Ange Lavoipierre: Dark Humour, Morbid Curiosities & The Comedy of Death

Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, screen rats.

I'm back again with another great episode of Television Times Podcast.

Now, this week, we have a great guest, the Australian comedian, Ange Lavoipierre.

Not only is she a comedian, she's also a broadcaster and journalist and works for ABC in Australia.

Now, I saw Ange performing in Edinburgh this year.

I just had to get her on, because she was just so fucking funny.

She really just took my breath away, so I just felt like I had to speak to her.

And we had a really lovely convivial fun chat.

I think you'll agree, sort of turns into, at one point anyway, a kind of therapy session for me, well, maybe both of us, I'm not really sure.

Anyway, it was a great laugh, and I really loved meeting her, and she was a fantastic guest for this podcast.

Now, normally I wouldn't do this.

I wouldn't tell you what song I've popped at the end of this particular episode, but I'm going to today, because of what's happened in the news.

So today's song is called Everything Could Change in an Instant.

It was recorded in Tokyo in 2006, and it was a direct reflection of what was going on in British politics anyway, and the wider world.

But it was mostly about that sort of David Cameron sort of turning up as a new Tory leader over here and sort of overshadowing Tony Blair on his way out.

And he was very much the new kid who was basically taking his mantle.

Now, for those of you who are following current events in the UK, you will, and from abroad, I'm sure, you will now know that David Cameron is back.

The pig is back in town.

He's back in number 10 as Foreign Secretary, even though he's not an MP.

A lot of people have mentioned he's unelected, so they've made him a life peer, which means he becomes a lord instantly.

So now we have an unelected PM and an unelected Foreign Secretary.

Isn't that great?

The man who literally fucking calls Brexit is back to wreak havoc.

Now, I don't hate David Cameron like some people do.

He's a moderate in some ways.

It's good to see that there isn't such a, you know, a slurry of right-wing lunatics in the cabinet like there was very recently.

And I know this isn't a political podcast, but it's impossible to sort of, to not talk about this because it is literally what this country has been going through for 13 years, nearly 14 years of Tory fucking rule.

The guy who started the whole thing, the austerity king, Mr.

fucking, you know, I can't eat a hot dog or a Mars bar without a knife and fork.

He is now back.

It's kind of unbelievable, really.

So that's why I put that song at the end.

But it is really, really strange, isn't it, that the king of Brexit is back, the guy that didn't want it to happen, the guy that lost the referendum is back.

But I guess in some way I should be happy there's a lot more remainers in charge now.

I don't know.

I don't know what to think.

So there we are.

That's something I could not not mention, considering the bombshell news story that it was just yesterday over here.

Anyway, let's get on to our guest.

Move away from all this political nonsense for now.

This is the wonderful comedian, journalist, broadcaster, artist.

I'm going to call her an artist because she really, really is.

This is Ange Lavoipierre.

Welcome to Television Times, a new podcast with your host, me, Steve Otis Gunn.

We'll be discussing television in all its glorious forms.

From my childhood, your childhood, the last 10 years, even what's on right now.

So join me as I talk to people you do know and people you don't, about what scared them, what inspired them, and what made them laugh and cry here on Television Times.

Nice to meet you.

Hi, how are you?

I'm good.

I mean, actually, in truth, I've still got whatever plague that every Australian seems to catch when they show up at Edinburgh.

Just whatever medieval diseases contained in those walls, we'll get and our weak little antibody and immune systems can't cope and we'll hit the deck and then slowly spend the next month or two trying to crawl back off the deck to extend the metaphor.

I first saw you at Fast Fringe on literally the first night I got up there.

I was there for about a week.

I saw Fast Fringe and you came on and did your-

Sleep meditation.

Yes, your sleep meditation character, which made me laugh my head off and thought, I've got to go see that show.

I wanted to see the other one, but we'll talk about this, but I have a slight aversion to blood.

Even though it looks really funny and I've seen trailers and I've obviously immersed myself in your work in the last few days.

Things I haven't seen.

You haven't got a lot of comedy online.

You kind of locked down, I see, which is quite a good thing, I guess.

No.

Well, I'm sort of like, are we in the podcast proper now or are we just like-

Yeah, pretty much.

Fantastic.

I love that.

I love that.

No, that's great.

No intros.

Yeah.

I think I've always had a sense that I've always just wanted there to be quality control, and it can be really expensive to get stuff filmed beautifully and put up.

I know TikTok is different and you just chuck stuff up, but I've always been a little bit risk averse about that stuff because I've got this media career in Australia.

I've got this whole other public profile as a journalist.

I talk about important things and sometimes I'm talking about culture or whatever it is, and it's a bit of a mixed bag for me.

But sometimes my comedy is pretty absurd and it's pretty off the wall, and I think Australia is quite a small place, and I just had this sense that it wouldn't necessarily make heaps of sense for me to have, I don't know, I did a spot at Ruben Kay's Variety Night at K-Hole at Fringe, which is just this fantastic night and I adore Ruben and the show that he puts on.

But the character that I did for that, I'm scurrying around in a fucking bin bag with my ass out, and putting my hand and talking about making weird sounds.

It just couldn't be further from like, and now I have some facts to tell you about corruption and also artificial intelligence.

Yeah, well, that's the thing.

I mean, because mostly your comedy seems to be character-driven these days and quite theatrical as well, I would say.

I come from a theater background, I worked in theater for a long time.

So I can see that aspect of things.

Did you train as an actor or?

No, I'm wildly untrained.

You look like you have.

That's so nice.

I've seen people through the whole RADA process and all that, and they're like a wooden spoon compared to you.

Trust me.

You do look like you've been through the theater mill, for sure.

Thank you.

Honestly, that doesn't sound like a...

I don't know that everyone would take that as a compliment, like you've been through the theater mill.

What I mean is I mean that in a positive way.

I do know what you mean, and I really appreciate it because no one's ever thought I had training before.

You don't look like a lot of comedians who do theatrical pieces.

It looks a bit like when Joey is in a play in Friends, how American's show plays on television, which is always really abysmal.

My performing partner, when I'm not doing things on my own, that's how performing partners work, is Jane Watt.

She's properly trained.

She went through one of the prestigious acting schools in Australia, Wobba.

It's based in...

Yeah, in...

Western Australia Performing Arts.

That's right.

Guessable, guessable.

Yeah, not like W-H-O-P-E-R.

It's just a big acting school.

Because you don't have Burger King, you have Hungry Jacks, so they're not really good.

So we just saved that for the acting school.

But she's incredibly, she's like a proper, she's like a capital A actor.

And she'll sometimes will be on stage and like, because we do quite a silly, absurd little show, like, I mean, I love it.

I think, you know, absurdism is a completely valid genre.

And you know, I think we, particularly people who perform in it sometimes have a habit, particularly if you're a woman and if you're, you know, I guess it's sort of the earlier part of your career to say, like, it's just this dumb little thing that we do, whereas actually, I've got like, and just denigrate it.

But yeah, yeah.

Well, I read your article on needing more women to do gross comedy.

I think you're onto something there.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think there's a value in being in being discussed with little grommets and weirdos.

And it points out something quite important about the world we live in.

But not to overstate things, of course.

But it was this quite odd feeling when we started to, I guess, formalize this show that we've been mucking around, you know, try and sort of get it in the kind of shape where you could tour it and, you know, bring it ultimately to Edinburgh.

And she would use this language that I just never heard before.

She, I can't even ruin it if I even try and repeat it.

She's like, we'll mark that or whatever.

And I'm like, what?

Like, what do you mean?

It's just I'm a total amateur.

And she's anyway, she's got little bits of elixir tape on the floor for the blocking and all that kind of stuff.

She does that sort of thing.

And she uses language.

And she thought I was taking the piss out of it the first couple of times.

I'm like, what do you mean?

What does that mean?

And she's like, don't be mean.

And I'm like, no, I'm not being mean.

I just don't know what you're talking about.

Please stop and tell me what you mean.

Your little theatre words.

I'm just a humble journalist.

You became a journalist for ABC at age 19.

Yeah.

She was extremely young.

Yeah, it was young.

I went through school a couple of years early, which they don't do anymore, because they think it causes problems for you socially.

Well, I went through two years.

I was two years behind my cohort the whole time.

Anyway, in Australia at least.

Which meant that I was sort of a bit interrupted because I had actually never properly finished high school because I was diagnosed with leukaemia at the beginning of my final year of high school.

I'm fine now.

But I had two years' worth of treatment, which covered the final year of my schooling and then what would turn out to be the first year in university.

And so I kind of never got my year 12.

It was weird.

They let me through.

Anyway, I don't know.

Cancer opens a lot of doors, apparently.

Americans always call it their general diploma of education or something.

And if they don't get it, they have to go back on their 40 and get it and stuff like that.

Oh, yeah.

We're much more casual about that in Australia.

An Irish friend of mine once described us as an aggressively informal people, and that's really stuck.

And I think that's kind of aggressively informal.

I think that really extends out to everything, like schooling, attainment, regulation sometimes.

It's in the language, isn't it?

I mean, I've got written up here.

I've got journo instead of just journal, because I know that's what you call yourself, absolutely, even in the most professional circles.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

No, I mean, journalists are the worst for it.

It's like a more exaggerated version of being Australian, is being an Australian journalist, because we will shorten every word that's possible to shorten.

But yeah, so as a consequence, just because I managed to remember to finish this story and don't get lost on six candidates, which I am want to do, I ended up in university at 16, just because school had kind of spat me out at that age, and I couldn't leave town.

I grew up in a country town.

I mean, Jane would scorn that because she grew up on a farm, and I'm like, I grew up in the country, and it was like a town of 30,000 people, just west of Sydney.

So country and country in Australia, you know, there's a couple of different levels of that.

Yeah, I see that on the TV shows a lot where there's literally, we watch quite a lot of Australian television, if there's any kind of, like on the bad TV shows, like I'm married at first sight, or Farmer Needs a Wife, all those kind of silly shows, which we do watch sometimes, I must admit, it's embarrassing.

But there's always this kind of like, well, I'm a country person and he's from the city, and I'm like, he's from Adelaide.

And they're acting like he's from LA or something.

Yeah, I was catching up with, who was it?

It was a, not to name drop, but my good friend Chloe Petz, a comedian who I love here, who just kind of got to know the circuit this year actually.

But she was saying that she really, that they were saying that they really love the pace of life, like the relaxed pace in Sydney, which is a very funny thing for Australians to hear, because Londoners say that, but Sydney is like the paciest place in Australia.

And we're like, well, gosh, I mean, everyone's in such a rush and in such a bad mood all the time.

It's like, this is like going to Fiji, I think, for Londoners.

I worked in a burger bar in Darling Harbour one summer, and I used to take the boat.

I'm so sorry for your loss.

I used to take the boat to work.

I was like, this is so cool.

This is the coolest job I've ever had.

Very badly paid.

I'm not sure it was entirely legal.

No, it sounds like it was definitely legal.

But yeah, so I was in Bathurst where I had not planned to be.

I had planned to be like out in the big wide world, but was pretty stuck there because I was pretty unwell and needed to be around family and, you know, kind of continuity of care from an oncology perspective.

And then I was like, oh, well, I guess I'll go to this university here.

They seem to have journalism and then ended up quite liking it and doing, you know, having it sort of just suited me for whatever reason, probably ADHD.

I don't know.

Yeah.

So then uni kind of spat me out, although I never really finished that either, at 19.

And I started picking up shifts at the ABC.

I don't think they knew I was 19.

I don't think they knew because I didn't, I mean, you don't kind of lead with it.

And they more sort of, they go like, oh, well, you're in your third year of university.

And you know, before, I think before my 20th birthday, I was like showing up at Prime Ministerial press conferences and, you know, having to like ask, I think it was Tony, was it Abbott at the time?

It might have been.

Just getting into runs with people.

I can't remember.

Just like, just being, you know, a journalist as you would be in Sydney as well, you know, where kind of a lot of it happens.

And in a small country town we call Australia.

And yeah, I don't think anyone, I think that kind of worked out later that I was 19.

They're like, oh, we let her do what?

And yeah, but then they, I don't know, then I was in there and they couldn't get me out.

And I've been there for 15 years, which is a long time.

That's amazing.

I tried to read as many articles as I could.

And there's only one that's stopping me sleeping.

And that's the one on Loab.

If that's how you say it.

That fucking thing kept me up at night.

That is scary.

That is scary stuff, especially when it starts speaking back.

I know it says it doesn't want to be evil and all that, but that really opened my eyes.

And I know there's a lot of stuff online about AI, a lot of fear mongering.

I've had a lot of things that are just a little bit over the top.

That just is the closest one that seemed like an entity talking to us, and it really was quite disturbing.

Yeah.

So for context, for anyone listening, what I did, it was about a year ago, it was before ChatGPT, less than a year ago, it was about November that this story came out, it was before ChatGPT had come out, we had GPT-3, so the precursor, we had some image generators, but it's just sort of the crest of that wave of generative AI, which we're all kind of thoroughly sick of hearing about, either because we're like, yeah, we get it, or it's so terrifying, we don't want to hear anymore.

Or we don't get it, it's become like crypto.

Or we don't get it, and it's exactly, it's blockchain, and we just are like, shut up, shut up, shut up.

So I think there's this really interesting moment where this technology that, unlike blockchain, is going to change the world around us, and everyone's going to go on like, la, I don't want to hear.

Another catastrophe, no thanks.

Another catastrophe, no thanks.

It's somewhere between climate change and blockchain in terms of how people engage with it as a media story, which is kind of my, I feel like it's part of my job to try and get around that and tell people what they need to know.

But this was before, for context, this was kind of like, before everyone had really heard of it, this was a bit of an educative mission.

But there's this artist, really incredible artist named Super Composite, Steph Swanson, who was working with some of the image generators in their earlier iterations, I think, some of the ones that are fairly available online.

And through a series of processes that I won't bore you with, discovered is probably the best word for what happened.

She discovered a kind of image of a woman.

But the woman, normally you'll get a random person every now and then, but this woman, in a block of four images that an image generator might churn up, if you're familiar with these things, they might be disparate.

You might get a ball, a chair, a vista and maybe a person, I don't know, whatever it is, just four different images.

It came back with like four of the same woman.

And she had these really distinctive characteristics.

She looked kind of bereft, devastated, like a little spooky maybe, and always located in the same place.

All of that's super weird.

And again, without wanting to get overly technical, no matter how Steph, this artist super composite, tried to sort of navigate away from the image of this woman, she was very persistent in the process that you used to generate images.

Not only that, but she showed a tendency to appear with images of like slight content warning, maimed and dead children.

There were gory horror images.

These are not image generators.

These tools are not designed to create that stuff.

And even to talk about, to give her agents to be like, she, like Loab, this person, it's kind of nuts because it's just a sort of a fluke of the machine.

Unless you actually believe in magic, and I don't think that anyone here does.

But it was something about it that just captured the imagination.

And for me, what it demonstrated was like, here's what we don't understand.

And here's the extent to which we don't understand it.

A sort of slightly spooky internet ghost story to help communicate that.

Not to be like, because people got quite mad.

People were like, this is a beat up or you're saying that you're giving this a supernatural quality.

I'm like, no, I'm telling a story in a spicy way for sure.

But if you read through at no point, I'm like, we go to great pains to say...

But it still makes you feel that way.

That's the thing, because we don't understand it.

If we don't understand something, we usually give it some kind of, who's the guy?

Oh God, Richard Wiseman, whose Paranormality book.

And he talks about that a lot, the things we don't understand.

We just say, well, we can't understand that, so it must be the paranormal.

I'm writing that down.

That is a hot recommendation.

Yeah, it's very good.

I'm very interested in this stuff.

He kind of comes from the magician kind of world, but when it comes to things like this, I think it's that thing, you know, like it's the double thing.

I don't believe in ghosts, but if I see something spooky, a bit close to bedtime, and I get up in the night, I'm going to see that in the garden.

I don't believe in it, but I still put the fucking light on.

So it's that kind of feeling.

And I think when I read that article, it gave me that same kind of feeling.

Of course, it's just computer code.

It's not Terminator 2.

We're not all going to be killed by the robots.

But there's something going on there that we don't understand.

But I also don't understand how I'm on a rock floating through space.

So there's a lot we don't understand.

Right.

The theory is just instructive.

The way that your mind constructs a story around it, it's instructive about the things that we don't know and what kind of, on some deep, primal level, it's triggered some sort of uh-oh, uh-oh feeling in the backs of our brains, which is interesting in and of itself, so we're worthy of attention.

It's a very interesting time.

I'm wondering where this is all going to go.

It seems like the year, it's like the thing of the year, isn't it, this year, chat, GPT and AI?

Yeah, we did a follow-up, which was, I did a follow-up, which was kind of more about the very interesting strain of thought within the community that is building this stuff, where like a certain percentage of them actually just really believe that this could lead to the end of the world.

Like we're not talking about like, you know, what you and I were essentially lay people when it comes to, you know, computer science at this level.

You know, we don't know, we can be like, I feel like it's scary, it's going to end the world.

Who cares what we think, really, at the end of the day.

But the people building it are kind of like, oh yeah, like it could, it could all end, it could all actually bend down.

We might be actually building the death machine.

And they think that, which is, they're not certain.

No, well, they never are.

It's like Manhattan Project.

You know, they didn't know if it was going to set off a nuclear reaction to blow up the world.

It was the same with CERN in Switzerland.

Nobody knows, but they still flick the switch.

See what happens.

Yeah.

Well, we're flicking the switch.

We're flicking all the switches right now.

We're just like running, like sprinting up and down the switchboard, just smashing switches.

It'll be fine.

Smythe Guys?

Yeah, Smythe Guys.

Smythe Guys podcast, did that come from your journalistic background or was that something you wanted to do anyway because you had a podcast before?

Yeah, well, I was making the ABCs, so the Australian National Broadcasters first daily news podcast for four years.

It was kind of their foray into that.

And then when I moved off that, and I sort of, I don't know, I had a background in hard news journalism, like chasing politicians around, going to corruption trials, murder trials, but had this sort of parallel career in comedy and more of an interest in just, I don't know, entertainment feels like a dirty word, but I just think whatever we're doing in the news a lot of the time, we are not engaging people anymore.

Like we're losing people kind of under 40 at a rate of knots, and that's partly to do with the media environment and the way that there are just a lot more places people can go to get whatever they want.

And a lot of people just, as we were saying, AI, climate change, blockchain, people are just like, actually, no, thank you.

No more news, no more information, goodbye.

Which I understand too.

But I guess I have an interest in talking to people about the world in a way that interests them and doing something that brings meaning, that makes meaning of the world, but doesn't do so with the voice of God.

The podcast was about that.

So was the other podcast that I worked on.

But yeah, this was my first big...

Shmike Guys was me making my own podcast with the ABC for the first time.

It was holy and solely my own thing.

And I got to just make a weird, but very detailed podcast about...

So it was taking a trend, something big in the culture, and actually, wait, how did this get here and what does it say about us?

So taking a small window into a big world.

So for example, like, okay, how did Crocs go from being the embarrassing...

I want to listen to that one first.

How did Crocs go from being the embarrassing shoe from the boat show that your dad would wear and you would die if they wore it to school drop-off or whatever, to being like a Balenciaga heel and like you could pay 1400, so you know, you pay like 700, 800 pounds for a croc, a single croc or two Crocs.

It's just on the back of that sort of plastic Kanye sort of shoes, isn't it?

It's a trend for like things that look like they've been made on a 3D printer for like thousands and thousands of dollars, which makes no sense to me at all.

That's definitely a parallel, but we wanted to sort of, yeah, I guess, because there are some really big reasons about like, big things about modernity and why we are where we are that inform Crocs.

Like if you kind of explode the Croc, you'll find a lot of interesting things about where we're up to as a society.

I definitely wore them, but they weren't...

Not sure they were real.

I think I bought them off a market somewhere.

But I wore the hell out of them.

And I remember wearing them all the way through my travels.

And when I got home to London, I was still wearing them like some kind of knobhead.

Did you get bullied for it?

I didn't have to, because I looked at my feet and they were black with dirt, because London is so dirty.

My feet were like, oh my God, I can't wear these here.

My feet are disgusting.

And then I went out and bought socks for the first time in about six months.

I went to Royal Albert Hall last night to see Rufus Wainwright with my friend, Dan Wye.

And we had, neither of us actually, Dan lives here in London, I'm visiting, but neither of us had ever been to Royal Albert Hall.

And it was for the proms.

And it was like this, you know, it was this very beautiful night.

Yeah, and for people who don't know that part of London, I certainly didn't, but you know, it's this incredibly affluent area and you know, you're wandering around and, you know, there's just like money falling off buildings.

Every building is ridiculous.

It's bananas.

And we came home and you know, obviously you have to catch a couple of trains to get home as you do.

And we kind of, we got back here and we're having a drink back at this apartment.

And we sort of wiped our faces at some point, because it's what Londoners would call a heat wave.

It's not, it's like 20, it's like 28 degrees.

It's like you're all made of ice cream here.

But we wiped our faces and there was like soot that came off.

I'm like, look what it did.

We're Dickensian orphans.

Seriously.

Look, it's wild.

Anyway, I had no idea.

But yes, so yeah, Crocs, not a shoe for London.

Not a London shoe, no.

When I was a kid, I used to travel on the London Underground with my nan and she was a smoker and they had smoking carriages.

And she'd always insist that I sit in the smoking carriage with her, obviously, to travel all the way from East London to North London.

It took two hours, right?

My times really have changed, haven't they?

It's really quite funny.

And my nan would make me sit in the cancer box.

Yeah.

And we sat in there and they had, because these were really old trains, they were still running then.

They had like wooden window frames.

And my nan would say, don't touch the wooden window frames because you'll get sooty hands.

And so I'd always do that.

But I'm telling you, I looked like a chimney sweep when I got off that train because I would touch it and I'd scratch my face.

And by the time I got to North London, I was absolutely covered.

It's just so indicative of that generation as well to be like, do breathe the air, like do breathe the smoke, don't touch the window.

Don't touch the window, stand behind the ice cream van and suck in all the food.

Yeah, it's fine.

Oh, it's disgusting when I think about it.

I can't believe they existed.

Smoking underground trains.

I mean, they don't even have an emergency exit.

I can't believe smoking planes existed, particularly when you keep in mind, you know, these days, they're like, do you have any loose batteries?

Like, if you've got a loose battery, it might explode.

And you're like, what?

How fragile is this whole operation?

Like, what do you mean?

Like, I don't know if I have any loose batteries.

Like, maybe, I mean, is this vape okay?

Yeah, you're a little shoe bomber if you take a vape on.

Yeah, like, what is it, a hot air balloon?

Like, what is going on here?

And, but then back when air travel was significantly more, like, planes were just falling out of the sky every other, like, every other month, they just hadn't worked it out yet properly and the pilots were drunk.

And so, you know, a much more kind of risk, like, the risk profile on flying in those times was higher.

And they were like, yeah, you can smoke.

Yeah, bring the little fire, big as a matches, prison fireworks.

Like, they were just...

Actual matches, of course, and a lighter.

Yes, yes.

They didn't give a shit.

They were just, yeah, anyway, so...

Smoking on flights wasn't banned in Europe until the year 1997.

And actually, the French national carrier Air France did not actually ban smoking until November 2000.

Yeah, you could smoke on a flight to Turkey from London in 97.

That's moderately...

Really?

Pretty recent times, if you think about it.

Yeah, that was like Clinton.

Like, that's like, that's modernity.

Before the millennium, you could pretty much, we could smoke in pubs and smoke everywhere, really.

Yeah, you could actually, yeah.

I sort of prefer that.

I'm not a smoker myself, nor a vaper, but I sort of, I preferred it when it was contained, rather than just like people outside doors blowing it at me.

It was way better when there was like an area, that was fine.

But I always think it's funny in countries like Singapore or China or Japan where they just stick them in a glass box.

So you just in a big glass box, you see a face come to the window now and again.

It reminds me of like when you were a teenager and you wanted to smoke either like weed or like anything, you would have to do it in a car because there's no way for teenagers to be except in cars.

And so you just see these like cars that were, I don't know if you call it here, but we call it like Dutch oven.

Oh right, like a Cheech and Chong car full of...

Yeah, like it's just like a car full of smoke because it was the only place that you were allowed to smoke and like being at Changi Airport or whatever and seeing the little glass box where people smoke, you're like, you all look 14 to me right now.

You know, you see American phone boxes from the 70s, it's like this little hood over a phone box.

There was one of them at Changi Airport when I first went there.

They didn't have a smoking room.

They had smoking, kind of like what you put your hair on, old lady would dry the hair on.

Like they'd lean back in and they'd smoke and the air would just go whoosh.

Like a little space hat.

Yes, and it would just suck the smoke through their hair.

I thought it was unbelievable.

That's the future.

I mean, we've got to write this down.

This is fantastic.

Why hasn't this been scaled?

This should be rolled out.

Absolutely.

Right, I'm gonna try and steer this into some television, if that's all right.

Okay, here's the thing why I laughed a little bit, and I was like, I wonder how this is gonna go, when you asked, when you said, come do this podcast, I went, sure, absolutely.

Always, yes.

I have not owned a TV though, that worked and like was hooked up to air, since I was, since I lived at home.

So since I was 17 or 16, that was the last time I had like a working TV.

Every now and then I'll get like a job in TV and I'll sort of have to pretend that I watch more TV than I do.

I'm also just like pathologically busy.

Basically, the things that I watch, I really watch, I tend to like really get into things occasionally, but there are huge, like just holes in my knowledge you could drive a fleet of trucks through.

I'm gonna do something I did with, I've done it with two people in Edinburgh.

I'm gonna ask you to pick a number between one and 20.

If you could embody a TV character in real life, take a fictional character and embody that person for 24 hours, who would it be?

It would be Natasha Lyonne's character in Russian Doll.

Which is interesting, I guess, because she lives the same 24 hours over and over and over and over again.

But I think that's one of my favorite TV shows.

And I loved that that world exists on the precipice of being hyper realistic, but also spooky and magical, but without ever really articulating that because it hints at the wonder of the world and sort of tries to reflect that without ever being so messy as to be specific.

Because I think once you become ultra specific about the type of magic you're trying to portray or the type of like spookiness, you immediately present logic problems that the world starts to fall apart.

So they kept it just vague enough and just spooky enough and poetic enough that it could be described or reflected rather.

Yeah, it just felt like a big sort of mental health allegory, like resolving a trauma as a way to kind of move past, you know, repeating the same mistakes.

Yeah, generational into generational trauma.

But yeah, looking within to kind of be able to move past the sense of repeating the same mistakes over and over again, just what she was doing.

But I also just like that character.

I think I also just want to be her.

It's not like you'd want to be like me in that world.

It's like, I would want to be her.

Yeah, use my brain and personality with Natasha Leone's because I think she's so funny and incredible and hilarious and wry and the way that she moves through the world without at all caring what other people think.

She doesn't give a shit what people think.

And that's something that I would love a little bit more of that essence in my life, in my personality.

Wouldn't we all, right?

But yeah.

I think she's got a new show out, but I can't watch it yet because it's too close to that one.

I want to give it a beat.

You know what I mean?

I kind of see her in that role.

So I can't watch another thing so soon.

Maybe give it a few years.

Yeah.

That's, you know, I once met a guy who loved Nirvana so much that he, and he was like very young when he worked out they loved Nirvana.

And he worked out as you do that Kurt Cobain was gone.

Nirvana's not making any more music.

And went, I don't want to exhaust the back catalog too quickly.

I'm going to pace myself.

I'm only going to let myself listen to a new Nirvana song, like one every three weeks or something like that.

And just get through the back.

I don't know if that really held out.

This person was in their twenties when I met them and they started doing that.

But anyway, I just, I've always thought it was very, it's an uncommon characteristics and uncommon choice.

And I think by telling about a person when they hold back and they're like, I'm gonna wait to consume this next thing because it's not my innate way.

Yeah, I can't do, like my wife, she's not mine.

She will, if we're watching something and another, like especially, and I say this, cause in an Australian TV show, I was watching Utopia, which I love that sort of, I love that show, but I was also watching Fisk.

The same two people are in it.

And I was like, I can't watch this till I've watched that.

And she was like, well, I don't care if it's the same actor and not me, but I can't, I know that's, that's when he decided that he's that guy and she's that woman.

And therefore they can't also, I can't watch it at the same time.

Okay, so what that seems like then is that you have managed to really thoroughly, you're a person who can really, or does, or necessarily really commits to, like you're incredible at suspending your disbelief, perhaps.

Like you really commit to the fiction of whatever the story is that you're engaging in.

Is that so to say?

Unless it's like American actors in films and it's like, well, that's just Tom Cruise.

Yeah, I can't do that because they're the same people all the time.

Right, but you're willing to be actually convinced of the reality of the world that you're watching.

For a period, yes.

How do you go with horror films?

Recently, a recent convert.

I always hated them, always disliked them, never liked horror, don't like gore.

I didn't like Scream and things like that at the time, probably a bit after.

But now I really love like Blumhouse movies and kind of, for some reason, I don't know what it says, I think it's not good, but I quite like films where people like, two people will go to the outback and someone will follow them from the fucking garage and it's Mick or whatever from someone similar to Wolf Creek will happen.

And I'm like, I like a survival flick or things like that, or a woman will get like, my God, that film, that Australian film, Hounds of Love.

I've never seen it.

Oh fuck, Stephen Curry, the comedian, Being Evil.

It's brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

It's probably the best film I've ever seen.

What?

It's up there, it's top three.

And it's just, I know it's only loosely based on what happened to some schoolgirls.

In, I'm assuming the nineties.

But it's so dark and it's so bleak and I'm so, I'm not gonna ruin the ending, but it ends all right.

But like, you're watching it and I just, you know, there's something about someone taking someone and trapping them and then them getting away that is incredibly fun to watch.

And I don't mean it in a fun, fun way, but it's just that they get one over on the oppressor.

I mean, this is why people love to watch post-apocalypse films, right, is because what you're doing is you're projecting yourself into that scenario and going like, how would I go?

How would I survive?

Kicking him in the face.

And so you're doing like, you're treating that sort of genre of horror film, right, as like a, like with a sort of escape room mentality of like, how would I do?

How would I go with this?

I can't, I mean, that's not my favorite one.

I like, I like the kind of like mind, mind bendy ones, like Infinity Pool, the new Cronenberg, because I'm a fairly recent.

I also like body horror.

Well, I actually don't, I mean, I wouldn't have said that I love body horror, but I think I liked that that was sort of, I liked the sort of psychedelic cosmic horror aspects of what Cronenberg Jr.

was doing there.

It may as well be genetic.

And similarly, there's an Australian horror out at the moment, which is kind of, you know, getting so much buzz.

Tell me more.

It's called Talk To Me.

Yeah, so it's out with, it's got A24 distribution, but it's an Australian production house that made it.

It's the same production house that made Babadook, if you ever saw that one.

Oh, Gail, Gail, terrifying.

Yeah, so psychological, psychological horror and like what is real, what is not, which both like is the most terrifying thing for me.

Like the genre, the sub genre of horror, which is like woman slowly loses her mind is like, I find it incredibly difficult to watch, but also incredibly compelling.

And I think something happened in the last couple of years where I realized that it's like, it's exposure therapy, right?

It's like, you got like, oh, oh, I don't like the sound.

They're like, oh, horror, that concept sounds scary to me.

But then you watch it and you realize that you just get to the other side and you're like, well, that wasn't so bad.

And actually what I got out of it far exceeded the discomfort, whatever discomfort I might've felt at the time.

That said, I'm not watching these things alone.

I actually went to start watching Last Night in Soho the other night.

So I was like, you know, it's the thing where you like, watch the, well, it's horror.

It's like psychological horror.

Don't say anything I've not seen it.

No spoilers because I started watching it.

But I was like alone in a house, in like an old London house.

And I'm like, I actually can't, I actually have to wait till I have company to watch this because I think it's going to be too much for me.

So there is still a limit.

I'm still like, but I think horror is kind of come through as maybe one of my favorite, like horror or horror adjacent stuff is now.

I'd say horror adjacent for me.

Yeah, my favorite thing to watch.

Yeah, me too.

I watch, sometimes I watch all of that.

Like it'll just be that, and I'll throw in like a sort of slightly gory Korean actiony horror film as well.

Like they do zombie films really well.

And I don't like zombie films.

I think they're stupid because I don't believe zombies can exist.

But I mean, like so much of what happens in horror can't exist.

No, no, of course not.

But like that's not a barrier most of the time.

But I mean, for example, a more realistic iteration of the zombie genre would be The Last of Us.

Did you get around that?

I did.

And I've talked about it before, but I have a problem with children getting killed in things and stuff like that.

I don't like seeing kids die or someone shoot a kid or something like that.

I just, you know, and there's spoilers on the show anyway, so we say that at the beginning.

Sure.

But initially I watched the first episode on my own.

I got as far as that happening and I went, fuck this, I'm out.

And then I watched it again about a month later.

We watched it together and with my wife and she, we got over that hump and it was brilliant.

Of course it was brilliant, but I do find that a bit of a barrier because I had, anyway, no.

That's so interesting.

No, it's not boring at all.

I think this is really interesting stuff.

I like, I actually, I mean, perhaps it's something you want to move on from, but like just finding what people's sticking points are in horror because I mean, let's like work from the starting point that we all know, we all know, in the same way that we know that magic isn't real, we know that the horror films are just that, they're constructions.

Like it's all just constructed narrative, except when they're retelling a true story and then you can't really take on that because what they're reflecting is something that happened in the world anyway.

Yeah, like Amityville was real.

Come on, it can't be, can it?

Come on.

But like, even when you get to the moment in, there's a particularly challenging moment in the film and talk to me, which you may struggle with.

But it is, you know, it's a particularly violent moment with a teenager.

It's like something really awful happens to that person.

And it's, you know, through the lens of like, there's super supernatural things are happening.

So it's not like, but you know, it's a device to tell a story and it's there to shock you.

And for me, it's like, oh, woman slowly loses mind is the really challenging thing.

That's the one.

And it tells us something about ourselves, right?

But like, I think what's really interesting is like, because all of these things, like horror shows us things that are objectionable.

That's maybe the defining characteristic of the genre.

It shows us things that are supposed to be, to revolt us on some level, like probably on some moral level, like it's supposed to upset.

That is kind of what we're doing there.

And so I think it's really interesting when people pick things out of the pile, like not that though, not that.

And I count myself in this as well, because that's no more morally objectionable than the other thing that was sort of...

No, of course so.

But it's just what we're able to tolerate.

And we have an ability to go, it's not real, it's not real, it's not real, we're just watching a construction.

But somewhere that safety that we have for ourselves, that it's not real, it's not real, it's not real, breaks down.

Yeah, and I don't want to think about things like that, because before I had kids, I wouldn't have given a shit.

I would have just watched it.

And for me, it was all about animals, animals, I am vegetarian for 30 something years.

I was like, it's all about the animals, all about the animals.

Now I've got kids, can give shit about the animals.

It's like, I see people going, oh, but you got to like save the dogs from kibble and stuff.

I go, yeah, I guess so.

But maybe get the fucking people out first.

So like, but I would have been the opposite 20 years ago.

And now I've got kids, it's like, well, I don't want to have that in my brain, because I have a lot of stuff in my brain.

When I'm like chopping vegetables, I'm thinking, if this knife flies out of my hand and chops their finger off, I'm going to, you know, so I'm always looking for danger, you know, and I think I just don't want that poison.

So I guess that's why I don't love that.

That's, I mean, and it's what you find sticky as well.

It's like the things that are psychologically sticky to you that are going to like hang around in your brain.

And you know from experience what those are.

Well, I do know from experience, because I wrote this book called You Shot My Dog and I Love You about me growing up in Ireland.

And at one point I was actually, I don't want to bang on about that, but like you know, it's a book about, it's a mostly funny book, but there is a bit in it where my parents actually locked me in a room for quite a long time.

And so that I know where I get that sort of want of survival.

I didn't actually break out of the room and I did do as I was told and I did stay there.

So I know what it's like to sort of have that impressive, you know, waiting for someone to let you out sort of thing.

So I know that's probably why I like those things and why I don't want kids to be, you know, hurt.

Well, that is completely understandable.

And I think what's really interesting is that there are two, sorry, this is me turning to me psychoanalyzing you.

I'm sorry.

This happens sometimes.

I'm so sorry.

This is what I do.

I don't mean to, I think I'm in the wrong profession.

Whatever this turns into is great.

I love it.

Okay.

If we were to split your like personal experience apart into the two kinds of horror genre that we've been talking about.

One is like escape room, person is trapped, person needs to escape.

I love an escape room shot film.

Oh my God, I love them so much.

Yeah, you love those.

But that is like equally a part of like your, if I can be so presumptuous as to call it your personal trauma, then as what was done to, you know, like harm being done to a child.

And yet one half of that, harm being done to a child, you cannot abide to see reflected on a screen or you find it very challenging.

But the other, you find compelling and you can't get enough of it.

You want more.

You're like, I wanna see how they get out.

And I don't know what the split is there.

Maybe it's because you overcame.

You sort of came out, you're okay.

And you are who you are now.

And so it's kind of a safe thought exercise maybe to go like, how does a person get out of that room to replay that?

Whereas the harm done to kids, you're now like, but my kids.

Yeah, because me as a kid trying to survive some kind of thing has happened and I've been through it.

And it's the worst thing that could happen, not sexual, only violence, as if that's a good thing.

So now I can sort of probably play that out by watching things like, if I see a film come on like the ledge, or like that film, was it just called like Fall or something?

Two girls climb this tall tower and they can't get down and something happens, it's like, oh yeah, this is so my bag.

If that happens just before a hotel stay, I'm like so happy.

I'm like, that's a perfect seven o'clock movie right there.

You know, just anything like that.

I just lap it up.

They're not all built like you.

I love that that's like a happy place for you now to be like, let's see how they do it, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I guess so.

Well, that speaks a lot, doesn't it?

Yeah.

I should be asking you questions.

You're a host this week.

The journalist in me dies hard.

It really is very hard to subdue, apparently.

I think I'm on to something.

Can I get salt on this script?

This sounds amazing.

Yeah, you can.

It's called...

Peep, peek, peek.

I worked in this, just for a day, in this place called British Sugar, and they said, oh, if you just climb up that ladder over the boiling hot sugar, and just clean up that thing.

And I was like, is this fucking 60s Batman?

I'm gonna fall in here and die, right?

60s Batman, try like Industrial Revolution, like sending a six-year-old down the coal mine.

Anyway, me, me, me, me, me.

Wrong podcast.

Okay, I will ask you, let's spin it to something really simple.

What's the funniest thing you ever saw on TV?

This isn't definitely the answer.

Like I don't have the answer to hand.

There's definitely be something funnier that I saw on TV, but I do have a memory of Monty Python.

I mean, so I, you know, I grew up, you know, in the nineties, I was born in 89.

So, you know, I was watching whatever we had managed to tape off the TV on VHS.

You know, that was kind of my comedy diet.

And we'd managed to like snaffle Monty Python's, I think it was The Meaning of Life, you know, when it was being played out sometime on Free to Air.

And that was the thing that I watched again and again and again and again, to the point where my parents pretended not to know what the tape was and like taped over it because they're like, the same way that my father, Heedle, his Beatles records from me because I wouldn't stop playing them.

And he's like, you're ruining my favorite band.

I need you to stop.

But I just did it with Beatles records.

I did it with Monty Python, The Meaning of Life.

I think it was The Meaning of Life or maybe it was enough, something completely different, but I just have this memory of being unable, physically unable to stop laughing.

I can't remember which Monty Python is, but it starts with like a series of explosions.

That's the TV show, isn't it?

Now for something different, I think.

And that's something completely different.

Yeah.

And maybe it was that.

And I remember seeing that, it was the first or second time I'd seen something, and just seeing a person in it.

And you know that there's a person in the bush or whatever and you're like pan back a hundred meters or whatever, and it just goes, and then you like snap, like smash cut to another, people exploding basically.

And I thought that was funniest shit I'd ever seen.

In my entire life.

And it was probably what made me fall in love with absurdism was that like those, for a lot of people, I think, like Monty Python did that for a lot of people, right?

They're responsible for a lot.

I was thinking a lot about that.

I was kind of working on it, as I sometimes do.

I've got a half written essay somewhere, which I'm yet to finish, but it's about what makes some deaths funny on screen.

Like look, they're talking about, for example, the season finale of White Lotus.

Obviously, this podcast is full of TV spoilers, but in this instance, I want to be extra vigilant.

If you haven't seen season 2 of White Lotus, skip this entire section, go to the next bit of music and listen to the next part, because there are massive spoilers.

So Jennifer Coolidge's character, we all know Jennifer has to die.

We can feel it coming, but it's the most shocking and sudden and undignified death.

Yeah, she's just like bam, we love this character and she's just like head trauma.

And it's like sort of shot at a sort of murky, you know, not overly close angle.

And it got me thinking about what makes some deaths funny on screen.

What are the mechanics that make a death funny?

And I was thinking back to that Monty Python sketch.

And I think it's like, if you turn the violence up, like past a certain, there's like obviously a window where it's unfunny.

But then if you take the violence to such an extreme level, it's like, oh, you don't get to see like their face being ripped apart.

Like you just see smithereens, you just see an explosion and you pull back.

Because it shows you something about the insignificance of the death and that like death becomes absurd when it's contextualized sufficiently.

When you're like, oh, it's just one person and the world is so large.

Maybe it's something about that.

I don't know.

I'm spitballing here.

But like why those deaths were so funny?

Because there wasn't context.

Like for people who haven't seen that sequence in Monty Python, there's no like...

What is funny about it is like you don't know the people who are exploding and dying.

It's just a series of people exploding and dying.

Someone talking in a field and then an explosion, then John Cleese at a desk and then...

But explain to me why the fuck that's funny.

But it was maybe the funniest thing I'd seen to that point.

And I'm like, that shouldn't be...

Like if you tried to explain that to aliens who don't have whatever part of our brain makes us find things funny, they'd be like, you're a monster.

I'd be like, well, maybe.

But I do care about other deaths.

I can't watch that fictional child die in that horror film.

However, watching that fictional person explode, six fictional people explode, hilarious.

So funny.

Funny deaths are funny no matter whether they happen to.

Jennifer Coolidge, great example.

We liked her.

We loved her.

We didn't want her to die.

She wasn't perfect, but she was not the bad guy in that plot.

In general, you could say because that series was part of the kind of wave of Eat the Rich content where it had a kind of strong anti-capitalist muscle at its core where it's just like, fuck these guys.

They've got too much money for no reason and we're angry about it.

And so now we're going to make fun of them.

But you did like her.

You did love her.

She was like a global sensation.

It sort of revived her career in this incredible way.

It's a slapstick character though, isn't it?

So when she dies in a slapstick way, so that's maybe why it's funny.

If she is going to die, that's how she's going to die.

She's going to die falling on her ass.

Her goodness doesn't actually interact with whether or not we...

We were okay with her death.

In a way that...

I think it's decoupled from morality.

I think that's sort of like, oh, a good person dies and therefore we care, versus bad person dies and therefore we don't.

That's not...

It's actually kind of nothing to do with that.

I think that's like the top of the pile answer.

But I don't think it's the right one.

Yeah, I started a list of...

I wonder if I've still got it, but like a list of funny deaths because I wanted to try and work out what united them.

And I think there is something where you do need to dehumanize in death.

Almost always, the kill shot that makes you...

I mean, that's not what that word means, kill shot.

But like the moment on screen when the person dies, one of the only sort of common aspects to it is that it's shot at a distance.

If it's sufficiently close, you cannot laugh.

If you've got face, expression, identity in frame, like in that moment, it undercuts whatever might be funny about it.

But if we're pulled back, the view has to be back.

And I don't know what the magic number of meters is, but at some point, it becomes funny if you've done it well enough.

And we find death funny.

I'm still trying to get to the bottom of it.

When I finish the essay, I'll let you know.

Yeah, I'm also trying to think of like, so they went the other way in sort of 80s and 90s films where like whole planes of people would just blow up in a movie or something and you wouldn't care about them either because you'd be like, I don't know who that is.

It would start with like Dying Hard and it would go into like Executive Decision, all those kind of 90s title movies that are like two words together.

If you look at like a list of movies with the highest death count, they're all from that era.

And they're quite unemotional, the deaths in them.

You don't really care about any of them.

What I never liked watching was like a close up death of someone for nothing.

They're just shooting everybody and shooting everyone, 70s stuff.

People just drop into the floor.

You don't really have a connection with these characters, but you also, I don't like seeing that.

I'd still want them to sort of, you know, deserve it in some way, you know.

It's all about where the camera lingers.

It's very interesting, you know, as a journalist, because I've, you know, we're always kind of covering deaths of various kinds in the news.

But we endow, in the same way that a director chooses whose death you're going to care about, whose death is going to be funny, whose death is going to be tragic, by where the camera lingers and how close it is, and what else is in the frame.

Journalists are doing exactly the same thing at all times when it comes to, we're choosing which deaths, you know, the news audience is going to care about.

If we say 207 people died on this plane in this, you know, part of the world, and we don't give any other detail, we don't talk about the nationalities, we don't talk about what their jobs were, we don't talk about, I don't know, we just don't know anything about them, we don't contextualise them, then we don't care.

But we randomly, sometimes seemingly, it's not random, of course, but you could be mistaken for thinking that it is sometimes elevate some deaths above others.

Yeah, when they say like a plane of 278 people go down in Indonesia containing two Britons, it's like, what about the others?

Oh, yeah, that is easily one of the most bananas things that we do.

And you can see there is just the barest rationale that holds up, like on a very sort of, it's a thin defence, but it does hold.

It's like, well, if you're reporting it for a British audience, perhaps they will know the person.

And so you need to know that they're your countrymen, country women, country people on the plane because, yeah, it is so often oriented around race.

But I mean, it's more than that as well.

The way that, if you look at crime stories, like why some crime stories are elevated to national media and why others aren't.

And there is merit to this argument about the rich, white, young, attractive person always going to care more about their death than the death of anyone from a marginalized community, for example.

But it is also more complicated than that.

But it's, yeah, there's just a really neat parallel there.

Sorry, I'm not very funny today.

I'm just talking about death.

I just want to talk about death apparently.

Yeah, so right after I attend my morning mainstream media conference, I attend my LGBTQI conference and we get together and we decide what the order of the day is, yeah.

People have increasingly, and I understand why, because power has been historically abused and concentrated in institutions, and so people are at this point in history incredibly skeptical of vestiges of power, institutions, to the point where it's bled into a pretty widespread pattern of conspiratorial thinking just among ordinary people, because the media, as this monolith, as if we all get together and have a conference of media journalists every morning and be like, yes, how are we going to decide what matters today, no such thing happens.

Because you, ABC, definitely call the BBC and corroborate and make sure that he has it.

The sad truth is that it is so much more ad hoc than that.

Like we could, maybe we should be better organized.

Maybe we should have a mainstream media conference.

You know, I have a question here that I ask people.

I won't ask you it, but it's, where is it?

What's the most horrific thing you've ever seen on television?

And do you know how many people say to me, oh, the news, the news, the news.

And I know a lot of people, I'll cut this, who just don't watch the news anymore.

They've all got fucking loads of opinions on everything, but they don't watch the news.

It's, oh, I can't watch the news anymore.

They get all their news from, I didn't even want to know where, but my mom will arrive.

Why would you cut this?

This makes absolute sense.

Maybe your family listens to the podcast, you don't want to upset them.

That's fine, it's fine.

They know.

I'll beep over it for me.

But my mom arrived recently, I don't care if she listens.

She came over for a visit and first thing she did was started telling me about how electric bikes or batteries have been blowing up on airplanes.

Have you seen that story?

And I'm like, listen, I know your agenda here.

Before you even begin with this, right?

Don't start telling me about electric vehicles being bad or where are you getting this shit from?

Do you know what I mean?

And stories like that, all I ever hear from people is stuff like something, a little seed like that.

Oh, have you heard about, well, apparently the wind turbine?

Nope, don't even begin the story.

Because I know you got it from your weird Fox info wars, world online, fucking flat earth lunatics.

I don't wanna hear this stuff from you.

But the whole point is this whole conspiracy, they just find a conspiracy in anything.

And I have to sort of hold myself to account because there was a time when, after 9-11, where I thought America being the most, almost the most corrupt country on earth, I saw it as at the time, especially around Iraq, that I didn't really believe the true story I was being told was true.

And since then, I kind of have, because I don't want to be in that group of people.

There are things I have concerns about that we might not be told the truth about from the past for political reasons, whatever.

Maybe even the moon, I don't know, I don't know.

I'm not gonna get into it.

But the point is, now they find it in everything.

Every little thing has some conspiracy behind it, no matter what it is.

You know what I mean?

It's just, people have gone fucking absolutely insane.

Yeah.

I don't know what's going on.

They don't meet the news, but they have all this news from not news outlets.

It could be you or me just making something up and it'll just get out there as a real story, you know?

I don't know what to do about it.

No one does.

And it's the intractable problem.

And I think maybe even the main problem that we have in this decade of history is the integrity of information and the fact that we don't have the measure of the problem of the extent to which we don't trust information anymore or each other, which means we certainly don't have a solution to it.

And it is causing it is at the root of so many problems that we have.

And it's, you know, if we get AI, but that's somehow work, you know, it's not looking like that's going to be the necessarily the solution.

But if it can think up a way to solve that one, it will all have been worth it.

90% of it is just going to be porn related, like everything else is.

I don't know what they're going to be doing, but anyway, I don't want to think about it fucking robots or whatever.

That's what it will be, whether we like it or not, we want it to solve.

Oh, maybe we could knock that asteroid out of the way.

It'll do what we ask it to.

And currently on the current trajectory, we're mainly going to ask it to come up with new plans.

Yeah.

From what you're doing, from what I'm doing, we need social media, we need the internet, we even need probably TikTok and things like that to exist in some way or form.

But there is a part of me that just really wants to switch it all off.

A big part, a big, big part, you know?

It was very interesting when Ted Kaczynski died earlier this year to see people re-engaging with his, because he more or less predicted Twitter.

And I'm not Kaczynski-pulled, I'm not like, and therefore male bombs.

But I think there were a lot of people, and interestingly, there were a lot of young people, I think a lot of a whole community of particularly younger millennial and Gen Z and increasingly Alpha, Gen Alpha, people online who now have access to, I guess a lot of radical or just obscure, forget the word radical, but fringe political theory that just wouldn't have been available to elder millennial Gen X people as they were coming of age, as point you start to develop political consciousness.

And as we know, when you're young, you do tend to gravitate to more extreme modes of thought because you're not seeing as much gray in the world.

I was very hard left when I was 18, very hard left.

I'm now not as hard.

But you now have the Unabomber's Manifesto was not something that was in circulation or discussed among people my age as we were coming into political consciousness or GenX or older.

But there is just a large corner of Reddit and TikTok, which is populated not exclusively by very young people, but also by very young people who know who Ted Kaczynski is and who are doing a lot of reading about what kind of the people aren't familiar.

He was kind of an anti-technologist.

He was kind of looking and he was a brilliant mind.

And he was looking down the barrel and doing a little bit of like napkin maths, maybe some more sophisticated maths based on his brain, but what we know about his brain.

But going, oh, this is all going in a really dangerous place towards a really dangerous place.

And it has done that.

And his solution where he kind of got to was like, go offline, live in the woods and send mail bombs until people read my manifesto and become convinced that I was correct.

And yeah, I just think I can just see that mode of thought coming back.

There are just, I just, so often I find myself drifting into conversations when people are going, what do we do?

What do we do about all the problems that we've been talking about today?

And they start speaking in a way that like, it could be ripped from Kaczynski's manifesto.

Anyway, I went on a Kaczynski deep dive this year, clearly.

I do have a slight theory that, because how these things are, everything that people engage with now, everything online, all methods we use to communicate on social media, these are all invented by people in their 50s, 60s, 40s, maybe whatever, right?

So there is going to be a backlash.

And I think it's coming in Generation Alpha, right?

Where they're gonna not want a lot of this.

Isn't there already a case where someone's suing their parents for their life being online without their permission and stuff like that?

I don't like sharing my kids' photos.

My wife does when school starts and things like that.

She likes to put a picture up and I'm still uncomfortable with it.

And I just wonder if they're going to rebel against a lot of it and they might be the ones that actually go on.

I think you are already seeing the internet, the way that the internet is organized and the way that people kind of gather, change shape a little bit.

And what you see in people kind of under 30, especially and increasingly in the millennial cohort as well, is people moving out of those kind of town square styles, spaces, you know, platform formerly known as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, even TikTok to an extent and kind of going, okay, well, where I'm actually going to be myself, where I'm actually going to communicate and participate in an online community, it's going to be more closed rooms, more curated spaces, whether that is a Discord channel, a Reddit, like a subreddit, you know, WhatsApp groups.

So less public.

Less public, more private, more curated.

So back to chat rooms, really.

Kind of.

We are like, we're sort of, and you know, that generation is also less likely to be using their real name or their real, the photo of themselves online when they, when they do post, when they kind of are public.

I have to have a kind of clear idea about the public and the private and what is appropriate to share, where and how.

And so you kind of are already seeing the internet reorganize itself, you know, and you're seeing this sort of disintegration and fragmentation of those kind of town square style platforms that I was talking about, kind of Web 2.0.

It's happening.

It's already kind of happening underneath this.

And I don't think it's the worst thing in the world, although what it does mean, what it does mean, the flip side of that is that we are now, so we replaced mass media with the internet, which sort of fragmented where people got their information undermined quality control.

And, you know, a lot of those things, which kind of gave us the chaos ship storm of misinformation that we have now.

We are now seeing a further fragmentation, which makes it even harder to, there's just no way to speak to everyone at the same time.

Some people think that's a good thing.

I think, you know, it cuts both ways, but what it does do is move us further away from any kind of solution to the misinformation problem that we were talking about before.

Anyway, I've gotten a big picture on this, but yeah.

From what I've seen, I see it in people over like 65, they are as bad as teenagers, worse with their phones and iPads and they've all got the fact, it's like, oh my God, I'm going to, if you don't turn those clicks off, seriously, they didn't get the memo.

Yeah.

As someone who grew up hearing a lot from my parents, get your head out of that idiot box, is what they call the TV.

It's like, don't watch, you know, your head, you've got, oh, you kids are hopeless.

You know, you got square eyes, you know, all that.

It's like, now he's got square eyes.

Like, I'm more focused, I'm more in the room than, you know.

I agree with that 100%.

That is so true, isn't it?

I think I'm gonna end it there.

I'm not even gonna bother asking you any more questions.

Well, it's lovely speaking to you.

Lovely to speak to you.

Yeah.

But I really appreciate the chat.

And yeah, it's been lovely.

Lovely to meet you.

Yeah, yeah.

And I really enjoyed your characters.

And it's very, very funny.

Thank you.

We had a very serious chat then, though.

It's all good.

I promise I can be funny.

I know you can.

Thanks, Ange.

It was really nice to meet you.

And thanks for coming on Television Times.

Ange Lavoipierre there, what a great chat.

I really enjoyed meeting her and seeing her in Edinburgh.

I look forward to whatever she does in the future, because it's going to be fantastic.

Everything she does is so artistic and just like, you know, out there and brilliant, really.

So do check her out.

All the links will be in the show notes for this episode.

Just scroll the bottom, and you get all the links to Ange's work.

Now, I've already told you about the outro tracks, I'm gonna say nothing else about it.

Here it is, it's called, Everything Could Change In An Instant, written by me, recorded in Japan, part of We Are Animals, the final track on it, actually.

Now remember, this is here purely because David Cameron has done a surprise return to the UK government.

And you'll hear his voice in this song.

That was Everything Could Change in An Instant, the final song on We Are Animals, which I consider my masterwork musically.

It's just a favourite album I've ever made, really.

I wrote it all over the UK and Australia and Thailand, actually, and then recorded the whole thing in Japan in 2006.

I just love it.

It will be remastered at some point, as I keep banging on about.

Now, I hope you enjoyed the episode with Ange.

Come back next week for more, and thank you for tuning in and I'll see you next time.