Over by Christmas – Russian Interference, Vaccines, Brexit Fallout and Dr Oliver Double on the existential threat facing the comedy circuit

Released on Tuesday, July 21st, 2020.

Over by Christmas – Russian Interference, Vaccines, Brexit Fallout and Dr Oliver Double on the existential threat facing the comedy circuit

Don’t worry it’ll be all over by Christmas, promised the Prime Minister. But he didn’t say of which year. Still I’m sure the wars with Russia and China will pass the time. Going back to work, face masks, the constant shitness of Chris Grayling and a little Brexit Fallout because this week’s show was released before the Russia Report and I have no idea what will be in it. Plus a selfish interview with Dr Oliver Double (@oliverdouble) where Tiernan asks him all about the existential threat facing the UK comedy circuit. Which is totally political. Uh huh. Definitely.

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THIS EPISODE IS TAGGED WITH: • Oliver Double, Oliver Dowden, parliament, Patreon, podcast, political, politics, PPE, Russia, Russia Report, satire, Scotland, stand up comedy, stand-up, The Last Skeptik, Tiernan Douieb, UK Lockdown, universities, virus

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Partly Political Broadcast, the comedy politics podcast that has never ever had any Russian interference during its recording *RADIO FUZZ NOISE* (in Russian Accent) podchinyaysya derzkoy rossii. Putin bol’shoy papik! *RADIO FUZZ NOISE* to the best of my knowledge. I’m Tiernan Douieb and this week as the Prime Minister and teenage boy’s bedroom punched into a hessian sack Boris Johnson said we will have a significant return to normality by Christmas, though he could just have meant that at that time of the year stocking up with food and staying indoors is the standard anyway.

For the first time a picture of Johnson with both his partner and son was released on the weekend and baby truther conspiracy theorists took to the internet to say the image was photoshopped, or that the baby seemed weirdly big and why was it in a suit, oh no wait, oh I see. Who can blame them for these beliefs when it’s so confusing seeing Johnson in the same room as one of his offspring that its bound to raise questions. But also, because how can we be sure of exactly what’s true and what isn’t anymore, when it comes to the government? As the Intelligence and Security Committee are about to release the Russia Report this week, should we believe the government – who’ve known the contents of this report since October – when they suddenly blurted out that oh wait Russia did interfere with the election that happened in November and it was with the leaking of government documents on a UK/US trade deal we just didn’t want to say before in-case you realise that we could’ve done something about it but didn’t. Foreign Secretary and medical diagram of penile thrombosis Dominic Raab said he was ‘almost certain’ that Russia tried it on, but ‘almost certain’ for Raab could mean anything as he’s probably almost certain he knows here Russia is on a map, but if you showed him an Atlas and asked him to point at it, he’d likely direct his finger at the window or bin or your face before his eyes went black and you’d have to call an ambulance. But it was them Russians, no not the ones who’ve donated tons of money to the Conservative Party, but the other ones that Labour were obviously, obviously in league with when they got the leaked trade files off Reddit where they’d been for months and no one had bothered looking. ITV journalists heard Raab’s cries of ‘quick look over there’ while he scarpered and they ran straight to former Labour leader and only human created by the Aeolian processes Jeremy Corbyn to ask him if he was complicit with the Russians who obviously put all their might behind him to help him drastically lose the election. Oh god everyone, better watch out for those Labour supporting Russian forces then, as clearly, they’re the reason the opposition is charging forward in opinion polls to, er, ten points behind. Oh. Raab is also absolutely confident, which is pretty big for him and up there with the time he managed to tie his own shoelaces, that Russian spies are trying to steal UK scientists’ coronavirus vaccine research, which will be pretty disappointing for the Kremlin when they discover the UK government has probably mostly given the research contracts to one of Dominic ‘Vizzini looks unwell’ Cummings’s mates who swears he cured himself of COVID by eating dog food.

By the time you hear this the Russia Report will be released and there’s every chance it says nothing of note but has several large black lines through it like an updated version of the Independent Group for Change’s party logo. Remember them? No, me either. Thing is, if the report is so unimportant why has the government delayed its release since last Autumn and why did they try to parachute in Tory shill and early Romero creation Chris Grayling to become chair of the intelligence and security committee, despite knowing as he leaped out of the plane, he’d be the one to realise he had a backpack full of a packed lunch instead. In typical Grayling fashion, even when he’s handed something on the plate, chances are high he’ll fall into the plate face first. So as is absolutely perfect for someone trying to go for chair of the intelligence and security, he was completely unaware of a plot by opposition MPs to give the role to Tom Hollander character Julian Lewis instead. I mean, of course he was and that’s the key quality that mean the government wanted him to get the job so that if he was handed a piece of paper saying ‘definitive evidence Russia helped the Conservatives win the election’ he’d be the idiot guaranteed to let it fly out of the open window and into the Thames while he was trying his best to sit down without missing the seat. Julian Lewis’s prize for nabbing the job? The Conservatives immediately removed the whip from him, because if they were poker players every time they got a bad hand they’d carefully hide it by screaming ‘FUCK THESE CARDS’ and stabbing the dealer. Lewis’s new job means the report is finally being released but its ok because there’s definitely nothing to see here and I’m sure it contains nothing of note, which is why Brexit pigdog Arron Banks is threatening legal action against the committee if they release it, because if he had a bad hand in poker he’d hide it by paying Russian intelligence to hide it.

It’s not just Russia we have to be worried about of course, as the government has decided that telecoms firm Huawei will be completely removed from all UK 5G phone networks by 2027 as they pose a national security risk. Namely that if the contracts with them are kept US President and methane filled puffer fish Donald Trump will have a hissy fit and might nuke us while on the toilet. Really if the government were ever consistent in their behaviour about anything, then like other national security risks, Education Secretary and Jar Jar Binks Gavin Williamson and Home Secretary and personification of when you get a sharp crisp stuck in your throat Priti Patel, Huawei would just get given an even bigger role in the cabinet. Dominic Raab also accused China of gross and egregious human rights abuses against the Uighur population, something the government are very angry about as the Chinese government didn’t by weapons off them to do it. There are reports of forced sterilisation and detention of the Muslim group as well as drone footage of people being blindfolded and led onto trains, and Raab said it was reminiscent of something not seen for a long time, because he hasn’t yet visited Yarl’s Wood. The UK is suspending its extradition treaty with Hong Kong, after China imposed its national security bill on the territory, meaning that any Hong Kong resident that commits a crime in the UK will likely just get deported to a Caribbean country they’ve never been to before instead. China are of course, pissed by all this and plans for Chinese social media firm TikTok to move their HQ to London are looking pretty uncertain, which is a shame because for a government that sacks an MP for getting a job that was rigged against them, you think they’d be into an app that’s all about acting out.

Who had war with Russia or China as their sweepstake for how 2020 will end? Not Boris Johnson who thinks everything will be normal again soon and is insistent that he doesn’t want a second national lockdown as like a nuclear deterrent he doesn’t want to use it unless absolutely necessary. Though unlike a nuclear deterrent he doesn’t want to spend £31bn making sure it’s ready and equipped even if everyone says its not needed. He should really have compared it to having a family in that it’s not something he really wants to do or have responsibility for but will do it if there’s a photo opportunity. Of course, it won’t really be up to the Prime Minister, especially when it seems he stopped following the science weeks ago because he was too out of breath with post COVID symptoms to keep up. Oh sure it looks like he’s trying with facemasks being compulsory in shops from the end of this week, rather than from when Johnson announced the measure, as you know it takes around 11 days for everyone in the media to write op-ed pieces about why something no one remotely gives a fuck about doing is an impingement on their freedom before they run out of imagination and have to move onto something else. There is no science that says facemasks work apart from all the science that says they do that I refuse to read. This is mask Nazism though if everyone wore masks the Nazis wouldn’t have known who wasn’t Aryan and it may have saved lives. What if wearing a mask makes me forget what my own face looks like and I think I’m someone else and stop speaking to my family and never open my post? What if people think my face mask is bunting and start a village fair on my head, and I get homemade jam in my eyes? What if I get confused and think my facemask is some pants and then wear a hat on my crotch and I’m banned from the park? What then? You know, that sort of thing. Conservative MP and perfect casting for a sex pest in Midsomer Murders Desmond Swayne said in the Commons that having to wear face masks is a monstrous imposition, this from a man who wore blackface in public for fun.

He might be in luck though as the rules for facemask wearing keep changing based on what it is that cabinet members remember to do. Inspiration for the 2004 horror film Creep Michael Gove stepped out of a Pret A Manger without a face mask, meaning that rather than say he and everything he does and stands for is wrong, the government changed the policy to mean that you don’t have to wear a facemask when buying takeaway food. This is because COVID, as we know, likes to wait before serving up symptoms. This is vague guidance as always, as what about if I go into a sit-down restaurant but I shove all the sachets of sauce into my pocket and leave? Facemasks are also not needed for offices, a headline that I had to re-read at least three times before I saw it correctly. Of course, you don’t need a facemask in an office because no one actually likes their colleagues. I’m sure facemasks will only be policy for a week at most before Dominic Raab forgets to wear one as Boris Johnson said during a press briefing that scientific advisors don’t make policy, only MPs do, which is yet another glaring issue with democracy. So when Chief Scientific Advisor and sad Harry Hill Patrick Vallance told the Science and Technology committee that there was no reason people should stop working from home, the very next day Boris Johnson told everyone to go back to work which is rich coming from someone who barely turned up even before a pandemic. Parliament closes after Wednesday so it’s nice everyone else has to go to work just as MPs don’t bother. We’ll just all go back to normal from August 1^st and Johnson’s main plan is just to hope for the best, which I’ve been doing since 2010 but hey I’m sure this time’s the winner.

Vallance also told the committee that he advised the government to lockdown from March 16^th, though as we all know the order for us all to shut in didn’t come until March 23^rd a full…oh no wait, sorry everyone, Health Secretary and the My Ding A Ling kid Matt Hancock said that actually we did lockdown on March 16^th. You remember right? We totally did and all those Cheltenham races – you know the ones with thousands of people that Matt Hancock has investments with as does the woman in charge of track and trace Dido Harding – didn’t happen did they? Then thousands of people’s lives were saved and I clearly remember commenting on all the different colours of pigs that were in the sky. Maybe Matt Hancock isn’t trying to gaslight us all and just has no clue of dates, which is why when announcing the lifting of the lockdown in Leicester from July 24^th he announced schools could go back, which will be a shock to all the pupils and teachers who went on summer holidays the week before. It’s not been his week poor Matty, much like every week, as his track and trace programme has been found to breach all GDPR data protection laws. While the government insist there has been no unlawful use of data, you do wonder if their main objection to Huawei was that it’d be taking their job. Hancock has also had to order an urgent review into all the COVID death statistics as it was discovered that the figures could include people who were tested positive for coronavirus but then died of a completely different thing that the Conservatives have neglected to deal with properly, weeks or even months later. So good news for the Department of Health in that deaths from coronavirus may be lower than the statistics suggested, which should make them about where they were once they get round to adding all the deaths that they weren’t acknowledging in the first place. Luckily the DoH have stopped releasing any death stats until this matter is fixed, so you can fully expect the inquiry to conveniently last for at least 2-3 years. The other potentially good news is that the government have signed off on deals for 90 million doses of promising vaccines that are being developed by various companies, though it is hard not to see the government’s record of procuring PPE and wonder if those companies are either all owned by Dominic Cummings’ Nan or all the vials will turn out to be filled with water that has been blessed by someone who was ordained online. Or they’ll give all the vaccines to Chris Grayling and he’ll manage to slip and inject them all into his eye.

So, with COVID death stats being non-COVID, impartial committees having rigged elections, ministers insisting we don’t know which dates things happened, security threats all over the place and science not being followed, who’s to say that is a picture of Boris Johnson’s baby son? I’m almost certain there’s every chance little Wilfred could be the product of Russian interference.

In other news yet another enquiry is being delayed by the government, this time into Priti Patel being a big old bully. Apparently its due to a possibility the findings may be embarrassing. I assume they mean for the Home Secretary, but considering she wasn’t fazed when it was discovered she breached national security and ministerial code meeting Israeli officials while on holiday a few years ago, there’s a high chance she’s just proud of being a total shit to her staff and that’s embarrassing for us as a country that she’s in government. The only thing Patel is actually embarrassed about right now is the High Court allowing teenage ISIS bride Shamima Begum to return to the UK to appeal the Home Office’s decision to strip her of British Citizenship because the classic British government solution to a problem they created is to give it to someone else entirely and then blame them for it instead. Priti Patel had previously said there was no way Begum would be allowed back in the country and the Home Office are now appealing Begum’s right to appeal but the High Court said she has the right to a fair trial. Maybe Patel doesn’t want Begum to appear in British courts as it means they have to find a way to open them for that to happen. Of course, none of this had to happen if only Shamima had been smart and just met ISIS officials while on holiday.

The Education Secretary has set out strict guidelines for universities that are facing bankruptcy to receive government bail-out loans, and these include scrapping any low value courses that lead to low skilled jobs. Bad news for any politics departments then. Universities must also comply with legal duties to secure freedom of speech, which is a scary ideological demand. And how can you have freedom of speech when it costs students £9k a year just to hear lectures? The UK economy has rebounded more slowly than expected but that is what can happen after a sudden harsh break up and an insistence to fuck everything possible without any forethought to the long-term damage it’ll cause all parties. As support grows for Scottish independence, Boris Johnson is going to visit Scotland to make a stronger case for union, because obviously the best advocate for better together is a Brexit loving family dodging twat. This is a man who it was revealed this week, that in 2005 he said he loved fox hunting in a semi-sexual way, which is typical of someone who loves the chase but once he’s got what he wants, has to destroy it. Its weird that anyone would trawl back through his bullshit that far when everyday there’s something else as bad, such as during Prime Minister’s Questions this week when he responded to a question about bereaved families by saying that Keir Starmer ‘has more briefs than Calvin Klein’. This from a man who’s record has bigger Staines than the borough of Surrey and all his policies come up shorts. Thank god Parliament has its holiday from this week, I think it may be for all of us and not just MPs.

And lastly former Chancellor and misshapen prune Philip Hammond has become an advisor to the Saudi government. Based on that time in 2017 when he said driving trains was so easy even women could do it, I’m not sure he’ll last long in the job.

ADMIN

Bongiorno pod people! How goes you in this summer so 2020 that every time the sun tries to peek through, the sky insists on clouding it over with something darker and more depressing? I started running a few weeks ago, doing the couch to 5k thingy, which means I’m currently fit enough that were I to be chased by a scary monster I could escape them easily if they kept stopping after 90 second to 3 minute intervals and an American man kept shouting encouragement at me throughout. I haven’t really done any exercise at all since becoming a dad because sleep deprivation meant that I was out of breath simply lifting up my mug full of coffee for the first time that day, but thankfully lockdown has bored me into attempting again. Or mainly, bored me into eating crisps solidly for 3 months then realising if I didn’t try to run some of that off my new normal would be being crane-lifted out of the flat if I wanted to go shopping. So I am on week 4 of this thing, and I have to admit that I don’t really feel I need the input from the narrator – I’ve chosen Michael Johnson as he says the sort of voice where I expect him to say ‘I’m disappointed in you’ if I fail and that would break me – because instead I just remind myself that everytime I’m outside running I’m not having to do childcare and that really keeps me going. Although I suppose it could also incentivise me to stand still in a park and just not go home and oh, shit, I’ve ruined it. I might not bother with week 5. I don’t like talking about exercising as you find that people always like to tell you how much quicker or less like a sweaty bao bun in shorts when they do it, but I have literally nothing else to update you on this week. I now run, searching for jobs online that may somehow accept someone who’s spent 17 years shouting at people in rooms and parenting. It is very weird trying to write a serious CV when I have to fight all instincts not to add ‘fucking exhausted’ at the end of a list of skills or adding how I once, in a bar in Boulder, Colarado, did a trick shot in pool completely by accident but I said it was on purpose so I didn’t have to buy a round and two men called me a fucking hustler and walked out. That should get me a job right? Right? Urgh. I had a drive in gig that was meant to be this week and even that got pulled with two of the drive in franchises due to local lockdown fears making insurance costs too high. Saying that, I was ambivalent about shouting at load of people in cars from a stage when I usually do that while in my own car and it’s not normally jokes, just swears about how shit their lack of indicating is.

Waffle waffle waffle. You are here, thank you for listening. Thank you especially this week to Joe, Somebody and Baldie for donating to the ko-fi account and if you should fancy doing the same and keeping me alive, the please throw a few pounds to ko-fi.com/parpolbro or even do a monthly reoccurring payment, or join the patreon.com/parpolbro which you can now do in pounds and euros and everything. If you can’t do that, don’t worry, I wouldn’t be able to right now, then please do give the show a review on your podcasting platforms and just generally spread the word, the word being God. No I’m only joking, the word about this podcast. The word being pod. Ah that’s better.

Right a few things this week. Firstly, I thought the Russia report was out today, Monday and it’s not, it’s out tomorrow, Tuesday or when you hear this, yesterday or four years ago. So this episode may go out of date within seconds but hey what’s new and what you have in the middle bit is my frantic attempt to talk about anything else. Speaking of which, next week’s episode will be the last one for a little bit. I’m not sure how long that little bit will be but I need a break for my brain and to find what on earth I’m doing with my career now all the comedy has died. So probably 2-4 weeks. It’ll def be back before parliament returns and I’ll do a few summer updates too, but after next week no full eps like this through August. Then when it does return, it’ll be nearly episode 200, so what do you fancy for that? Lots of MP descriptions? I asked online and a popular option seemed to be getting someone to interview me for once, even though I can’t imagine I’ll say anything remotely interesting. Would you want to send in questions if I sorted that out? Otherwise Rob suggested I get a panel of people and do my own version of actually sensible question time. What takes your fancy? Let me know at all the usual places and happy for a few unusual places too if you want to say, send it to me on an owl or skywriting.

On this week’s show, yes, there is an awful lot of serious awful stuff going on, but I talked to Dr Oliver Double about the state of the comedy circuit because I’m really selfish. What you gonna do about it? Yeah? Yeah? Let’s take this outside, which you can do as it’s a podcast and you can take it where you like. Oh, not as warm as it looks is it? Bloody 2020. And the middle bit is just a Brexit Fallout highlighting some loose ends like a particularly shitty hairdresser or unreliable boy scout.

INTERVIEW WITH OLLIE PART 1

The state of the world today in its coronavirus ridden, weird haired populist rubber bladder leaders, climate change fuckery horror, isn’t really a laughing matter. Which is why this podcast is becoming worse. But it’s even more of a reason that we need to find things to laugh about within it, or outside of it, or just somewhere, because you know if we don’t laugh, we’ll just cry. Frankly I can’t do a podcast of just crying because I do that weird snorting thing and I’ll really hit some horrible noise peaks. Comedy in some form or another, has been pretty important in helping to cope with shit situations throughout history, from the jesters who were able to openly mock the monarch while no one else could, to the surreal Dadist movement in the early 20^th century that mocked the idea of a capitalist society, or the British alternative comedy scene in the 80’s where acts such as Alexei Sayle and Ben Elton among others, became the sort of spoken word punk movement against Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. It might questionable whether or not today’s comedy output in the UK is really taking on the man or if instead no one really understands the pun in the title of Mock The Week, but the fact is, the UK comedy scene is in a very dire situation, with a recent Live Comedy Association report saying that 77.8% of comedy clubs are set to close within 12 months if there isn’t support and 45% of acts thinking about giving up as quite a few of them have been unable to receive any support at all. While live comedy has often proved to be recession proof, much like theatre or dance or music, it definitely isn’t virus proof having people packed into small windowless rooms and making them laugh. But while some of those other art forms have now had funding allocated, it’s still unclear whether Oliver Dowden wants to save the comedy industry or those who work in it, which may be because he’s never experienced people laughing with him.

So, this week I’m being selfish and talking about the industry I’m part of. You might question as to how comedy is as important as the many other areas that have been hit by the ‘rona and I’m aware I had Dan Rebellato on only recently to talk about theatres. But comedy is different because in this age of wanging on about the fabricated idea of cancel culture, stand-up comedy is still very much raw freedom of speech in action and an area of culture that while it still has massive diversity issues, on the surface, is far more open to everyone than some of the more elitist art forms. But look, I’m not going to tell you all about why it’d be nice if I still had a job, so instead I got my former lecturer, the reason I do or rather did stand-up comedy and a certified doctor of comedy Dr Oliver Double to let me interview him for this podcast. Olly has written four books on stand-up comedy and its history, including his latest on the alternative comedy scene in the 80s. He teaches drama and comedy at the University of Kent, establish the British Stand-up Comedy Archive and very importantly, did and still does stand-up himself. I asked Olly all about why comedy is facing an existential threat, why on earth it deserves to be saved and also some questions about the future of higher education.

Quick things before the interview. We spoke before the government’s clarification that comedy does qualify as an art under their £1.57bn bail-out scheme but it’s still very, very unclear how venues or acts will benefit from it. This chat was also a few days before the government’s bizarre demands for universities to demonstrate their commitment to free speech to receive bail out funds. I’ve also edited out about 25 mins of this chat as we rattled on for ages, but I’ll release that later in the week or next week as a bonus episode with some stuff I edited out of my chat with Nicky Branch a few weeks back too. Right. Enough of all that, here’s Olly:

INTERVIEW WITH OLLY PART 1:

And we’ll be back with Olly in a minute, but first…

MIDDLE BIT – BREXIT FALLOUT

Parliament has its recess from the 22^nd July, this Wednesday, until the 1^st of September and rightly so eh? I mean it’s not like there’s anything much for them to do is there? Obviously, MPs do still work and the government is meant to still work but it hasn’t to date and I’m certain that Boris Johnson will be off on holiday before they can even lock up the Commons, at the expense of a lobbyist pal. Something I would usually be angry about but it’s so shit having him here that someone willingly paying to make him go away for a bit actually sounds like what we need. I’ll be looking at the Russia report in next week’s show because it isn’t out just yet, so I thought this week might be a good time to look at some of the Brexit measures that have been clarified like butter and others which are more sort of very thinly spread notions. Like butter. Talks resume on Tuesday and a spokesperson for No.10 swears Britain will continue to engage constructively, but that assumes they’ve been engaging constructively already, which they haven’t. But while the politicians aren’t doing much of a good job, financial regulators, The European Securities and Markets Authority and Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority have cracked open their Memoranda of Understanding incase of a no deal meaning that all them stocks and funds will be safe. Don’t worry everyone, the rich will be fine. I know you were concerned that a no deal might leave all of us in the shit, but I wanted to reassure you that billionaires will still not be in this together. Phew.

Still though, it does mean eating the rich might be an option as there is a huge risk of food shortages with EU trade permits only being available for 2088 businesses if there’s a no deal, rather than the 8348 that have them for this year. 2088 is the maximum amount of permits that would be allowed by the European Conference of Ministers of Transport scheme and basically it means a whole load of trucks won’t be trucking, which means less food, medicine or sneaky dangerous border crossings for you. Still it does mean there might be a lot of free parking at the £705m costing 12 lorry parks in Kent, so should you want to have a cheap trip to Dover to see the pub someone I knew at uni used to buy weed and knock off DVDs in, then you can knock yourself out. Which might be more fun than going to Dover. For the businesses that do manage to trade, its estimated that border checks are going to cost £13bn overall as companies will have to fill in an extra 400 declaration forms a year because it seems there’s a lot of admin involved in taking back control. You can’t just get it done, you have to spend a lot of time with a biro and hazarding a guess at what things mean when the advice won’t be there till July. It’s nice to know that me, being a Type 1 diabetic, with all my insulin coming from Denmark, might not receive it till its way past its expiry date because a lorry driver spent 3 months asking someone in a toll booth what every tick box means.

There’s more admin for the rest of us too, which will keep us all on form, literally. European Health Insurance Cards cease working on December 31^st this year, so you’ll def have to fork out more for your travel insurance if travelling to Europe after then, but I’m sure insurance companies won’t take advantage of this. Nah uh. Wouldn’t be like them at all. Border control will now require you giving more details of your stay, showing your return ticket and that you have enough money for your stay as they don’t want any economic migrants and lets face it, based on our economy at the moment, it’s a tempting notion to cross the channel in search of any cash in hand work picking fruit or veg. Oh and it’ll cost a ton more to use your phone in the EU, a bit like it did a few years ago till they made it easier and now it’ll be harder again. Still it isn’t a holiday if you don’t turn your phone off and get lost and have to sleep on the beach and get put into Spanish prison is it? If you want to take your pet abroad with you, you’ll have a four-month process before they can be allowed to travel, meaning therapy pets are now more stress inducing than not. And of course you can no longer live or work or maybe study in the EU but I’m sure all of that was on the other side of the bus and we just couldn’t see it.

For Brits living abroad, much like EU citizens in Britain, they now have to apply for settled citizen status. In some countries they appear to have made the process pretty easy but in other countries less so, with much shorter application windows. Places like Spain have opted for a guarantee of ex-pats rights to stay if they already lived there before December 31^st of this year, but a lot of the application process is online so many elderly British nationals or those without the internet may be missed out. On the plus side, Brexit is all about sovereignty and it’ll be nice to have our own criminals back on British soil robbing our trains.

Oh, and you might remember that Northern Ireland was promised unfettered trade between them and Great Britain. You remember that when former Prime Minister and what happens if you drink nail varnish Theresa May gave what if the Spanish Inquisition looked heavily rained on The DUP a ton of dosh & promises of a lovely deal in order to vote for everything she did? Well turns out they won’t get so much of that, and while the UK government says trade between NI and GB won’t change, the EU have to grant a concession which they haven’t yet. So, there’s a chance NI will have EU trade laws and have a whole ton of checks to trade with GB. While NI does more trade with the EU than GB, most of its EU trade goes via British ports so there’s a chance any trade will need to fill in 400 forms to get from NI to GB, then another 400 from GB to the EU.

So, there you go. All sounds easy right and as though our post Brexit future will be bright as long as you don’t want to travel anywhere or eat or take medicine. But that is what taking back control is, and it largely makes you realise why it’s so nice delegating shit. During the lockdown, lots of people took back control of their eating and washing up and childcare and all that, but now everyone’s clamouring to go to restaurants and stick their kids back in school. Well there won’t be those options with Brexit. Our dirty dishes will very much be our own, piling up and difficult to ignore until we deal with them. But hey, at least the billionaires will be fine and that’s all that matters right?

And now back to Ollly…

INTERVIEW WITH OLLIE PART 2

That was Oliver Double, who you can find on Twitter @OliverDouble. His latest book Alternative Comedy: 1979 and the Reinvention of British Stand-Up is available to buy now but Olly has told me to warn you that’s its very expensive as it’s an academic book, despite being one about fun things. However if you can get it for a library or educational institute please do and if you can afford it’s hefty price tag, he said the more people who buy it now it’ll increase the likelihood it’ll be released in a more affordable format soon. I will release that extra chat on a bonus pod soonish promise, though one area we didn’t cover is why, despite comedy being open to all, it still isn’t diverse enough now. The main reason for that is becoming harder and harder to survive on it if you’re starting out, meaning only those who already have tons of dosh, and inheritance and don’t have to worry about rent, can take the time to work on the 5 and 10 min sets and EdFringe shows and gig lots instead of working. What’s happening now will likely only make that divide worse and mean there’s even less diverse voices on the scene. So, do check out the Live Comedy Association, who are at livecomedyassociation.co.uk and @LiveComedyUK on Twitter for all their updates on how to help.

I’m aware all my guests for the last 3 weeks have been straight white blokes, but hey, someone’s gotta give them space to talk right? Jokes! I’m afraid next week’s might be similarly un-diverse and then it’s a summer break. However, when this show returns I would love to balance things out again as I do try, so please tell me who you’d like to hear from, what subjects you’d like to hear about and I will endeavour to mix things up a bit. Drop me a line @parpolbro on Twitter, the Partly Political Broadcast facebook group, the contact page on partlypoliticalbroadcast.co.uk or email me at partlypoliticalbroadcast@gmail.com. Or you could get hackers to breach the Twitter accounts of some of the world’s biggest billionaires and then tweet out exactly what guests you’d like to see, only to realise that by not making it obvious they’d been hacked by saying something as equally as unrealistic as ‘I want to support my community’, everyone would just think they’d recommended an interviewee and in which case they’d instantly lose all credibility and I won’t contact them and then you’ll get arrested. As always, it’s probably just best to email isn’t it?

END

And that’s all for this week’s Partly Political Broadcast podcast. Of course, here we are at the end, and there you are patiently waiting, bowl in hand, for your ParPolBro Hot Political Gossip Fact. With Boris Johnson promising that the entire Coronavirus will be over by Christmas, what is the worst broken promise a politician has ever made? No, it wasn’t former Gambian President and man always dressed like the Little Chef, Yahya Jammeh who promised to rule for a billion years, then in 2017 conceded to his opponent. He had already been President for 21 years though, and that is the sort of time after which you learn not to say things a 2 year old might. Nor was it US President and Missing Link George HW Bush who said ‘Read my lips: No new taxes’ and then raised taxes. But to be fair, if anyone had actually read his lips rather than listening to the words, they’d have got ‘no nudes Texas’ which is a very different promise indeed. No in fact the worst broken promise by any politician ever was Boris Johnson when he said it was do or die for Britain to leave the EU on October 31^st 2019, and that he’d die in a ditch if it didn’t. Then it didn’t and he selfishly avoided all ditches and ruined Britain even worser. Then again, ditches are made to hold water, the exact opposite of any of Johnson’s ideas or promises, so maybe he felt intimidated. AND THAT’S THE PARPOLBROHOTPOLGOSSFACT this week! If you enjoyed that or it made you so angry you stripped walls with your fingernails and thus saved you money on decoraters, then please do tell everyone you know to tune into this show, give us a lovely review on any of those podcast app places, and pop a quid or two into the ko-fi or patreon if you can.

Muchos gracias to Acast, my brother the Last Skeptik, Kat Day and Mushybees.

This will be back next week when the Russia Report reveals that all along Boris Johnson was actually the largest of a group of Russian dolls and that the baby photo of Wilfred was actually just the smallest Boris removed from the middle.

BYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

This week’s show was sponsored by *RADIO INTERFERENCE SOUND* Rossiya. V Rossii veshchi pokupayut! *RADIO INTERFERENCE SOUND*