In that strange media landscape where TV production companies owned by TV comedians make TV panel shows featuring other TV comedians whose own TV production companies in turn then make TV panel shows featuring the TV comedians whose TV production companies’ TV panel shows they just appeared on, there is a new TV panel show in town.
Having totally lost track of how to use a modern television since my son left home, I don’t understand where or how I am supposed to watch the programme, but it’s called Unacceptable and I was able to see some of it on YouTube, alongside algorithmic suggestions that I also watch cartoons of a talking lemon and an interview with the Canadian prime minister Mark Carney.
Unacceptable features a number of talented young people doing work that is evidently beneath them, and is based on a premise that seems oddly irrelevant at this precise cultural moment: namely the idea that some opinions, which they are required to defend in an amusing fashion, are unacceptable. Really?
I don’t know when the wind-powered metropolitan liberal elite wheelchair ramp enhanced programme makers responsible for Unacceptable last looked outside their non-binary tofu and avocado juice smeared north London vegetarian liberal bubble eco-friendly biodegradable windows, but there aren’t really any unacceptable opinions any more. Most people seem to think they can just say anything, and it’s often difficult to tell the difference between opinions voiced by supposedly respectable people in positions of political power and influence and statements you would once only have seen written in blood and human excrement on a toilet cubicle wall.
The Reform candidate for Makerfield, Robert Kenyon, said women should be denied abortions even if they had been raped by a family member; the Reform MP Sarah Pochin said there were too many black people on television; the Reform candidate for Rayleigh West, Stuart Prior, said white people were the master race and had bigger brains than black people; the Reform candidate for Bootle West, Jay Leslie Cooper, said the Holocaust was a hoax; and Nigel Farage made a wedding speech joke, after a gay man died in a celebrity’s swimming pool, about throwing your fags in the pool. He’s here all week! Try the fish!!
It would be fun and fascinating to see the comedians on Unacceptable defend the opinions above, and might tell us something about the nation we are becoming. Of course, if there were Reform candidates on the panel instead of comedians, they wouldn’t have to defend their opinions. Nigel Farage could have said the comments were all “youthful banter”, “the way ordinary people speak” and “stuff all blokes say in the pub after a few pints”, and everyone could carry on as normal. As you were!
And it is into this fractured landscape that strides the colossus that is Count Binface, who, by absurd association, may throw Reform’s attempt to foist fascism on a public who seem to have forgotten what fascism looks like into sharp relief. Not all heroes wear capes. But Count Binface does. And he wears a bin as well. So that bit doesn’t make sense, sorry.
New Readers Start Here: Nigel Farage is facing inquiries from the parliamentary standards committee, and from the National Crime Agency, in regards to his accepting a £5m donation from a cryptobillionaire – either for his personal security or as a reward for Brexit or to do whatever he likes with respectively – and in regard to money received from the convicted fraudster George Cottrell.
So Farage has denied any wrongdoing, as his great friend, “the bravest man” he knows, Donald Trump, would have done, and decided to frame this as a battle between him and “the establishment” and “the media”. Resigning from his Clacton constituency means the current investigations are suspended while Farage is no longer an MP, thus preventing any further dirt being dished at this stage. Then he announced he was standing for re-election, stating explicitly that a second win in the seat, which he assumed was assured, would prove he was trusted by (a small Clacton-dwelling section of) the public, thereby discrediting the allegations against him.
Farage’s media goons have clearly been briefed to keep mentioning the words “the establishment”, without offering to define what the word means, in all their media appearances this week on the media that they apparently never get to appear on because of the biased media. On Thursday, some cynic at LBC even gave Robert Jenrick three primetime hours to spew his lies, largely unchallenged by aggrieved callers whom he either muted or maligned, a commercial decision that will have further discredited the opportunistic and amoral profit-driven wank-windsock of a station in the ears of its listenership.
He will be accused by all the usual born-again proletariat Spectator Paul Marshall-funded satirists for hire of mocking decent ordinary working people, and decent ordinary working bins
However, the trust of the Clacton folk is irrelevant in regard to Nigel Farage’s guilt if, once he wins and the investigations are restarted, he is found to have broken the law. The voters of Clacton, who aren’t in possession of all the evidence, don’t get to decide if Farage is a criminal, sadly. That is for the parliamentary standards committee and the police. A good-natured heckler in Shrewsbury last night suggested I might have ADHD. He may be right. But I’d probably wait for an actual medical diagnosis from a professional.
So the whole Farage Clacton farrago is a pointless and costly exercise in manipulating public perception which the other parties have seen through and have refused to field candidates for. Which is where things went really wrong for Farage, as the only person prepared to stand against him, initially, was an alien aristocrat from space called Count Binface, who suddenly has odds of 5-1 for actually winning the Clacton byelection.
It should all make for a fun summer. But I hope the man inside the bin – a comedy writer who has contributed to BBC panel and sketch shows and to Private Eye – is ready for the storm of shit Farage’s powerful backers are about to rain down on him. While Farage may be racist and homophobic, his fascism is, it seems, largely just a means to facilitate his personal enrichment. But for an extremely sinister and powerful coterie of genuine far-right thinkers, Farage’s election victory would, like the similarly insincere Trump’s presidency, be a means for them to impose their views on the country.
The diligent Byline Times revealed this week that Palantir’s evil genius headman Peter Thiel is backing Farage’s head of policy, the far-right Cambridge University professor of divinity James Orr, in attempts to recruit the young fascist thinkers of tomorrow to their cause, a state of affairs the university has declined to clarify. And it’s unlikely that Farage’s £5m gift came with no strings attached. And the Russians didn’t bot-boost Brexit to see Farage prevented from destabilising Britain further by being binned off by a bin. People like this aren’t about to allow a pretend alien refuse receptacle to get their gateway to power deselected.
Get ready to see the Binface smear campaign step up a full gear of smear. The man inside the bin’s history of writing for the BBC will see him called a “BBC plant”. His Oxford classics degree will see him framed as part of “the elite”, often by people who attended the same university. He will be accused by all the usual born-again proletariat Spectator Paul Marshall-funded satirists for hire of mocking decent ordinary working people, and decent ordinary working bins, by choosing to stand in Clacton at all. But you know you’re in trouble when even the Daily Mail’s miserable Dan Hodges seems to find Binfacegate amusing.
The real worry for Farage will be if those discrediting stories don’t appear. Because then it will mean that his paymasters have decided, not unreasonably, that he’s a lame duck who has backed himself into a corner, discrediting their project as a whole, by putting himself in a position, entirely of his own making, where, in the words of Rachel Reeves, “he has to spend his summer arguing with a bin.”
Binface might yet be Farage’s Waterloo. The history book on the shelf is always repeating itself. British people like to cause disruption, to not do as they're told, and vote for the funny underdog. Once Farage, a golf club bar bore caricature with his cigarettes and his pint and his love of the pound, was that funny underdog, and many were suckered in by that persona. But now he’s a cryptobillionaire’s plaything and an absentee MP. And the funny underdog? It’s the man with the bin on his head whose two decades of comedy campaigning have made him absolutely match-fit for the moment where he just might save the whole country from fascism. For without Farage, Reform is just a ragbag of discredited Tory deserters and thugs who don’t even have bins on their heads.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, with a final November and December London run just announced.
Stewart will appear with the musicians Charlotte Keeffe, Thurston Moore and Mark Wastell in an improvisation based around his forthcoming book, Pea Green Boat, at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall on 22 October.