I'm Not Exaggerating The Problem - Andrew Doyle - #232

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi friends, welcome back. My guest today is Andrew Doyle, comedian, writer and moonlighting, as Titania McGrath. He joined us in late 2019 for some clairvoyant prophecy, where everything that he claimed was going to happen has now come true in 2020 So today, expect to learn whether we need to decolonize Mars, who Andrew thinks will win the 2020 election, why whiteness is a problematic term, what's happened with gay activism, whether creating a slave-themed workout routine is a clever idea and much more. Andrew is a big friend of the show. I really enjoy speaking to him. He has a wealth of understanding that helps to dissect what's going on politically and in pop culture at the moment. And yeah, I look forward to finally being able to sit down with him properly face to face. But for now, Skype will do as he's enjoying his time in the Amalfi Coast. Don't forget, if you are enjoying the audio version of this podcast, everything is available in video too. You can see the face of me and the face of the guest that I'm speaking to in all of its high definition beauty over at the Modern Wisdom YouTube channel. Just search Modern Wisdom and it will come up. Hit the subscribe button as it would make me very happy. But if you just wanna stay listening, that's fine as well. I'm not discriminating. I just wanna get two subs out of you, you know? So go hit the button if you have time.
But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Andrew Doyle.

**Andrew Doyle** (1:44)
Lovely to be back, it's been a while. How long has it been? More than a year, I think.

**Chris Williamson** (1:48)
Just over a year. You were on route from London to the Fringe, dropped in for a quick coffee in there.

**Andrew Doyle** (1:53)
That's right, that's right, yeah. It was fun, it was good, but none of that anymore. That's not how the world works now.

**Chris Williamson** (1:58)
No.

**Andrew Doyle** (1:59)
It's all remote.

**Chris Williamson** (2:00)
It is. You're on holiday at the moment, somewhere nice.

**Andrew Doyle** (2:05)
I'm not really, I'm working. I'm on the Amalfi Coast. I'm staying in a small town, halfway between Positano and Amalfi, and I spent the day in Capri the other day. I've been to Pompeii, so it sounds like I'm having a good time, but I am here to work. For the rest of the week, I'm not going to leave the flat. I'm just going to sit here and write, because I can't work at home. Too many distractions.

**Chris Williamson** (2:26)
You're reading some future classics, I'm sure.

**Andrew Doyle** (2:29)
No, I'm not. I'm working on a new book. Because the last two books I wrote, I wrote in Sark, the Isle of Sark, but I can't get there because of the quarantine rules, so I had to come to Italy.
It's fine. Yeah, it's a real-

**Chris Williamson** (2:41)
It's a tough life, isn't it? Yeah.

**Andrew Doyle** (2:43)
Yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (2:44)
It's good.

**Andrew Doyle** (2:44)
It's good. I mean, I've got the space I need just to focus on stuff.

**Chris Williamson** (2:47)
I like it. So what have been the major developments in the woke world this year?

**Andrew Doyle** (2:53)
I mean, where do you begin? It has exploded. When I last spoke to you, I was often accused of exaggerating the problem and people would say, well, you know, you're just complaining about the behaviour of a few rogue students here and there on university campuses or a few nutcases on the internet.
And well, I've been proven right, haven't I? Because now it's not that it's demonstrably not that the evidence of everything I've been writing about and talking about for the past five years is absolutely everywhere. It's incontrovertible. And if that sounds arrogant, so be it. But there you go.

**Chris Williamson** (3:25)
The profit has arrived.

**Andrew Doyle** (3:27)
I fucking told you so and you did nothing. And you attacked me. You just attacked me. I am Cassandra. You didn't believe my warnings. And here we are. You know, had you heeded my prophecies, perhaps this could have been evaded.

**Chris Williamson** (3:40)
So other than you being one of the one of the four horsemen, where where is the world of if there's trends, if there was like a trending in the world of woke sort of, where's it gone this year?

**Andrew Doyle** (3:51)
Yeah. So it's been a kind of just a concatenation of unfortunate circumstances. You know, we had the obviously the pandemic and the lockdown and this created this kind of tension and this kind of this sense of frustration. It meant a lot of people were spending more time on the internet rather than the real world, which means that they have a skewed perspective of how things are going.