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Lineker wins. I can’t believe that he managed to get them to agree to rename the whole thing the GLBC, but that just shows that power he wields. But why did Jeremy Clarkson risk losing his job for wishing for Meghan Markle to be publicly shamed and Gary Lineker gets to keep his after saying let’s be kinder to refugees? They are clearly equivalent. They are both heroes of freedom of speech, just one of them uses that freedom to say horrible stuff that makes people not want to work with him and the other says empathetic stuff that makes people not want to work without him. Exactly the same.
I actually don’t think people should be cancelled for expressing an opinion or making a bad joke and in truth hardly anyone has been. Bad jokes are the inevitable consequence of trying to make jokes. But we also all have the freedom to decide who we work with and who we don’t. It’s how society has always worked. The consensus doesn’t always get it right. In fact it often gets it wrong - look what happened to poor old Jesus and all those scientists who spotted that the earth wasn’t the centre of the Universe etc.
It just makes me laugh that we have got so bad at debating a subject that people can genuinely compare Clarkson and Lineker and not see the gaping difference in the cases. Oh right, I get it now. One of them was being a cunt.
And the one who was being a cunt will be fine.
Welcome back Gary. One would hope that this would be the first step in people realising that the BBC is too precious to destroy and should be independent from political influence, but it will probably end up being the next step in its destruction.
Dammit, really hoped I’d be at full strength for today’s RHLSTPs and it was certainly an improvement on last week, but still snotty (I’ve blown my nose so much over that last fortnight that my snot has turned red) and coughy and tired. Of course I still went to work. No sick days for the self employed.
Unusually for this series, neither guest had done the show before and both of them have made a splash recently, having come to comedy from not entirely conventional routes (though maybe there isn’t a conventional route for comedy). Jordan Gray was a smash hit at last year’s Fringe. So much so that I thought she’d actually won the comedy prize (even though it was just a nomination) but if people thought you won then that’s essentially a win isn’t it and Jordan has won lots of other stuff too! Eshaan was once a banker and Bollywood choreographer who seems to have stumbled almost accidentally into being a comedian and now an actor in a hit Netflix show.
If I had expected any controversy (which I rarely do as my audience is pretty chill) it might have been from the kind of people who say they are not anti-trans but also seem to think that all trans people are only doing it for the toilet access (or worse), but it was in fact Eshaan that caused a mild ripple of frisson in the audience, when he looked out for other Asian people and was challenged by one very polite and erudite man. Eshaan had been arguing that he wasn’t interested in representing a community of any kind and had always felt confident and equal and didn’t want to get involved in causes, but the man worried that this attitude might be seen as vindication for the kind of people who think the world is too woke and there’s no problem with racial inequality. It was an interesting discussion to have and I had some sympathy with both sides, so it was good to get it talked about.
There were loads of funny bits too, of course and I didn’t feel like I was going to die whilst on stage, so that’s an improvement. Though I was flagging in the tube journey up to my car and glad that I only had to drive for 30 minutes or so. Colin Murray kept me awake (on the radio - he wasn’t in the car) and there was no big roadworks so I made it home. I was lucky this time, death only has to be lucky once.
