 Hello, and welcome to Downstream, the show that takes Andrew Breitbart's old adage that politics is downstream from culture and goes, yeah, sounds good. Why the hell not? And in that spirit, I am really excited to introduce this week's guest, comedian, host of the MASH report and reluctant standard bearer in the culture wars, Mish Kumar. Oh yeah, so are you. I'm all right. Thank you for taking time out of your very busy schedule of being mistaken for Ramesh Ranganathan. Well, you know, it's a heady week. Get mistaken for Ramesh. Watch seven episodes of Frasier. I've got a lot going on. I mean, listen, I think that, you know, obviously it's a racist microaggression when you get mistaken for another South Asian, but every time I get mixed up with Faisal Shaheen, my credit rating improves. Is it that bad? That's how I feel about Ramesh. And at last, a son my parents can be proud of. Yeah, exactly. He definitely used to upset me, but now Ramesh is very rich. I'm like, you know, maybe that's not so bad. If you ever need to like, I don't know, do like a little bit of mortgage fraud or something. It's gonna come in very handy. He only did a bit of mortgage fraud. Come on, come on, judge. It was just a soup son of mortgage fraud. It's not a big molecule of fraud. It wasn't a big amount of mortgage fraud. And when you think about it, it was in the spirit of post-colonial reparations. So I think I should, I'm just, you know, claiming back what's over my people. Listen, they did not take that excuse when I robbed the National Trust gift shop. They did not, they did not, they did not, the backdated reparations were not, was not a valid excuse. I mean, I think it ought to be. I mean, there can't be any more, any more cynical than the girl who I saw claiming individual reparations. But that is another, another beef that happened. How's your pandemic going, by the way? My pandemic is- Are you having a good pandemic? Have any of your enemies died? You know, that's a good pandemic. I've lost zero enemies as far as I know. It's, yeah, it's fine. It's weird, isn't it? Like I sort of miss, I miss small talk that didn't involve death rates. Like it sucks that our small talk is now like, boy, the air is poisonous. Like I really miss like just the general chat about the weather. My pandemic is absolutely fine in the, not even in particularly the grand scheme of things, just even in the most basic scheme of things. My pandemic is fine because I worked through a lot of it. And it's, it really, it hasn't been a, it's, I escaped relatively unscathed. Everyone I know that's had it has recovered from it. So, you know, and I haven't had it as well. So I mean, all in all, no complaints from me. I think if you're in a position such as mine, you have a sort of moral obligation to shut up as frequently as possible because- Either shut up or lip sync to imagine, you know? That's what we want from our celebrities, either silence or actually doing something so cringy and annoying that it gives us something to talk about. I was thinking about that the other day because it must be coming up to the anniversary of that imagine video and it sort of just shows you just the way all of my friends and my comedic colleagues minds worked. I would say within three hours of that video going up, I had four group messages saying, hey, we're organizing a piss take of that imagine video. It was a bad combination of a sort of like very sort of funny, maybe somewhat lacking in self-awareness thing and a bunch of comedians with nothing to do. And it was a really confluence of circumstances because people were literally like, we got to take the piss out of this. It's ridiculous. But it also maybe also says something about comedy is that like no shade to you lot, but you're essentially parasites on other people's sincerity. So when you see other people being like horrendously sincere, it's like, that's material. I don't think that that is shade at all, Ash. I think that's pretty much the job description. Like I think the word parasite is very apt for comedians. I mean, I want to get into this because I've never tried doing comedy because I think it'd be really bad, but I love it and I love dissecting and cutting into it and thinking what makes comedy work and what doesn't. And I think it's that ability to sort of identify a lack of self-awareness in other people and go like, that's my window. It's certainly something that I think the great sitcoms, I think particularly the great British, actually, no, that's not true. I think the great British and American sitcoms, definitely sitcom characters. It's all about identifying a person's inability to spot their own weaknesses. Like Alan Partridge, it's just all vulnerability, ultimately. And a lot of the best sitcom characters particularly are a sort of hare's breath away from being protagonists in a really upsetting drama about a really tragic person. The line between those two things is so slim. And I think it's why really great, really gifted comedic actors are able to sort of switch between comedy and drama because in some cases, the line is so... I watched Bridesmaids for the first time in years the other day. And when you look at that movie and the sort of circumstances of, it's like there's a lot of real shit in that film. Her cupcake store went under the financial crisis. And there's all this idea of your sort of anxiety about your friends doing better than you. Everything Kristen Wiig does in that movie is hare's breath away from being a really tragic drama about somebody whose life is just spiraling out of control. But as it is, there's a whole scene where people take a dump in a sink. And so that's the fine line between comedy and drama. But I thought that it was uncut gems which like play with that line all the way through. And you don't know until the final millisecond like what the film is, if it's a comedy or a tragedy because it's that really unpleasant... Because a lot of time experiencing a comedy as a viewer is unpleasant. Like you're invited to identify with this person who's making horrendous choices all the time. Like uncut gems just like ratchets that up to 11. Like for the entirety of that film, like my sphincters were clenched. Like it was just so uncomfortable. The scene when they can't get in through the door is like, it's pure... Like that movie is basically what would happen if Martin Scorsese made Curb Your Enthusiasm. And also I also think because of the age we are... You're a little younger than me, but you're younger than me, right? But it's sort of rough age that we're in. Yeah, I mean, I currently look like I've put my own aging app on my own face. Like I don't know how I've managed to do this in the pandemic. But we're programmed to find Adam Sandler funny. And I think uncut gems like Punch Drunk Love, the people making those films know... Like it's a very deliberate thing. It wasn't like, oh, we auditioned a bunch of people. They are deliberately playing with your expectations of Adam Sandler. And that movie is like... You're waiting for 51st dates, Adam Sandler, to come back and to sort of have this happy end and to no longer be this like... Because comedy, I guess in another way, it's always dealing with like compulsive characters. So they're slaves to their own misjudgment or anxiety or that's just very, very compulsive. Because if they had... If the main character in a comedy had any self-control, it wouldn't be a comedy. The thing wouldn't be happening. And so you're waiting for the sort of good compulsive behaviour to like manifest a happy ending. And it's like, oh shit, like he's just been like lending the face. Oh, so yes. So my take on that is that that film has a happy ending. Uncut gems. Okay, all right, hot take me. Yeah, because I think that that is the only... That is the only way that his circumstance ends well for him because he's not going to stop. He won and he would just be back in the same cycle. And in a way, the fact that he crests this wave of winning and everything going well for him and then he just dies is almost the only way his life would end happily. Otherwise it would just be a drawn out cycle of this sort of compulsive... Because he would just never be able to stop. And that the look on his face at the end when he's just lying in that jewelry store, he's kind of smiling. And I really feel like that's the sort of deliberate thing that the Safdie brothers are trying to do. It's like trying to put this like doubt in the audience's mind because you've just seen the guy get shot in the face. But it's not... I kind of... I can buy that. And I suppose like from an internal perspective, I mean, this is where I'm going to be like darling, I went to UCL and did it. Here we go. So Freud is always appropriate. But it is like this kind of mimicking of like a build up of like libidinal energy and then once it's over, you're dead. Like gone. It's like that except you get shot in the face. Except you get shot in the face. Like lying in a wet patch. God, it's a good movie. It's a great movie. Maybe I'll watch that again. I mean, so I didn't actually want to talk to you about uncut gems. I wanted to talk to you because for disclosure, I was like, what? This is the only South Asian who's more hated by the daily expression I am. And so I was like, okay, I've really got... I've really got to ask him like, how did this happen? Like, here you are. You're a desi boy. You land the BBC job. All you have to do is shut up and take your check. And here you are pissing everybody off. And I don't think that it's just to do it with you and your personal, you know, Adam Sandler compulsions to like, this isn't just your death drive out the wheel. Although maybe this is your death drive out the wheel. I think that what's happening at the moment is really interesting because comedy has become so fiercely politically contested and it's the thing which is held up as kind of prime battleground in the culture war. And in some ways it's kind of funny because comedy was never really seen as like the A list of the arts. Do you know what I mean? So it's not the R and C and it's not... Not even by people in it. I mean, like comedy is what you do if you're not hot enough to make it as an actor. I like that. That's what I've been saying to everybody. In my case, I was neither hot enough nor talented enough to make it as an actor. So it was a double whammy for me. But see, that doesn't stop the hop on talented people. And that's the thing that kills me. It's like, if I was just 10% hotter, it went mad, I was mediocre. That's just me hot. But can you talk to me a bit about how you found yourself becoming this flashpoint for the culture war in comedy? I mean, listen, I could very well ask you the same thing. I did think as we were... As I was getting ready to talk to today, I did think, God, this is like some sort of like weird... Like this is some like Daily Mail writer's worst nightmare. It's you and me having a cup. This is like the Daily Mail's worst nightmare version of that scene in heat when Tanira and Petina go for a coffee. Like it's a nightmare for them. Yeah. I mean, I guess I could sort of ask you the same thing. I think there has to be... Listen, am I talking around the obvious brown? Yes. Let's put a pin in that. Let's put a pin in the word brown just for a second because we can circle back to that. I think it's very interesting because some of the sort of culture war arguments were actually sort of playing out a little bit within comedy before they... I guess like it's hard... It's very difficult to put order on the events that have happened in the last few years. And it's very difficult to have this sort of sequence or chain of events where you say, okay, then that happened and then the Brexit vote happened and then this, that and then Trump. And then it's very difficult to put an order on those events. But if you take 2016 as like a kind of breakthrough year for the culture war, if that's a useful way of thinking of things, there had been arguments percolating in comedy the sort of year or so before that. And there was sort of this idea that... And the only reason I really think about that a lot is in 2015 I did a show in Edinburgh that I then toured that had a load of stuff about left wing... Like a load of comedy material about left wing and right wing ideas of comedy. And there's a sort of semi-facetious routine about how I think that it's easier to express left-wing beliefs through comedy. But that is fine because culture evens itself out because it's easy to express right wing beliefs through action films. Elections. And yeah, elections, yeah. I mean, my thing has always been, guys, you should get worse at winning elections because then the comedy about the news is always going to skew anti-government. And I mean, I certainly remember the early 2000s. I don't remember there being a huge amount of comedy talking about how wonderful Tony Blair was. Like, I certainly don't remember, you know, if I think about the things that have really endured from that period in terms of the comedy, I mean, if you watch in the loop or the thick of it, those are not exactly kind, you know. And Malcolm Tucker is the thinnest veiled cipher for Alistair Campbell that I can possibly think of. So in my mind, it was always natural that the comedy that would be around would skew somewhat towards the left because we've had a Tory government since 2010. But there was this idea that comedy wasn't reflecting the broader streams of political thought and had actually, you know, there was this argument about in sort of late 2014, I think, when the BBC issued this somewhat clumsy, but I personally believe ultimately in the long-term good thing, they sort of put out an edict that said every comedy panel show had to have one woman on it. Now, if you think about what a meagre demand that is. We're 50% of the population and we can't be 50% of the panel. And also, they were not asking for 50. They were asking for one, not 50%, one. And that kind of uncorked a real shitstorm of a dispute in comedy. So some of those arguments had been brewing for a while. But very much contained within comedy. There's no reason that anyone outside of the comedy industry would particularly have been aware that those things were happening. So, like, I guess in a sense, it was a kind of trial run for the sort of wider conversations about the culture or so it started in comedy. So what I'm, in a roundabout way, what I'm saying is, I wasn't, I shouldn't be that surprised about the reaction that there has been to me doing what I consider to be very innocuous comedy about the news. It just seems to me to be a very British phenomenon because as far as I can tell, and obviously you do have cancel culture more panics in the States as well, but you don't necessarily have somebody like Trevor Noah or John Stuart when he was on the air being held up as an example of, look, here's a liberal establishment and it's expressing itself through jokes, through the medium of political joke. Why has that become the symbol of, you know, eschewed media culture in this country in a way that it hasn't in the States? Well, I mean, I don't know is the answer. One theory that I have is that we have a lot of our comedy by nature of the broadcasting landscape of this country comes through the BBC and a lot of the arguments about comedy are proxy battles over the existence of the BBC and a lot of the people comedy becomes a very convenient way in for people to bash the license fee and the existence of the corporation and that's a huge factor. You know, ultimately, Trevor Noah, John Stuart, John Oliver, they, you know, they all broadcast on private companies, you know, HBO Comedy Central are not taking money from the American taxpayer. And so I think part of the reason that, you know, the majority of the conversations about comedy do come down to BBC comedy. And, you know, to the extent that even people who don't broadcast on the BBC but get dragged into these articles have to be bracketed. I saw Adam Hills replying to an article where he had been included saying, I've been on the BBC for about 10 years but he was included in this kind of list of BBC comedians. And it's, I think it's a sort of useful, it's a sort of useful way in to attack the BBC in general but then also to claim that there is some kind of nebulous cultural force that is biased against conservatism and comedies are sort of useful way in, I think, for people to make that argument. I mean, do you think that, like, the reason why comedy is identified in a way that, like, you know, oil painting isn't is because comedy forces an audience into a position of being unguarded. Like when you laugh, you very rarely have control over the fact that you're laughing. So if there's something which is seen to be ideological within that, it's seen as so much more insidious because it is this quite physical, involuntary response. Yeah, and it's seen as a tacit endorsement of those ideas, which as we all know from experiencing our own comedy is not necessarily true. There is an extent to which you could be laughing at something and find some of the ideas behind it unpleasant. There are times in which you don't necessarily have control of the laughter. But I think that there is this obsession with that somehow these people who keep winning elections and by and large see their views reflected in almost every single newspaper in the country and have really won the big political debates of the last decade is not enough for them. It's just not enough and they want a total control over the cultural conversation. And the problem with that is that they're too shit at comedy. I mean, I think like when I've seen the kind of comedy unleashed like stand-ups and stuff, what's really struck me about that is how forced the laughter is. It's this kind of hectoring of, you know, they're going to say you can't laugh at this. Therefore, you will. And the laughter itself is like, yes, I'm laughing to stick one in the eye of Owen Jones. Like this really strange, like kind of forced and inauthentic. That's how it strikes me. It strikes me as like really, really inauthentic. The thing that I think is interesting about those things, sort of philosophically, is the idea of that comedy club is that it's a free speech comedy night where you can say anything, which is every comedy night, which is like every single comedy club. You know, and there's comedy clubs all over the country, you know, in every single town or city, there's a weekend comedy club that works on a Friday and a Thursday, Friday, Saturday night. And I mean, listen, I have a deep well of affection for those places because that's where I first experienced comedy is where I first did comedy. And there is something genuinely exciting about the atmosphere in one of those clubs. And some of it is because the audience might turn on you at any second. You know, it is, it does, you know, because people don't, people pay to see a comedy night. They don't, they're by and large not paying to see a specific comedian because those comedians, they don't see in their touring shows. This is you're paying to see a mixed bill. It's part of a night out. There's a lot of people who are very drunk. And I, those environments are incredibly exciting. What I will say about them is they are not bastions of leftist thought. But I mean, I always thought that, like, if you've got a free speech comedy night, you can say anything, you can do anything. And what you choose to do is the same joke about trans people. Yeah, yeah. That's, I identify as a helicopter. That's the, that's the, that's the joke. That's the one, you know, which is not even funny. And also, and sometimes you see people extending the route to that same joke. But I know what path we're on make. Exactly. But also, you can make those awful jokes at comedy clubs. And what I think is really interesting is it's for people who decry the concept of a safe space, they have made a safe space for themselves. They've made a safe space for themselves because they were ultimately oppressed by their own profound lack of talent. And, you know, because it's nothing to do with your political beliefs. Things that work or don't work in those comedy clubs on Friday and Saturday nights. And, you know, it's not a handpicked, you know, if I do a tour show, there's about 5% political variation in the entire audience. Like it's either, you know, it's basically people who subscribe to The Guardian or recently canceled their Guardian subscription. Like basically that's like roughly the political variation in an audience. But in a comedy club, it's much more representative. And you do have, you know, but the reason that they've had to create this comedy club is because their jokes weren't good enough in that work. Because they couldn't sustain contact with reality. Yeah, exactly. A real audience. Yeah, absolutely. So instead, they have to sort of, you know, because you can have whatever argument you want about broadcast network and stuff. But there are really very few gatekeepers in those comedy clubs. Like the booking agents are only going to book people that they know will get laughs. And they've had to kind of excuse that inability to make it work by saying, well, look, the audience is everything. There's such a like pervasive culture of censorship that the audience is sent. And that's why they're not laughing. And I recognize that need to explain why the audience is not laughing as part of some sort of grand political strategy that's against me from when I was shit. So I remember that. So I don't, I'm not unsympathetic. I'm not unsympathetic towards it. But I mean, you had that gig, which like where you got a bread roll chucked at you because you made some Brexit jokes. And Piaz Morgan picked up on it. And it was a real moment of crowing and perceived victory for them. Right. And one of the things that I found interesting about your response, because you were like, well, I'm a comedian. I'm kind of, I'm kind of in this to like have bad nights. I'm kind of in it to like, you know, die on stage occasionally. And I sort of thought, well, in a way, it's really good that what happened was the most absurd version of what could have happened, which is they provided you with a funny situation, which when it's exposed to a wider audience outside of that room of being booed and having a bread roll chucked at you, that that in itself becomes an extension of your comedy. Yeah, it was, in a sense, it was, yeah, I mean, it was so weird. It was so strange because, listen, I take it as a huge compliment that the one time I have a bad gig in that calendar year, it makes the news. I take that as a huge affirmation of my skill as a comedian. But it was, it sounds mad. I sort of don't mind. I didn't mind. I don't agree with throwing things. Obviously, it's very funny. The thing that they threw was a bread roll. And also, I would say, if you're an audience that may have aligned yourselves, may have aligned yourselves politically with a party that's resulted in massive increases in food bank usage, the optics of throwing food around are not great, right? But also, I would say, don't throw things at people. That's not great. But booing is kind of fine. I had a right to say what I said. They had a right to do what they did. And that's the end of it. The thing that became a problem was when somebody passed a video of it to the Telegraph. And then it becomes, listen, I've got to think of a better metaphor for this, but it's a kind of human centipede effect, whereby a thing that happens in the room gets eaten and then shot into the mouth of the Telegraph, which then eats it and shits it into the mouth of loads of Twitter accounts. And by the end, by the time it's actually shot onto the faces of the British public, the story is that I put on a beret and brought out an AK-47 and demanded that conservatives be lined up against the wall of the Park Lane Hotel that they were all in. And so that's when it becomes a problem. When it gets taken out of the room and when it gets taken away from what actually happened, it becomes much more of an issue. And over the course of that 24 hours, that's when the death threats start. And unfortunately, you know all too well about this kind of thing, where the outrage machine takes it and starts passing it around. And then by the time you start reading somebody telling you why they wanted to kill you, the reason is so far away from, I made some Brexit jokes and someone threw a bread roll at me and has become twisted and warped into something else. And it was really funny having to explain to a policeman why somebody threatened to kill me. How do you deal with it? I mean, emotionally, how do you deal with it? For me, clap backs, that's how I feel. I recover some agency from it. Like, you are never going to be able to throw something at me that I can't throw back. But that's the public-facing bit of it. And the private bit of it is like... Yeah, how do you handle that? ...sleeping. So a few ways. One is the really big lesson I had from this was the first time the far-right really, really wanted to kill me was back in 2016. And it was like, I woke up and it was just like insane. It was death threats. It was people trying to find the address of where it worked. It was, you know, all of that. And I had like a few days of not really being able to sleep. And then I was with my best mate and another one of our friends came around and they just sort of quite gently took away my laptop on my phone and put on the Anthony Joshua fight. I'd made boozy milkshakes. And then a couple of days later, I mean, my best friend got matching tattoos, which said PG, which stood for the neighborhood and also pretty gang. And after that, I was like, okay, well, the counterweight to all of this violence is a real life social, you know, kind of big cushiony pile of blankets. And it's a set of people who you vibe with so well and so closely that there's no room for the other stuff. And then also these kind of like real life demonstrations of care and solidarity. Like my best mate doing something as dumb as getting a tattoo on him forever, forever. That's right. To kind of make me feel better. And that's, that's, there's various versions of that is how I deal with it is clap backs and then real life. But occasionally, I mean, you must get this. Occasionally, I'm like, I am dealing with this not very well. I'm becoming snappy. I'm becoming tense. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my partner is very good at going just take a breath. Okay. Just let's just take a breath and think about this and think about this kind of practically. And I think, you know, I like, I'm very lucky. I my job means that I can grab some like what I think what you said about having agency back is really important. And one of the things that I've tried to stop doing so much is spending spending too much time trying to seriously engage with people on Twitter who are not arguing from a point of they're arguing in bad faith. And it's just a waste of time to kind of go, I at no point have said, we should kill all white people. So but you know, because when initially your impulse is to go, that's an awful thing to have said that I've said. So I have to go and correct. But you just don't have, there's not enough hours in the day. And you expend a lot of emotional energy trying to argue with people who won't ever take it seriously. That's one thing when it's anonymous. But what about when it's someone who works for the same institution as you? Andrew Neil is saying that something you've done is anti British dribble and it's really gunning for you. How do you then go? Okay, this isn't a fight that I've chosen to have. And perhaps not in this way of someone who works and so senior within the institution that I also work for. But what do you do? Well, luckily, when that happened, we were broadcasting at the time. So we then we'd had this idea about talking about impartiality on the BBC. For a while. And the week that Andrew Neil thing happened, it was like one of those things where, you know, I couldn't believe what was going on. You know, I look at my phone and Andrew Neil is, I think he was like, it was very late at night. I don't know what was going on in his life. But he had gone on this sort of tirade about how the show was anti British dribble is what he said. And it was all packaged in this kind of tirade about Carol Cadwalader. And the journalism that she was doing about, you know, potential Russian interference in the Brexit vote and the Trump vote. And which I think is a very interesting because you like you realize you're sort of all part of some, you're all like different heads on an amorphous bogeyman that sort of exists for people. But also with her work, you're like, it's lawyers have looked at that work. You know, like it was it was she wasn't just like randomly tweet. These were articles that were published that had to go through like legal. You know, it's it's weird. And but we were broadcasting that week. So immediately, everyone at the show was like, we have to we can do the BBC impartiality thing and talk about this. And we gave Carol a right to reply because that felt like something that should be done on the BBC. And so as soon as you can kind of put things in motion. And again, you like it feels like you're taking agency in the situation. And also, you know, when there isn't a global pandemic on the thing that I'm doing for five nights a week, most of my life is doing stand up on stage. And that again makes you feel like you have control of it. And it being able to tell your own version of a story that's being put out about you on stage in front of people is really important because one of the things that gets taken away from you when and you will well know this, when you get swallowed up into the outrage human centipede, which I swear to God, I'm going to find a better man for you. No, I think I think you've got the right one. I think that's the right one. Once your once something that's been said about you is being eaten and shot into people's mouths and then eaten and shot into other people's mouths. The most important or one of the most important things is to be able to feel like you can tell your side of the story. And yeah, that definitely really helps. I mean, do you think like from within the BBC now that there's perhaps a bit of capitulation to the cultural narrative that's happening around it? So you do get these sort of briefings saying that, you know, there's going to be an impartiality lecture for everyone who works there, that there's going to be a kind of war on Woke and restrictions about, you know, where BBC staff can go politically. The interesting thing is that I don't see any of those things and I would never see it because I mean, these are the slightly boring vagaries of the employment contracts and stuff, but I don't work for the BBC. So I work for a show that the BBC has then bought off Sepatron, whoever the production company. So in theory, I am not, I wouldn't be subject to those things. I don't really understand how it works. What I will say is I think the BBC is really trying to appease people who will never be appeased by it. I think the BBC is really trying to compromise with people who aren't trying to compromise with them. What does an organisation like the Mail or any of the Murdoch papers, what is their ultimate goal here? Their goal here is not to have a balanced representative BBC. Their goal is either for the BBC to effectively be a propaganda distribution network for the government or really what their goal ultimately is for the BBC to not exist because the BBC stands as a kind of buttress against a complete media whitewash by the Murdoch papers, the Rothermere group. The BBC is a direct competitor to them and so when the BBC tries to compromise with them, there is an element of the antelope trying to meet the lion halfway and you think, guys, you can cut off your leg and feed it to them but they aren't going to go, thank you very much. If you give them an inch, they will take a mile and that I think is the thing that I find most frustrating and worrying for the future of the BBC because I think that on any number of levels a healthy functioning public broadcaster is an essential component of a democracy. I think we need, like the National Health Service, I think the BBC a public owned entity that provides news is essential but also from a perspective of the arts, it's good to have a public broadcaster, it's good to have somebody putting money into things that don't necessarily have a guaranteed commercial payoff. I'm just not sure that, even if I take it into comedy, I'm just not sure that a commercial broadcaster is going to risk giving Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant two guys with moderate at best track records, total control of a six-part sitcom. They did it because the BBC commissioner thought, this is good and worthwhile so maybe it should exist. Adam Kurt is documentary. No one else is going to be commissioned in that. It's hard to justify those things commercially and so it is good that those things exist but my concern at the moment is that the BBC is falling into the trap of trying to meet people halfway that I'm not trying to compromise with them. It's idiotic to assume that the mail is suddenly just going to go, oh, they did this, this and this. Fantastic, the BBC is great. I think you're completely right in identifying there are some very naked market interests here at play. There's political interests about government propaganda, there's market interests in terms of wanting to disempower still the biggest beast in the broadcast landscape but I think there's also this third element which is on television, you can see how much the country's changed. From what I see on Telly now, from what I saw 15 years ago, 20 years ago when I was a kid, I remember when Goodness Gracious Me was on Telly, it was a massive family event because we were like, wow, we've never seen so many brown people in Italy and it's not crime watch. This is such a huge moment and now in terms of representation, it is a real embodiment of where the country is in having accepting people that aren't white and also aren't straight and are from marginalized backgrounds as being part of the country itself and do you think that there's a part of that? There's an attempt to roll back the clock on those small measures of representative progress which have been made? Yeah, I think that that's definitely a part of it. I think maybe I was sort of naive in terms of where the country was at five years ago, six years ago maybe but I just didn't realize that there were people that felt that diversity, not diversity is the wrong word, representation is the right word, representation was an attack on them and I think that I don't think I've realized the extent to which that was something that people were that angry about but yeah, I definitely think that there is a part of that that is there is something that offends a certain demographic about, even before I open my mouth, just me sat in that seat on BBC2, there is a group of people that are very very angry about that and the solution for me under that circumstance would be to try and maybe appease them and the fact that I then don't do that just compounds the thing. It's like you can be brown in the public sphere as long as what you're saying in that sphere is Britain does not have a problem with racism, the country is fantastic, as long as you're saying all the right things that make people feel better, you know, what a fantastic job Britain did in ending slavery and ask how it's died but what a brilliant job Britain did, the statues are great, more statues. Do you remember when they just gave us India? They loaned us India for a bit, that was nice, they thought Queen Victoria was sad, they thought she looked grumpy in a portrait so they loaned us India for a bit, that was very nice. If you're saying those things then that's fine but if you have the brazen audacity to be brown and then and then not necessarily have those opinions then that definitely winds people up and then on top of that if you're a brown woman then that's like even oh my god that's even worse. Oh look when you're a brown woman they don't know if they want to ban you or murder you or both, I mean it really is, it's this like such like horny murderous energy that I find it kind of confusing sometimes, like you know my role play with my partner is just potentially voted Brexit, like it's actually really started to like you know mess with my sense of like how people are meant to treat me. I see the things that people are tweeting to you when you quote tweet them and is that like that weird like horny racialized hate, like it's a whole like Freud would have a field day with some of these people. I mean this was actually something I kind of wanted to ask you about because it seems to me that like in a really weird way what you're seeing in America in terms of South Asian representation where South Asian men aren't you know being so desexualized anymore, like you know you've got a South Asian lead in you know a Marvel movie and I don't know what they're giving him and I'm not suggesting for one minute it's the old anabolics but it's very impressive. You know he's stuck man. Let me tell you I've seen those in real life. He's not those are those muscles are not messing around. That journey is not messing around. What I was just like what did you do? Did you like amalgamate the musculature of all the other South Asians in Hollywood so you're just like slicing bits of like you know Harry, Contabula and going up have that stick that onto my car. For me it's not really even the South Asian-ness of it because like I've you know I've grown up watching South Asian athletes in cricket and stuff and you know they're all stuck. For me it's more the comedian. I'm more confused by that transformation as I'm like how does a comedian do that? That's what blows my mind about it but yeah. I mean it's kind of the Chris Pratt trajectory. Do you know what I mean? Like you saw off as like a kind of like a comedian and then it's like oh you're in a Marvel movie and suddenly you've got definition. It's genuinely impressive. It blows my mind. I'd kind of feel like the sexiness of South Asian men. There's more of it being recognized in the States and you can kind of see it the way in which Riz Ahmed is received in the States compared to here. Whereas I think still there are still very very narrow constraints on like how you can be perceived as a South Asian man. Yeah I think so. Yeah I mean I think Riz is probably a really good example of that as somebody who is British started working here and then you know is this kind of like like tiny little sex symbol like like a pocket rocket of a sex symbol in America. I was well I met him and I realized he wasn't that much taller than me. I was like raw like I should have pursued a career and doing what you do and then people would have thought I was tall. But he's you know he's you know when I see something like him in the night of which is a great show and he's amazing in it I'm like why is why is he having to go to America to do that? Like that sucks you know it you know it irritates me when I see it doesn't irritate me I'm delighted for her but when I see Lolly in something like Shrill which is a great show and she's great in it because I know Lolly I know for a fact that like that she is those roles are not those roles don't really exist for her in the same way in this country and like she's been doing comedy stuff and acting and stuff like that for years and it frustrates me when I see I feel like we might be seeing a lot of really interesting talent and like London Hughes has talked about this a lot recently when you know about why she because I mean she moved to LA like just before the pandemic started and the basic subtext of everything she's saying is imagine how bad it was in Britain for me if I had to come to what was then Trump's America in the middle of a pandemic and you know she's totally right and yeah I worry sometimes that there are you know that there are narrower bands and also in this country I feel like every time you start to have a conversation about race people go what about class and then you kind of go 100% absolutely that is a really important conversation and there's no doubt that the one of the things that is being left left behind by representation is class in some way now I would say because of my political bias that that is the result of you know 10 years of funding cuts you know I've seen in the real world what those funding cuts do increased cost of living means that it's harder to exist and subsist like as an artist it's you know I would say that there's economic factors for it but I'm definitely like up for a conversation about class but what you then discover is very quickly people when they say working class they only mean white working class and they don't want to consider to me is that as much as they consider it a rebuked identity politics is pure identity yeah yeah absolutely yeah like my partner is white and he's working class he would never in a million years describe himself as white working class because that is a definition which has emerged as a kind of way to delegitimize the language of anti-racism yeah I mean which is sprung up in that context yeah which is you know which is boringly is like it's kind of necessary for a certain socioeconomic groups to remain politically dominant right the one thing that the one thing that they have to continuously do is to smash any class race solidarity they have to sort of make sure that the white working class believes its interests are in direct competition with all ethnic minorities because if those two groups that you know that's most people if working class people and everyone from ethnic minorities starts voting as a block then that is a really that's a dangerous voting block potentially then the ruling class are fucked yeah yeah that's because I mean I don't want to talk about I don't want to talk about the class thing because I think me and you've got like very similar educational backgrounds I went to a grammar school for my sixth form then I went to UCL you went to a grammar and then Durham yeah and it seems to me like there is this sort of like you start of like university educated you know South Asians with cultural capital who are occupying certain positions within the public eye and then what's missing from that are people who didn't have that background with the emphasis on education you know it was a degree of of social mobility which was allowed because of the class background that your parents and your grandparents had before they came here yeah totally that's like one of the most I feel like that's one of the most interesting things that isn't really discussed you know it's like what were the circumstances because we we've been very good I say we I'm blumping all South Asians into one block here but one of the things we've been very good at is like very carefully inventing the drake myth of starting from the bottom now we're here like we very we very quickly been like we came here with nothing don't ask any questions about what we were doing before nothing nothing so why why why are you in Kenya no reason no reason yeah oh no oh oh uh normal reasons normal reasons world music we were doing world music yeah no exploitation yeah we weren't a manufactured middle class that was inserted by the British into Kenya no we'd know it was one mad but like I kind of feel like when we talk about because you're having to defend some degree of representation against like the forces of reaction and you're right about that I mean sometimes we do reaffirm this myth of like well hang on we're talking about people we were middle class there yeah and now we're becoming middle class here again after like a kind of generation of of or two of of interruption yeah yeah it's yeah it's definitely um yeah I mean listen it's an interesting myth that we have told quite successfully um you know I saw the picture of that Rishi Sunak posted uh oh my god yesterday or the day before where he was like you know you know how could I have imagined that I would and I was like statistically you could have imagined it quite easily my friend you went to Winchester you went to Winchester you went to one of the most elite public schools in this country and now you're telling me oh you know it's no way I could have imagined myself being Chancellor of the Exchequer look at his primary school uniform you don't have a primary school uniform like that unless you expect to be in the cabinet one day I'm like you know in theory in theory stand-up comedy is meritocracy but in reality the fact that I went to Durham University meant that there was already like a comedy organization that went to the Edinburgh Fringe every year and the university would part subsidize our trips to Edinburgh and it was really like particularly in Edinburgh that I first had an idea that like this was something that I potentially could do for a career but also it laid out in front of me what the vague shape of that career might take and I was only really able to go there because of what university I went to and I was only able to go to what university I went to because of what school I went to and you have to be careful you have to really guard against telling the myth of yourself too potently you know or at least you need to have in the back of your mind a bit of self-awareness when you say things like I made it on my own you know like yeah okay okay okay mr. grammar school Durham University you've made it on your you know and you know that you definitely have to like guard against that sort of thing and then you know it's like one of the things that I've I'm so grateful for is that I got you know like I'm really grateful for the fact that I started comedy at the time that I did and lots of people that I met are my dearest friends and but also you know I started at the same time as someone like Romesh and he and I have been friends for that entire time and you know I really valued the fact that I you know you know when you can send each other text messages saying well someone thinks I'm you and I've just had a conversation with them and not told them that that's not the case you know you can go and I have not corrected them because I also stole their wallet yeah it's like that that thing I really valued and then one of the things that I really valued was Nick S. Schuchler who's a novelist and also sort of like I don't even know what the other title you would give him is like cultural godfather he is an enabler he is a shadowy background figure who is just very quietly supporting loads of artists and writers of color yeah he is and the thing is he sort of pulled me because he knows people in comedy as well we kind of met through that and he sort of through this the Good Immigrant which is a sort of book of essays that this thing is the Japanese edition of it which is insane oh my god yeah it's the Japanese edition but he through that book pulled me into this like other world of people from people of color from across a bunch of disciplines and it's through Nick Esh that I you know met people like Rene Adolage and Moose Rock Wonker and Vinay Patel and Innu Elms like I got brought into this like whole other world and it's really shifted my perspective and watching the amount that Nick Esh has done in terms of shifting the conversation about representation and has made me kind of go it's not enough if we are if our sort of group of people the kind of children of the upwardly mobile people who are middle class anyway and then work to regain that status in a maximum two generations but in some cases even one generation what is our responsibility then to the next group of people you know if we if we kicked out if we had doors kicked open for us my first job in television was writing for the relaunched kumars at number 42 oh my first job in TV was writing for Sanjeev and Mira who I you know grown up idolizing so I feel like for me the next conversations that I've got I've got responsibility to have are how how do I make it so that somebody who is talented but doesn't have my educational background or privilege how do how do they get the opportunities that I've got this was one of the reasons why for me that art stuff about Corbinism you know for all of the flaws and you know missteps in the strategy and whatever and you can identify them all in hindsight but the thing that really spoke to me was the support for working class arts and saying that every single child has got an artist in them or a poet or a musician or something like that and it was something which you know collided with me when my mom was telling me this story she's a social worker and she was doing this you know thing where the kids in care sort of tell you how their experience has been and there was this one kid who was just not interested in having that conversation at all and was really really bored the whole thing and he was like I want to I want to be a comedian can I tell you can I tell you a joke instead and because he he also had learning difficulties the way in which he told the joke was just so unexpected it was not a typical pacing and structuring of this joke and it was telling the story and it became funnier because of this kid's completely sideways entry into the humor and so then my mom and the other person's doing the assessment are like crying with laughter then she just felt this tremendous guilt of like there's no obvious way for her to like guide this kid with this incredible talent into comedy and it was this feeling of like almost like a gate coming down of just because this kid has this incredible talent and it's not in spite of their circumstances it's a talent that's from their circumstances and you know he's sort of always telling his own story even when he's not um yeah but there's just no route into saying well the great thing about someone like Josie Long is she sort of is just like she was just like she just gets on with stuff and does stuff so she co-founded this charity called arts emergency which is trying to work to redress some of that balance to sort of manufacture opportunities for people from low income backgrounds um and this is my frustration with it is like when people say what about working class representation you're like yes let's have let's have that conversation and then you realize they didn't want to have that conversation at all they just didn't want to see a brown person on tv like but they've somehow had to like drag this because you know definitely I'm up for having I think that it's an essential conversation and I think that social mobility has got worse in the last 10 15 years um but the problem is and this is coming back to me trying to stop arguing with people who I know are not trying to have an argument with me it's that problem where you get into that conversation and you kind of go oh you you don't care about working class representation and instead of that instead of having that pointless conversation I'm now like talking to Neil and Josie at arts emergency and going hey how can can I help you what can I what can I do to help because that feels more proactive than getting wound up trying to convince somebody who isn't actually trying to have an argument with me and is just trying to call me anything other than the p word which is what they really have wanted to do and you can see them looking they are hitting up the the sorus looking for the synonyms I remember somebody called me a mohammedan once and I was like wow that is like lots of arabia era racism like that is unbelievable like I'm a you actually have to like this part of you that's like where have you even reached for that word I'm you're kind of impressed you're like well you put so much effort into your racism you didn't go for the obvious ones and for that I applaud you yeah you're surprised at what words people reach for for example watermelon smiles and picking and it's it's always a surprise when people reach for those arcade terms of racism I mean so I think this kind of like and kind of natural way brings me round to the last thing which I wanted to talk to you about which is I feel that for as much as the spectator or the telegraph or the Daily Mail try and mark you out as part of a noisy minority that's fundamentally unrepresentative in terms of values in terms of style of communication pop culture references you are just completely representative of of your generation and that's mapped out by voting behavior and every study ever done and so thinking about my fondness for Bob Dylan which I think maybe the only thing that marks me you know but you know what you're like every millennial who isn't like the other millennial yeah yeah that's exactly what I'm like you know I'm not do you are who like you're not you're not special hun like oh you think you just discovered blood on the tracks okay she's not like the other girls you're not special hun is very may very well be my epitaph I mean like the rest of the next comedy show I'm like it's true it's not even like you're talking about like you know Woody Guthrie like you are talking about on the biggest recording artist of all time he's very funny yeah and I think maybe that's why that's why a lot of these people are so angry is it they're sort of angry I'm there maybe we're just in the way and actually it's very useful for them to have us because what they're angry really with is like this like you know every every year somebody says oh my god why is the percentage of people that vote for left wing or centre left parties why is the average age getting higher every year and you kind of go I mean it feels like a response to circumstances it does sort of feel like a response to circumstances and it's that frustration that you know that I think it's like is at the heart of a lot of the you know the cultural stuff you know I think that there's like in the same way as in the states this there's definitely a generation of people that was shaken violently by the election of Obama and the slightly weird nebulous statistic that started going around that in 2042 the U.S. would be a majority non-white country which Harry Kondabala has a brilliant has an album called Waiting for 2042 and he has a joke about how that only works if you think all other races are one race it doesn't like white people still the majority but I think that that like that the kernel of that sort of fear of what the internet conspiracy version of which is the sort of great replacement theory all that stuff that kernel is it is that fear do you feel that what you're doing is sort of talking for you know Keir Milburn calls it generation left so it's all those people who just like aren't going to get on the property ladder can't vote conservative because you've got nothing to conserve values have changed disposition has changed but you're locked out of political powers like do you see that being the place where your comedy is aligned or do you visualize it as something different yeah I mean to be honest that is definitely that's the audience that comes out and sees me on tour and that's the most you know when you do something on television you don't really have you have no idea where where it's going you know we get told a million people watch this week and you're like I have no idea what those but when you go on tour and you see the audiences you have a rough sense of who you're you know and and broadly it is that I should say there are often exceptions of people who are much older than that but broadly it is that group of people or it's at least the group of people who's like political philosophy aligns behind generation left whether they're of that generation or not and you know those people need a laugh they keep losing elections it's like keep like they keep losing elections they're having a tough time and those people you know those people need those people need entertainment and that is you know if we can't have home ownership then at least we've got the comedy industrial complex you know we're doing absolute fuck all about climate change but that's fine Nishkumar's on telly yeah exactly yeah yeah well in many ways I am the ultimate disaster capitalist like Jacob Rees-Mogg and I in many ways are very similar economic models if things get any better you're out of a job yeah thank god thank god there's no sign of immediate improvement Ash thank god otherwise I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have to retrain in cyber this is awesome or maybe you could at last finally become a lawyer at last at last I mean my mom it doesn't matter you know what I'm on she'll be like well you could have done the law couldn't you yeah I know see this is what I think is impressive about your continual reviews to do law because at least for my parents they had to give up that dream at some point when I was like trying to kick a basketball through a hoop and taskmaster I think they were part of them that was like okay the legal dream may be dead but with you you're still on these shows and you're still saying very serious things and arguing in a very coherent way and so it must be difficult the world from the door it's not even that far you argue with people for a living just money she's not wrong yeah and you know if all that childhood of her telling me your grandmother came here with just the sari on her back and a penny in her pocket for nothing it's like telling that story of my 17-year-old grandma I might as well span her face on the boat over you know my grandmother says because she has six grandchildren and two of them are under 18 so the jury's still out on those two but the other four she's like we didn't get a single doctor or a single lawyer now just to be clear I did make friends with the kid at school who's now our family's doctor so I've done but the consistent obsession with having a lawyer in the family makes me wonder what these people are planning on doing I do think that South Asians we're a very litigious people I don't like no idea my mom's like we don't have a lawyer in the family I'm like what kind of legal trouble are you planning on getting into a hostile corporate takeover what are you like what's your plan is there some sort of criminal ring that I don't know about that you're all concerned about like look you never have to have a defense lawyer on call that's what I'm saying you know I'm stacking bricks of coke into like the family people carrier just never that's what I'm concerned about my dad is very mild mannered and that is the sort of thing that people subsequently say about someone who's been secretly bringing cocaine into this country I watch Breaking Bad I watch Breaking Bad your dad is textbook meth cook it's my dad cooking meth I mean that would explain why I didn't see mine for 28 years but you know but you know what I don't even think in some ways I'd really like it if he was like you know a hardcore drug dealer if he was like you know the El Chapo of of great Manchester but he's not I think he's just a bomb sorry I've been away for 28 years but I've cooked a lot of this is my gift to you your inheritance yeah I'd love it I'd be like okay I lost a reason not just um you have two kids it would be a very funny it would be a fantastically funny left turn for your career to go into a sort of suddenly have you heard about Ash yeah she's she's running a meth empire now like it turns out her dad was like a serious and now she's just oh well I guess I guess that is the trajectory of all public leftist yeah I guess um you know once Corbinism failed we all had to find we all had to find another way to live our dreams you know some people got behind Keir Starmer I got I got really into crack dealing so oh my god but Nish thank you so much for joining us and giving up your time to come and chat with us on downstream this week it has been my pleasure Ash let's all labor under the misapprehension that I had something better to do look I'm just trying to hype you up bro in case your parents are watching this I'm like he was he was doing something socially productive and useful before he came on to talk to communists about dealing meth before he came to have the to contribute his half of a Daily Mail readers worse nightmare conversation let's see if we can conference Owen in here oh my god my my I mean I I really love like people say that like you can't give up your white privilege but I've never seen someone so committed to giving up any any sort of oh my well wishes that might come his way because of being white he was like right I'm just gonna that guy's really trying to burn his bridges that guy's burning his white bridges left right and centre I mean that it's an ally ship or is it death drive I don't know I don't know but sometimes I worry about him I respect it I absolutely respect it I do kind of think that it's appropriate that like we end this show as with all good Navarra content with an intervention for Owen Jones she's like look politically I think you're doing great work but sweetie we're worried about you so worried about you we're genuinely so worried we didn't have a choice you could have opted out you got a nice white face you're born white and male you won the jackpot of life and you spent it all on fireworks to let off in your own bathroom you're like the Mario Balotelli of white men like why is it always you Owen Jones is UK politics is uncut gems that's who he is Owen Jones has uncut gems his life it's oh god I mean I really hope that it ends it ends a different way for him that's that's all I can say I'm worried about him but he's doing great work he's on that like list of it's just when I see him or you I just I know that the merry-go-round is coming towards me I mean it's just like one of us three is going to be the main character of right wing twitter for the day and it's just keeps going around it's like oh it's my turn it's okay this just had a rough time of it so you know when that when that stuff happened the awful stuff happened with Sophie Duker when when Sophie Duker responded to a conversation that the white host of the show instigated under a topic that he and his writers had prepared and somehow Sophie Duker got the blame for it I sent her an email being like welcome please collect your gift bag from the friend test we shall see you at the secret meetings oh thank you so much gary killed the recording got it gary