The Nerve roundtable: How can culture fight back in a turbulent world?

Carole Cadwalladr I’ll start with you Stewart. The Nerve’s focus is culture plus politics and tech, disguising the serious with a bit of fun. Our ethos is culture first. How does that speak to you?

Stewart Lee The idea of being culture-led is interesting, because six months ago, I did an interview for Channel 4 News where I said that I thought it would be difficult to go and do comedy in the States because I imagined you might get shut down or censored or arrested. Michael Gove's magazine [the Spectator] ran a 1,000-word article taking the piss out of me for saying that, saying I was a hysterical leftwinger. That's aged well, then, hasn't it?

I think culture and the arts are something that people in power fear because they can shine a light on all the things that are being done and are going wrong. So it is really important. And we're seeing it shut down in the States. If Nigel Farage gets in, he's going to follow the Trump playbook of trying to close down independent press, newspaper cartoonists, comedy, whatever. And so we need to get ahead of the curve and start to work out how we talk about these issues without being shut down.

Carol Vorderman I have been a part of mainstream media for the last 43 years. And I'm astonished at how rapidly not all, but a lot of it, is becoming clickbait. A lot of TV stations are increasingly desperate for viewers as online viewing has increased and the use of social media has gone up. So they say: “Oh, well, we want to create a fire, we want to get people angry, we want to get people debating something that really is a pile of nonsense.”  But the danger is it plays to the far right all the time.

Carole Cadwalladr Ellen, tell us how art and culture can help us through these turbulent times.

Ellen E Jones They are really important, not least because in the media a lot of the ways in which we communicate with each other and get our ideas across are argument-based. So you'll often find when you're watching Newsnight or listening to the Today programme that the tone makes you more angry and more entrenched in your own position, even if they actually do have some facts to go with it.

Whereas storytelling has this amazing power to evoke emotion in people. And that's actually the only way that you really change minds about all the issues that matter. We have this tendency when times get tough to think arts and culture, and arts and culture funding, should go out the door, as if that's the least of our worries. Actually, it should be central to everything we do. 

Carole Cadwalladr Stewart, how real is the threat to Britain posed by what Farage is doing? The rise of Reform, the rise of quite blatant racism? 

Stewart Lee Well, I think it is a major moment. I'm on tour and travelling around the country. I've been on the road for nine months. I see the flags going up everywhere. They're designed to intimidate people from Southport down to Portsmouth. They're very specifically placed outside mosques or Indian restaurants. So it is a thing. 

When you try to talk about the bigger picture, the problem is that there are so many different narratives happening at once. When I started doing standup, you could do jokes about the news from different political perspectives, but the basic facts were commonly understood and held to be true. Now, if you get in a cab – and me and Nigel Farage get all our best ideas from cab drivers – the guy will honestly tell you that Keir Starmer defended the Southport killer's father or something. All these things have entered the folklore of the news via the unregulated social media of Musk and co. And so there isn't an agreed-upon story to address in cultural comedy. We need journalism that shows its working-out. We need to attribute sources. We need to say where facts are from.

Carol Vorderman It’s made worse by the way the media has become progressively centred around London and political journalism is dominated by the voices of Westminster. And so everybody outside the capital goes: “Oh, for God's sake, do we have to listen to that again?” People who live in other parts of the country see life differently from people in London. So you see this detachment happening and it's feeding the progression of the far right, which preys on people who feel detached. 

Carole Cadwalladr Ellen, do you feel that we are seeing enough stories that illustrate the incredible jeopardy that we are in? And if not, why not? What more needs to be done? 

Ellen E Jones The big mistake that people often make is buying into this idea of surface diversity. So you've got Bridgerton with all sorts of different people on screen that you wouldn't normally see in a period drama and yet somehow Bangladeshi and Indian people still have a 33% pay gap, despite them playing princesses on screen. So the disconnect is there. 

One of the ways to bridge that is to have diversity in positions of power – people who are actually making creative choices. And I mean diversity not just in the sense of ethnic and racial diversity, but in terms of regional diversity, class and gender. We want everybody to see a version of themselves on screen. And that is important. But what is actually just as important is people seeing other kinds of lives on screen, lives that are not like their own. 

Carole Cadwalladr Absolutely. Now can we take questions from the audience?

Audience member What's the panel’s position on the regulation of the press, cross-media ownership, the ineffectiveness of Ofcom and the presence on-air of GB News, the mouthpiece of the right?

Stewart Lee That’s a bit of a pet subject. At the moment you've got GB News owned by a billionaire, Paul Marshall, who owns loads of other things, including Unherd and the Spectator. And Paul Marshall has been specifically criticised by Hope Not Hate for his online postings. At the same time, you can trace all the media in the States being taken over bit by bit by people who have sworn loyalty to Trump. That's why Disney had that wobble when they dropped Jimmy Kimmel and then got him back when they lost six million subscribers in a week.

So I think it is really important to be outside of that, in independent journalism. It comes back to showing where information is coming from and who owns the companies that are disseminating it, and what their interests might be. If people were told about where the news they consume comes from, they might relate to it differently.

Audience member It’s far easier to tell a lie than the truth in politics but on the left we love to explain ourselves. So how can we get our messaging across in a way that’s clear, accessible and concise, but also appealing?

Ellen E Jones I think on the left we have a natural advantage because we are funnier and sexier. Everyone knows that. But that is the point of journalism, isn't it? How to tell the truth and not be boring. I wrote an article yesterday which I was really scared to write, because I thought: “I'm going to get it in the neck.” It was about the new Paul Thomas Anderson film, One Battle After Another, which everybody loves. And I had seen it and I thought: “The way this guy's depicting black women is a bit off.” 

I wanted to write about that. But it's going to annoy a lot of the people who like this film. Anyway, I did it. And it actually went really well. I had a lot of really positive feedback. I think the thing was that I tried to not be hectoring about it. I tried to do it in a way that was like, even if you didn't agree with me, the piece was entertaining to read.

Stewart Lee I thought Billy Bragg did this very well on Question Time recently. He was really good at talking to the Reform constituency in a language they understood about issues that concerned them in a charming and funny way. Richard Tice absolutely hated it – a whole studio of people laughing at him. We need culture and artists and performers and writers that can do that.

Audience member What does success look like for you guys?

Stewart Lee I would like it if there could be stories that made a difference. Success for a thing like the Nerve, also, I think, is in making people feel less alone.

Ellen E Jones I think it's very obvious that we desperately need a properly free and bold media in this country. We've seen how corrosive client journalism has been, how corrosive it's been when media becomes a kind of billionaire plaything, buying a newspaper as an alternative to buying another superyacht. And I think what films have taught me is: if you build it, they will come. It’s about how worthwhile it is to make good things and put them into the world. We need to come together. You need to be part of that if you want that in our country and in our world. So I'm doing my bit. Let’s do it together.

Carol Vorderman is a contributing editor of the Nerve. Read an interview with her here. Stewart Lee writes a weekly satirical column for the Nerve on the state of the nation, most recently about the Riyadh comedy festival. And Ellen E Jones is our film critic, who this week asks if Spotify has killed the music biopic