Richard Bacon made a documentary about Cancel Culture, for C4, in 2021 called simply: Cancelled

It may have seemed like a good idea at the time but it’s an awful title for anyone trying to search for it, at a later date.

Jimmy has worked with Richard many times over the years (see here) and, with the uproar over his comedy every 12-18 months or so, was a natural choice.

Broadcast on December 2^nd 2021 Jimmy’s interview was filmed before a gig at Indigo at the O2, on September 30th. He answers Richard’s questions and then walks straight out on stage and does his stuff.

This docu was partly about living people attracting the cancel culture mob (including J K Rowling) but also had to cover the pulling down of statues and demands for buildings / streets to be renamed etc. I watched it at the time and didn’t think it was that bad – but, as a 1-hour documentary, it kind of failed because it was trying to cover too much ground. Really need to be a series to do the topic justice.

Reviews

The Daily Mail hated it (here), the Metro reported most of what Jimmy said (here) and the Telegraph gave it 4/5 (here)

As some of the articles are now hidden behind paywalls – I’ll go a little into what the reviews said. Meaning the below has a bit of my personal opinion / interpretation.

Telegraph

When Jimmy said he “felt like he was going to be cancelled for tax avoidance” The Telegraph piece asked “wasn’t it simply that he was caught bang to rights?”.

I would argue – NO. Tax evasion is illegal but tax avoidance is not. It was declared “morally wrong” and he paid it all back, plus interest.

What something like that should not bring down on you (and I apply this to anyone, in or out of the public eye) is a screaming mob that tries to get your career ended, protests outside of gigs, endless press stories that are purposely written to fan the flames yada yada. That’s getting into Salem Witch Trials territory.

The point Jimmy has made in other interviews (about secular society having no notion of redemption or forgiveness) is that “cancel culture” (as in the online mob coming for you, brandishing pitchforks) has no clear way back. If you apologise it’s never, ever good enough (for the online puritanical keyboard warriors) and so he doesn’t.

We need to remember that society has to have a formal structure for crime / punishment that is fair to all. None of us are perfect enough to never make a mistake – but those mistakes (when not actually illegal) should rarely justify losing your livelihood, regardless of who you are.

Mail / Metro

The Mail and Metro mentioned that Jimmy described it as the “new book burning” and this is something that Andrew Doyle expanded on in his book “The New Puritans”. It’s not enough to decide that you don’t like something, shrug and walk on by – things have to be eradicated. In the documentary Jimmy cites the example of Beatles records / posters being burned, after John Lennon had made his “more popular than Jesus” quip.