7221/19741
It doesn’t seem appropriate to me at all to cancel events or to try and police how other people react to something like this. Personally as much as I think the idea of having a Royal Family is somewhat ridiculous, I think the Queen was an amazing woman, but it’s perfectly valid to not think that or to be more aggressively opposed to the monarchy and to not want to spend the next month wringing your hands and scrolling through Twitter looking for people who aren’t being sufficiently respectful in your opinion. The basic rule of you do you holds good as a basic rule of thumb. You can, of course, speak out about what it is you think and try and convince others, but ultimately you don’t have the right to dictate how they behave. You might not want to go to football after an old lady has died, but for others going to football might be the distraction they need or even help them celebrate that old lady by living life while they are still here. You don’t have to go. Same with comedy shows and religious belief and bodily autonomy. You do you.
Footballers might not feel like playing and comedian might not feel like comedying - but let them make that choice. My guess is that most of them would love to go ahead. But who decides which things we can and can’t do in a period of mourning? Best that you decide for yourself.
The Daily Mail led with the headline “Our hearts are broken” - good of them to finally admit this fact, but an inappropriate day to tell us (when they could have done it any time). The Queen just died guys. Lead with that. But whilst journalists tried to pretend that they were anything but delighted or ambivalent, they also led the crusade to find anyone doing anything wrong and picked out some fairly light comments for Kevin Bridges’ gig on Thursday where he did nothing more than address the elephant in the room, which was entirely necessary. It would have been weird if he hadn’t. He’d decided to carry on and his audience had decided to come to comedy. Why isn’t trying to stir things up unnecessarily seen as more of an issue in the event of someone’s death?
I spent my day prepping for a zoom podcast record with Doug Stanhope. Even though he will be in the country imminently we couldn’t find a time for him to do the live show and understandably he wants
to publicise his tour, so I got to talk to him very shortly after his plane had arrived in Dublin. He was a little bit jet lagged and there was also a tiny lag on the call too, but we got through it all OK. And there’s a RHLSTP first (as far as I know) as Doug carried on the conversation whilst he carried to his laptop to the toilet and did a wee. Acast Plusser Plus Plusses will be able to watch the video of that (the camera stays on Doug’s face thankfully) but the rest of you will get to listen to it on the podcast on Monday.
