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Laughter In An Ugly World With Alistair Williams · UK Column Radio

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hello. I'm Charles Mallett with a UK Column interview today.
• 0:04
  I'm very pleased to have Alistair Williams with me. He
• 0:07
  is a comedian and commentator, and notes from this interview
• 0:12
  will be posted at ukcolumn dot org, so please be
• 0:17
  sure to review those and send them on now. Alistair,
• 0:21
  a very warm welcome to UK Column. Thanks very much
• 0:23
  for joining me. Many of the audience i'm sure will
• 0:26
  be aware not just of you as an individual, but
• 0:30
  of your great array of work over the years. What
• 0:34
  I'd like to do, before we deal with all the
• 0:36
  various issues that confront us today, is to go back,
• 0:40
  not through all the sounds of time, but some of them,
• 0:43
  to the sort of the genesis of your career as
• 0:47
  a comedian and what it was that led you down
• 0:50
  that path. It's a big and bold step to enter
• 0:53
  that world, and I would like to understand better the
• 0:58
  inspirations upon you and your aspirations back then when you
• 1:02
  were starting out.
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: Sure, okay, yeah, that's a good question. I guess Initially,
• 1:08
  I always always thought I would have liked to have
• 1:12
  been a comedian. On my eighteenth birthday, I went to
• 1:14
  the comedy store in Leicester Square, which is not a
• 1:17
  usual choice for someone who's eighteen, you know, usually go
• 1:20
  to nightclub, so that sort of thing. But I wanted
• 1:21
  to go to the comedy store in Leicester Square. I
• 1:23
  always looked at comedians and thought, oh man, I'd love
• 1:25
  to do that. I was always sort of one of
• 1:26
  the joker type in class with my friends. Always thought
• 1:30
  I'd like to do that. And then it took me
• 1:32
  till I was about about thirty to try it. And
• 1:34
  I went and did a an open mic, and I
• 1:37
  realized that, you know, I thought it was gonna be
• 1:39
  really intimidated by how good everyone was, and I was like,
• 1:41
  oh man, these guys are rubbish. You know, I could
• 1:44
  be rubbish. No, I can be as good as them.
• 1:47
  They're rubbish, but everyone is when you start. When I started,
• 1:50
  I was rubbish. And then, you know, so I just
• 1:52
  started doing it in my spare time, and then eventually
• 1:53
  I started getting paid to do it and it just
• 1:55
  sort of took over as my full time job. But
• 1:57
  initially I wanted to be like, you know, amous, and
• 2:01
  I want to be in Hollywood, and I want to
• 2:02
  be this great comedian that everyone loved, and you know,
• 2:05
  I had those sort of childish hopes and dreams about it.
• 2:09
  But yeah, things have changed quite a bit since then,
• 2:13
  but you know that was the original.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: That's a good start point, I think for certainly for me,
• 2:18
  but for the audience as well. So let's go let's
• 2:21
  go further forward, because obviously you've been through some big
• 2:24
  ups and downs over the last few years, which I
• 2:25
  think I would be right and saying are effectively traced
• 2:29
  back to the Brexit in a burger king period or not.
• 2:36
  But either way, when at what point did things start
• 2:39
  to change?
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: Okay, good question. I did used to have to go
• 2:44
  to Edinburgh and you do like an hour long comedy
• 2:46
  show to sort of showcase yourself. And I did this
• 2:48
  show called Food where basically it was an hour long
• 2:51
  comedy show and I was explaining to people that, you know,
• 2:54
  people like what can I eat to be healthy? And
• 2:56
  essentially the point of the show was the food that
• 2:58
  you can need to be healthy is the food that's
• 2:59
  sort of now naturally here on the earth that's either
• 3:02
  you know, animals or growing out the ground. And it
• 3:04
  was a really sort of sort of an educational message
• 3:07
  about food and that got sort of agents interested in me.
• 3:12
  But I quickly figured out that they weren't interested in
• 3:15
  sort of helping people eat the right food, you know,
• 3:17
  they were interested in, you know, changing what I was
• 3:21
  saying really, and that's when I've got my first sort
• 3:25
  of TV agent. And when I got my first sort
• 3:28
  of TV agent, I really noticed how much I was
• 3:33
  being sort of coerced to change what I was saying
• 3:35
  into something completely different. And I really didn't get on
• 3:40
  with my you know, sort of TV agent because they
• 3:42
  didn't want to change what I was saying. And then
• 3:44
  Rex's Berking came slightly after that, which was the sort
• 3:51
  of the piece of comedy that sort of made me
• 3:52
  go sort of really viral, and that also made the
• 3:57
  comedy industry or whoever runs at the entertainmentry decide that
• 4:00
  I had to be sort of completely erased at that
• 4:02
  point because I was sort of I was doing it
• 4:05
  for myself. Really. They they'd already they'd already told me
• 4:08
  that I wasn't going to be back on the television
• 4:09
  or anything like that. You know, when I when I
• 4:11
  left this agent, they made sure that you know, I
• 4:14
  wouldn't be able to be sort of mainstream famous anymore.
• 4:19
  So they sort of destroyed my career. This mainstream agent
• 4:22
  I left, and then Brexit Burking was me sort of saying, Okay,
• 4:25
  well I'll just sort of go viral by myself. Then,
• 4:28
  you know, I don't I didn't feel like I needed
• 4:32
  to be on the television. I was like, I can
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  just I just go on YouTube and put my stuff
• 4:35
  up there. And at the time, I didn't realize how
• 4:37
  controlled YouTube was, you know. I was like, oh, we
• 4:40
  don't need the TV anymore. We got YouTube. I can
• 4:42
  just you know, throw a big YouTube channel and and
• 4:46
  I laid it down the line. I sort of discovered that, oh,
• 4:49
  YouTube is exactly like the television, you know, like Twitter
• 4:53
  is exactly like Netflix is exactly like television. You know,
• 4:56
  it's all controlled to one degree or another. But yeah,
• 5:00
  Brexit working was sort of my first, my most popular
• 5:03
  viral piece of content, and the beginning of the end
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  basically just the opposite to how it should worked. It
• 5:09
  should be like there's Brexit. At the time, all these
• 5:12
  comedians were trying to do comedy about Brexit, and it
• 5:14
  was all the same. It was all you know, oh,
• 5:17
  if you've heard for Brexit, you're a big raisist, you know.
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  It was, and it was a million different versions of
• 5:22
  that on the BBC and everywhere, you know, and mine
• 5:25
  was the first bit of comedy I think. Really that
• 5:27
  took a sort of opposite view or just a different
• 5:30
  even opposite view, just a different view to that, and
• 5:32
  it should if the comedy industry was real, it should
• 5:36
  have made the whole comedy stry go, wow, here's this
• 5:38
  guy and he's saying something new and interesting about Brex
• 5:41
  and everyone thinks it's funny. Instead, it was like, this
• 5:43
  guy has to be destroyed. You know, you must, you
• 5:46
  must we never hear from this comedian again. And it
• 5:49
  really just sort of exposed that I had the hypocrisy
• 5:52
  I guess in the comedy industry and it's my career
• 5:56
  if you like. It really just sort of exposed the
• 5:58
  comedy industry as being fake. Because if the comedy industry
• 6:01
  was real and they were sort of out there looking
• 6:03
  for comedians that are popular, that make people laugh and
• 6:06
  sort of broadcasting their reach, you know, then they would
• 6:10
  have everything to do with me. But they don't want
• 6:12
  anything to do with me because comedy it is not
• 6:15
  really about that. I'm sure people might, some people might struggle,
• 6:19
  but what do you mean it's not about that? Like
• 6:21
  they're not trying to pick the funniest comedians to make
• 6:23
  you all laugh. That's the last thing they're doing. There's
• 6:26
  a real agenda to everything in the entertainment space, but
• 6:31
  especially comedy. You know, especially comedy, which is one that
• 6:35
  people think, oh, comedy, surely that's the one place where
• 6:38
  you must all be free. It's like, yeah, that's and
• 6:40
  that's the reason why it's the most tightly policed, because
• 6:43
  it is the place where you would expect that everyone
• 6:45
  can just you know, say whatever they want. And that's
• 6:48
  the reason why it doesn't work like that at all.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: Basically, I think that's completely fascinating, and that is exactly
• 6:54
  what I would like to get into with you. You
• 6:57
  just at the beginning of that you talked about being
• 6:59
  co and being co effectively as I don't stand it
• 7:03
  into creating particular material or only delivering particular material. Just yeah,
• 7:08
  go into a bit more detail on how exactly does
• 7:11
  that work in terms of having an agent or you know,
• 7:14
  that space and coercion, and then getting to the point
• 7:18
  of finding that comedy is used as such a tool.
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: Firstly, people usually say, you know, I don't understand how
• 7:25
  would that work or how does it work? It's all
• 7:27
  sort of run through the agents and the managers. That's
• 7:29
  how they control everything. And what they say to the
• 7:31
  comedians is you know, oh, what you're sort of doing,
• 7:34
  it's not really going to work for television. You know,
• 7:36
  this isn't really going to go across. It's not what
• 7:38
  the television companies are looking for. And by doing it
• 7:42
  that way, they can sort of control what the public
• 7:44
  is given as comedy. I'll give you an example. When
• 7:48
  I was just signed with this television agent, I had
• 7:50
  this this these pieces of material about how we shouldn't
• 7:53
  be on our phone so much, we shouldn't use our
• 7:55
  phone so much. You know, society's really been damaged by
• 7:58
  us all being on our phones. And this was one
• 8:01
  of my most popular jokes at the time. It's really
• 8:04
  really popular. And I was supporting this comedian on tour
• 8:07
  who was way more famous than me, really really popular comedian,
• 8:11
  and I was doing these jokes on his show and
• 8:14
  he would came backstage to me and said, hey, man,
• 8:15
  those jokes, those iPhone jokes are amazing. They're incredible. Man,
• 8:18
  that's some of the funnies stuff I've heard. And literally
• 8:22
  that same night, my agent, who was his agent as well, said,
• 8:26
  you can't use his iPhone jokes anymore, right, And I
• 8:29
  was like, well, what do you mean I can't use
• 8:31
  the iPhone? Jackson? Well, the crowd love him and your
• 8:33
  biggest act, he said, that's my best stuff is that.
• 8:36
  There's no way I'm getting rid of that, right. I'm like,
• 8:39
  what are you talking about? And I was never I
• 8:41
  was supposed to support this guy on his whole tour.
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  They took me off his tour the next day. I
• 8:46
  never worked with him again because I had displayed, you know,
• 8:50
  I'm not gonna be controlled by you. It's like they
• 8:52
  told me to not do this, and I'm like, no,
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  I'm not doing that, you know, because I really believe
• 8:55
  people are on their phones too much, and people were
• 8:58
  laughing at my material, and I all has always had
• 9:01
  this sort of the sort of attitude of when an
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  agent or a manager or someone would try and tell
• 9:06
  me how to do comedy or what I must say
• 9:09
  or what I couldn't say. I was like, you know,
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  I don't you're an agent or a manager. Okay, fine,
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  but you're not a comedian. You've never done this before,
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  you have zero minutes experience, you know in what you're
• 9:19
  giving me advice, and I'm not here to take your
• 9:21
  advice on how to be a community how to make
• 9:23
  peop laugh, because that's something that you don't know how
• 9:25
  to do.
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: You know.
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  Speaker 2: I'm the expert in that. The guy who I'm supporting
• 9:28
  on tour, he's very successful and he told me that's
• 9:32
  a great piece of material and there's no way I'm
• 9:35
  going to stop doing this. And the way the agent
• 9:37
  of the manager might sell it to you is like, oh, well,
• 9:39
  it's not you know, it's not going to work on
• 9:40
  TV because you know, we got sponsors and stuff and
• 9:44
  they might be sort of phone companies and they don't
• 9:47
  you know. So there's that. But there's also a real
• 9:51
  sort of political science to it. It's a real sort
• 9:53
  of everyone in comedy is left wing or all the
• 9:56
  BBC comedy is left wing, and everyone in the comedy industry,
• 10:00
  comedians especially like to think themselves as left wing because
• 10:02
  they still have this very sort of childish perception of
• 10:04
  like left is good and right people are mean, and
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  I'm a goodies I'm on the left and all the
• 10:10
  bad he's on the right.
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  Speaker 1: You know.
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  Speaker 2: It's like they're you know, a six year old or something.
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  But the way we keep that going is anyone who
• 10:15
  steps outside is sort of a sort of a rabid
• 10:18
  left wing position. Anyone that steps outside of that, you
• 10:21
  just you do won't work anywhere. You know, people who
• 10:24
  won't book you for shows and that sort of thing,
• 10:26
  and that'll be their excuse. When they canceled me after
• 10:30
  the Brexit burger ing thing, their excuse for doing that was, well,
• 10:34
  you were on stage with Nigel Farage because they invited
• 10:36
  me to come and come and do this piece of
• 10:38
  comedy one of the Brexit rallies. And back in the day,
• 10:41
  I was even more naive out the whole thing. I
• 10:43
  used to think that, you know, the Brexit Party were
• 10:44
  the good guys and if they got it and everything
• 10:46
  a change. So I was like, yeah, sure, I'll I'll
• 10:49
  come and do that. So I went and did that,
• 10:50
  and they took photos of me next to Farage and
• 10:52
  all the comedy clubs and people use that as an excuse.
• 10:54
  It's like, you know, we're canceling you because it's not
• 10:58
  there's nothing wrong with joke, because there's anything wrong with
• 11:00
  the joke. Even people who thought we should have remained
• 11:02
  in the European Union were like, ah, this is a
• 11:04
  great joke. I'm laughing at this, it's funny. So there's
• 11:07
  no real premise for them to cancel me about that.
• 11:09
  So they were like, well, we're not cance you for that,
• 11:11
  as they couldn't. They were like, but it's because you
• 11:13
  stood next to Night of Farag, you know, that's why.
• 11:16
  And I've actually reached the point where I perhaps even
• 11:19
  consider that I might have been put on stage next
• 11:21
  to Farage so that I could be canceled for standing
• 11:24
  on stage next to Farage basically. So that's the way
• 11:29
  that they control all elements of comedy and the entertainment industry,
• 11:34
  but especially comedy is policed. A lot of the comedy
• 11:39
  you see on television has canned laughter put over it.
• 11:42
  And on my one only time they put me on TV,
• 11:45
  I remember I went to the recording and literally probably
• 11:50
  nineteen out of the twenty one comedians that were being
• 11:53
  recorded for television, they died on their They died on
• 11:59
  their butt. The experience is the expression in the industry.
• 12:01
  They were out there doing their jokes to know laughs whatsoever, right,
• 12:05
  the the in studio audience just like, oh, this is awful,
• 12:08
  you know. And then when I watched it back on
• 12:10
  the TV. Oh, these guys were absolutely killing it. They
• 12:13
  were cutting to the crowd, falling around, laughing, and I realized, like, oh, oh,
• 12:19
  this is why a lot of people they watch comedy
• 12:23
  on the television and they say I don't get it,
• 12:25
  like and I don't find this funny, like but everyone's laughing.
• 12:29
  It's like they're probably not, Like they probably they record
• 12:33
  a really sort of rabid left wing position and they
• 12:36
  put canned laughter over the top of it, and that
• 12:38
  convinces you as the listener, like even if you're not laughing,
• 12:42
  it's like, well, everyone else agrees with this, so you know, look,
• 12:46
  this whole this whole audience is cracking up about how
• 12:48
  amazing feminism is. So you must be, you know, way
• 12:53
  outside of where everyone else is thinking if you don't
• 12:55
  think this is funny. So it's it's it's a real
• 12:59
  vig for them manipulating how people perceive everyone thinks is
• 13:05
  putting TV comedy on. And just to add one third
• 13:09
  point to this, I used to be and when I
• 13:11
  had my TV agent, a lot of the guys that
• 13:13
  I was performing with they would be sort of really
• 13:16
  sort of left wing guys and they would go to
• 13:18
  their TV recordings, and they would sort of privately say
• 13:21
  to each other, does anyone else find it weird how
• 13:23
  crazy the crowd goes for our stuff, like, you know,
• 13:26
  not even the punch lines. They'll be like, I'm just
• 13:28
  up there and set up, and they were like yeah,
• 13:31
  and they're just like it's really like strange. It's like yeah,
• 13:34
  like you know, the whole thing is manipulated to the
• 13:37
  point where even the left wing comics are just like
• 13:40
  putting me off. How the audience is just falling over themselves,
• 13:43
  you know, at these set up recordings to you know,
• 13:46
  really lay it on thick. Sometimes they use can laughter,
• 13:49
  and sometimes they just use an audience full of planted
• 13:52
  people who are just going to go nuts to anything
• 13:54
  you say.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: Basically fascinating insight. I mean, you know, for the past
• 13:58
  majority of us saying I've to know how the comedy
• 14:01
  industry or the you know, sort of the minushy of
• 14:04
  the performance side of it would work. But I think
• 14:07
  it's much more obvious to people in mainstream media, in
• 14:11
  say the film industry, where exactly like you're describing, you know,
• 14:14
  we're constantly given the impression that everybody thinks that so
• 14:17
  therefore you must think the same. But comedy, I think
• 14:22
  is one of those areas exactly like you say that
• 14:24
  people overlook, they don't, they don't imagine that can be
• 14:26
  the case. But so this is what you saw. What
• 14:30
  did you find that you were working alongside other people
• 14:33
  who did see it or who you know, as it
• 14:37
  would appear to us now like a lot of mainstream
• 14:39
  journalists who okay, notwithstanding the sort of vested interest side
• 14:42
  of it, who appeared just not to be able to
• 14:44
  see it. Were there people around you that did see this?
• 14:48
  And how did they react?
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: I mean, it's in their best interest not to see it.
• 14:53
  They're quite clever, and that everyone is at this sort
• 14:55
  of level sort of they're on the TV, they've got
• 14:57
  an agent, they're all on the on the gravy trains,
• 15:00
  so to speak. You know, they don't want to see
• 15:02
  the things that that I'm seeing. And I remember I
• 15:04
  would go to other comedians and I reached the stage
• 15:07
  where this agent was directly trying to ruin my career
• 15:15
  because I wouldn't tow the line. So it's reached the
• 15:18
  point where the person is supposed to be trying to
• 15:20
  help my career was actively trying to ruin it like
• 15:22
  and I mean like if a meeting, if I was
• 15:24
  on the radio at twelve thirty, they would send me.
• 15:27
  They would tell me it starts at one point thirty,
• 15:29
  so I'd be an hour late, you know, and they
• 15:31
  would consistently do this and the other acts that I
• 15:33
  was signed this agent. You know, they're all they've got
• 15:35
  the same agent as me, and we're friends. So I'm like,
• 15:37
  you know that they're ruining my stuff on purpose, but
• 15:40
  they were like, you're yeah. I would say, like, naw,
• 15:42
  I don't believe that. I'm like, well, look, I got
• 15:43
  the evidence right here, de emailed. I don't want see it.
• 15:46
  I want to see it. You know, like, no, they
• 15:47
  don't want to see it. No one wants to see it.
• 15:49
  It's not like I couldn't prove what's going on. It's just,
• 15:52
  you know, no one, no one really wants to admit
• 15:56
  that this is going on, because ninety nine percent of
• 15:58
  people just more than happy to go along with it,
• 16:02
  and they keep you so anxious. In the comedy entertainment industry,
• 16:05
  you know, everyone's desperate to get their agent, and once
• 16:07
  they've got their agent, they're want to lose their agent.
• 16:09
  And you know, they they really sort of if you
• 16:13
  go to the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, see the anxiety that
• 16:15
  is in the performers, you know, everyone, It's like they
• 16:19
  keep you like piranas in a tank, you know, and
• 16:21
  they've got everyone just desperate to cling on to their
• 16:23
  seat at the table. And you know, they get most
• 16:25
  of the comedians into debt by sending them up to
• 16:28
  Edinburgh every year and telling them they've got to spend forty
• 16:29
  grand on the show and hope that someone who works
• 16:32
  with PRLC or something. Anyway, they've got everyone desperate just
• 16:37
  to hang on to this this chance at fame that
• 16:40
  they have. And ninety nine point nine percent of the
• 16:43
  people in that industry they are not interested at all
• 16:46
  in taking any sort of a actual moral position on anything.
• 16:51
  They just want to be famous, you know, they just
• 16:54
  want to be on the BBC or you know, and
• 16:59
  I would be I'm very vocal, and I was on
• 17:01
  that Brexit boaking video. I was very vocal about the
• 17:04
  fact that the BBC are just this terrible organization with
• 17:07
  the record of you know, covering up for you know,
• 17:10
  Jimmy Saville and this sort of thing. I'm like, why
• 17:12
  would you ever want to work for this organization. It's
• 17:15
  horrendous in my view, propaganda institution that's just ruining this country.
• 17:20
  And you know, but ninety percent of comedians was like, hey,
• 17:23
  I'm on BBC. You know, like, aw, check this out,
• 17:26
  mom and dad. You know, that's it's great for them.
• 17:28
  Like no one really has any sort of morals in
• 17:31
  that industry really, because if you do, they just they
• 17:34
  just kick you out, you know, so you really do
• 17:38
  have to make a choice. But fortunately for me in
• 17:41
  a way, you know, they'd already sort of they'd already
• 17:44
  sort of booted me out and rejected me if you like,
• 17:48
  but not you know, playing ball, So you know, what
• 17:51
  did I have to lose? And Brexit Boking was just
• 17:55
  me kind of saying like, hey, you know, just just
• 17:58
  leave me alone because I can do this. I can
• 18:00
  do this by myself. And I gave I gave, I
• 18:03
  gave the establishment a bit of a black eye with
• 18:05
  the Brexit Burgking thing, just because people might not realize
• 18:11
  how bad things are. But so this Brexit burger King thing,
• 18:15
  for example, it was sort of anti European Union in
• 18:19
  a way. Right when I would go on comedy tours
• 18:22
  with other comedians around Europe, we'd all be using the
• 18:25
  same promoter, right, and we'd all be staying in the
• 18:27
  same hotel. My room would always be terrible. It'd be tiny,
• 18:31
  be small. I'm like, you guys rooms terrible about no.
• 18:34
  I was like, what is going on? And then one
• 18:36
  time the guy works on reception in the hotel was like, hey,
• 18:39
  you know he let the cat out of the bag.
• 18:40
  He's like, hey, you're there, the anti European Union guy.
• 18:42
  Enjoy your room. I'm like, oh, oh, right, you know
• 18:46
  that's why, you know? And I think there is a
• 18:49
  kind of it's kind of like a digital black spot
• 18:52
  that they put on people like me, Like my Twitter
• 18:56
  won't grow, my YouTube doesn't grow, Like it's not as
• 18:59
  simple as they canceled my YouTube channel. It's like no, no, no,
• 19:02
  The whole thing is connected. All the social media networks
• 19:05
  are connected. Like, if you are sort of marked out
• 19:11
  as someone who is trouble who they don't want everyone
• 19:14
  listening to you, no one's going to be able to
• 19:16
  find you, basically, and they can make your life miserable
• 19:19
  in a number of different ways. And they were already
• 19:23
  doing that with me before Brexitburger King, but there were
• 19:26
  certainly sort of doing it afterwards. So you know, there's
• 19:29
  no chance that they're ever going to allow me to
• 19:31
  have any sort of a mainstream career. But that's not
• 19:34
  even something I'm interested in anymore anyway. So it's fine.
• 19:37
  But you know, the whole sort of social credit score
• 19:41
  system that people think only exists in China, I'm pretty
• 19:43
  sure it's here already. It's just they're not sort of
• 19:46
  overt about it, you know what I mean.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: I think you're quite right. I'm certain it's absolutely here.
• 19:51
  And that goes back to the jokes about iPhones and
• 19:56
  how crisical it is to the system functioning that everybody
• 19:59
  is good of a device all the time. Yeah, I
• 20:02
  think that the last bit really as the newly appointed
• 20:06
  or relatively newly appointed chief executive of Twitter or x said,
• 20:10
  freedom of speech but not freedom of reach, I think
• 20:12
  was her catchphrase. But you you know what you're talking
• 20:18
  about in terms of taking a moral line or a decision,
• 20:23
  a choice which going back to your initial aspirations, you
• 20:29
  know you have been faced with a difficult fork in
• 20:33
  the road, in effect that the illusion of the world
• 20:37
  of comedy sort of shattered around you. And yet obviously
• 20:42
  you have decided to stick with comedy as something that is,
• 20:47
  you know, still a very big part of your life.
• 20:50
  How did you well, I mean, I don't know how
• 20:53
  hard the decision that was to make, but how did
• 20:55
  you make that decision? Did you question? You know that
• 20:59
  it might be something that you would get out of
• 21:01
  all together?
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: There was a time when I wasn't sure whether I
• 21:05
  would whether I would keep doing it. But it's it's
• 21:09
  what I'm supposed to be doing, and I've always been
• 21:12
  I've always been sure of that, And you know, I'm
• 21:16
  pretty sure that's why got what God made me to do.
• 21:19
  And I'm pretty sure that God gave me specific talents
• 21:21
  and he's expected me to use them to tell people
• 21:25
  the truth. Because if you're really good at stand up comedy,
• 21:28
  people will listen to you because they're laughing and they're
• 21:30
  just and when someone's laughing at something you say, they're
• 21:32
  admitting that it's true. So it, like no other art
• 21:36
  form or medium, you change someone's mind with stand up
• 21:40
  comedy because if you make them laugh, they're sort of
• 21:42
  agreeing with you. If I'm talking about it doesn't matter what.
• 21:45
  Let's say, I'm talking about climate change, and I've got
• 21:47
  the whole audience laughing at climate change. Well really, they're
• 21:50
  sort of saying, hang on, maybe this whole thing is
• 21:53
  a bit silly. This is a bit ridiculous, and it's
• 21:55
  not so serious. I thought, you know, you can really
• 21:57
  change people's you can really change people's mind Chase Bill's ideas.
• 22:00
  And I'm one hundred percent certain that the talents I
• 22:05
  had are God given and that He's created me to
• 22:08
  use these talents to tell people the truth. And I
• 22:10
  couldn't care less what you know, they think at the
• 22:14
  BBC or the Netflix. You know, I'm doing what I'm doing,
• 22:17
  what he tells me to do. So you know, I'm
• 22:19
  going to keep doing it, even if it's only on
• 22:21
  a small scale. You know, right now, I'm just sort
• 22:24
  of doing the sort of comedy circuit and they won't
• 22:26
  let me in the big clubs anymore. But I'm sort
• 22:28
  of beneath that and I'm sort of doing my own thing.
• 22:30
  But you know, you know that's absolutely fine. You know
• 22:32
  that's absolutely fine. So I never, really, I never really
• 22:37
  came that close to giving up altogether. But there was
• 22:41
  a time when I was doing more stuff on sort
• 22:43
  of social media and more stuff on YouTube, just because
• 22:47
  you know, that's where when my career sort of took
• 22:50
  me sort of thing, and then they had the whole
• 22:51
  sort of three year period where there was no comedy
• 22:53
  shows anyway. So it's just as well I had something
• 22:55
  to do during that time. But now I'm sort of
• 22:57
  getting more back into doing live stand up comedy. Really,
• 23:01
  but I never considered, you know, stopping doing it. It's like,
• 23:04
  I'm good at this, Why would I why would I
• 23:07
  stop doing this, especially when you know there's there's no
• 23:10
  one I've ever offended, you know. I find it's one
• 23:12
  of the one of the few people you can find
• 23:14
  who's canceled, and there's no discernible reason why, Like you
• 23:18
  can't even point to a single person who's like, oh
• 23:20
  he offended me about this, you know. And so the
• 23:23
  people that they really want to cancel, they just they
• 23:25
  just do it quietly. They just they shadow ban you.
• 23:28
  They take away your channels, they reduce your reach, so
• 23:32
  to speak. You know, the people that they publicly cancel,
• 23:35
  like Andrew Tape for example, you can't go anywhere without
• 23:38
  hearing this guy's name everywhere, you know what I mean.
• 23:41
  It's like you go on these big peers Morgan about
• 23:44
  how canceled I am, it's like, oh, come on, guys,
• 23:46
  you know, like the people they own everything, including the
• 23:52
  people that are canceled, Like, you know, the people who
• 23:55
  the people who are famously canceled are part of the
• 23:57
  whole thing. You know, there's there's very little there's very
• 24:01
  little legitimate voices out there that have you know, big followings.
• 24:04
  I don't know if there's any.
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: That's completely fair enough. I think it's a very accurate
• 24:10
  summary of the situation. But tell me, I mean, and
• 24:13
  you know, anyone, as I say, I should imagine a
• 24:17
  vast majority of the audience will be familiar with some
• 24:20
  of your material in there, have even had the pleasure
• 24:22
  of listening to you live. So I speak I think
• 24:27
  for everybody, and I say, we're absolutely delighted that you
• 24:28
  didn't give up comedy. But do you find now having
• 24:33
  seen things for what they are and feeling I think
• 24:35
  I'm right in saying that you have, like you've just said,
• 24:38
  you have a clearer path in life. Has that made
• 24:41
  a difference to the connection that you feel with an audience?
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess so, I guess so. How many audience
• 24:50
  is a really sort of an honest group of people,
• 24:52
  you know, they're just out to have a good time.
• 24:53
  They want to have a laugh, and if you make
• 24:55
  them laugh, they're enjoying themselves. And that's it. You know.
• 24:59
  It's really not a difficult industry to run. It's like,
• 25:02
  if the guy's up there speaking and everyone's laughing, he's
• 25:04
  good at this. Get him to do it more. But,
• 25:08
  like I say, having a connection with the audience and
• 25:12
  stuff like that has never been my problem. Like maybe
• 25:13
  people laugh has never been my problem, Like staying alive
• 25:16
  outside of the outside of the game. Having made a
• 25:20
  room full of people laugh is the difficult bit, you know,
• 25:23
  especially when you're sort of broaching the sort of topics
• 25:26
  that I want to that I want to broach, you know,
• 25:32
  for example, in forced speech around pronouns, that sort of thing.
• 25:36
  Ninety nine percent of people think that that's horrendous and
• 25:41
  they don't like it, and they don't really think that
• 25:43
  this man is a woman or this woman is a man.
• 25:46
  They know it's nonsense, right, but they're terrified. They're terrified
• 25:50
  to say anything because as they know they're going to
• 25:52
  be relentlessly bullied, they'll probably lose their career. So we're
• 25:57
  in this sort of weird position where five percent of
• 26:00
  the population don't agree with this stuff. They can see
• 26:03
  how damaging there is, but they're not going to say
• 26:04
  anything because they're too worried about what it might cost them. Well,
• 26:10
  it's already cost me everything. And I'm in the position
• 26:14
  of somebody who should be saying something about this. You know,
• 26:18
  it's the comedian's job is to point out the ridiculous,
• 26:20
  Like throughout the pandemic, for example, comedians that weren't talking
• 26:23
  about how ridiculous whole thing is. I'm like, you know,
• 26:25
  where are you guys? Like all the comedians I used
• 26:28
  to love, all the comedians I used to think were
• 26:29
  great and amazing, I couldn't care less for any of
• 26:32
  them after this pandemic. If you were a comedian, someone
• 26:35
  is supposed to be making observations for a living right
• 26:40
  You're you know, you're supposed to really be able to
• 26:44
  tell what's going on and then explain to people. And
• 26:45
  you're sitting through this thing and you're you're making jokes like, hey,
• 26:49
  if you not vaccinated, punch yourself. It's like, now that's
• 26:52
  that's that's gone past sort of incompetence and into sort
• 26:57
  of you know, evil. To be honest, with you. So
• 27:00
  I lost, I lost a lot of respects. I never
• 27:02
  I never lost a connection with the audience, but with
• 27:06
  my sort of peers or the sort of famous comedians,
• 27:08
  but the same thing with sort of famous musicians or
• 27:11
  famous actors. It's really exposed to me how fake that
• 27:16
  whole industry is. These these people that you're given to follow,
• 27:21
  you know, and the way our culture encourages that. You know,
• 27:24
  there's some of the most some of the most goutless
• 27:29
  spineless people that are available, who literally they just like
• 27:32
  I said before, they just want to keep their space
• 27:34
  at the table of being this extra special human being
• 27:37
  who's famous, you know. And yeah, so I always, I always,
• 27:42
  you know, had had no problem having a connection with
• 27:45
  the audience. It's just it's the slime of the entertainment
• 27:49
  industry that that I don't want to be involved in.
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: Fair enough, And you make a very good point about
• 27:55
  on the observational side of it and not offending people,
• 27:59
  not not necessarily saying that's an explicit sort of purpose
• 28:03
  in your material. But but on that though, how how
• 28:06
  do you yourself and particularly now, how do you decide
• 28:12
  what will be something that you can effectively make a
• 28:15
  joke out of and that you would you know, might
• 28:18
  for whatever reason decide not to. How do you how
• 28:21
  do you filter stuff?
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: I just sort of go with what I what I
• 28:24
  want to talk about. I to go with what I
• 28:27
  what I think is is amusing, or if there's a
• 28:30
  particular issue that i'd like to I'd like to have
• 28:33
  people really consider about whether they want to go along
• 28:37
  with this sort of agenda. I'll try and make, you know,
• 28:40
  jokes about it, for example. So I don't really have
• 28:45
  a we have a particular thing that I made me
• 28:49
  to do. I just I just want to do what,
• 28:51
  you know, what I think I think people will laugh at.
• 28:55
  But there's very few comedians that you know, are actually
• 28:59
  doing that. A lot of a lot of the comedians
• 29:02
  these days, they're trying to they're trying to do what
• 29:06
  their agent and their manager tells them that people want
• 29:08
  to hear about, which is usually very sort of monotone
• 29:12
  left wing stuff. You know, there's very few people out
• 29:14
  there that are legitimately just saying what they think is funny.
• 29:19
  Most of it is sort of agenda driven. But so yeah,
• 29:24
  I just sort of go with what I think is
• 29:26
  what I think is funny. Basically, sounds very simple, but
• 29:28
  that's supposed to be what we're all doing, really fair.
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: Enough, and it works. Last year a British Comedian of
• 29:36
  the Year at the Comedy Store, which is a fantastic
• 29:42
  achievement and I'm sure would have given you a sense
• 29:46
  of enormous sort of pleasure and satisfaction and in a
• 29:49
  way one in the eye for a lot of the
• 29:51
  people that you've described earlier on in this interview. But
• 29:56
  I think to people who have heard that, you know,
• 30:00
  your story is one of having been shunned, completely pushed outside,
• 30:05
  and then you've had this amazing success at the Comedy Store.
• 30:10
  Just to sort of clear the path as to how
• 30:14
  that happened, How does that work? How were you able
• 30:17
  to get to that?
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: I'll tell you how, Charles, I'll tell you exactly how.
• 30:21
  I don't enter comedy competitions because they're all crooked. Essentially,
• 30:25
  they have judges and the judges just pick the most
• 30:29
  left wing or you know, the person who ticks all
• 30:31
  the right boxes or whatever. But the British committe of
• 30:34
  the Year is the only competition that's voted for by
• 30:36
  the audience, So it's literally like whoever the audience thinks
• 30:40
  had was the funniest wins and that's the only reason
• 30:43
  I entered it. And the final was at the Comedy Store,
• 30:46
  which is one of my favorite places ever to do comedy.
• 30:49
  And I'm not allowed to do comedy there anymore, and
• 30:53
  no one's told me why. I always do very well
• 30:55
  when I'm there, then all of a sudden one day
• 30:57
  just I'm not welcome there anymore. They never told me why.
• 31:00
  So the opportunity to go back there do comedy there,
• 31:04
  you know, one last time, and maybe I'll go back
• 31:06
  to maybe they'll have me back there again one day.
• 31:08
  Maybe not, but doesn't look like it. But the opportunity
• 31:11
  to go back there again and you know, have a
• 31:13
  great show and walk out with a giant check. But
• 31:15
  I see a lot of guys, you know, it's just
• 31:16
  too good, too good to pass up, you know. So,
• 31:20
  But the only reason I want that's because it's both
• 31:22
  fought by real people, you know, it's a real competition.
• 31:25
  But nothing else in comedy works like that. If you
• 31:28
  go to the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, the judges like right
• 31:31
  for the Guardian or you know, it's all you know,
• 31:35
  it's like who's the funniest lesbian it's not like who's
• 31:37
  the funniest person, you know what I'm saying, Or it's
• 31:39
  like who's the funniest, you know, person who's got some
• 31:42
  kind of you know, woke points or whatever. But there
• 31:45
  they'll straight up tell you like, dude, you're just you're
• 31:47
  a straight white male. You're not getting anything here, especially
• 31:50
  if your comedy isn't left wing. It's like, you know,
• 31:53
  the whole thing is is a rub. There's no point
• 31:56
  someone like me, you know, even going up there. And
• 31:59
  there's lessons people sort of going Every year and more
• 32:03
  and more audiences switching off to the way that the
• 32:07
  comedy has run. But to take this even further, I
• 32:12
  don't even believe that they're looking for the funniest people anymore.
• 32:15
  I got a theory that there's certain people in the
• 32:18
  world that want to make the world ugly. Okay, So
• 32:22
  if you look at architecture, it's a great example. Films
• 32:25
  is another great example, music is another great example. Comedy
• 32:29
  is another great example. All these things are awful compared
• 32:33
  to what they used to be. Architecture is one of
• 32:35
  the best examples I can give you. We look at
• 32:37
  the buildings from four hundred years ago, how incredibly beautifully
• 32:39
  are look at you know, look at the latest like
• 32:42
  libraries that they put up in places place just awful.
• 32:44
  They hurt your eyes. You know, statues in London just grotesque, ugly.
• 32:49
  You know, music is the same. New music's awful. You know,
• 32:52
  new comedy is awful. And I'm on the comedy circuit.
• 32:56
  I know who's funny and who isn't. Some of the
• 32:58
  people that they're putting on the televison are the worst, Charles.
• 33:02
  They are the They're not even like just okay or average.
• 33:06
  Some of them are the worst, like open mic level
• 33:10
  people and they've got an agent and they're on TV.
• 33:13
  And I honestly believe that there's certain people that run
• 33:17
  the world and they hate joy. They hate joy. These
• 33:20
  people are so soulless, they're so disconnected from the creator
• 33:25
  that they they want other people to suffer like they're suffering.
• 33:28
  And entertainment industry and culture is controlled a lot of
• 33:32
  times from the top down. Like in comedy, they have
• 33:35
  a they have an arts council, an arts council, Charles,
• 33:39
  you know what I mean, like bureaucrats in charge of
• 33:41
  the arts. Like why would I need a bureaucrat to
• 33:46
  run stand up comedy, and they do these comedy clubs
• 33:50
  that I mentioned. When the pandemic hit, the arts Council
• 33:54
  comes in and says, listen, we've got millions of pounds
• 33:56
  to help me stay open. But if you want the money,
• 33:59
  you have to sign up to this, you know thing.
• 34:02
  And the thing is, when you reopen, it's going to
• 34:06
  be fifty percent women, it's going to be fifty percent
• 34:08
  black guys. It's gonna be this, it's gonna be that
• 34:11
  and this way. They come in and they run the
• 34:12
  whole show now, you know. And places that I used
• 34:15
  to love, places like the comedy store. For example, if
• 34:19
  you made it to the comedy store, it used to
• 34:21
  mean something, used to mean, Oh, he's at the comedy store.
• 34:24
  He must be one of the best acts in the country.
• 34:26
  It's not that anymore. Man. I walk past the comedy store,
• 34:29
  I see the names of the people performing, and like,
• 34:31
  one of the people on there will be a real comedian,
• 34:34
  you know. They'll put them on last. The other three
• 34:37
  it might be good, and they might not be that good,
• 34:39
  you know. And it's because it's not run the way
• 34:43
  it used to be run. It's not run as in
• 34:45
  the funniest people get in here. Now It's like, right, fifth,
• 34:48
  every bill be fifty percent women, you know, and fifty
• 34:52
  percent of the people do understand up comedy are not women.
• 34:55
  Let's say twenty percent of the acts are women. Right,
• 34:57
  So now you're filling fifty percent of your bill from
• 35:00
  twenty percent of the people. You know, it's not going
• 35:03
  to be as good as it was when you were
• 35:04
  just picking the funniest people that there are. And you know,
• 35:09
  it's it's a bit of a shame, you know that
• 35:11
  that comedy has gone that way, but you know what
• 35:14
  hasn't gone that way? You know. So, But I think
• 35:18
  it actually runs a little bit deeper. I think on
• 35:19
  the outside, they'd like you to think that this is
• 35:22
  happening because we're really progressive and we love these certain
• 35:24
  groups of people, we want to help them. I don't
• 35:26
  think that's the case. I think they actually want to
• 35:28
  ruin everything, and this is their way of doing it.
• 35:31
  You know, they don't really care about black people, they
• 35:33
  don't really care about lesbians, there about women, they don't
• 35:35
  care about anyone. They want to ruin things, and this
• 35:38
  is their excuse to ruin things. They come in here
• 35:40
  under the guise of we need to make sure that
• 35:43
  there's representation, but really it's just it's an excuse for
• 35:46
  them to pick people that aren't very good put them
• 35:48
  up there, and then the female comedians is a great example, right,
• 35:52
  I know, loads of female comedians are hilarious. They're never
• 35:55
  the ones that they put on the television. They're never
• 35:57
  the ones that they pick. They picked the ones on
• 35:59
  our breaking it, and then people watch it and they go,
• 36:02
  she's not very good. Female comedians suck and it's like, no,
• 36:05
  they don't, No, they don't. They could have picked the
• 36:07
  really good ones the same way. I don't think they're
• 36:09
  picking the really good male ones either, you know, the
• 36:11
  same way I don't think they're Star Wars is a
• 36:15
  great example too. You know, I still love Star Wars.
• 36:18
  My brother used to love Star Wars. Star Wars used to
• 36:20
  be great. You watch the latest Star Wars stuff, and
• 36:24
  fans of Star Wars are like, dude, are you trying
• 36:26
  to ruin us? You know, it's all about, you know,
• 36:30
  lesbian driven again for no reason. You know, it's you know,
• 36:34
  everything's got that, everything's lesbian driven.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: Now.
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: I don't mean it's not just lesbian, but you know,
• 36:38
  what I'm saying, there's all you know, especially kids programs.
• 36:42
  You know, there's so much stuff in there that doesn't
• 36:44
  belong in there, and I just can't see it as
• 36:47
  being an accident anymore. I just see that they're just
• 36:51
  out there deliberately ruining not just the world of entertainment,
• 36:56
  but you know, most things.
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: You won't find any disagreement from me, certainly in all
• 37:01
  the audience I should imagine, and as exactly as you
• 37:04
  point out, you know, joy is now an act of resistance.
• 37:08
  Talk to me about Christianity because I know this has
• 37:13
  become a significant part of your life. And I don't
• 37:17
  want to get you no need to go and do
• 37:18
  anything into any great sort of personal detail if you
• 37:21
  don't want to, but just the sort of broader of
• 37:23
  principles you've referred to it. You've touched on it a
• 37:25
  little bit sort of earlier on in the interview, But
• 37:28
  just tell me a bit about how that's come into
• 37:30
  your life and formed an important important part of it
• 37:35
  and your your sort of outlook.
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: I started off just before I was a Christian, before
• 37:41
  I believe in God. I wanted to do the right thing,
• 37:43
  you know, and then not because as a Christian because
• 37:45
  I believe in God. I just I just want to
• 37:47
  do the right thing. I legitimately wanted to make people laugh.
• 37:50
  I wanted to bring you joy, and I wanted to
• 37:53
  try and do the right thing and help the world
• 37:54
  a bit. You know, this food show, help people lose weight, stuff.
• 37:57
  And when you start down that part of you sort
• 38:01
  of you'll quickly be destroyed, especially if you're trying to
• 38:05
  do that in the entertainment industry. And I was very quickly,
• 38:09
  completely and utterly destroyed for trying to do the right thing.
• 38:14
  And you're left with this realization like, hey, why does
• 38:19
  the world hate me so much for trying to do
• 38:22
  the right thing? Okay? And I lost everything when you know,
• 38:29
  my agent sort of counseled me. I lost my YouTube channel,
• 38:31
  all my friends in comedy turned against me on the
• 38:33
  same day. You know, but I knew that this was
• 38:37
  all happening because I wanted to do the right thing.
• 38:39
  I didn't want to A lot of comedy at the
• 38:41
  time was about dividing people. You know, white people are racist.
• 38:46
  You know, men are toxic. You know, it's like men
• 38:48
  should hate women, white should hate blacks.
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 38:50
  Speaker 2: I was always trying to bring people together legitimately, and
• 38:54
  I would always be painted as the bad guy and
• 38:57
  this horrible person for doing this.
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 38:59
  Speaker 2: It's like, Alice, why won't you do the material about
• 39:02
  how white people are racist? And I would say, well,
• 39:04
  I'd love to accept it. You know, that's racist, you
• 39:06
  know what I mean? Like, I won't pick on white
• 39:09
  people for the color of their skin for the same
• 39:10
  reason I want people pick on black people. Dude, it's wrong.
• 39:14
  And having that attitude it was going to cost me
• 39:17
  in my career, but it was more important to me
• 39:21
  to say what was true and to try and do
• 39:24
  the right thing. And for that reason I was completely
• 39:29
  destroyed to the point where after I lost my agent
• 39:35
  and stuff, I became very paranoid that there was this
• 39:41
  big sort of entity that run the world and I
• 39:42
  had pissed it off and they wanted to destroy my life.
• 39:45
  Now I say paranoid, I was paranoid. That doesn't mean
• 39:49
  I was wrong, like you know, and now, especially looking back,
• 39:52
  I was quite correct, you know. But I was, you know,
• 39:55
  a very desperate, scared and alone person, you know the time,
• 40:00
  and I would I would say the Lord's Prayer over
• 40:04
  and over again because it just it made me feel
• 40:07
  better for some reason, and I found myself God revealed
• 40:12
  himself to me personally at this time, and then I
• 40:15
  found myself reading the Bible, and there was a There
• 40:18
  was something that Jesus said that changed my life completely,
• 40:21
  and that was if the world hates you, which spoke
• 40:26
  to me because I'd just had my whole life destroyed
• 40:30
  for trying to do the right thing. And I knew
• 40:32
  in my heart that I was trying to do the
• 40:33
  right thing and that's why I've been destroyed. And Jesus said,
• 40:36
  if the world hates you, remember that it hated me first. Now,
• 40:41
  Jesus was a man who went around healing people, telling
• 40:44
  us to love each other, and for that he was
• 40:46
  tortured to death. If you think that you have any
• 40:48
  sort of story that is, oh poor me. I was
• 40:52
  trying to do the right thing and something bad happened
• 40:54
  to me. You can't beat the story of Jesus, you know.
• 40:57
  And before I heard that Jesus said this, I used
• 41:01
  to feel bad about the fact that the world hated me.
• 41:05
  I used to feel like negatively about it, like, oh,
• 41:08
  the world hates me. And then when I realized that
• 41:09
  what Jesus said was true. Was you know, if the
• 41:13
  world hates you, remember that it hated me first. If
• 41:15
  you look at what sort of a person Jesus was
• 41:17
  and how good he was, and the world hated him. Right,
• 41:20
  So if the world hates you for trying to do
• 41:24
  the right thing, you shouldn't feel bad about that. You
• 41:27
  should feel as though you're following in the footsteps of Jesus.
• 41:33
  And that completely changed my whole life because I realized
• 41:38
  that it was true. It was true, and that married
• 41:42
  with my own personal experience, which is if you go
• 41:44
  out and you try and heal the world and you
• 41:46
  try and fix it, the people that run the world
• 41:49
  will hate you and they will destroy you. And there
• 41:53
  really is a war taking place. And your listeners, whether
• 41:58
  or not they believe in God, they'll be able to
• 42:00
  see the war that's raging right now between good and evil.
• 42:04
  And you know, the Bible speaks of this, and the
• 42:07
  Bible lets you know that if the world hates you,
• 42:10
  remember that it hated me first, speaking of Jesus, if
• 42:12
  you're really on the side of good, if you really
• 42:16
  want to follow Christ, you will find yourself in complete
• 42:20
  opposition with the world. And that was where I started.
• 42:24
  I started listening to what Jesus had to say. And
• 42:29
  I came to the Bible not as a Christian, not
• 42:32
  as a believer in God, not someone that had been
• 42:34
  raised on it. But I did love the truth. If
• 42:36
  you're a good stand up comedian, you say, people will
• 42:38
  be like, oh, that's so true, and as they're laughing, right,
• 42:42
  I was all about the truth. And I realized I'd
• 42:46
  never read the Bible, I'd never listened to what Jesus said.
• 42:51
  And I said to myself, I'm going to read every
• 42:53
  word that Jesus said, and I'm going to find whether
• 42:56
  or not it's true. And every single word that Jesus
• 43:00
  Christ spoke is one hundred percent true. A hunt. I
• 43:04
  couldn't find a fault in any of it. All of
• 43:07
  his logic, all his reasoning, everything that Jesus Christ has
• 43:10
  ever said is true. And this is a man who
• 43:12
  claims to be the son of God. So if everything
• 43:15
  that I can find that he ever said true, right,
• 43:18
  the one thing that he's lying about is the fact
• 43:20
  that he's the son of God. I don't think so.
• 43:22
  Like I'll give you an example. They ask Jesus, what's
• 43:26
  the golden rule? What's the one thing that we should
• 43:28
  be doing. And he says, treat other people as you
• 43:30
  would have them treat you. Right now, if everyone in
• 43:33
  the whole world followed that one simple rule, if everyone
• 43:37
  in the world treated each other as we would expect
• 43:40
  ourselves to be treated, you know what sort of world
• 43:42
  would we be living in. If everyone did that, we'd
• 43:45
  be living in heaven. So I look at that and
• 43:47
  I think, well, this guy has just told us the
• 43:49
  way to heaven in one sentence. You know, if we
• 43:53
  followed that, we will be living in heaven. So, you know,
• 43:56
  I can't get away from the truth that were in
• 44:00
  the words of everything that Jesus Christ spoke, and not
• 44:04
  only that, his practical example of if you try to
• 44:07
  do the right thing, you know this world or hate
• 44:10
  you that spoke to me as well. Then despite from
• 44:13
  that the multiple signs that God has given to me
• 44:18
  that He's real and He's looking out for me, I
• 44:22
  honestly don't believe I ever have my comedy career back.
• 44:24
  If it wasn't for God, I don't believe i'd still
• 44:27
  you know, be here. I wouldn't have my family. Everything
• 44:29
  I have comes from God, you know. And I can't
• 44:31
  go into detail. I'm not sure if you you'd want
• 44:33
  me to, but multiple times where it's been unmistakably God
• 44:38
  that has intervened in my life that you know, it's
• 44:43
  it's the most important thing to me is to do
• 44:46
  to do His work, is to you know, you know,
• 44:51
  live a live a good life, the type of life
• 44:53
  that he would want me to do, and just just
• 44:54
  do what He wants for me to do rather than
• 44:57
  what I want for myself.
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: That's amazing And it's obviously been a huge sort of
• 45:02
  solace to you and clearly has shaped the way that
• 45:07
  you conduct yourself now sort of at least on a
• 45:10
  on a sort of spiritual and psychological level, in terms
• 45:14
  of the practical sort of delivery of your philosophy. Has it?
• 45:20
  Has it made a difference? You know, we're talking about
• 45:22
  the world around us being so ugly and being deliberately so,
• 45:27
  and the sewing of the vision and all the rest
• 45:29
  of it. Do you see a way, a sort of
• 45:32
  collective way out of this.
• 45:36
  Speaker 2: A collective way out of this? Well, I mean the
• 45:41
  collective way out of this is Jesus Christ. There's no
• 45:45
  there's no one else that can save this world. You know,
• 45:48
  That's that's what the Bible says, and and trust me,
• 45:51
  that's what I believe. And you know that I think
• 45:54
  is the is the great conspiracy. That's the one thing
• 45:58
  that they don't want people finding out that God is
• 46:01
  real and if we turned back to him, all of
• 46:03
  this can be fixed. If you look at the United Kingdom,
• 46:05
  for example, as a country, people often talked about the West,
• 46:09
  the fall of the West, and as though there's some
• 46:13
  Western way of life that has built this country. This
• 46:16
  is not a Western country. This is a Christian country.
• 46:20
  It's following Christian values that have made this country what
• 46:24
  it is that gave this country the empire that it had.
• 46:27
  It's because we believed in God. If you go back
• 46:29
  and you listen to these songs Land of Hope and Glory,
• 46:32
  you listen to the words, we're thanking God for making
• 46:35
  this nation great. Everyone in this nation pretty much, you
• 46:37
  go back five hundred years, almost everyone believing God. If
• 46:41
  you didn't believe in God, you'd be a weirdo. People
• 46:42
  who think you were crazy if you didn't believe in God.
• 46:44
  We used to read the Bible, we used to follow
• 46:47
  God's rules, try and be a godly people, and things
• 46:51
  were amazing about one hundred years ago, we decided we
• 46:56
  weren't going to read the Bible anymore. We're not going
• 46:58
  to try and love each other and be selfless and
• 47:02
  be honorable and righteous. We're going to be selfish and
• 47:05
  we're going to watch the television and we're going to
• 47:07
  follow celebrities, and we're going to throw the Bible and
• 47:10
  the name of Jesus Christ in the bin. And we're
• 47:12
  going to replace it with Anton Deck. And now we
• 47:14
  look around and we wonder where everything went wrong. You know,
• 47:18
  it's it's not the fall of Western civilization, it's the
• 47:22
  fall of Christian civilization. We've we've thrown God in the bin.
• 47:26
  We don't think we need God anymore. And the Bible
• 47:28
  is very clear many examples of throughout history when this happened.
• 47:32
  When a nation of people turn their back on God,
• 47:35
  things get terrible. And if you look at the United
• 47:37
  Kingdom or America or anywhere around the world where you
• 47:41
  know people, they don't they don't believe in God anymore,
• 47:44
  they don't try and be holy anymore. Look, we look
• 47:47
  down these days on people that try to be holy.
• 47:49
  So do you understand that being a Christian is about
• 47:52
  sacrificing yourself and helping others and trying to be kind
• 47:56
  and looking after the poor and looking after you know,
• 47:59
  widows and orphans and being selfless. And when everyone starts
• 48:04
  working like that, you know, nations rise, communities rise. We've
• 48:09
  thrown that away, and we don't see that things are
• 48:11
  getting worse, and they're getting worse, and they're getting worse
• 48:15
  because we replaced God with technology. You know, when people
• 48:20
  started watching the television, you know, and if you look
• 48:23
  back at old entertainment, it used to be so wholesome.
• 48:26
  It used to be hello and welcome, and I will
• 48:28
  be playing the piano and my wife will be singing
• 48:31
  and playing the harmonica. You look at it now, you know,
• 48:33
  it's twerking and wap and just it's gross. Charles. You
• 48:39
  look at a music video now it's soft core satanic pornography.
• 48:43
  I'm not even joking. I wish I was joking. You know,
• 48:47
  our culture is just being just being poisoned. And I
• 48:51
  imagine there's a large part of the audience that perhaps
• 48:53
  don't believe in God. When you might not see God,
• 48:55
  but I bet you can see the devil when you
• 48:58
  look at entertainment and when you look at you know,
• 49:01
  you don't have to look very hard when you watch
• 49:03
  these the Grammys or even the Olympics and opening ceremonies
• 49:08
  of Commonwealth Games. I've got some great material of mine
• 49:13
  where I'll do a commentary over the top of the
• 49:15
  opening ceremony for the Commonwealth Games and Birmingham, for example,
• 49:18
  with the Giants Satanic ritual, the Olympic Games, London Giants
• 49:24
  Satanic ritual. You know, and when you listen to me
• 49:26
  commentating about these things, and anyone that's got an understanding
• 49:30
  of the Bible and the Scripture knows that these people
• 49:33
  they know what they're doing. Then they know about the Bible.
• 49:36
  They know that God is real, and a lot of
• 49:39
  the stuff that they put out there in your face
• 49:41
  is the exact opposite of what God says and how
• 49:45
  God says to behave down to God made the male
• 49:47
  and female. You know, that's we're living, you know, the
• 49:50
  opposite of that. You don't have to get very far
• 49:52
  into the Bible before you realize that our world is
• 49:55
  structured to be the exact opposite, the exact opposite of
• 50:01
  the way God wants you to live and the way
• 50:03
  God says to do things. And that is the reason
• 50:07
  why this country is falling apart. That's the reason why
• 50:10
  the world is falling apart, is because we're turning away
• 50:12
  from God. And the Bible even says that this is
• 50:15
  going to happen. The Bible even tells you that towards
• 50:18
  the end of the age, which is where I believe
• 50:20
  that we are, people will turn away from God in
• 50:23
  huge droves and things will get worse and worse and worse.
• 50:26
  And this is, you know, clearly the age we're living in.
• 50:29
  You know, the six sixty six, the market, the beast.
• 50:31
  You know, the people that have read the Bible and
• 50:34
  they understand scripture. Most people that don't read the Bible,
• 50:36
  they won't understand that the Bible is history pre written.
• 50:39
  You can read what's going to happen in the next
• 50:41
  fifty hundred years in the Bible right now, and you
• 50:43
  can watch it happen in front of your face. You know,
• 50:46
  people that actually take time to read and study the
• 50:48
  Bible will realize that all of human history pretty much
• 50:51
  has been played out in the Bible, written before it happened.
• 50:55
  You know, the more people investigate the Bible, the more
• 50:57
  you'll realize that, oh, there's a reason why the whole
• 50:59
  world used to be glued to this book NonStop, you know,
• 51:03
  and family was important at that time. Marriage was important
• 51:06
  at that time, and things were good. You know, we've
• 51:10
  thrown all that away for love island, fast and furious,
• 51:15
  and we wonder why things are degrading. But when you ask,
• 51:20
  is there a collective solution to all this? Indeed there is.
• 51:24
  If this it's not too late for this nation and
• 51:27
  it's people to turn back to God and he will
• 51:31
  heal this land, you know. But that is that is
• 51:35
  the solution. But most people, you know, they don't want
• 51:39
  to hear that solution. That's you know, they want they
• 51:41
  want a man to save them. They want Trump to
• 51:43
  save them or Nigel far Ours to save them. But
• 51:47
  there's no man that can that can reverse this. There's
• 51:51
  no man that can bring peace to the earth.
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 51:54
  Speaker 2: There is a man that's going to come and offer
• 51:57
  peace to the earth. But that is the and the
• 52:00
  Bible says to truly look out for that is the Antichrist,
• 52:05
  the man that will combine all the world's religions and
• 52:08
  all politics and rule the whole world. And he'll be
• 52:10
  the best man, and he'll be so peaceful and great
• 52:13
  the people that don't believe the Bible and they don't
• 52:15
  believe in God. Let's just remember that I told you this,
• 52:17
  and just if it happens, remember that I told you this.
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 52:21
  Speaker 2: So this is the period of history that I believe
• 52:24
  that we're in. We're in the period where people are
• 52:26
  falling away from God and things are getting worse and worse,
• 52:29
  and people should be encouraged that, you know, Jesus is
• 52:34
  coming back. God is going to return, you know, and
• 52:37
  the important thing is to get right with him before
• 52:39
  he does.
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: I think you're absolutely right, you know, for people, regardless
• 52:43
  of their particular belief system, the descriptions you cite specifically
• 52:49
  of where things have not just gone wrong but are
• 52:53
  being apparently deliberately made to go wrong is something that
• 52:57
  I don't think people can really contend with at all.
• 52:59
  And of course, from in particular in recent times the
• 53:02
  year twenty twenty and thereafter, where people were incited to
• 53:07
  do the most abominable things to one another, brings me
• 53:12
  on to I suppose you know that the aspect of
• 53:17
  contrition and forgiveness, and I suppose I wonder if this
• 53:20
  relates back at all to comedy, and that we've heard,
• 53:25
  you know, in raking over what has gone in the
• 53:29
  last four years, there's many sort of statements along the
• 53:32
  lines of very well, you know, mistakes were made. You know,
• 53:35
  we didn't know at the time that that was going
• 53:37
  to be so awful. Have you had people in effect
• 53:40
  sort of crawling back to you, particularly after what we
• 53:42
  were talking about earlier with the you know, the success
• 53:44
  at the comedy store, crawling back to you saying, Okay,
• 53:49
  now I see what you were talking about. I see
• 53:50
  that you're writing people from you know, whether agents in
• 53:53
  the past or anyone you know, has anyone had the
• 53:57
  spine I suppose, effectively to come back to you and say,
• 54:00
  you're right. I see what you will think, So really.
• 54:04
  Speaker 2: I don't think so. No, I don't think any I
• 54:06
  don't think so. You're not expecting anyone to either, you know,
• 54:12
  and I'm not sure I don't. I don't think anyone
• 54:15
  said you know, you're right, and honestly I'm not. But
• 54:18
  I'm not particularly you know, expecting them to.
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 54:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think that's happening, Charles.
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: I suppose honestly, I can't say I'm particularly surprised, but
• 54:30
  it's always worth asking as you never quite know who's
• 54:32
  going to pop out of the course at what time.
• 54:35
  But but then so looking ahead, I suppose more on
• 54:39
  a personal level rather than the macro level. Yeah, but
• 54:44
  bearing in mind where your sort of work is at
• 54:48
  the minute, have you got anything in the pipeline particularly
• 54:52
  related to you know, your your belief system as it
• 54:54
  is now, Is that influencing any of the projects that
• 54:57
  you're either concentrating on the minutes or Yes, I'm.
• 55:01
  Speaker 2: Doing an audiobook called Christianity for Dummies. That's a working title.
• 55:05
  I might change. I might change the title where I
• 55:08
  just want to sort of sort of package the message
• 55:13
  of Christianity and the message of the Bible into something
• 55:15
  that you know is easy for people to listen to,
• 55:20
  that is you know that is amusing. I think I
• 55:23
  might have I might have a way to phapture people's attention.
• 55:29
  Like for example, most most people would say, you know,
• 55:32
  I haven't read the Bible because I don't believe in God. Right, Well,
• 55:35
  I would say, you know you don't believe in God
• 55:38
  because you haven't read the Bible. Right The evidence that
• 55:40
  God has realized in the Bible se you've sort of
• 55:43
  got things the wrong way so I'd like to give people,
• 55:45
  you know, an incentive or just an idea about, Hey,
• 55:48
  you know, you know some of the incredible wisdom and
• 55:51
  stuff that you that you can read in the Bible
• 55:53
  that will just completely change your life. There isn't a
• 55:56
  problem I've had in my life that the answer isn't
• 55:59
  in the Bible. It really is the most fantastic, incredible
• 56:03
  life changing book. And I wanted to just do the
• 56:06
  sort of audiobook that would just sort of encourage people
• 56:09
  to you know, pick it up and you know, get
• 56:13
  involved and ask God to come into their life, you know,
• 56:16
  and just because it's it'll change your It'll change your
• 56:19
  whole life. It did for me, So you know that's
• 56:23
  that's I guess influences my you know, my work.
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: It sounds like a huge undertaking. How on earth do
• 56:29
  you set it back doing that? And how did you
• 56:31
  start that?
• 56:32
  Speaker 2: I interviewed a lady called Claire Craig, who I really like,
• 56:37
  and she'd done an audio book, and I was to say,
• 56:39
  audiobooks are thing. Hey, I do an audiobook, and you know,
• 56:43
  that was it. I put it on I put it
• 56:45
  on sale on my website for pre orders, and a
• 56:48
  bunch of people pre ordered it, and I was like, well,
• 56:50
  now I got to write it, you know. So that
• 56:53
  was that sort of just snooked myself and you know,
• 56:58
  now I guess I really need to get down to
• 57:00
  finishing it. And you know, so, yeah, that's that's that's
• 57:03
  what happened.
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: Fantastic. Well, that what we want to look forward to.
• 57:06
  But tell me, I mean, I don't want to pin
• 57:08
  you down necessarily, but when do you think or whenever
• 57:12
  you committed to publishing it.
• 57:14
  Speaker 2: I said it would be out this year. So I'm
• 57:17
  absolutely terrified. They've got six months left. So I said
• 57:21
  it would be out in twenty twenty four. Let's let's
• 57:25
  assume that I stick to that.
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: I was going to give you the chance of not
• 57:29
  actually mentioning the year and holding publication latest interview. But
• 57:34
  well that's one to look forward to. And so okay,
• 57:37
  so we've got the book, the book's coming up, tell
• 57:41
  me forthcoming gigs and that sort of thing. Bearing in
• 57:45
  mind where July twenty twenty four, is there anything on
• 57:49
  the on the immediate horizon that people might like to
• 57:51
  sort of look out look out for you at.
• 57:54
  Speaker 2: It's actually, believe it or not, it's quite difficult for
• 57:56
  me to even get the rooms to put on my
• 57:59
  own shows. That circuit is quite closely controlled. Although I
• 58:03
  did just do my own show in London on Tuesday
• 58:07
  and that sold out. That was quite encouraging, So I'm
• 58:10
  going to be doing a few more of those dates.
• 58:12
  So Tania Edwards is a comedian that I'm working with.
• 58:14
  She's great as well. She's very much along the sort
• 58:16
  of same lines as me and you and as your
• 58:19
  audience probably, and we do we do an hour long
• 58:21
  show together. So we're going to try and get a
• 58:24
  sort of nationwide tour going for that, to get a
• 58:26
  bunch of dates and put them together. So I'd like
• 58:29
  people to look out for that because that'd be a
• 58:31
  great opportunity to come see me and her together. So
• 58:33
  we're just working on the moment about putting you know,
• 58:37
  which towns we can get to and which venues will
• 58:38
  give us a room and when and that sort of thing.
• 58:40
  So that is very much, yeah, something I'd.
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: Like to help for, Okay, perfectly, Well, we'll look out
• 58:45
  for further details more. I'll absolutely put that out when
• 58:47
  there is more on that, and otherwise just sort of
• 58:51
  day to day for people who would like to find
• 58:54
  out more about what you do do what you have done.
• 58:58
  Where should they go to look for your material?
• 59:02
  Speaker 2: Well, you can find me on locals. You're familiar with
• 59:05
  that locals. It's like you search my name on there
• 59:10
  and rumble, I'm on there. You can you can search
• 59:14
  me out on those places. I guess locals and rumble.
• 59:17
  Just search my name, you might find me. They're gonna
• 59:20
  let you. That would be the best place, super Alistair.
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: That's fantastic. I think we'll probably think about drawing to
• 59:28
  a close now. Nice if if you had any sort
• 59:33
  of concluding remarks on on anything that we've covered, I
• 59:36
  think now would be the time to get that out.
• 59:40
  It's been, I mean it's been. It's been quite a
• 59:42
  la cause youer, we cover a lot of big topics
• 59:44
  and I think that you know, what I would say
• 59:45
  from my point of view is that the to the
• 59:47
  start point, the insights into the sort of comedy environment
• 59:51
  and completely eye opening and I think would have been
• 59:53
  for the for the audience. And then again the passage
• 59:56
  through and into Christianity and have that's shaping your worldview
• 59:59
  and and died your outlook is phenomenal. But yeah, just
• 1:00:04
  if there was anything you particularly had to say to
• 1:00:06
  sort of round off, that would be lovely.
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 2: Oh well, sure, I summarized the whole thing, don't I
• 1:00:14
  don't know. I don't know that I that I have anything.
• 1:00:17
  I don't really powerful to conclude, you know, be nice
• 1:00:21
  to each other about that. There you go. That's that's
• 1:00:24
  my message. That's it. It's all I've got, Charles.
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: I've got simple, to the point, very effective. I think
• 1:00:32
  I think we like that. That will go very well.
• 1:00:35
  As I said at the beginning, this has been an
• 1:00:38
  interview for UK Column. To please share it widely. Look
• 1:00:40
  at UK column dot org for notes and relevant links.
• 1:00:45
  If you are able to support UK Column financially for
• 1:00:48
  five pounds a month, and you're not already doing so,
• 1:00:50
  please do consider it. And it just remains for me
• 1:00:53
  to say thank you very much. Indeed for Alistair. It's
• 1:00:56
  been a real delight to have you here and you
• 1:01:00
  can touch thanks Thomas.
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 2: I enjoyed it, Thank you, thank you very much. Soon