BBC anymore. Wouldn’t read the Guardian anymore. You know, the pay masters, the liberals, they will stop anything that’s like meaningful analysis that’s left-wing. So that’s their position on it. So they go to YouTube. See, there’s this uncomfortable thing where I’m like, but every click on YouTube obviously goes to a tech baron that is best friends with Donald Trump. Yeah. And so really, so even though you can go on YouTube and watch people criticizing the tech bros in a way that’s more fulsome and throaty that you’d probably want to see, the tech bro’s don’t lose. I mean, it’s really no such thing as bad press for them. So it’s all sewn up, but then there’s a feeling that those creators are independent, whereas the ones that are doing it in an establishment are not. And obviously I’m sure there’s like a, well, how can they be independent if they still need to get clicks or need to work the algorithm, blah, blah blah. So it’s all very thorny and it was all very difficult. And the fact is, as I sit here now and I actually don’t know what the right thing is or what the the right path is. And I feel very, it’s certainly a battleground.

Stewart Lee I think the more you know, the more kind of defeated you feel. I mean, I’ve become really aware of how lobbying groups and think tanks manipulate news. And I noticed how stories are planted. Here’s an interesting one, actually. There was a week where the story on Monday was that Tim Davies, the then head of the BBC, Insiders had said was going to drop the MASH report because it was going be canceled because it’s too political. That was on the Monday. On the Tuesday, I was asked to come on and talk about this on Time’s Radio. Oh, Time’s radio obviously is against the BBC. It was competition, whatever. And I said, well, I won’t because we don’t know who this source is. So we don’t know if Tim Davey actually even said that. Apparently, he’s going to say this in his speech on Thursday. I said well, wait for the speech because I said you don’t where this has come from. And they seem baffled that someone. Would say that. We can’t go on and discuss something that we don’t know exists. Then the speech was made on the Thursday, internal BBC speech and leading up to it all the right-wing press had been running think pieces and editorials even in the fucking Guardian and Observer had done it about how the comedy was too left-wing or whatever and maybe there needs to be more balance or whatever. And then the speech was on for Thursday so obviously the speech was going to answer these questions presumably. But the speech wasn’t covered at all by anyone, because guess what? He didn’t say any of that, right? And I’d noticed that it had just passed without incident, and I managed to get… It was broadcast internally on the BBC’s own network for staff to hear. I managed get someone to provide me with a copy of it, and of a transcript of the Q&A afterwards. Somebody said to him, I understand you’re going to ban comedy for it being too left-wing. And he went, well, I don’t know where that’s come from. I never said that. And at no point was I going to say that. Inevitably it will be left-wing at the moment, because there’s a right-wing government in power. He said something along these lines, so it’s going to critique where the power lies. And that was it, right? And they managed to get three days out of it. And it was from nothing. No one had said that. The forces that were aligned against them and it… So we’ll never know exactly what happened with Dimash report. But what didn’t happen is Tim Davey himself never made a statement about it, saying that it was done in for that. That’s one example of it, I notice it all the time. When the Birmingham police admittedly incredibly mishandled banning the Tel Aviv football supporters, a guy got onto talk sport and Sky, he was the honorary president of the Aston Villa Jewish Football Supporters Club. There is no club of that. And that guy wasn’t the honorary president because there isn’t one. Who that guy was, was a bloke who specializes in disinformation and has been to do lectures about disinformation at Sandhurst Military Wow. And nobody at Sky. Or Talkspore thought to Google his name to see whether he existed. Then you’ll remember a few months ago when Charlie Kirk was very tragically murdered, a guy who was in, a young black student who was line to be head of a debating society in Oxford that isn’t affiliated with a university called the Oxford Union, he said he was glad he died or something like that, which same as Trump said about the head of the FBI. Who died the other day, on Monday Trump said, good, I’m glad he’s dead, when that FBI guy who did the Russia report died. But this was awful, wasn’t it? And in America, anyone that expressed relief that Charlie Kirk had died would lose their job, be censored, whatever. So I was in my car at one in the morning waiting to pick my daughter up from something, and a man from an organization called the Concerned Alumni of the Oxford Union came on talk radio. And said that all the concerned alumni of the Oxford Union were withdrawing their donations because of this guy. Because they were so concerned. They were so concern. Do they, bang, bang bang, do they exist? No. There’s no evidence for them whatsoever. And who’s the guy? Oh, he’s from one of these things that basically try to stir up shit to advance the cause of deregulation or whatever. So I rang the switchboard, which I’ve done before at LBC, and they went, oh, we’ll tell it, you know, we will tell Nick Abbott who was doing it. I thought, well, they won’t. But they obviously did, as he said. That’s very interesting, but of course your organization doesn’t exist and the thing just fell apart on air. And that’s all they have to do is just look at who the people are and somebody with that news story about The Mash Report should have said, well, who is this person that is saying this? Or ask Tim Davey because Tim Dave would have said I’m not going to say that. But they didn’t ask him because all the right wing press knew if they asked him he’d say no I’m going to not say that, so it’s much better to keep the lie percolating and not fact check it to create stupid phone ins. And stupid discussion programs on talk radio with loads of people talking about a quote that is unattributable and doesn’t exist and getting a two hour argument out of it. That’s how they do these things and it’s not just algorithms and bots making up stuff. It’s a clever strategy and the left don’t do that. After the break we have a classic political U2.

Coco Khan [AD]

Nish Kumar Last week, we chatted about the series of, it says here, we describe them as highly questionable videos. I think that’s one way of putting it. Created by Nigel Farage on Cameo that was unearthed by The Guardian. Now, the clips included Farage endorsing a neo-Nazi event, repeating extremist slogans, and supporting a man convicted of his involvement in a far-right riot.

Coco Khan At the time, Farage’s spokesperson said he used the platform in good faith and without knowledge of the individuals involved beyond what is written for him. So that’s what they supply in the prompt.

Nish Kumar So the update this week is that Farage has now decided to stop accepting cameo requests over, according to a source, what they’re calling, security concerns. His page on the website now reads, Nigel Farage is unavailable, although you can choose to join the wait list if you want to. So all in, The Guardian has found that Farage should charge more than £370,000 for the video since joining the platform, and he appeared to have uploaded on 212 occasions, Whilst parliamentary business was taking place. Even though it doesn’t seem that he regrets the videos, in an ITM broadcast interview he said, I mean this is an astonishing quote, even for him this is absolute bollocks. If I have a shoe shop and I sell you a pair of shoes and it turns out the person that bought the pair of shoe is a former convicted murderer, is that the fault of the person selling shoes? Stewart, your thoughts.

Stewart Lee He’s sold he’s sold a pair of shoes with swastikas on them doesn’t he? You know, you know it makes you nostalgic doesn’t it, for the time where had a sitting MP endorsed a far right rally, a neo-Nazi rock festival or whatever, they might be looking at losing their job. The worst thing about that really is that if we take it in good faith that he didn’t know what they were, and I don’t because I think one of the things that he does and what they do is they use these little buzzwords and they use little phrases and know what they’re associated with. And they know that there’s room for doubt and the average person won’t recognize what that is relating to. When he talks about the Bilderbergs or whatever, you know, the neo-Nazi will go, oh great, he’s endorsing an anti-Semitic conspiracy. But my mum would think, is that a cake or something? What’s also worrying is that he’s got no-one checking these things for him. And we know that because someone else got him to wish happy birthday to the dead pedophile singer from The Lost Prophets, didn’t he? And he was also happy to say that he’d communicated with him and he was a great bloke. So we know he doesn’t check this stuff, right, and you can’t be the next Prime Minister of Britain and be that useless. No, you can be wrong.

Nish Kumar You can’t be Ron Burgundy from Anchorman and just read out whatever is fucking put in front of you

Stewart Lee who’s telling you things, right, so he’s either deliberately endorsing far-right anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and neo-Nazi hate rallies or he’s absolutely incompetent and shouldn’t be anywhere near government or he is both and any of them are no good. But essentially they’ve suspended a guy this week for saying those Jewish community ambulance groups were a cosplay. So it must be very confusing in reform if you say a really racist thing. You don’t know if you’re going to get suspended or invited to come and address the conference.

Nish Kumar You don’t really know where you are, do you? Yeah, there’s a real dissonance in Farage repeating, you know, far-right anti-submitted talking points for play on cameo and then punishing somebody for… And the punishment is correct, absolutely. You know, spreading anti-Submitted conspiracy theories about an attack on two ambulances is an absolute disgrace and should be a sackable offense, but Reform have put themselves in a very convoluted philosophical position here.

Stewart Lee A philosophical position. That’s talking it up a bit. It just goes from day to day, doesn’t it? It just surges along, and no one holds it to account. There’s a slot on James O’Brien on LBC that they call, I think they call it Reform Watch, where once a week a guy just lists all the contradictory positions they’ve taken over the course of that week. But everyone should be doing that. It shouldn’t be like a fun bit on one radio station.

Coco Khan Just in defense of left-leaning journalists, you know, we’re very busy, there really is a lot going on and we’re increasingly finding it hard to find it.

Stewart Lee And you’re not getting funded.

Coco Khan We’re not getting funded, we don’t get paid that much, and increasingly outlets aren’t letting us do it. I’m just saying, I just feel that we should just take a moment to defend. Oh yeah, no, I’m not saying… Poor, poor, brow-beaten, left-leaning journalists. No, I am not saying left-wining journalists should do it…

Stewart Lee They say you should be doing that.

Coco Khan The BBC is particularly, I think, egregious because it’s a public broadcast and it isn’t run for profit. A lot of the things, LBC, Talksport, they trade in sensationalist approaches and they’re willing to gloss over stuff because that’s the model.

Stewart Lee Traffic.

Coco Khan But with the BBC, I mean, what’s your excuse here? I mean you’re yeah. Anyway, I don’t

Stewart Lee It’s strange for that little guy, don’t they, on the BBC who calmly and rationally pops up and… David Ambrer? No, not David Ambre, for the other one. He just factually… Ross Atkins. Ross Atkines will just dismantle a whole thing in like ten minutes and it’s better than half an hour of BBC news. And yet he seems to be… He seems to have been kept in a little cupboard and brought out to prove that they’re actually doing their job and then sent back before anyone gets annoyed.

Coco Khan Between drum and bass sets. That’s the thing I know about him. Just on this Nigel Farah story, I just have to release this fury of mine about, I mean, this is the least of this story really, but that quote, if I have a shoe shop and I’ll show you a pair of shoes, I hate it when people do this. I hate when people take things and then create a fake, oversimplified metaphor. They do it with, you know, when we’re talking about the household finances of the nation. Running a country is not a household, and yet if you do it back though and you say, yeah, but if I shout fire in a crowded theater, one might regard that as being malicious, you can’t have that, that’s far too simple, you know, when you’re talking about free speech, it’s just a trope and I find it extremely irritating. But anyway, let’s stick with reform. And one of their failed MP candidates. So that’s Matt Goodwin. He’s in trouble of a different sort. As you know, he failed last month in the Gorton and Denton by-election. He might have hoped to turn things around with the new book, hoping it would keep him relevant, but sad news listeners, it’s not going that well for him.

Nish Kumar So the book, and sticking with, I mean, this isn’t so much winking as it is just absolutely full-throated nodding whilst having your eyes closed at far right talking points, the book is called Suicide of a Nation, Immigration, Islam Identity, and it claims to tell the story of how Britain is committing national suicide because of, amongst other things, two-tiered multiculturalism.

Coco Khan Now we have to admit, we couldn’t face reading it, but luckily a journalist, Andy Twelves, did it for us. So he took on that unenviable task and he found that Goodwin had apparently used more than a healthy dose of AI. There’s actually chat GPT links in the book’s references. And it’s also likely that there are false quotes and misrepresentations of data. They call these AI hallucinations.

Nish Kumar I wonder how the nerve would feel about this. So in the entire book, there are 12 footnotes. Five of those footnotas refer to Goodwin’s own substack, and at least two source chat GPT. People on the internet, wags on the Internet have started referring to Matt Goodwin as Matt GPT, there’s also a claim that most primary school children in Leicester, Luton and Slough do not speak English as a main language, which is obviously misrepresenting children who might speak another language at home, but learn English at school. And obviously, the most important thing to do is jump on the bandwagon of London bashing in a chapter titled London Has Fallen, Goodwin laments that the white British are a minority in nurseries across the capital and that Muslim enclaves in London are giving rise to a new and dangerous sectarianism. And just today, on my way here from one part of London to another, I passed so many Muslim enclaves. So many Muslims. You can’t move for Sharia law in Leicester Square.

Stewart Lee I think it’s terrible that he would use it during ChatGBT. You have to be so careful with it because it will hallucinate factually inaccurate things. I mean, weirdly, when the Tel Aviv supporters were banned from Birmingham, the tragedy is partly that was done because the Birmingham police used AI and invented a football match that had never happened. There was no right, there was no football match, so the decision was made based on AI. And AI will hallucinate. So you can’t be using it, kids, you can use it for your homework, for God’s sake. So who knows what he will have come up with in that. Aside from the fact that it’s morally and intellectually questionable, the idea that a public intellectual would write a book using those tools is crazy.

Nish Kumar In a response posted on X, Goodwin dismissed criticism of his use of AI, and he said he saw no issue in obtaining datasets via AI as long as they were cross-checked with the original source. He also thanked the left-wing trolls and resentful, bitter, unsuccessful former academic colleagues for help drive more attention to the book. Just a quick reminder, he lost by over 4,000 votes to the Greens in Gorton and Denton, and blamed it on dangerous sectarianism amongst a coalition of Islamists and woke progressives. The Natural Bedfellows.

Coco Khan Oh, yeah!

Nish Kumar Islamist

Stewart Lee and woke progress.

Coco Khan They have a lot in common, it would seem.

Stewart Lee Well, you know, what is interesting about that though, isn’t it, is that the right would like to say that Islam has bad attitudes to women’s rights and whatever and whatever. But whether that’s the case or not, those people chose to vote for a woman plus right, as opposed to voting for reform. And if we were to believe the propaganda, they forced all their relatives to vote for her as well. So that gives you an indication of the extent to which the far right were not wanted that. Yeah.

Nish Kumar The producer would also like us to just reiterate that Andy 12’s article about this is on the nerve right now and it is absolutely worth checking out because no one should have to read Matt Goodwin’s book. I’m very sorry for Andy that he did have to do that. That’s very, very tragic for him, but it is worth checking out. That is all we’ve got time for this week.

Stewart Lee Aw. Thanks for having me.

Nish Kumar Thank you so much to Stewart Lee for joining us.

Stewart Lee I’ve learned such a lot. No, really. I’ve got an idea for a joke out of it as well.

Coco Khan Oh great! Are we allowed to hear it or no?

Stewart Lee Yeah well I think I’ll write about the shoe shop thing for a thousand words.

Coco Khan Great!

Nish Kumar When I read that quote, I did think you would have got a whole comedy vehicle episode out of it. You would absolutely have got half an hour of television out of that quote. Stew’s latest show, Stewart Lee vs the Man Wolf is on tour in the UK now and you can read his column at The Nerve. And that’s all for this week’s episode. Thanks to Stewart Lee for joining us. And thank you for listening to Pod Save the UK. If you liked what you heard, leave us a review. It really helps to boost the show.

Coco Khan You can follow us at Pod Save the UK on Instagram, TikTok, BlueSky and X.

Nish Kumar Pod Save the UK is a Reduced Listening production for Crooked Media.

Coco Khan Thanks to lead producer May Robson and digital producer Jacob Liebenberg.

Nish Kumar And the music is by Vasilis Fotopoulos.

Coco Khan Our engineer is Dana Ruka and our social media producer is Nada Smillionich.

Nish Kumar The executive producers are Kate Fitzsimons and Katie Long with additional support from Ari Schwartz.

Coco Khan And remember to hit subscribe for new shows on Thursdays on Amazon, Spotify or Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.